The Cosmos Is Also Within Us
Title: The Cosmos Is Also Within Us
Rating: PG
Characters: Kurt/Blaine
Words: 3,889
Spoilers: 2.18, Born This Way
Summary: On Kurt's last night at Dalton, Blaine takes him stargazing. Love, history, and science. (Also available on AO3.)
Author's Note: I wrote this for narie, for the kurt_blaine Hiatus Gift Exchange. She was like, "Science!" I was like, "I love science! What a crazy random happenstance!" The title comes from a quote by Carl Sagan, and this gorgeous, nerdtastic video. (Oh, hey, also: I am accepting fic prompts on Tumblr. Feel free to drop something in my ask box; anonymous is perfectly fine.)
Normally, being startled awake after midnight by a light rapping on his door was not something Kurt suffered gladly, or at least not without a thorough verbal maiming. But apparently all sense of propriety and beauty rest could be thrown easily away if the person on the opposite side of the door was Blaine, still in his uniform, with one finger pressed to his lips and his eyes bright and amused. Kurt had exactly enough time to raise an expectant eyebrow before Blaine reached out to take his hand and pull him into the hallway, and again only enough time to shut his door before Blaine started away with soft footsteps, tugging Kurt along.
Down the hall, down the stairs, the carpet muffling their movements; the whole time, Kurt watched the back of Blaine’s head, caught between exasperation and amusement at all of the silence and the mystery and the fact that this was Blaine, leading him somewhere by the hand again, though with much more familiarity to their fingers wound together. (And that was still incredible, still made his heart speed up when it washed over him again; that this was his boyfriend, his boyfriend. He’d repeated the word so many times over the last few weeks that it had started to feel like nonsense syllables.)
They reached a window on the fourth floor landing and finally Blaine turned around, smiling. The moonlight caught him through the glass, touched his face and hair and eyes in the dark, and Kurt smiled back because he couldn’t help it. “Where are we going?” he whispered, glancing back over his shoulder at the wide turn of the stairs.
Blaine pulled him a little more into the light. “Do you trust me?” he asked.
Kurt smothered a laugh with his hand. “When did this become Aladdin?”
“Shut up,” Blaine murmured amiably, turning to the window and curling his fingers beneath it to heft it very slowly up. The glass was old enough that a perfectly distorted circle hung in one pane, through which the world appeared to be underwater. Kurt traced it with his fingers as Blaine lifted it up a little higher, agonizingly slow for fear of the noise, until it settled evenly as far as it could go. Blaine set his hands on the sill and leaned out with almost his entire upper body, looking down, then to either side while Kurt watched, amused. Apparently satisfied, Blaine drew back in. Then he lifted a leg and straddled the sill, half hanging out into the dark.
Kurt grabbed his arm immediately, panicked. “What are you--”
Blaine turned to look at him, grinning. “I promise I won’t get us killed. I’ve done this before. A lot. It’s safe.”
Kurt watched his face, disbelieving. “What part of hanging out of a window is safe?”
“Oh, it gets worse.” Blaine tilted a little more out of the window, a look of pure concentration on his face, peering down into the dark. Kurt didn’t let go of him, even when his face cleared and he ducked his head outside with a weirdly practiced ease. He tugged his other leg to the edge of the sill, then looked back at Kurt. “The roof’s right there,” he said. “You just have to feel for it a little.”
“Why are we feeling for the roof?”
Blaine smirked. Kurt thought it was probably at his expression. “Well. You aren’t feeling for the roof. You’re feeling for me.”
Then he tilted all the way out and disappeared, his foot swinging out of the window and out of sight.
“Blaine!” Kurt hissed, leaning out into the open air.
Blaine’s hand caught his, and Kurt looked down. He was standing there, on the slant of the roof, his head at the level of the sill. He smiled. “I’m fine,” he soothed. “Come on.”
Kurt let out a breath. “You’re insane.”
“No, just really optimistic.” Blaine tugged a little at Kurt’s hand, his maniac grin coming clearer as Kurt’s eyes adjusted to the dark in the shadow of the roof. “I swear on everything I love that you’re not going to fall to your death. I swear on Disney movies. I swear on Katy Perry.”
Kurt wrapped his hand around the bottom of the window, his other still reaching down to grip Blaine’s. He frowned out into the dark, not able to differentiate black shingle for open space. “I remain unconvinced.”
Blaine’s expression softened, his mouth curling at one side, still slightly teasing, but half-serious. “I swear on the way you laugh,” he said earnestly. “I swear on the way the moon was hitting your face in the hallway just now. I swear on--”
“Oh my God, shut up, stop talking,” Kurt mumbled desperately, hefting one leg to hang out of the window, his face burning. Blaine held his hand tighter, laughing.
“Tilt out a little more,” he said. “You’re taller than me, it’ll be easier for you.”
“That’s the first time you’ve admitted that,” Kurt muttered, searching with his foot for some kind of purchase. He gripped back at Blaine’s hand as tightly as he could. When his foot hit the roof and settled, he let out a relieved breath - and Blaine pulled him the rest of the way out of the window as he gave a strangled little shout.
Blaine steadied him by wrapping his arms around Kurt’s waist. He tilted his head the little bit he had to in order to look into Kurt’s face. “I like that you’re taller than me,” he murmured. His face was completely open, childishly honest.
Kurt cleared his throat past the breath caught there. “I hate you a little,” he managed.
Blaine only grinned, and turned on his heel, starting carefully down over the shingles. “You wouldn’t really have had far to fall, anyway,” he said. “The drop is, like, seven feet.”
Kurt looked at him askance. “Drop to what? The ground?”
“No,” Blaine said simply. He stopped them, and then pointed down. “Look.”
He’d brought them to the edge of the roof. Or at least, to the edge of this section of the roof; Dalton was cut into strange levels, the way that very old, very large houses tended to be. From where he stood, Kurt could see a wide, flat section of curbed cement below him, with squat, broad shapes in the dark far corner. There was a metal door set into the brick wall at the edge of the cement abutting the building. Kurt blinked down at it. “We couldn’t use the door?”
Blaine shrugged, crouching at the edge of the roof overhang and feeling below for something. He had to let go of Kurt to do it, and Kurt steadied them both with a hand on Blaine’s shoulder. “You need a key to use the door. I think it’s a maintenance thing. I don’t even know where that leads to inside of the school.”
“Secret passageways,” Kurt said.
Blaine glanced back over his shoulder, grinning. “Trust me, I looked.” He seemed to find what he was feeling for beneath the roof; he took in an a-ha sort of breath and leaned down further. “There’s a ladder thing here. It’s kind of shallow, so go slow, okay?”
Kurt frowned down at him. “What happened to ‘it’s only like seven feet’?”
“Still enough to sprain something.”
Kurt sighed and crouched down next to Blaine. He followed Blaine’s arm until he found the ladder; it was a series of slots indented into the brick, going down to the flat cement roof. He raised an eyebrow at Blaine, who was still only inches away from him, looking down. “If I fall and break my talent, I’m blaming you.”
Blaine held up a Scouts-honor hand. “I take total responsibility for your clumsiness.”
Kurt smirked, then swung his leg down and nosed it into the first indentation. Blaine steadied him by holding his arms, and he swung his other leg down to the next, and so on, until Blaine was forced by the distance to let go, and Kurt very carefully maneuvered himself down to flat rooftop. He stepped back, relief immediately rushing through him at the fact that he no longer felt like he was going to slide off of the building into the dark, and watched as Blaine swung himself over the edge of the roof and climbed down, skipping to last few slots to land with a soft noise right in front of Kurt. He looked up, wiped his hands on his uniform pants, and smiled.
“I’m honestly shocked I got you out here,” he said.
Kurt held up his hands. “I’m a man of many mysteries, and infinite curiosity for whatever crazy thing it is you think you’re doing.”
Blaine tilted his head a little. “Not quite as crazy as you might think,” he said. “Look up.”
Kurt did. Then he smiled, bright, stretching wide across his face. The stars hung suspended in the blue-black sky, close and vivid, with the moon round and full and almost unreal in how clear it was, carved with imperfections and scars. Kurt thought that it was probably more stars than he had ever seen at one time. The roof of a dark campus in Middle-of-Nowhere, Westerville, Ohio was apparently a good place for stargazing. “You’re a ridiculous romantic,” he murmured without looking away. “How did you even find this place?”
Blaine shrugged, his arm slipping around Kurt’s waist. “I had a lot of hiding places, when I first got here,” he said. “Just to get away from things.”
Kurt looked at him and caught the soft, sad smile on his face, self-deprecating and a little foolish. When Blaine talked about himself in his first few months at Dalton, it was almost always with this expression; it was like he was talking about someone else, someone vaguely embarrassing. A lonely little boy with big scars and a heart-pounding fear of being seen. It made Kurt step closer to him and wrap his arms around his waist. It made him tilt his head to brush their lips together, like a reminder, maybe. Or a promise.
Blaine’s expression was brighter when he pulled back; his smile pulled wider at the corners. “All right, no more maudlin,” he murmured. “Tonight’s all about stargazing. I want to do as many cliché things as I can while you’re still here.”
Kurt laughed as Blaine started across the flat rooftop, pulling Kurt easily after him. “Does your idea of cliché romance involve getting caught out of our rooms after curfew?”
Blaine waved his free hand. “No one will know. Besides, it’s not like they’re going to kick you out now.” He glanced back over his shoulder. “You’re leaving tomorrow.”
The way Blaine said it, the look on his face, made Kurt swallow hard. He squeezed at Blaine’s hand and opened his mouth to say something, anything - but what came out instead was a laugh, when he saw where Blaine was leading him. “You’ve already been out here today,” he said.
There was a plush red blanket spread over the concrete, neat and unwrinkled and perfectly centered. Blaine grinned, pleased, and sat down in the middle with his legs folded, pulling Kurt down to sit next to him. “I might have made some minor arrangements for comfort.”
Once settled, Kurt smirked across at him, head tilted, chin resting on his fist, elbow resting on his knee. “So, Copernicus,” he said, jutting his chin up at the stars. “Wow me.”
Blaine looked at him, eyebrows raised in mock surprise. “What, I’m supposed to be knowledgeable?” he asked. “Can’t you just quietly take in the majesty of the universe, or whatever?”
Kurt snorted. “Blaine, your head is like a storage unit for useless facts,” he said. “You have, like, eighty possible things to say about nebulas or the big bang or some weird Carl Sagan reference I won’t understand. I can see it in your eyes.”
“Nebulae,” Blaine corrected, looking at Kurt thoughtfully for a moment. “Okay,” he said, finally, straightening his legs out and lying down against the blanket in order to look straight up at the sky. He closed his eyes, and Kurt watched him, the play of light and shadow over Blaine’s face in his concentrated silence.
Quietly, Blaine said: “Suspiciendo despicio, despiciendo suspicio.”
Kurt blinked slowly, settling down beside Blaine, turned towards him with his head propped in his arm. “Okay,” he said. “Is that some kind of incantation?”
Blaine opened his eyes and glanced at him, smirking. “No,” he said. “It’s this - idea, I guess, from Tycho Brahe. This ideology. It means ‘by looking up I see downward, by looking down I see upward.’”
“Who’s Tycho Brahe?” Kurt nestled his head further into his arm. Blaine’s eyes were glittering black in the dark, and Kurt watched them looking at him, a small smile tugging at the corner of Blaine’s mouth.
“He was a sixteenth-century astronomer,” Blaine said. “One of the guys who was studying planetary motion. Like Copernicus, but Tycho was, you know, wrong. He had this huge amount of really accurate data about the movements of the stars, though. He had his own island for a while.”
“Lucky guy,” Kurt murmured. “So what does ‘by looking upward-‘” Kurt broke off, unable to remember the rest of it.
“’By looking up I see downward, by looking down I see upward,’” Blaine repeated. He turned on his side to face Kurt, trailing his hand along the blanket between them to carefully weave their fingers together. “I think it means that the sky reflects the things that happen on the Earth. The stars. That they’re bound to each other.”
Kurt raised an eyebrow. “Like astrology?”
Blaine blinked at him. It was very slow, and his eyebrows knit together, creasing his forehead. His mouth tipped into a frown. “Would you believe me if I said I never actually made that connection?”
Kurt laughed in surprise. “Of course you didn’t.”
Blaine’s frown twitched as he tried to keep himself from smiling, his eyes bright with humor. “Give me a break,” he said. “This was, like, two paragraphs in a book I read in fifth grade. I just really liked the phrases in Latin. I remembered the interesting parts.”
“Because you’re a nerd,” Kurt murmured fondly, moving closer to Blaine, until they were tucked against each other all along their bodies, radiating warmth. Kurt closed his eyes and sighed, tipping his head to touch against Blaine’s. “What else do you remember?”
Blaine huffed a laugh, and his breath ghosted over Kurt’s cheek. “Tycho either died because he refused to leave a party and his bladder exploded, or he was slowly poisoned to death with mercury by his assistant, Johannes Kepler, who hated him and eventually went on to prove the Copernican theory of heliocentricity using Tycho’s research database.”
Kurt thought about that for a moment. “I can’t decide which story I like better,” he said.
“Neither can I,” Blaine murmured. He shifted a little closer to Kurt, ducking his head to settle against Kurt’s chest.
Kurt smiled down at the crown of hair he could see above the curve of Blaine’s shoulders. “We aren’t really stargazing right now.”
Blaine tilted his head back up to look at Kurt’s face. Then he moved a little bit away, and Kurt watched the way his expression changed, from something content and pleased to something - not. He met Kurt’s eyes, and Kurt could see the softness there, the weird vulnerability when Blaine took an unsteady breath. “I know,” he said quietly. He dropped his eyes down to the blanket between them. His thumb swept back and forth over Kurt’s hand in his. “I just--” he closed his eyes. “I’m really going to miss you.”
Something sealed Kurt’s throat shut. He tried to swallow past it. “Blaine,” he managed, less a word and more a movement of air that broke in a soft whine.
“I know it’s your decision,” Blaine said, and he opened his eyes again to meet Kurt’s gaze with an earnest expression. “I know better than anyone why it’s right, believe me.” His hand tightened over Kurt’s. “I’m just - I’m scared, of you not being here. I didn’t know how much I needed this - you, everything. Everything’s different now. You’re always just here, in class, passing me in the hallway, Warblers practice.” He shook his head. “I’m going to miss all of that. I’m going to miss kissing you good night at your door five minutes before curfew. You’re just going to not be there.” He let out a breath, eyes slipping briefly closed once more. “I have to figure out how to be here without you again.”
Kurt pressed himself close against Blaine, arm slipping around his chest to pull them tight together. He pressed brief, light kisses against Blaine’s cheek, his forehead, his mouth. “I know,” he murmured. “I know, I know, this is the worst part of leaving.” He tucked his head between Blaine’s neck and shoulder. “I’m going to miss this - so much, I can’t even--” It had felt like weights being piled slowly on Kurt’s chest, crushing and unimaginable, and he’d been avoiding it so steadfastly, avoiding even the passing thought of this, because it was just so much. But Blaine could say it, could lay it out like that even though it looked like it was tearing him apart, and Kurt knew, because he felt it, too.
“I’m sorry,” Blaine said, fingers trailing up and down Kurt’s back. “I don’t mean to put this on you.” He tilted his head to press a cheek against Kurt’s temple, and Kurt could feel a dampness there that made his heart squeeze painfully.
“No,” Kurt murmured. “I understand.” He moved back slightly, to be able to look into Blaine’s face. If Blaine had been crying, it was gone now; the only sign was a slight redness to his cheeks and eyes. Kurt set his expression resolute, his tone fierce, gripping Blaine’s hand in his. “We’re going to be fine, though. I know that. You need to know that.”
Blaine nodded. “I know.” His mouth turned up in a watery little smile. “I’m going to be eating up your weekends for a while, though.”
Kurt relaxed, a little. He matched Blaine’s smile, soft, and leaned forward to brush his lips over Blaine’s. “Deal.”
They settled back together, molded against one another, no room for even air between them, their breath moving in and out of their chests at the same slow tempo. Kurt wanted their hearts to sync, some kind of intrinsic connection, but he settled for the way Blaine’s fingers knotted into his shirt, the way he could feel Blaine’s pulse in his throat, eyes squeezed tight and remembering this, remembering this feeling of being held and loved and missed before he’s even gone.
After a while, the feeling tapered away. It bled down through the blanket, into the cement. The need moved on, leaving a languid kind of bonelessness in its wake. Kurt hooked his ankle over Blaine’s and sighed against him. “Tycho Brahe is a really great name.”
“It is,” Blaine agreed, and Kurt could hear his smile.
“If you read horoscopes, I’m breaking up with you.”
Blaine laughed. He unlooped his arm from Kurt’s waist and rolled over onto his back, arching against the roof in a wide stretch before settling more comfortably. “I just really like the idea of the Earth and sky being connected, somehow. Not necessarily as a way to tell the future or say anything about who a person is - just, a way that the world is parallel. Connected.” He went quiet. “I don’t really know how to explain it.”
Kurt rolled onto his own back, but turned his head to smile across the gap between them, at the middle of which their hands were still held. “So,” he said after a moment. “Any more useless facts?”
Blaine turned his own head to blink thoughtfully at Kurt, taking a long, soft silence. His thumb ran over Kurt’s knuckles again. “There’s this phenomenon,” he said, quiet and slow, “in quantum physics, called quantum entanglement, where two - well, it can be a lot of stuff, but let’s say two electrons - where two electrons that have had some kind of physical interaction become - well, entangled. They become this pair where the quantum mechanical properties of one are dependent on what happens to the other. When they’re separated, they stay entangled, no matter how far away they are. So you could have one side of the pair China and the other in America, and their properties would still be dependent on each other. When you measured the one in China and observed that its spin state was up, then the one in America would be down, and vice versa.” Blaine stared down at their hands, the slow sweep of his skin against Kurt’s. “You could have them on opposite sides of the planet, but they’re still dependent on each other,” he murmured.
Kurt watched Blaine watching their hands, a grin slowly beginning to work its way over his mouth. He squeezed his fingers until Blaine looked up to meet his eyes, and his grin widened. “Did you just use a quantum mechanical phenomenon as a romantic metaphor?”
Blaine smiled, completely shameless. “Yes.”
Kurt stared at him. I love you, he thought.
Instead, he said, “Of course you did.”
Blaine grinned at him, amused, then disentangled their fingers to slip his hand against Kurt’s cheek and turn to kiss him. Kurt sighed into it, craning his neck to deepen it, his hand slipping under Blaine’s jacket to fist in his shirt.
He pulled back a few seconds later with a reluctant groan. “The longer we spend out here, the more likely we are to get caught.”
Blaine sighed, letting his head fall against Kurt’s shoulder. “Good. Maybe they’ll kick me out and I’ll transfer to McKinley.”
Kurt smirked. “Don’t even joke.”
Blaine was silent for a moment. Then: “Part of me isn’t really joking.”
Kurt’s hand tightened involuntarily in Blaine’s shirt. He took a breath and closed his eyes, then let it out and opened them. “Not a good idea,” he murmured. “No matter how nice it would be to have you there. And it would be really nice. Just, not a good idea.”
“I know,” Blaine said, and it sounded like he really did. He pressed a dry kiss against Kurt’s jaw, then sat up, stretching. “Come on.” He pushed himself to his feet and held out a hand for Kurt to take. “Time for bed.”
Kurt accepted the hand and pulled himself up, then stepped away to watch as Blaine bent to gather up the blanket.
“We’re going to be fine,” Kurt said softly.
Blaine straightened up, folding the blanket and draping it carefully over his arms, with the moonlight falling over his shoulders, making his hair blacker, his eyes darker in shadow. When he was finished, he looked up, met Kurt’s gaze, and smiled.
“I know,” he said. And he sounded like he really did.
They climbed back up with the sky watching silently, the stars burning bright and relentless above them. Constellations, so many of billions of suns, very old light, looked on until the window closed behind them with a short, soft sound.
Disclaimer:
Please don't wander up to a quantum physicist with that explanation of quantum entanglement. I can only imagine how much nuance both Blaine and I are missing; this comes from a teenage-hood obsession with science documentaries about quantum mechanics. I also apologize for how Blaine totally ignores the alchemy part of "by looking down I see upward." Blaine apparently likes the philosophical, metaphorical parts of science more than the actual science parts of science. This totally has nothing to do with the fact that I also like those parts. (But I like the science-science, too.)
Rating: PG
Characters: Kurt/Blaine
Words: 3,889
Spoilers: 2.18, Born This Way
Summary: On Kurt's last night at Dalton, Blaine takes him stargazing. Love, history, and science. (Also available on AO3.)
Author's Note: I wrote this for narie, for the kurt_blaine Hiatus Gift Exchange. She was like, "Science!" I was like, "I love science! What a crazy random happenstance!" The title comes from a quote by Carl Sagan, and this gorgeous, nerdtastic video. (Oh, hey, also: I am accepting fic prompts on Tumblr. Feel free to drop something in my ask box; anonymous is perfectly fine.)
Normally, being startled awake after midnight by a light rapping on his door was not something Kurt suffered gladly, or at least not without a thorough verbal maiming. But apparently all sense of propriety and beauty rest could be thrown easily away if the person on the opposite side of the door was Blaine, still in his uniform, with one finger pressed to his lips and his eyes bright and amused. Kurt had exactly enough time to raise an expectant eyebrow before Blaine reached out to take his hand and pull him into the hallway, and again only enough time to shut his door before Blaine started away with soft footsteps, tugging Kurt along.
Down the hall, down the stairs, the carpet muffling their movements; the whole time, Kurt watched the back of Blaine’s head, caught between exasperation and amusement at all of the silence and the mystery and the fact that this was Blaine, leading him somewhere by the hand again, though with much more familiarity to their fingers wound together. (And that was still incredible, still made his heart speed up when it washed over him again; that this was his boyfriend, his boyfriend. He’d repeated the word so many times over the last few weeks that it had started to feel like nonsense syllables.)
They reached a window on the fourth floor landing and finally Blaine turned around, smiling. The moonlight caught him through the glass, touched his face and hair and eyes in the dark, and Kurt smiled back because he couldn’t help it. “Where are we going?” he whispered, glancing back over his shoulder at the wide turn of the stairs.
Blaine pulled him a little more into the light. “Do you trust me?” he asked.
Kurt smothered a laugh with his hand. “When did this become Aladdin?”
“Shut up,” Blaine murmured amiably, turning to the window and curling his fingers beneath it to heft it very slowly up. The glass was old enough that a perfectly distorted circle hung in one pane, through which the world appeared to be underwater. Kurt traced it with his fingers as Blaine lifted it up a little higher, agonizingly slow for fear of the noise, until it settled evenly as far as it could go. Blaine set his hands on the sill and leaned out with almost his entire upper body, looking down, then to either side while Kurt watched, amused. Apparently satisfied, Blaine drew back in. Then he lifted a leg and straddled the sill, half hanging out into the dark.
Kurt grabbed his arm immediately, panicked. “What are you--”
Blaine turned to look at him, grinning. “I promise I won’t get us killed. I’ve done this before. A lot. It’s safe.”
Kurt watched his face, disbelieving. “What part of hanging out of a window is safe?”
“Oh, it gets worse.” Blaine tilted a little more out of the window, a look of pure concentration on his face, peering down into the dark. Kurt didn’t let go of him, even when his face cleared and he ducked his head outside with a weirdly practiced ease. He tugged his other leg to the edge of the sill, then looked back at Kurt. “The roof’s right there,” he said. “You just have to feel for it a little.”
“Why are we feeling for the roof?”
Blaine smirked. Kurt thought it was probably at his expression. “Well. You aren’t feeling for the roof. You’re feeling for me.”
Then he tilted all the way out and disappeared, his foot swinging out of the window and out of sight.
“Blaine!” Kurt hissed, leaning out into the open air.
Blaine’s hand caught his, and Kurt looked down. He was standing there, on the slant of the roof, his head at the level of the sill. He smiled. “I’m fine,” he soothed. “Come on.”
Kurt let out a breath. “You’re insane.”
“No, just really optimistic.” Blaine tugged a little at Kurt’s hand, his maniac grin coming clearer as Kurt’s eyes adjusted to the dark in the shadow of the roof. “I swear on everything I love that you’re not going to fall to your death. I swear on Disney movies. I swear on Katy Perry.”
Kurt wrapped his hand around the bottom of the window, his other still reaching down to grip Blaine’s. He frowned out into the dark, not able to differentiate black shingle for open space. “I remain unconvinced.”
Blaine’s expression softened, his mouth curling at one side, still slightly teasing, but half-serious. “I swear on the way you laugh,” he said earnestly. “I swear on the way the moon was hitting your face in the hallway just now. I swear on--”
“Oh my God, shut up, stop talking,” Kurt mumbled desperately, hefting one leg to hang out of the window, his face burning. Blaine held his hand tighter, laughing.
“Tilt out a little more,” he said. “You’re taller than me, it’ll be easier for you.”
“That’s the first time you’ve admitted that,” Kurt muttered, searching with his foot for some kind of purchase. He gripped back at Blaine’s hand as tightly as he could. When his foot hit the roof and settled, he let out a relieved breath - and Blaine pulled him the rest of the way out of the window as he gave a strangled little shout.
Blaine steadied him by wrapping his arms around Kurt’s waist. He tilted his head the little bit he had to in order to look into Kurt’s face. “I like that you’re taller than me,” he murmured. His face was completely open, childishly honest.
Kurt cleared his throat past the breath caught there. “I hate you a little,” he managed.
Blaine only grinned, and turned on his heel, starting carefully down over the shingles. “You wouldn’t really have had far to fall, anyway,” he said. “The drop is, like, seven feet.”
Kurt looked at him askance. “Drop to what? The ground?”
“No,” Blaine said simply. He stopped them, and then pointed down. “Look.”
He’d brought them to the edge of the roof. Or at least, to the edge of this section of the roof; Dalton was cut into strange levels, the way that very old, very large houses tended to be. From where he stood, Kurt could see a wide, flat section of curbed cement below him, with squat, broad shapes in the dark far corner. There was a metal door set into the brick wall at the edge of the cement abutting the building. Kurt blinked down at it. “We couldn’t use the door?”
Blaine shrugged, crouching at the edge of the roof overhang and feeling below for something. He had to let go of Kurt to do it, and Kurt steadied them both with a hand on Blaine’s shoulder. “You need a key to use the door. I think it’s a maintenance thing. I don’t even know where that leads to inside of the school.”
“Secret passageways,” Kurt said.
Blaine glanced back over his shoulder, grinning. “Trust me, I looked.” He seemed to find what he was feeling for beneath the roof; he took in an a-ha sort of breath and leaned down further. “There’s a ladder thing here. It’s kind of shallow, so go slow, okay?”
Kurt frowned down at him. “What happened to ‘it’s only like seven feet’?”
“Still enough to sprain something.”
Kurt sighed and crouched down next to Blaine. He followed Blaine’s arm until he found the ladder; it was a series of slots indented into the brick, going down to the flat cement roof. He raised an eyebrow at Blaine, who was still only inches away from him, looking down. “If I fall and break my talent, I’m blaming you.”
Blaine held up a Scouts-honor hand. “I take total responsibility for your clumsiness.”
Kurt smirked, then swung his leg down and nosed it into the first indentation. Blaine steadied him by holding his arms, and he swung his other leg down to the next, and so on, until Blaine was forced by the distance to let go, and Kurt very carefully maneuvered himself down to flat rooftop. He stepped back, relief immediately rushing through him at the fact that he no longer felt like he was going to slide off of the building into the dark, and watched as Blaine swung himself over the edge of the roof and climbed down, skipping to last few slots to land with a soft noise right in front of Kurt. He looked up, wiped his hands on his uniform pants, and smiled.
“I’m honestly shocked I got you out here,” he said.
Kurt held up his hands. “I’m a man of many mysteries, and infinite curiosity for whatever crazy thing it is you think you’re doing.”
Blaine tilted his head a little. “Not quite as crazy as you might think,” he said. “Look up.”
Kurt did. Then he smiled, bright, stretching wide across his face. The stars hung suspended in the blue-black sky, close and vivid, with the moon round and full and almost unreal in how clear it was, carved with imperfections and scars. Kurt thought that it was probably more stars than he had ever seen at one time. The roof of a dark campus in Middle-of-Nowhere, Westerville, Ohio was apparently a good place for stargazing. “You’re a ridiculous romantic,” he murmured without looking away. “How did you even find this place?”
Blaine shrugged, his arm slipping around Kurt’s waist. “I had a lot of hiding places, when I first got here,” he said. “Just to get away from things.”
Kurt looked at him and caught the soft, sad smile on his face, self-deprecating and a little foolish. When Blaine talked about himself in his first few months at Dalton, it was almost always with this expression; it was like he was talking about someone else, someone vaguely embarrassing. A lonely little boy with big scars and a heart-pounding fear of being seen. It made Kurt step closer to him and wrap his arms around his waist. It made him tilt his head to brush their lips together, like a reminder, maybe. Or a promise.
Blaine’s expression was brighter when he pulled back; his smile pulled wider at the corners. “All right, no more maudlin,” he murmured. “Tonight’s all about stargazing. I want to do as many cliché things as I can while you’re still here.”
Kurt laughed as Blaine started across the flat rooftop, pulling Kurt easily after him. “Does your idea of cliché romance involve getting caught out of our rooms after curfew?”
Blaine waved his free hand. “No one will know. Besides, it’s not like they’re going to kick you out now.” He glanced back over his shoulder. “You’re leaving tomorrow.”
The way Blaine said it, the look on his face, made Kurt swallow hard. He squeezed at Blaine’s hand and opened his mouth to say something, anything - but what came out instead was a laugh, when he saw where Blaine was leading him. “You’ve already been out here today,” he said.
There was a plush red blanket spread over the concrete, neat and unwrinkled and perfectly centered. Blaine grinned, pleased, and sat down in the middle with his legs folded, pulling Kurt down to sit next to him. “I might have made some minor arrangements for comfort.”
Once settled, Kurt smirked across at him, head tilted, chin resting on his fist, elbow resting on his knee. “So, Copernicus,” he said, jutting his chin up at the stars. “Wow me.”
Blaine looked at him, eyebrows raised in mock surprise. “What, I’m supposed to be knowledgeable?” he asked. “Can’t you just quietly take in the majesty of the universe, or whatever?”
Kurt snorted. “Blaine, your head is like a storage unit for useless facts,” he said. “You have, like, eighty possible things to say about nebulas or the big bang or some weird Carl Sagan reference I won’t understand. I can see it in your eyes.”
“Nebulae,” Blaine corrected, looking at Kurt thoughtfully for a moment. “Okay,” he said, finally, straightening his legs out and lying down against the blanket in order to look straight up at the sky. He closed his eyes, and Kurt watched him, the play of light and shadow over Blaine’s face in his concentrated silence.
Quietly, Blaine said: “Suspiciendo despicio, despiciendo suspicio.”
Kurt blinked slowly, settling down beside Blaine, turned towards him with his head propped in his arm. “Okay,” he said. “Is that some kind of incantation?”
Blaine opened his eyes and glanced at him, smirking. “No,” he said. “It’s this - idea, I guess, from Tycho Brahe. This ideology. It means ‘by looking up I see downward, by looking down I see upward.’”
“Who’s Tycho Brahe?” Kurt nestled his head further into his arm. Blaine’s eyes were glittering black in the dark, and Kurt watched them looking at him, a small smile tugging at the corner of Blaine’s mouth.
“He was a sixteenth-century astronomer,” Blaine said. “One of the guys who was studying planetary motion. Like Copernicus, but Tycho was, you know, wrong. He had this huge amount of really accurate data about the movements of the stars, though. He had his own island for a while.”
“Lucky guy,” Kurt murmured. “So what does ‘by looking upward-‘” Kurt broke off, unable to remember the rest of it.
“’By looking up I see downward, by looking down I see upward,’” Blaine repeated. He turned on his side to face Kurt, trailing his hand along the blanket between them to carefully weave their fingers together. “I think it means that the sky reflects the things that happen on the Earth. The stars. That they’re bound to each other.”
Kurt raised an eyebrow. “Like astrology?”
Blaine blinked at him. It was very slow, and his eyebrows knit together, creasing his forehead. His mouth tipped into a frown. “Would you believe me if I said I never actually made that connection?”
Kurt laughed in surprise. “Of course you didn’t.”
Blaine’s frown twitched as he tried to keep himself from smiling, his eyes bright with humor. “Give me a break,” he said. “This was, like, two paragraphs in a book I read in fifth grade. I just really liked the phrases in Latin. I remembered the interesting parts.”
“Because you’re a nerd,” Kurt murmured fondly, moving closer to Blaine, until they were tucked against each other all along their bodies, radiating warmth. Kurt closed his eyes and sighed, tipping his head to touch against Blaine’s. “What else do you remember?”
Blaine huffed a laugh, and his breath ghosted over Kurt’s cheek. “Tycho either died because he refused to leave a party and his bladder exploded, or he was slowly poisoned to death with mercury by his assistant, Johannes Kepler, who hated him and eventually went on to prove the Copernican theory of heliocentricity using Tycho’s research database.”
Kurt thought about that for a moment. “I can’t decide which story I like better,” he said.
“Neither can I,” Blaine murmured. He shifted a little closer to Kurt, ducking his head to settle against Kurt’s chest.
Kurt smiled down at the crown of hair he could see above the curve of Blaine’s shoulders. “We aren’t really stargazing right now.”
Blaine tilted his head back up to look at Kurt’s face. Then he moved a little bit away, and Kurt watched the way his expression changed, from something content and pleased to something - not. He met Kurt’s eyes, and Kurt could see the softness there, the weird vulnerability when Blaine took an unsteady breath. “I know,” he said quietly. He dropped his eyes down to the blanket between them. His thumb swept back and forth over Kurt’s hand in his. “I just--” he closed his eyes. “I’m really going to miss you.”
Something sealed Kurt’s throat shut. He tried to swallow past it. “Blaine,” he managed, less a word and more a movement of air that broke in a soft whine.
“I know it’s your decision,” Blaine said, and he opened his eyes again to meet Kurt’s gaze with an earnest expression. “I know better than anyone why it’s right, believe me.” His hand tightened over Kurt’s. “I’m just - I’m scared, of you not being here. I didn’t know how much I needed this - you, everything. Everything’s different now. You’re always just here, in class, passing me in the hallway, Warblers practice.” He shook his head. “I’m going to miss all of that. I’m going to miss kissing you good night at your door five minutes before curfew. You’re just going to not be there.” He let out a breath, eyes slipping briefly closed once more. “I have to figure out how to be here without you again.”
Kurt pressed himself close against Blaine, arm slipping around his chest to pull them tight together. He pressed brief, light kisses against Blaine’s cheek, his forehead, his mouth. “I know,” he murmured. “I know, I know, this is the worst part of leaving.” He tucked his head between Blaine’s neck and shoulder. “I’m going to miss this - so much, I can’t even--” It had felt like weights being piled slowly on Kurt’s chest, crushing and unimaginable, and he’d been avoiding it so steadfastly, avoiding even the passing thought of this, because it was just so much. But Blaine could say it, could lay it out like that even though it looked like it was tearing him apart, and Kurt knew, because he felt it, too.
“I’m sorry,” Blaine said, fingers trailing up and down Kurt’s back. “I don’t mean to put this on you.” He tilted his head to press a cheek against Kurt’s temple, and Kurt could feel a dampness there that made his heart squeeze painfully.
“No,” Kurt murmured. “I understand.” He moved back slightly, to be able to look into Blaine’s face. If Blaine had been crying, it was gone now; the only sign was a slight redness to his cheeks and eyes. Kurt set his expression resolute, his tone fierce, gripping Blaine’s hand in his. “We’re going to be fine, though. I know that. You need to know that.”
Blaine nodded. “I know.” His mouth turned up in a watery little smile. “I’m going to be eating up your weekends for a while, though.”
Kurt relaxed, a little. He matched Blaine’s smile, soft, and leaned forward to brush his lips over Blaine’s. “Deal.”
They settled back together, molded against one another, no room for even air between them, their breath moving in and out of their chests at the same slow tempo. Kurt wanted their hearts to sync, some kind of intrinsic connection, but he settled for the way Blaine’s fingers knotted into his shirt, the way he could feel Blaine’s pulse in his throat, eyes squeezed tight and remembering this, remembering this feeling of being held and loved and missed before he’s even gone.
After a while, the feeling tapered away. It bled down through the blanket, into the cement. The need moved on, leaving a languid kind of bonelessness in its wake. Kurt hooked his ankle over Blaine’s and sighed against him. “Tycho Brahe is a really great name.”
“It is,” Blaine agreed, and Kurt could hear his smile.
“If you read horoscopes, I’m breaking up with you.”
Blaine laughed. He unlooped his arm from Kurt’s waist and rolled over onto his back, arching against the roof in a wide stretch before settling more comfortably. “I just really like the idea of the Earth and sky being connected, somehow. Not necessarily as a way to tell the future or say anything about who a person is - just, a way that the world is parallel. Connected.” He went quiet. “I don’t really know how to explain it.”
Kurt rolled onto his own back, but turned his head to smile across the gap between them, at the middle of which their hands were still held. “So,” he said after a moment. “Any more useless facts?”
Blaine turned his own head to blink thoughtfully at Kurt, taking a long, soft silence. His thumb ran over Kurt’s knuckles again. “There’s this phenomenon,” he said, quiet and slow, “in quantum physics, called quantum entanglement, where two - well, it can be a lot of stuff, but let’s say two electrons - where two electrons that have had some kind of physical interaction become - well, entangled. They become this pair where the quantum mechanical properties of one are dependent on what happens to the other. When they’re separated, they stay entangled, no matter how far away they are. So you could have one side of the pair China and the other in America, and their properties would still be dependent on each other. When you measured the one in China and observed that its spin state was up, then the one in America would be down, and vice versa.” Blaine stared down at their hands, the slow sweep of his skin against Kurt’s. “You could have them on opposite sides of the planet, but they’re still dependent on each other,” he murmured.
Kurt watched Blaine watching their hands, a grin slowly beginning to work its way over his mouth. He squeezed his fingers until Blaine looked up to meet his eyes, and his grin widened. “Did you just use a quantum mechanical phenomenon as a romantic metaphor?”
Blaine smiled, completely shameless. “Yes.”
Kurt stared at him. I love you, he thought.
Instead, he said, “Of course you did.”
Blaine grinned at him, amused, then disentangled their fingers to slip his hand against Kurt’s cheek and turn to kiss him. Kurt sighed into it, craning his neck to deepen it, his hand slipping under Blaine’s jacket to fist in his shirt.
He pulled back a few seconds later with a reluctant groan. “The longer we spend out here, the more likely we are to get caught.”
Blaine sighed, letting his head fall against Kurt’s shoulder. “Good. Maybe they’ll kick me out and I’ll transfer to McKinley.”
Kurt smirked. “Don’t even joke.”
Blaine was silent for a moment. Then: “Part of me isn’t really joking.”
Kurt’s hand tightened involuntarily in Blaine’s shirt. He took a breath and closed his eyes, then let it out and opened them. “Not a good idea,” he murmured. “No matter how nice it would be to have you there. And it would be really nice. Just, not a good idea.”
“I know,” Blaine said, and it sounded like he really did. He pressed a dry kiss against Kurt’s jaw, then sat up, stretching. “Come on.” He pushed himself to his feet and held out a hand for Kurt to take. “Time for bed.”
Kurt accepted the hand and pulled himself up, then stepped away to watch as Blaine bent to gather up the blanket.
“We’re going to be fine,” Kurt said softly.
Blaine straightened up, folding the blanket and draping it carefully over his arms, with the moonlight falling over his shoulders, making his hair blacker, his eyes darker in shadow. When he was finished, he looked up, met Kurt’s gaze, and smiled.
“I know,” he said. And he sounded like he really did.
They climbed back up with the sky watching silently, the stars burning bright and relentless above them. Constellations, so many of billions of suns, very old light, looked on until the window closed behind them with a short, soft sound.
Disclaimer:
Please don't wander up to a quantum physicist with that explanation of quantum entanglement. I can only imagine how much nuance both Blaine and I are missing; this comes from a teenage-hood obsession with science documentaries about quantum mechanics. I also apologize for how Blaine totally ignores the alchemy part of "by looking down I see upward." Blaine apparently likes the philosophical, metaphorical parts of science more than the actual science parts of science. This totally has nothing to do with the fact that I also like those parts. (But I like the science-science, too.)