All The Glory Of
Title: All The Glory Of
Rating: G
Characters: Kurt/Blaine
Words: ~2,600
Spoilers: 2.18, Born This Way
Summary: "I'm going to worry later, but right now I'm too happy for you." (After the meeting with Figgins, Kurt comes back to Dalton and finds Blaine to tell him about what happened.)
Author's Note: I honestly just wanted to write something warm and bright and happy. I hope that I achieved those or similar adjectives.
(The title comes from Sufjan Stevens' Casimir Pulaski Day. I listened to it on endless repeat during the writing and editing of this. I first encountered it when zunmo used it in I Thought I Saw You Breathing. If you haven't read that story, you must. It's gorgeous.)
Edit: Also, this is possibly the last of my assaults to your eye-holes for a little while. I say that, then in three days I'll have something else, but -- there's other writing I'm supposed to be doing, and this is all fantastically distracting. I wanted to leave off with something that wasn't miserable.
Blaine thinks that there must be a word for the fall of sunlight through a canopy of leaves. There’s a word for everything. Petrichor. The smell of dust after rain. Paresthesia. The feeling of pins and needles. So as he lies on his back and holds his hand up above him and watches the shift of light and shadow against his skin, he thinks that there must be a word for this. Sunlight through the gaps of the leaves, and the gaps between his fingertips.
It’s May. May. Summer is rushing towards Ohio with a breathless intensity, and soon he’s going to have finals and papers and home to worry about, but right now he can do nothing but breathe the heavy, warm air and smile until it’s painful. Because it’s May. And he’s happy.
The red brick wall beneath him radiates its collected heat up through his jacket, against his shoulders and his back and his legs. He lets his hand fall against his chest, lets his eyes close. The sun moves against his face with the wave of branches high above him, changing the colors of the lights behind his eyelids.
He remembers finding this place for the first time, that first October when the bruises of September still stood out against the skin of his back and chest. When Dalton had seemed so claustrophobic and complicated and vast, and he’d just run, anywhere, to find something easier. And he’d found this place, these woods set back on the school grounds; a red brick wall along a well-worn path, surrounded on all sides by towering trees, where sunlight fell thick and heavy in the afternoon, and he could lie down and drift and tend to wounds physical and mental without anyone there to see. He could walk and study and read and get away from the press of constant unfamiliar boys. He'd left so much extra weight in these woods, cutting it away and letting it fall and be forgotten.
He needs it less, now. He found people. The Warblers. (Kurt.) He found a place for himself, after a while, nestled between blue blazers, laughing until he couldn’t breathe, climbing on furniture, making a fool of himself. It’s perfect, and sometimes the fact that he experienced anything other than this feels like a dream, or a story someone told him once. Sometimes he still comes, though. When the weather clears, and the afternoon stretches before him unbroken and sweet; when his head is full of dust and the bars of light through the tall library windows distract him from studying. He’ll come, and walk down the path with twigs snapping softly beneath his shoes, his fingers trailing against the brick as he goes.
It reminds him of the Robert Frost poem. Before I built a wall I’d ask to know what I was walling in or walling out, and to whom I was like to give offense. He doesn’t know why he thinks of it every time he meanders aimlessly beside it, or hauls himself up by the arms to sit on top. It has nothing to do with the meaning of the poem, and probably everything to do with the way it made him feel the first time he read it, lying in the grass in his back yard, breathing the close warmth of the earth with The Complete Poems of Robert Frost between his hands. He thinks that’s why it struck him so much, the first time. A relic left over from a time when Dalton was just acres of abutting farmland, one long wall with one long path left to mark a border that didn’t exist anymore, the forest around it overgrown and wild. It looks so much like a poem.
Blaine lets all of his breath out in one long, slow exhale, only so he can breathe the place back in again, the smell of earth and green and light.
The approaching footsteps don’t startle him, but he tilts his head back to see, a lazy smile stretching across his face. “Oh, look,” he says. “It’s my boyfriend.”
Kurt’s smile is quick, and the blush that spreads through his cheeks makes Blaine want to swing his legs down and bend to kiss along the arches beneath each eye, tracing that color with his lips until it deepens. Kurt’s changed back into his uniform, but he’s foregone the blazer and tie, and the white button-down floats a little after him, untucked. He stops next to Blaine, the wall just the right height so that their heads are perfectly level, even with Blaine lying down. “Oh, look,” Kurt replies, his smile slipping a little sardonic. “It’s my boyfriend. In the woods again.”
I’m never going to get used to him saying that, Blaine thinks, and the truth of it slams into his chest and makes his heart turn over. He reaches out and tucks three fingers through the gap in Kurt’s collar where the knot of his tie would sit, against the soft skin at the base of his throat. Because it’s there, pale and inviting, and because he can. Kurt’s blush returns, darker and broader, moving down his neck with his unsteady exhale. He puts his hand over Blaine’s and presses it against his chest.
“I thought you’d be somewhere around here,” Kurt murmurs with a small roll of his eyes that Blaine knows is just a way to avoid looking at him. “I saw that poetry anthology open on your desk when I went to see you.”
“You’ve cracked my enigmatic little code,” Blaine says, smirking.
Kurt sighs fondly. “No, I just know that you’re ridiculous.”
“I would be so offended right now,” Blaine says, turning his head to look back up at the canopy of leaves, “if I didn’t also know that I’m ridiculous.” Kurt’s hand is still over his; he is pressed between two soft patches of Kurt’s skin, cool and light and soaking up Blaine’s heat. It feels amazing to just touch like this, to just be touched, and to be allowed to be absolutely ridiculous.
(He’s brought Kurt here before; walks when he first came, times when they were both maudlin and quiet, testing the boundaries of their friendship with the things they could say to each other, how honest they could really be with the press of silence around them. And then, the last time, with their hands twined together and the sun pouring over the trees, over Blaine’s shoulders and against Kurt’s face, making the red of the brick seem so much more vivid in contrast to the blue of Kurt’s blazer when Blaine kissed him pressed against the wall, both of them laughing, both of them breathless and buoyant and so incredibly bright.)
Kurt lifts Blaine’s hand away from his chest and sets it back against Blaine’s own. When Blaine pouts, he just laughs, and moves to throw his hands up to the top of the wall and pull himself up by the arms with huge sounds of effort. When he finally manages to maneuver into position, sitting next to Blaine’s head, he breathes hard and sweeps his hair out of his face. “I have no idea how you have the upper body strength to do that all the time,” he wheezes.
“I don’t do it all the time,” Blaine says. “And I have great upper body strength.”
“Sure, for a hobbit,” Kurt murmurs. When Blaine looks up to defend himself against the vicious Shire-related slander, he sees that Kurt’s expression is suddenly thoughtful. Unfocused.
He smiles softly. “So, how did it go?”
Kurt sighs. It deflates his entire body so that his back bows forward. “It certainly went.”
Blaine laughs. Kurt carefully slides himself a little further down the wall, then swings his legs up and lies down. His head brushes against Blaine’s, and he settles himself, balancing, his hands tucked against each other over his chest. Blaine feels him turn his head to stare up through the trees, and he mimics the movement, so that they are looking at the same thing, together. “Tell me about it,” he murmurs.
Kurt takes a moment. “I never really thought that Karofsky was actually contrite about the whole thing,” he says, his words slow with the turn of his thoughts below them. “My dad was so angry during the meeting. He brought up the money. It was that bad. But Karofsky just sat there and took it and smiled in the right places, and--” Kurt lets out a breath. “He’s so different from the last meeting we had, right before I transferred. He’s scared, but he isn’t - violent. Or desperate. Or, not as desperate.”
Blaine tilts his head back to look at Kurt; mostly what he sees is the rise and fall of Kurt’s chest, the shift of his shoulders against the brick. “Do you think that’s real?”
Kurt scoffs. “The smiles? No. He’s still a repressed idiot. But everything else--” Kurt lifts a hand and looks at it hovering in the air, the way that Blaine had done. Blaine watches as Kurt examines the patterns created by the light. His voice gets softer when he speaks, still moving his hand slowly back and forth above himself to watch the shift of shadows. “Santana knows. She’s blackmailing him to get me to come back to McKinley so I can go to Nationals with them.”
“You make the weirdest friends,” Blaine murmurs, watching Kurt’s hand.
“You, for example.” Blaine can hear Kurt’s smirk in the words, but it drops off at the edges, fades away. “I think it’s safe now, Blaine,” he says quietly. “I think Karofsky was looking for a reason to stop, and Santana’s giving him one. They made an anti-bullying club. They wear terrible berets. I convinced Karofsky to start a chapter of PFLAG, which would sound insane to me a few months ago, but it actually happened.”
Blaine reaches up and back and catches Kurt’s hand. Their hands stay there, above their bodies, suspended in the light, palms pressed together and fingers interlaced. “You can say it, Kurt,” Blaine says.
Kurt takes a breath and slowly lets it out. “I’m going back to McKinley.”
Blaine squeezes his hand tighter. “Are you scared?”
There’s hardly a hesitation before Kurt breathes, “Yes.” The word is still and fragile.
Blaine gently pulls Kurt’s hand backwards. He runs his lips over Kurt’s knuckles and presses a kiss into the warm skin above. “Courage,” he whispers.
Kurt laughs. Loud. Long. He sounds surprised to be doing so, but it’s real, and he has to slip his hand out of Blaine’s to balance himself on the wall so that he won’t fall off. Blaine laughs, too, low and pleased, sitting up on an elbow so that he can look back and watch Kurt’s face, the tension draining out of him, his fingers pressed over his mouth and one hand gripping the edge of the wall. “I hate you!” he wails around the laughter, trying to get himself under control. “This is serious and you’re being way too good about it!”
Blaine shrugs, still watching him, still smiling. “I told you that I would be fine with you going back if it was safe. I wasn’t just saying that because I thought it would never happen.” He lies back down, eyes skyward. “I’m going to worry later, but right now I’m too happy for you.”
Kurt is quiet for a long moment. They both breathe, bodies still and continuous, watching as three birds curve through the branches of the trees and head on for places unknown.
It’s Kurt’s hand, this time, that reaches back for Blaine’s. His thumb runs over Blaine’s skin, back and forth. “If you were going back to your old school,” Kurt says quietly, “I would be yelling at you. A lot.”
Blaine closes his eyes. He takes a breath in through his nose (wet wood, wildflowers, heat) and lets it out through his mouth. “You never really belonged here, Kurt.”
Kurt makes an indignant noise, but he doesn’t snatch his hand away, and that more than anything is proof that he knows what Blaine is talking about.
“It’s true,” Blaine murmurs. “We love you here. Me, the Warblers, all of the boys you’ve ever met. Everyone thinks that you’re amazing. You make this place so much better just by existing.” The sweep of Kurt’s thumb is back. Blaine thinks he hears a surreptitious sniff. “But you belong back at McKinley. That’s where you’re actually you. I told you a long time ago that you had to learn how to blend in. That was pretty stupid. Pretty much all of my advice is stupid. Why do you date me?”
“You’re so pretty,” Kurt manages around a short, hitching breath. Blaine laughs.
“Be that as it may,” he continues, “I love you. And I want you to be happy. And I think that this is going to ultimately make you the most happy.”
“You make me happy,” Kurt whispers.
“I’m going to keep doing that.” Blaine squeezes Kurt’s hand. “If you want me to. This doesn’t change anything between you and me.”
“Of course it doesn’t,” Kurt says. Strength is gathering back into his voice. “We managed before I came here.”
“I just have to make a lot of really long, really good playlists for driving.”
Kurt laughs. He brings Blaine’s hand back to him and brushes his own lips over Blaine’s knuckles, presses his own lips into Blaine’s skin. An exchange, like a promise. The idea makes Blaine dizzy and euphoric. Against the back of Blaine’s hand, his lips breathing the words into Blaine’s body, as though the idea will diffuse into Blaine’s bloodstream, become a physical part of him, touch every inch of him, Kurt says, “I love you.”
With all of his complicated, ridiculous happiness welling in his chest, Blaine smiles harder than he ever has in his entire life. “Of course you do,” he says. “Look at me.”
Kurt’s indignant shriek of laughter is punctuated by him using his grip on Blaine’s hand to roll Blaine off of the wall. Blaine lands on the ground with a faint oof, all of the air knocked out of him, but his body still trying so hard to laugh even without making any noise as Kurt sits up and pushes himself off of the wall to land on his feet with all of the poise of a cat.
Kurt looks at him, grins, and runs off down the path.
Blaine pushes himself up with the help of the wall and gives chase. They run down the path, back toward Dalton, in and out of pools of light and shadow, the sun just starting to set and slanting just right through the trees to pick out the colors of Kurt’s hair as it flies, the grace of his legs propelling him forward, and finally the surprised, laughing expression on his face when Blaine throws his arms around him in a tackle and sends them both sprawling to the ground.
They both lie there, chests heaving, giggling breathlessly. Blaine pushes himself up onto his elbows and looks down at Kurt, smiling like an idiot. Kurt looks back up at him, eyes bright and face clear and beautiful, perfect, everything, and Kurt’s hand grips the lapel of Blaine’s blazer before he pulls himself up and presses their lips together.
When Kurt flops back down, looking pleased with himself, Blaine can do nothing but watch.
“You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” he says.
Kurt’s face goes a deep, pretty pink. He lifts a hand and puts it against Blaine’s cheek, his thumb rubbing against Blaine’s jaw. The feeling makes Blaine shiver, makes his eyes slip closed, makes him lean into the touch. The feeling of Kurt beneath him, the smell of him, and of the trees, and the dry dirt under their bodies, and the tangles of weeds and flowers in the underbrush - it’s this that Blaine wants to remember. When he’s old and doddering and charming and finished, he wants to remember what it felt like to be breathless and free and in love.
“You’re ridiculous,” Kurt says, grinning up at him, quiet. “But I think I like that.”
Blaine likes it, too.
Rating: G
Characters: Kurt/Blaine
Words: ~2,600
Spoilers: 2.18, Born This Way
Summary: "I'm going to worry later, but right now I'm too happy for you." (After the meeting with Figgins, Kurt comes back to Dalton and finds Blaine to tell him about what happened.)
Author's Note: I honestly just wanted to write something warm and bright and happy. I hope that I achieved those or similar adjectives.
(The title comes from Sufjan Stevens' Casimir Pulaski Day. I listened to it on endless repeat during the writing and editing of this. I first encountered it when zunmo used it in I Thought I Saw You Breathing. If you haven't read that story, you must. It's gorgeous.)
Edit: Also, this is possibly the last of my assaults to your eye-holes for a little while. I say that, then in three days I'll have something else, but -- there's other writing I'm supposed to be doing, and this is all fantastically distracting. I wanted to leave off with something that wasn't miserable.
Blaine thinks that there must be a word for the fall of sunlight through a canopy of leaves. There’s a word for everything. Petrichor. The smell of dust after rain. Paresthesia. The feeling of pins and needles. So as he lies on his back and holds his hand up above him and watches the shift of light and shadow against his skin, he thinks that there must be a word for this. Sunlight through the gaps of the leaves, and the gaps between his fingertips.
It’s May. May. Summer is rushing towards Ohio with a breathless intensity, and soon he’s going to have finals and papers and home to worry about, but right now he can do nothing but breathe the heavy, warm air and smile until it’s painful. Because it’s May. And he’s happy.
The red brick wall beneath him radiates its collected heat up through his jacket, against his shoulders and his back and his legs. He lets his hand fall against his chest, lets his eyes close. The sun moves against his face with the wave of branches high above him, changing the colors of the lights behind his eyelids.
He remembers finding this place for the first time, that first October when the bruises of September still stood out against the skin of his back and chest. When Dalton had seemed so claustrophobic and complicated and vast, and he’d just run, anywhere, to find something easier. And he’d found this place, these woods set back on the school grounds; a red brick wall along a well-worn path, surrounded on all sides by towering trees, where sunlight fell thick and heavy in the afternoon, and he could lie down and drift and tend to wounds physical and mental without anyone there to see. He could walk and study and read and get away from the press of constant unfamiliar boys. He'd left so much extra weight in these woods, cutting it away and letting it fall and be forgotten.
He needs it less, now. He found people. The Warblers. (Kurt.) He found a place for himself, after a while, nestled between blue blazers, laughing until he couldn’t breathe, climbing on furniture, making a fool of himself. It’s perfect, and sometimes the fact that he experienced anything other than this feels like a dream, or a story someone told him once. Sometimes he still comes, though. When the weather clears, and the afternoon stretches before him unbroken and sweet; when his head is full of dust and the bars of light through the tall library windows distract him from studying. He’ll come, and walk down the path with twigs snapping softly beneath his shoes, his fingers trailing against the brick as he goes.
It reminds him of the Robert Frost poem. Before I built a wall I’d ask to know what I was walling in or walling out, and to whom I was like to give offense. He doesn’t know why he thinks of it every time he meanders aimlessly beside it, or hauls himself up by the arms to sit on top. It has nothing to do with the meaning of the poem, and probably everything to do with the way it made him feel the first time he read it, lying in the grass in his back yard, breathing the close warmth of the earth with The Complete Poems of Robert Frost between his hands. He thinks that’s why it struck him so much, the first time. A relic left over from a time when Dalton was just acres of abutting farmland, one long wall with one long path left to mark a border that didn’t exist anymore, the forest around it overgrown and wild. It looks so much like a poem.
Blaine lets all of his breath out in one long, slow exhale, only so he can breathe the place back in again, the smell of earth and green and light.
The approaching footsteps don’t startle him, but he tilts his head back to see, a lazy smile stretching across his face. “Oh, look,” he says. “It’s my boyfriend.”
Kurt’s smile is quick, and the blush that spreads through his cheeks makes Blaine want to swing his legs down and bend to kiss along the arches beneath each eye, tracing that color with his lips until it deepens. Kurt’s changed back into his uniform, but he’s foregone the blazer and tie, and the white button-down floats a little after him, untucked. He stops next to Blaine, the wall just the right height so that their heads are perfectly level, even with Blaine lying down. “Oh, look,” Kurt replies, his smile slipping a little sardonic. “It’s my boyfriend. In the woods again.”
I’m never going to get used to him saying that, Blaine thinks, and the truth of it slams into his chest and makes his heart turn over. He reaches out and tucks three fingers through the gap in Kurt’s collar where the knot of his tie would sit, against the soft skin at the base of his throat. Because it’s there, pale and inviting, and because he can. Kurt’s blush returns, darker and broader, moving down his neck with his unsteady exhale. He puts his hand over Blaine’s and presses it against his chest.
“I thought you’d be somewhere around here,” Kurt murmurs with a small roll of his eyes that Blaine knows is just a way to avoid looking at him. “I saw that poetry anthology open on your desk when I went to see you.”
“You’ve cracked my enigmatic little code,” Blaine says, smirking.
Kurt sighs fondly. “No, I just know that you’re ridiculous.”
“I would be so offended right now,” Blaine says, turning his head to look back up at the canopy of leaves, “if I didn’t also know that I’m ridiculous.” Kurt’s hand is still over his; he is pressed between two soft patches of Kurt’s skin, cool and light and soaking up Blaine’s heat. It feels amazing to just touch like this, to just be touched, and to be allowed to be absolutely ridiculous.
(He’s brought Kurt here before; walks when he first came, times when they were both maudlin and quiet, testing the boundaries of their friendship with the things they could say to each other, how honest they could really be with the press of silence around them. And then, the last time, with their hands twined together and the sun pouring over the trees, over Blaine’s shoulders and against Kurt’s face, making the red of the brick seem so much more vivid in contrast to the blue of Kurt’s blazer when Blaine kissed him pressed against the wall, both of them laughing, both of them breathless and buoyant and so incredibly bright.)
Kurt lifts Blaine’s hand away from his chest and sets it back against Blaine’s own. When Blaine pouts, he just laughs, and moves to throw his hands up to the top of the wall and pull himself up by the arms with huge sounds of effort. When he finally manages to maneuver into position, sitting next to Blaine’s head, he breathes hard and sweeps his hair out of his face. “I have no idea how you have the upper body strength to do that all the time,” he wheezes.
“I don’t do it all the time,” Blaine says. “And I have great upper body strength.”
“Sure, for a hobbit,” Kurt murmurs. When Blaine looks up to defend himself against the vicious Shire-related slander, he sees that Kurt’s expression is suddenly thoughtful. Unfocused.
He smiles softly. “So, how did it go?”
Kurt sighs. It deflates his entire body so that his back bows forward. “It certainly went.”
Blaine laughs. Kurt carefully slides himself a little further down the wall, then swings his legs up and lies down. His head brushes against Blaine’s, and he settles himself, balancing, his hands tucked against each other over his chest. Blaine feels him turn his head to stare up through the trees, and he mimics the movement, so that they are looking at the same thing, together. “Tell me about it,” he murmurs.
Kurt takes a moment. “I never really thought that Karofsky was actually contrite about the whole thing,” he says, his words slow with the turn of his thoughts below them. “My dad was so angry during the meeting. He brought up the money. It was that bad. But Karofsky just sat there and took it and smiled in the right places, and--” Kurt lets out a breath. “He’s so different from the last meeting we had, right before I transferred. He’s scared, but he isn’t - violent. Or desperate. Or, not as desperate.”
Blaine tilts his head back to look at Kurt; mostly what he sees is the rise and fall of Kurt’s chest, the shift of his shoulders against the brick. “Do you think that’s real?”
Kurt scoffs. “The smiles? No. He’s still a repressed idiot. But everything else--” Kurt lifts a hand and looks at it hovering in the air, the way that Blaine had done. Blaine watches as Kurt examines the patterns created by the light. His voice gets softer when he speaks, still moving his hand slowly back and forth above himself to watch the shift of shadows. “Santana knows. She’s blackmailing him to get me to come back to McKinley so I can go to Nationals with them.”
“You make the weirdest friends,” Blaine murmurs, watching Kurt’s hand.
“You, for example.” Blaine can hear Kurt’s smirk in the words, but it drops off at the edges, fades away. “I think it’s safe now, Blaine,” he says quietly. “I think Karofsky was looking for a reason to stop, and Santana’s giving him one. They made an anti-bullying club. They wear terrible berets. I convinced Karofsky to start a chapter of PFLAG, which would sound insane to me a few months ago, but it actually happened.”
Blaine reaches up and back and catches Kurt’s hand. Their hands stay there, above their bodies, suspended in the light, palms pressed together and fingers interlaced. “You can say it, Kurt,” Blaine says.
Kurt takes a breath and slowly lets it out. “I’m going back to McKinley.”
Blaine squeezes his hand tighter. “Are you scared?”
There’s hardly a hesitation before Kurt breathes, “Yes.” The word is still and fragile.
Blaine gently pulls Kurt’s hand backwards. He runs his lips over Kurt’s knuckles and presses a kiss into the warm skin above. “Courage,” he whispers.
Kurt laughs. Loud. Long. He sounds surprised to be doing so, but it’s real, and he has to slip his hand out of Blaine’s to balance himself on the wall so that he won’t fall off. Blaine laughs, too, low and pleased, sitting up on an elbow so that he can look back and watch Kurt’s face, the tension draining out of him, his fingers pressed over his mouth and one hand gripping the edge of the wall. “I hate you!” he wails around the laughter, trying to get himself under control. “This is serious and you’re being way too good about it!”
Blaine shrugs, still watching him, still smiling. “I told you that I would be fine with you going back if it was safe. I wasn’t just saying that because I thought it would never happen.” He lies back down, eyes skyward. “I’m going to worry later, but right now I’m too happy for you.”
Kurt is quiet for a long moment. They both breathe, bodies still and continuous, watching as three birds curve through the branches of the trees and head on for places unknown.
It’s Kurt’s hand, this time, that reaches back for Blaine’s. His thumb runs over Blaine’s skin, back and forth. “If you were going back to your old school,” Kurt says quietly, “I would be yelling at you. A lot.”
Blaine closes his eyes. He takes a breath in through his nose (wet wood, wildflowers, heat) and lets it out through his mouth. “You never really belonged here, Kurt.”
Kurt makes an indignant noise, but he doesn’t snatch his hand away, and that more than anything is proof that he knows what Blaine is talking about.
“It’s true,” Blaine murmurs. “We love you here. Me, the Warblers, all of the boys you’ve ever met. Everyone thinks that you’re amazing. You make this place so much better just by existing.” The sweep of Kurt’s thumb is back. Blaine thinks he hears a surreptitious sniff. “But you belong back at McKinley. That’s where you’re actually you. I told you a long time ago that you had to learn how to blend in. That was pretty stupid. Pretty much all of my advice is stupid. Why do you date me?”
“You’re so pretty,” Kurt manages around a short, hitching breath. Blaine laughs.
“Be that as it may,” he continues, “I love you. And I want you to be happy. And I think that this is going to ultimately make you the most happy.”
“You make me happy,” Kurt whispers.
“I’m going to keep doing that.” Blaine squeezes Kurt’s hand. “If you want me to. This doesn’t change anything between you and me.”
“Of course it doesn’t,” Kurt says. Strength is gathering back into his voice. “We managed before I came here.”
“I just have to make a lot of really long, really good playlists for driving.”
Kurt laughs. He brings Blaine’s hand back to him and brushes his own lips over Blaine’s knuckles, presses his own lips into Blaine’s skin. An exchange, like a promise. The idea makes Blaine dizzy and euphoric. Against the back of Blaine’s hand, his lips breathing the words into Blaine’s body, as though the idea will diffuse into Blaine’s bloodstream, become a physical part of him, touch every inch of him, Kurt says, “I love you.”
With all of his complicated, ridiculous happiness welling in his chest, Blaine smiles harder than he ever has in his entire life. “Of course you do,” he says. “Look at me.”
Kurt’s indignant shriek of laughter is punctuated by him using his grip on Blaine’s hand to roll Blaine off of the wall. Blaine lands on the ground with a faint oof, all of the air knocked out of him, but his body still trying so hard to laugh even without making any noise as Kurt sits up and pushes himself off of the wall to land on his feet with all of the poise of a cat.
Kurt looks at him, grins, and runs off down the path.
Blaine pushes himself up with the help of the wall and gives chase. They run down the path, back toward Dalton, in and out of pools of light and shadow, the sun just starting to set and slanting just right through the trees to pick out the colors of Kurt’s hair as it flies, the grace of his legs propelling him forward, and finally the surprised, laughing expression on his face when Blaine throws his arms around him in a tackle and sends them both sprawling to the ground.
They both lie there, chests heaving, giggling breathlessly. Blaine pushes himself up onto his elbows and looks down at Kurt, smiling like an idiot. Kurt looks back up at him, eyes bright and face clear and beautiful, perfect, everything, and Kurt’s hand grips the lapel of Blaine’s blazer before he pulls himself up and presses their lips together.
When Kurt flops back down, looking pleased with himself, Blaine can do nothing but watch.
“You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” he says.
Kurt’s face goes a deep, pretty pink. He lifts a hand and puts it against Blaine’s cheek, his thumb rubbing against Blaine’s jaw. The feeling makes Blaine shiver, makes his eyes slip closed, makes him lean into the touch. The feeling of Kurt beneath him, the smell of him, and of the trees, and the dry dirt under their bodies, and the tangles of weeds and flowers in the underbrush - it’s this that Blaine wants to remember. When he’s old and doddering and charming and finished, he wants to remember what it felt like to be breathless and free and in love.
“You’re ridiculous,” Kurt says, grinning up at him, quiet. “But I think I like that.”
Blaine likes it, too.