It's Dangerous To Go Alone (Take This)
Title: It's Dangerous To Go Alone (Take This)
Rating: G
Characters: Kurt/Blaine, Joseph (Blaine's old Dalton roommate)
Words: ~5,000
Spoilers: Major for Episode 3.11, Michael
Summary: Blaine and Joseph are terrible at chess, but slightly better at talking about Blaine's feelings. Blaine gives Kurt a gift.
Author's Note: Hi! It's been a while! Have some fanfiction. The title comes from The Legend of Zelda, making it the second overlong title from a video game for a fic featuring Joseph The Zen Nerd Roommate. Reading the first one ( Thank You, Mario, But Our Princess Is In Another Castle) is in no way required. All you need to know is that Blaine had a very nerdy roommate at Dalton to whom he tended to go for advice.
Neither of them was good at chess, so the whole thing was a recipe for disaster from the beginning.
“I’m not sure if that move’s legal.”
Blaine paused, his queenside rook held aloft between his fingers. He looked up at Joseph, his eyebrows furrowed. “What move?”
Joe was frowning down at the board, hands clasped in his lap. “The one where if you put that there, you’ll probably win.”
Blaine sighed, and dropped the piece down on the board with a decisive little twist. “Check,” he said, sitting up. His eye hurt. This wasn’t news, but he couldn’t touch it, which always seemed to be news to his fingers when he was distracted, and they would travel up to rub some of the weird, almost-sourceless pain away, only to be met with the patch. They did that now, and the pads pushed at the cloth instead of at his eyelid, and a renewed flood of annoyance went through Blaine as he dropped his hand back to the bedspread.
Joseph had his hand splayed out over the board, a look of deep concentration on his face, as though the right piece would magically fly up and move itself into position to get him out of check. His mouth twitched a little when he heard Blaine’s hand flop back down for probably the twentieth time since he’d arrived. “That eyepatch is totally working for me, by the way,” he said. He rocked his remaining bishop back and forth on its square. “Can you whistle the song from Kill Bill?”
Blaine propped his head up with an elbow on his knee. “Shut up and lose at chess, Joseph.”
“I’m just saying.” Joseph looked up at him and grinned. “You’ve got a Tom-Cruise-In-Valkyrie thing going on, only you’re actually a good actor and you aren’t crazy. Or a Nazi, which is a firm check in the ‘plus’ column.”
Blaine smiled slightly, despite himself. It was nice to have Joseph there; he’d never asked once whether Blaine was all right, or if it hurt, or if he needed to rest. He’d just walked right in and dropped his bag and his Dalton blazer by the bedroom door and thrown two packs of Magic cards on the bed, declaring that it was high time Blaine learned the ancient mysteries of the planeswalkers. It had taken them about half an hour to come to the conclusion that half-blind and slightly vague from painkiller was not the best state for learning how to play any kind of game that involved keeping track of numbers, so the cards were sitting abandoned in messy piles on the other side of the mattress, replaced by the first two-person board game Joseph had been able to excavate from Blaine’s closet.
Blaine felt terrible, in his eye and everywhere else. Four consecutive bedbound days did no favors to how gross Blaine already felt, with something wrapped around his head and the frustrating inability to poke at his own face, or do anything besides continue sitting in his pajamas squinting with one eye at a book or the television or just the ceiling for hours at a time, desperately bored. Or, well. Desperately something. The fact that he couldn’t even open a window because it was freezing cold outside didn’t help how much his room had started to get stale and musty with boy-smells that Blaine was sort of starting to neurotically want gone, because it made him feel claustrophobic in the worst way.
Joseph picked up his bishop and used it to take Blaine’s offending rook. “You know,” he said, apropos of nothing, “you’ve gotten really bad at hiding how you feel.”
Blaine drew his eyes quickly up from the board to stare at Joseph, blinking, his eyebrows slowly drawing together. “I - what?”
Joseph shrugged, smiling at just the corners of his mouth. “When you first came to Dalton, most of the time I couldn’t tell if you were terrified or depressed or hungry or what. You just kind of went tharn whenever anybody touched you, and you went on a lot of walks. You were my weird silent movie roommate.”
Blaine scowled down at the chess board, poking at his one of his knights. “I’m not a rabbit,” he muttered. “Also, you know, thanks.”
Joseph spread his hands. “Hey, man,” he said, grinning, “what are friends for, if not to be really honest about our emotional constipation? Then you joined the Warblers and became the Warblerbot, programmed to sing and be charming and sit up straight and eat your leafy vegetables. Then Kurt came and he broke your emotional inhibitor chip and you were a total wreck for a while. Then you guys got together and you started actually breathing like a real boy.” Joseph paused thoughtfully, with a sage little tilt of his head. “I am very well-versed in the emotional journey of one Blaine Anderson.”
Blaine still wasn’t looking at him. “It’s actually vaguely creepy,” he said. He’d lost track of the game, somewhere between the Watership Down reference and the Pinocchio reference. His eye was getting tired, and he couldn’t keep the board from blurring. “Probably more than vaguely.”
“The point is,” Joseph said, tapping on a wrinkled corner of the chess board, making the plastic pieces bounce and rattle, “you used to be really great at keeping everything hidden under the uniform and the big smile, but you suck at it now. Because I can totally tell that there’s something wrong, and you definitely want to talk about it.”
“I’m going in for a dangerous eye operation, Joe. I’m nervous. Not really much to talk about.”
“That isn’t it.”
Blaine rolled his eyes, a motion which felt strange in the right one, and finally tore his gaze up to Joseph, who was sitting with Buddha-ish neutral patience across from him. “I don’t have anything to talk about, Joseph. I’m nervous about the surgery. My eye hurts and I’m tired of sitting in my bedroom thinking about how much it hurts and I want to touch it constantly and I want to go out and do things that don’t involve eye surgery and I want to see Kurt and the medication makes me kind of high but it doesn’t totally help and why are you looking at me like that?” Blaine took a post-rant breath, doing his best to glare with only the use of one eye at Joseph, who was sitting there with a little grin, like Blaine was a funny child.
“If I tell you why you’re actually freaking out, can we talk about it?”
Blaine gave up. He slumped forward, shoulders low, head down, hands in his hair. “Fine,” he said. “Why am I actually freaking out?”
“Kurt got into NYADA.”
Blaine’s head snapped up. Even at the words, his heart sped up a little, pushing heat into his cheeks, and it was a total bodily betrayal, giving him away. “How--” he tried. “What did - how did you guess that?”
Joseph jerked his head back over his shoulder, toward the door. “Your trash can,” he said. “Two plastic champagne flutes. You and Kurt are incredibly overdramatic, but I doubt you were toasting to serious eye injuries, so there was something to celebrate. You told me about Kurt’s application. Put them together and what have you got?”
Blaine stared at him, a little dumbfounded. “Is that really how you figured it out?”
Joseph kept the coolly superior expression for a second, but then it flickered with a smile, and he dropped into a wry laugh. “No. Kurt and I are friends on Facebook. I just like seeing the look on your face when you think I’m a deductive genius.”
Blaine immediately slumped again. “I hate you.”
“You adore me,” Joseph sighed. He pinched the edge of the chess board between his fingers and slid it carefully over to the other side of the bed, next to the decks of Magic cards, then drew his knees up onto the mattress, facing Blaine cross-legged, looking interested. “Tell me of your troubles, Blainers, and spare no detail of your misery.”
Blaine flopped backwards into the pillows at the head of the bed, arms crossed over his face. “What did I do to deserve this?” he asked nothing in particular, muffled.
Joseph was right, of course. Blaine had been doing his best to think about anything but Kurt’s NYADA audition for three very long, very uninvolving, very stressful and guilty and particularly horrible days. On the one hand, it was amazing and wonderful that Kurt had been made a finalist for NYADA. On the other hand, Blaine wanted to go out and physically sink every bit of land between Ohio and New York. He wanted to go and drag New York City to the western edge of Pennsylvania. He wanted to build the best performing arts school in the country right next to his house.
“He isn’t really in yet,” Blaine murmured without opening his eyes. “He’s a finalist.”
“But he’s going to get in?” Joseph seemed further away when Blaine couldn’t see him, like Blaine was alone in the room.
He let out a breath. “Yeah.”
Blaine felt Joseph reach out and pat his leg gently. “You’re going to New York, too, aren’t you? Haven’t you been talking about NYU?”
Blaine nodded. “But. There’s a whole year.”
“Oh my,” Joseph said, and Blaine could hear the smile in his voice. “A year. However will you survive such an intense period of separation?”
Blaine kicked out at him and missed completely, which he thought was actually pretty impressive, given Joseph’s general largeness. “Mocking me is extremely helpful, Joe. I can’t imagine why I didn’t bring this up myself.”
Joseph laughed and grabbed Blaine’s still-seeking foot to press it back down on the bed next to the other one. “I can’t help it, man. It isn’t like separation is new to you guys. You were really good at keeping it together when Kurt went back to McKinley last year.”
Blaine frowned, holding an answer back behind his teeth. That was only a little separation. They saw each other every weekend. They hadn’t been - involved, in some ways, yet, ways that now made even being out of sight during classes a little unbearable at times. And even then, it had been almost constantly terrible, Kurt not being at Dalton anymore. Kurt being a voice on the phone during the week. I miss you had been Blaine’s most uttered sentence that first month, partly because it was as close as he could get to I love you without saying those words, but mostly because it was very, very true. He missed Kurt now, and he was probably coming over later to read to him and sing the week’s wrap-up song because he was missing it. The idea of a year interrupted by Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Spring Break sounded like a prison sentence.
“I was really good at hiding how bad I was at keeping it together,” Blaine murmured. He dropped his arms to his sides and scooted up to sit against the pillows. “I’m so happy for him, Joe. Honestly. This is the best thing that could possibly have happened to him, and he’s definitely going to get in, and so is Rachel, and it’s gonna be unbelievable for them. Just--” He broke the sentence, trailing off, eyes cast away, arms wrapping around his knees. “I’m scared that he’s going to get there and get tired of me.”
Joseph snorted.
Blaine frowned at him, a little hurt. “Hi. Having an actual moment over here.”
Joseph shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said, smiling. “Really. It’s just - have you seen the way that Kurt looks at you? It ridiculous. No one should be so obviously in love with another person. It’s like his prime objective is to eventually become permanently physically attached to you so that he never has to look away from you if he doesn’t want to. The only thing that trumps it is the way that you look at him, which is this expression that defies the physics of human faces in terms of the amount of emotion packed into any given square inch. It makes me want to run experiments on you. We could probably cure cancer with the power of your stupid love for each other.”
Blaine took all of this in with his eyebrows hovering at his hairline. He blinked at Joseph, slowly, and let out a long breath. “That doesn’t really mean that we’ll always be like that.”
Joseph reached out across the space between them and put a hand on Blaine’s knee, rocking it back and forth a little. “Blainers,” he said, making Blaine meet his eyes. “I have complete confidence that you and Kurt can make distance work. If anyone in the world can do it, you can. Kurt’s going to go to his big fancy school and wander around New York making mental notes of places he’s going to take you when you get there. You’re gonna get closer to the people in your new glee club and sing him ridiculous things on Skype. Or, I don’t know, maybe you’ll come back to Dalton and kick that douchey Sebastian guy out and sing girl songs in perfect harmony again. Whatever you do, you’re gonna be with people who care about you and want you to be happy.”
Blaine frowned, brushing his hand along his bedspread, watching his fingers move over the material. “I’m not really sure that the Warblers are people who care about me anymore.”
“If you think that they knew that there was anything in that slushie, you are sadly mistaken. You didn’t hear all of the weeping and gnashing of teeth the week you left Dalton.” Joseph grinned at him, all teeth. “I think Thad took to his bed for days. That creepy new guy is like Dracula. He has them all hypnotized or something. You need to stake his heart and cut off his head, and then his influence will be lifted and they’ll run screaming back to you in eight part harmony.”
Blaine smiled a little, tipping his head up to look back at Joseph. “I’ve been trying to give Sebastian the benefit of the doubt.”
“I don’t really think there’s any doubt left, my friend,” Joe said. “Blinding you in a dark underground parking structure is pretty unambiguous. And you know I’m all about turning the other cheek. I’m Fat Jesus. This is just a few stops past Crazyville.”
Blaine’s smile lifted a little higher, amused. He thought for a moment, playing with a stray thread on the comforter. “I’m starting to get closer to the guys in New Directions. Kurt’s brother doesn’t hate me anymore. Except for the fact that I leaked our setlist to the Warblers, things have been pretty good. Me and Artie and Tina are all staying behind next year. That could be a good group.”
Joseph was grinning. “Look at you, getting all optimistic about the future.”
There was still the distance, though. There was still Kurt discovering all of these new things, about himself and about the world, about everything, all ahead of Blaine, who still had no idea why Kurt had chosen him and really, honestly loved him despite the amount of things he managed to screw up on a daily basis. Kurt might find something better. Kurt might get lost in all of the spectacle and never come back. Kurt might get scared and quit while they’re ahead.
“What if it doesn’t work?” Blaine asked softly, half-lost in the idea of it. That big bright light gliding away from him, leaving him alone in the dark.
Joseph reached out, face serious, and wrapped his hand around Blaine’s shoulder. “Do you trust him? You don’t think he’s going to run off with someone he bumps into at the supermarket?”
Blaine looked at him, annoyed. “Of course not.”
“Well,” Joseph said, shrugging. “Distance doesn’t really do anything to that.” He squeezed Blaine’s shoulder a little. “At this point, there is literally nothing you can do but keep calm and carry on. Whatever happens is going to happen, and you can sit around worrying about it, or you can run shrieking into it with your banner raised and your war cry ready. You can make it a self-fulfilling prophecy, or you can be positive about it and hope for the best. It’s your choice. And you’re pretty much not an idiot.”
Blaine smirked weakly. “Thanks,” he said. He sighed. “This could end really badly.”
“So we can say of everything, Blainers,” Joseph said grandly, letting go of his shoulder. “No use crying over Schrödinger's cat. It’s either dead or it isn’t, and you won’t know until you open the box and look.”
Blaine raised an eyebrow at him. “You know you used that metaphor totally wrong, right?”
“Whatever, I never claimed to be good at science.” Joseph grinned. “But I think it’s going to work. Trust me. I’m clairvoyant. In a few years, there’s going to be a bunch of little AnderHummels toddling around. You’ll be calling up six foster mothers at a time. You’ll be the DodecaDads, and everyone in the country will question your parenting skills and common sense.”
Blaine laughed, and the sound almost surprised him. “I - thanks, Joseph.”
“My absolute pleasure, Blainers,” Joseph said. He stood up and straightened his uniform shirt. “That’s why you keep me around.”
“Also to teach me how to play Magic.”
Joseph glanced at the decks of cards. “Keep those,” he said. “I’ll be back after you have your bionic eye fitted, and I’ll teach you for real. You’re not allowed to cheat with your X-ray vision.”
Blaine rolled his eyes. “I’m not getting a bionic eye.”
“Yes you are,” Joseph said, sing-song. He went to pick up his blazer and slip it on. “You’re getting a bionic eye, and you’re gonna keep the old one in a jar on your bedside table.”
“No, I’m not. Also, gross.”
“You can’t kill my dreams, Anderson.” He picked up his bag and slung it over his shoulder. “I wish you all of the cornea-related luck in the known universe.”
Blaine snorted. “I hope that’s enough.”
“More than enough. I’ll see you in a week.”
With one last grin over his shoulder, Joseph opened the door and was gone.
Blaine leaned back against his pile of pillows, a smile stretching itself slowly across his face. The metaphor actually did work, sort of. Totally ignoring the point of the thought experiment, Schrödinger's cat was both alive and dead until such a time as someone opened the box to observe it, at which point it would be one or the other. It was an incredibly morbid way of looking at a relationship, but Blaine never claimed to be a normal person, and the idea made him feel better in a very, very weird way.
There was no way of telling how it would work out, so he could sit around and worry about it (which he knew he would still do, at least a little, no matter what), or he could do something.
Blaine tilted over the edge of his bed to pull a box out from beneath.
To: Kurt
Maybe you should come over tomorrow instead.
To: Blaine
Everything okay?
To: Kurt
Just tired. And I’m making something for you.
To: Blaine
Color me interested. I’ll see you tomorrow. Love you.
To: Kurt
Love you, too.
Blaine was sleeping when Kurt opened his door the narrowest possible crack, pressing one eye against it to look in. The lights were off, and his curtains were closed; Kurt could just barely make out the shape of him on the bed, sprawled and twisted into the blankets. He bumped the door open a little more, slow and quiet, to squeeze through and close it behind him, cutting out the light from the hallway.
Blaine didn’t move when Kurt set his bag down by the armchair, or when he tucked himself into it. The dark wasn’t total; he could still see Blaine’s face, half-obscured by his pillow. Kurt - and this was something mildly creepy, he knew, but he couldn’t help it - Kurt liked to catch Blaine sleeping. He liked that Blaine always looked slightly worried, like there was something puzzling in whatever he was dreaming. He liked the even rise and fall of Blaine’s chest in the dark, with every other part of him relaxed. Mostly, he liked to sit and wait for him to wake up, because it seemed polite, but mostly because Blaine would open his eyes and see him, and smile.
He slipped the book off of Blaine’s bedside table, and was three pages into it by the light of his phone when he heard a muffled, “Yarr.”
He looked up from the book and smirked. Blaine’s good eye was a bright little point in the dark, and he was grinning in the loose way that made Kurt’s stomach flip every time he saw it. He put the book back. “You aren’t a pirate. Eyepatches don’t automatically give you buccaneer status.”
Blaine reached out for him with two clenching-unclenching hands and a bad accent. “Come here, I will plunder your booty.”
Kurt laughed, loud, then slapped a hand over his mouth, looking at the door.
“Don’t worry,” Blaine said. He was reaching for the lamp pull-chain on his bedside table, missing a few times before finally grabbing it and flooding the room with light. “My parents are out. Work.”
“They left you alone?” Kurt asked, frowning.
Blaine shrugged. He dragged himself up higher against the headboard, sitting straight. “There’s nothing wrong with me except that my eye feels weird. They don’t need to be around. There’s nothing they can do.”
Kurt knew that he would probably have to threaten his dad to get him to leave. Carole wouldn’t go, no matter what he did, but there was nothing he could say about that to Blaine, so he only shrugged back, with a little more unease. “Fine.” He leaned forward. “Where’s my present?”
Blaine grinned, and it brightened his face considerably. He patted the bed next to him. “First, come and sit here.”
Kurt leaned down over his knees to unzip his boots one at a time. He stood, slipped out of them, and skirted the edge of the bed to slide across from the other side. He noticed Blaine disappointed expression and rolled his eyes at him. “These pants are too tight to try and crawl over you.”
“I thought I would get to see you looking undignified for three seconds.”
Kurt settled back against the headboard, his shoulder against Blaine’s. He crossed his legs before him at the ankle, settling his hands on his thighs. “You’ve seen me plenty undignified,” he said, arch. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Blaine take a little breath through his open mouth, color rising in his cheeks, gaze going a little darker. He smirked. “I’m sitting in the special present-receiving position, Blaine. Whenever you’re ready.”
Blaine blinked at him, like it was taking him a moment to rediscover the thread of the conversation. “Right,” he said. He shook his head. “Okay. Wait.” He turned and started to lean out over the edge of the bed. Kurt grabbed the hem of his pajama shirt to keep him from tumbling out and listened to his little frustrated grunts as he searched for whatever he was looking for under the bed. When he found it, he made a little noise of triumph and sat back up, pulling with him a black shoebox. He set it in his lap, then looked at Kurt. “This didn’t involve me having to get out of bed or use depth perception or anything.”
“You’re really talking it up.”
“I just mean,” Blaine said, undeterred, “that there isn’t a whole lot of stuff that I can do when I’m high on pain medication and cycloptic. But I didn’t get you anything for making finalist for NYADA.”
Kurt smiled at him. “You didn’t have to--”
“I wanted to,” Blaine said. He smiled back. “I had a lot of time on my hands. And I love you.”
He picked up the box and held it out for Kurt to take. It was a little heavy, and when Kurt set it in his own lap he heard the whisper of something inside. Paper, he thought.
If Kurt was being totally honest with himself, he really hadn’t stopped thinking about what this could be since the minute Blaine had sent him the text message. Blaine gave extremely sweet gifts, and there was something wonderful about the idea of him making a present, out of things he just happened to have. It was nice to have literally no idea what it was. Kurt’s heart was beating a little faster than usual when he slowly started to flip up the box’s lid and look at what was inside.
The light hit something shiny. It hit a lot of tiny, shining things, when the lid fell back and Kurt looked inside.
So many tiny paper stars.
Kurt’s breath caught a little in his throat, and he reached down to touch the layer of colorful, chubby little ribbon stars along the bottom of the box, running his fingers through them. In the middle, nestled down, was a little glass bottle, bell-shaped, full to the brim with more, and one bigger star, right in the heart of it. They were all made with something glossy, enough that the bottle seemed to glow with the reflection from the lamp. Kurt picked up the bottle and held it closer to his eyes.
“My origami skills are obviously pretty limited,” Kurt heard Blaine say beside him, self-deprecating smile obvious even if Kurt wasn’t looking.
Kurt was honestly a little stunned. He ran his fingers over the glass, and the cork stopper at the top. It was extremely pretty. Kurt could imagine Blaine sitting in his bed late at night, leaning over his knees, folding each star as carefully as he could, the pile in the box growing hour by hour. The image made something warm bloom in the center of Kurt’s chest.
“You’re the big star,” Blaine added.
Kurt let out a breath. “What are the little ones?”
“Everyone else.” Blaine shifted against him, laying his head against Kurt’s shoulder to look at the bottle held up in his hands. “I’ve kind of been freaking out a little for the last few days. About NYADA. You going to NYADA, I mean.”
Kurt winced a little, leaning closer towards Blaine. “I haven’t exactly been calm about it, either.”
Blaine snorted, wry. “I totally couldn’t tell by the way you burst in here screaming about it.” He lifted one hand and gently tapped the glass, three resonant little ringing sounds. “You’re the brightest thing in my life, and I was kind of scared that all of the lights will go out when you leave.”
Kurt deflated a little. “I’m not actually in yet.”
“You’re going to get in,” Blaine said, immediately. “Definitely. Without question. One hundred percent guaranteed.” He smiled, probably at the way Kurt felt his face starting to heat. “So I was scared. But, I have other lights.” He tapped around at the other stars, blue and red and yellow and purple. “You’ll still be bright enough for me to see you. You’ll just be further away. That doesn’t really matter as much, when it comes to stars. The more luminous ones are still visible, even if they’re really far away.”
Kurt had to tamp down very hard on the urge to start crying, and he knew that he wasn’t going to be completely successful. It was so sweet. Completely, impossibly, ridiculously sweet. Blaine’s painkiller-addled brain was a beautiful place. A little jar of people he loved, little lights to take with him to New York. “I don’t need this to remember you,” he said, his voice breaking a little. He pressed a palm over one eye, trying to keep it together.
“I know,” Blaine said. He leaned up and pressed a kiss to Kurt’s cheek. “I just like the idea of you having all of us.”
Kurt laughed, a little. He sniffed, and then started to fumble at the cork, thumbing it off.
“What’re you doing?” Blaine asked, totally baffled.
Kurt put the cork aside and reached into the neck of the bottle very, very carefully, with two fingers like pincers, to pinch the edge of the biggest star. He drew it slowly up, out of the other stars, and even more slowly out of the neck. He held it up in his palm, letting it catch the light and shine. Then he turned and gave it to Blaine.
“You keep that,” he said.
Blaine smiled. It was goofy and delighted. “Why?”
“You’ll still have me,” Kurt said. He put the cork back in and shook the bottle a little, letting the stars settle back into place. “And I’ll have you, and everyone else.” He looked at Blaine, meeting his gaze. “Thank you.”
Blaine smiled at him, then reached out and pointed at one of the stars. “I’m the one that’s kind of unraveling.”
Kurt set the bottle gently back into the box, surrounded by its little bed of stars, and leaned over the other side of the bed to set the box on the floor before turning back to Blaine. “Show me how to make them,” he said.
Blaine grinned, then nodded, and reached over rummage around in his bedside table for the ribbon and scissors. Kurt watched him, smiling, feeling like the top of his head was going to fall off. Blaine had perfect confidence that Kurt was going to get into NYADA. Blaine had given him something beautiful and sweet to take with him, to remind him that he wasn’t alone. And Blaine had that, too. Kurt was the brightest thing in Blaine’s life, and he wasn’t disappearing.
When he made it to New York, Kurt was going to send Blaine envelopes and envelopes of stars.
Rating: G
Characters: Kurt/Blaine, Joseph (Blaine's old Dalton roommate)
Words: ~5,000
Spoilers: Major for Episode 3.11, Michael
Summary: Blaine and Joseph are terrible at chess, but slightly better at talking about Blaine's feelings. Blaine gives Kurt a gift.
Author's Note: Hi! It's been a while! Have some fanfiction. The title comes from The Legend of Zelda, making it the second overlong title from a video game for a fic featuring Joseph The Zen Nerd Roommate. Reading the first one ( Thank You, Mario, But Our Princess Is In Another Castle) is in no way required. All you need to know is that Blaine had a very nerdy roommate at Dalton to whom he tended to go for advice.
Neither of them was good at chess, so the whole thing was a recipe for disaster from the beginning.
“I’m not sure if that move’s legal.”
Blaine paused, his queenside rook held aloft between his fingers. He looked up at Joseph, his eyebrows furrowed. “What move?”
Joe was frowning down at the board, hands clasped in his lap. “The one where if you put that there, you’ll probably win.”
Blaine sighed, and dropped the piece down on the board with a decisive little twist. “Check,” he said, sitting up. His eye hurt. This wasn’t news, but he couldn’t touch it, which always seemed to be news to his fingers when he was distracted, and they would travel up to rub some of the weird, almost-sourceless pain away, only to be met with the patch. They did that now, and the pads pushed at the cloth instead of at his eyelid, and a renewed flood of annoyance went through Blaine as he dropped his hand back to the bedspread.
Joseph had his hand splayed out over the board, a look of deep concentration on his face, as though the right piece would magically fly up and move itself into position to get him out of check. His mouth twitched a little when he heard Blaine’s hand flop back down for probably the twentieth time since he’d arrived. “That eyepatch is totally working for me, by the way,” he said. He rocked his remaining bishop back and forth on its square. “Can you whistle the song from Kill Bill?”
Blaine propped his head up with an elbow on his knee. “Shut up and lose at chess, Joseph.”
“I’m just saying.” Joseph looked up at him and grinned. “You’ve got a Tom-Cruise-In-Valkyrie thing going on, only you’re actually a good actor and you aren’t crazy. Or a Nazi, which is a firm check in the ‘plus’ column.”
Blaine smiled slightly, despite himself. It was nice to have Joseph there; he’d never asked once whether Blaine was all right, or if it hurt, or if he needed to rest. He’d just walked right in and dropped his bag and his Dalton blazer by the bedroom door and thrown two packs of Magic cards on the bed, declaring that it was high time Blaine learned the ancient mysteries of the planeswalkers. It had taken them about half an hour to come to the conclusion that half-blind and slightly vague from painkiller was not the best state for learning how to play any kind of game that involved keeping track of numbers, so the cards were sitting abandoned in messy piles on the other side of the mattress, replaced by the first two-person board game Joseph had been able to excavate from Blaine’s closet.
Blaine felt terrible, in his eye and everywhere else. Four consecutive bedbound days did no favors to how gross Blaine already felt, with something wrapped around his head and the frustrating inability to poke at his own face, or do anything besides continue sitting in his pajamas squinting with one eye at a book or the television or just the ceiling for hours at a time, desperately bored. Or, well. Desperately something. The fact that he couldn’t even open a window because it was freezing cold outside didn’t help how much his room had started to get stale and musty with boy-smells that Blaine was sort of starting to neurotically want gone, because it made him feel claustrophobic in the worst way.
Joseph picked up his bishop and used it to take Blaine’s offending rook. “You know,” he said, apropos of nothing, “you’ve gotten really bad at hiding how you feel.”
Blaine drew his eyes quickly up from the board to stare at Joseph, blinking, his eyebrows slowly drawing together. “I - what?”
Joseph shrugged, smiling at just the corners of his mouth. “When you first came to Dalton, most of the time I couldn’t tell if you were terrified or depressed or hungry or what. You just kind of went tharn whenever anybody touched you, and you went on a lot of walks. You were my weird silent movie roommate.”
Blaine scowled down at the chess board, poking at his one of his knights. “I’m not a rabbit,” he muttered. “Also, you know, thanks.”
Joseph spread his hands. “Hey, man,” he said, grinning, “what are friends for, if not to be really honest about our emotional constipation? Then you joined the Warblers and became the Warblerbot, programmed to sing and be charming and sit up straight and eat your leafy vegetables. Then Kurt came and he broke your emotional inhibitor chip and you were a total wreck for a while. Then you guys got together and you started actually breathing like a real boy.” Joseph paused thoughtfully, with a sage little tilt of his head. “I am very well-versed in the emotional journey of one Blaine Anderson.”
Blaine still wasn’t looking at him. “It’s actually vaguely creepy,” he said. He’d lost track of the game, somewhere between the Watership Down reference and the Pinocchio reference. His eye was getting tired, and he couldn’t keep the board from blurring. “Probably more than vaguely.”
“The point is,” Joseph said, tapping on a wrinkled corner of the chess board, making the plastic pieces bounce and rattle, “you used to be really great at keeping everything hidden under the uniform and the big smile, but you suck at it now. Because I can totally tell that there’s something wrong, and you definitely want to talk about it.”
“I’m going in for a dangerous eye operation, Joe. I’m nervous. Not really much to talk about.”
“That isn’t it.”
Blaine rolled his eyes, a motion which felt strange in the right one, and finally tore his gaze up to Joseph, who was sitting with Buddha-ish neutral patience across from him. “I don’t have anything to talk about, Joseph. I’m nervous about the surgery. My eye hurts and I’m tired of sitting in my bedroom thinking about how much it hurts and I want to touch it constantly and I want to go out and do things that don’t involve eye surgery and I want to see Kurt and the medication makes me kind of high but it doesn’t totally help and why are you looking at me like that?” Blaine took a post-rant breath, doing his best to glare with only the use of one eye at Joseph, who was sitting there with a little grin, like Blaine was a funny child.
“If I tell you why you’re actually freaking out, can we talk about it?”
Blaine gave up. He slumped forward, shoulders low, head down, hands in his hair. “Fine,” he said. “Why am I actually freaking out?”
“Kurt got into NYADA.”
Blaine’s head snapped up. Even at the words, his heart sped up a little, pushing heat into his cheeks, and it was a total bodily betrayal, giving him away. “How--” he tried. “What did - how did you guess that?”
Joseph jerked his head back over his shoulder, toward the door. “Your trash can,” he said. “Two plastic champagne flutes. You and Kurt are incredibly overdramatic, but I doubt you were toasting to serious eye injuries, so there was something to celebrate. You told me about Kurt’s application. Put them together and what have you got?”
Blaine stared at him, a little dumbfounded. “Is that really how you figured it out?”
Joseph kept the coolly superior expression for a second, but then it flickered with a smile, and he dropped into a wry laugh. “No. Kurt and I are friends on Facebook. I just like seeing the look on your face when you think I’m a deductive genius.”
Blaine immediately slumped again. “I hate you.”
“You adore me,” Joseph sighed. He pinched the edge of the chess board between his fingers and slid it carefully over to the other side of the bed, next to the decks of Magic cards, then drew his knees up onto the mattress, facing Blaine cross-legged, looking interested. “Tell me of your troubles, Blainers, and spare no detail of your misery.”
Blaine flopped backwards into the pillows at the head of the bed, arms crossed over his face. “What did I do to deserve this?” he asked nothing in particular, muffled.
Joseph was right, of course. Blaine had been doing his best to think about anything but Kurt’s NYADA audition for three very long, very uninvolving, very stressful and guilty and particularly horrible days. On the one hand, it was amazing and wonderful that Kurt had been made a finalist for NYADA. On the other hand, Blaine wanted to go out and physically sink every bit of land between Ohio and New York. He wanted to go and drag New York City to the western edge of Pennsylvania. He wanted to build the best performing arts school in the country right next to his house.
“He isn’t really in yet,” Blaine murmured without opening his eyes. “He’s a finalist.”
“But he’s going to get in?” Joseph seemed further away when Blaine couldn’t see him, like Blaine was alone in the room.
He let out a breath. “Yeah.”
Blaine felt Joseph reach out and pat his leg gently. “You’re going to New York, too, aren’t you? Haven’t you been talking about NYU?”
Blaine nodded. “But. There’s a whole year.”
“Oh my,” Joseph said, and Blaine could hear the smile in his voice. “A year. However will you survive such an intense period of separation?”
Blaine kicked out at him and missed completely, which he thought was actually pretty impressive, given Joseph’s general largeness. “Mocking me is extremely helpful, Joe. I can’t imagine why I didn’t bring this up myself.”
Joseph laughed and grabbed Blaine’s still-seeking foot to press it back down on the bed next to the other one. “I can’t help it, man. It isn’t like separation is new to you guys. You were really good at keeping it together when Kurt went back to McKinley last year.”
Blaine frowned, holding an answer back behind his teeth. That was only a little separation. They saw each other every weekend. They hadn’t been - involved, in some ways, yet, ways that now made even being out of sight during classes a little unbearable at times. And even then, it had been almost constantly terrible, Kurt not being at Dalton anymore. Kurt being a voice on the phone during the week. I miss you had been Blaine’s most uttered sentence that first month, partly because it was as close as he could get to I love you without saying those words, but mostly because it was very, very true. He missed Kurt now, and he was probably coming over later to read to him and sing the week’s wrap-up song because he was missing it. The idea of a year interrupted by Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Spring Break sounded like a prison sentence.
“I was really good at hiding how bad I was at keeping it together,” Blaine murmured. He dropped his arms to his sides and scooted up to sit against the pillows. “I’m so happy for him, Joe. Honestly. This is the best thing that could possibly have happened to him, and he’s definitely going to get in, and so is Rachel, and it’s gonna be unbelievable for them. Just--” He broke the sentence, trailing off, eyes cast away, arms wrapping around his knees. “I’m scared that he’s going to get there and get tired of me.”
Joseph snorted.
Blaine frowned at him, a little hurt. “Hi. Having an actual moment over here.”
Joseph shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said, smiling. “Really. It’s just - have you seen the way that Kurt looks at you? It ridiculous. No one should be so obviously in love with another person. It’s like his prime objective is to eventually become permanently physically attached to you so that he never has to look away from you if he doesn’t want to. The only thing that trumps it is the way that you look at him, which is this expression that defies the physics of human faces in terms of the amount of emotion packed into any given square inch. It makes me want to run experiments on you. We could probably cure cancer with the power of your stupid love for each other.”
Blaine took all of this in with his eyebrows hovering at his hairline. He blinked at Joseph, slowly, and let out a long breath. “That doesn’t really mean that we’ll always be like that.”
Joseph reached out across the space between them and put a hand on Blaine’s knee, rocking it back and forth a little. “Blainers,” he said, making Blaine meet his eyes. “I have complete confidence that you and Kurt can make distance work. If anyone in the world can do it, you can. Kurt’s going to go to his big fancy school and wander around New York making mental notes of places he’s going to take you when you get there. You’re gonna get closer to the people in your new glee club and sing him ridiculous things on Skype. Or, I don’t know, maybe you’ll come back to Dalton and kick that douchey Sebastian guy out and sing girl songs in perfect harmony again. Whatever you do, you’re gonna be with people who care about you and want you to be happy.”
Blaine frowned, brushing his hand along his bedspread, watching his fingers move over the material. “I’m not really sure that the Warblers are people who care about me anymore.”
“If you think that they knew that there was anything in that slushie, you are sadly mistaken. You didn’t hear all of the weeping and gnashing of teeth the week you left Dalton.” Joseph grinned at him, all teeth. “I think Thad took to his bed for days. That creepy new guy is like Dracula. He has them all hypnotized or something. You need to stake his heart and cut off his head, and then his influence will be lifted and they’ll run screaming back to you in eight part harmony.”
Blaine smiled a little, tipping his head up to look back at Joseph. “I’ve been trying to give Sebastian the benefit of the doubt.”
“I don’t really think there’s any doubt left, my friend,” Joe said. “Blinding you in a dark underground parking structure is pretty unambiguous. And you know I’m all about turning the other cheek. I’m Fat Jesus. This is just a few stops past Crazyville.”
Blaine’s smile lifted a little higher, amused. He thought for a moment, playing with a stray thread on the comforter. “I’m starting to get closer to the guys in New Directions. Kurt’s brother doesn’t hate me anymore. Except for the fact that I leaked our setlist to the Warblers, things have been pretty good. Me and Artie and Tina are all staying behind next year. That could be a good group.”
Joseph was grinning. “Look at you, getting all optimistic about the future.”
There was still the distance, though. There was still Kurt discovering all of these new things, about himself and about the world, about everything, all ahead of Blaine, who still had no idea why Kurt had chosen him and really, honestly loved him despite the amount of things he managed to screw up on a daily basis. Kurt might find something better. Kurt might get lost in all of the spectacle and never come back. Kurt might get scared and quit while they’re ahead.
“What if it doesn’t work?” Blaine asked softly, half-lost in the idea of it. That big bright light gliding away from him, leaving him alone in the dark.
Joseph reached out, face serious, and wrapped his hand around Blaine’s shoulder. “Do you trust him? You don’t think he’s going to run off with someone he bumps into at the supermarket?”
Blaine looked at him, annoyed. “Of course not.”
“Well,” Joseph said, shrugging. “Distance doesn’t really do anything to that.” He squeezed Blaine’s shoulder a little. “At this point, there is literally nothing you can do but keep calm and carry on. Whatever happens is going to happen, and you can sit around worrying about it, or you can run shrieking into it with your banner raised and your war cry ready. You can make it a self-fulfilling prophecy, or you can be positive about it and hope for the best. It’s your choice. And you’re pretty much not an idiot.”
Blaine smirked weakly. “Thanks,” he said. He sighed. “This could end really badly.”
“So we can say of everything, Blainers,” Joseph said grandly, letting go of his shoulder. “No use crying over Schrödinger's cat. It’s either dead or it isn’t, and you won’t know until you open the box and look.”
Blaine raised an eyebrow at him. “You know you used that metaphor totally wrong, right?”
“Whatever, I never claimed to be good at science.” Joseph grinned. “But I think it’s going to work. Trust me. I’m clairvoyant. In a few years, there’s going to be a bunch of little AnderHummels toddling around. You’ll be calling up six foster mothers at a time. You’ll be the DodecaDads, and everyone in the country will question your parenting skills and common sense.”
Blaine laughed, and the sound almost surprised him. “I - thanks, Joseph.”
“My absolute pleasure, Blainers,” Joseph said. He stood up and straightened his uniform shirt. “That’s why you keep me around.”
“Also to teach me how to play Magic.”
Joseph glanced at the decks of cards. “Keep those,” he said. “I’ll be back after you have your bionic eye fitted, and I’ll teach you for real. You’re not allowed to cheat with your X-ray vision.”
Blaine rolled his eyes. “I’m not getting a bionic eye.”
“Yes you are,” Joseph said, sing-song. He went to pick up his blazer and slip it on. “You’re getting a bionic eye, and you’re gonna keep the old one in a jar on your bedside table.”
“No, I’m not. Also, gross.”
“You can’t kill my dreams, Anderson.” He picked up his bag and slung it over his shoulder. “I wish you all of the cornea-related luck in the known universe.”
Blaine snorted. “I hope that’s enough.”
“More than enough. I’ll see you in a week.”
With one last grin over his shoulder, Joseph opened the door and was gone.
Blaine leaned back against his pile of pillows, a smile stretching itself slowly across his face. The metaphor actually did work, sort of. Totally ignoring the point of the thought experiment, Schrödinger's cat was both alive and dead until such a time as someone opened the box to observe it, at which point it would be one or the other. It was an incredibly morbid way of looking at a relationship, but Blaine never claimed to be a normal person, and the idea made him feel better in a very, very weird way.
There was no way of telling how it would work out, so he could sit around and worry about it (which he knew he would still do, at least a little, no matter what), or he could do something.
Blaine tilted over the edge of his bed to pull a box out from beneath.
To: Kurt
Maybe you should come over tomorrow instead.
To: Blaine
Everything okay?
To: Kurt
Just tired. And I’m making something for you.
To: Blaine
Color me interested. I’ll see you tomorrow. Love you.
To: Kurt
Love you, too.
Blaine was sleeping when Kurt opened his door the narrowest possible crack, pressing one eye against it to look in. The lights were off, and his curtains were closed; Kurt could just barely make out the shape of him on the bed, sprawled and twisted into the blankets. He bumped the door open a little more, slow and quiet, to squeeze through and close it behind him, cutting out the light from the hallway.
Blaine didn’t move when Kurt set his bag down by the armchair, or when he tucked himself into it. The dark wasn’t total; he could still see Blaine’s face, half-obscured by his pillow. Kurt - and this was something mildly creepy, he knew, but he couldn’t help it - Kurt liked to catch Blaine sleeping. He liked that Blaine always looked slightly worried, like there was something puzzling in whatever he was dreaming. He liked the even rise and fall of Blaine’s chest in the dark, with every other part of him relaxed. Mostly, he liked to sit and wait for him to wake up, because it seemed polite, but mostly because Blaine would open his eyes and see him, and smile.
He slipped the book off of Blaine’s bedside table, and was three pages into it by the light of his phone when he heard a muffled, “Yarr.”
He looked up from the book and smirked. Blaine’s good eye was a bright little point in the dark, and he was grinning in the loose way that made Kurt’s stomach flip every time he saw it. He put the book back. “You aren’t a pirate. Eyepatches don’t automatically give you buccaneer status.”
Blaine reached out for him with two clenching-unclenching hands and a bad accent. “Come here, I will plunder your booty.”
Kurt laughed, loud, then slapped a hand over his mouth, looking at the door.
“Don’t worry,” Blaine said. He was reaching for the lamp pull-chain on his bedside table, missing a few times before finally grabbing it and flooding the room with light. “My parents are out. Work.”
“They left you alone?” Kurt asked, frowning.
Blaine shrugged. He dragged himself up higher against the headboard, sitting straight. “There’s nothing wrong with me except that my eye feels weird. They don’t need to be around. There’s nothing they can do.”
Kurt knew that he would probably have to threaten his dad to get him to leave. Carole wouldn’t go, no matter what he did, but there was nothing he could say about that to Blaine, so he only shrugged back, with a little more unease. “Fine.” He leaned forward. “Where’s my present?”
Blaine grinned, and it brightened his face considerably. He patted the bed next to him. “First, come and sit here.”
Kurt leaned down over his knees to unzip his boots one at a time. He stood, slipped out of them, and skirted the edge of the bed to slide across from the other side. He noticed Blaine disappointed expression and rolled his eyes at him. “These pants are too tight to try and crawl over you.”
“I thought I would get to see you looking undignified for three seconds.”
Kurt settled back against the headboard, his shoulder against Blaine’s. He crossed his legs before him at the ankle, settling his hands on his thighs. “You’ve seen me plenty undignified,” he said, arch. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Blaine take a little breath through his open mouth, color rising in his cheeks, gaze going a little darker. He smirked. “I’m sitting in the special present-receiving position, Blaine. Whenever you’re ready.”
Blaine blinked at him, like it was taking him a moment to rediscover the thread of the conversation. “Right,” he said. He shook his head. “Okay. Wait.” He turned and started to lean out over the edge of the bed. Kurt grabbed the hem of his pajama shirt to keep him from tumbling out and listened to his little frustrated grunts as he searched for whatever he was looking for under the bed. When he found it, he made a little noise of triumph and sat back up, pulling with him a black shoebox. He set it in his lap, then looked at Kurt. “This didn’t involve me having to get out of bed or use depth perception or anything.”
“You’re really talking it up.”
“I just mean,” Blaine said, undeterred, “that there isn’t a whole lot of stuff that I can do when I’m high on pain medication and cycloptic. But I didn’t get you anything for making finalist for NYADA.”
Kurt smiled at him. “You didn’t have to--”
“I wanted to,” Blaine said. He smiled back. “I had a lot of time on my hands. And I love you.”
He picked up the box and held it out for Kurt to take. It was a little heavy, and when Kurt set it in his own lap he heard the whisper of something inside. Paper, he thought.
If Kurt was being totally honest with himself, he really hadn’t stopped thinking about what this could be since the minute Blaine had sent him the text message. Blaine gave extremely sweet gifts, and there was something wonderful about the idea of him making a present, out of things he just happened to have. It was nice to have literally no idea what it was. Kurt’s heart was beating a little faster than usual when he slowly started to flip up the box’s lid and look at what was inside.
The light hit something shiny. It hit a lot of tiny, shining things, when the lid fell back and Kurt looked inside.
So many tiny paper stars.
Kurt’s breath caught a little in his throat, and he reached down to touch the layer of colorful, chubby little ribbon stars along the bottom of the box, running his fingers through them. In the middle, nestled down, was a little glass bottle, bell-shaped, full to the brim with more, and one bigger star, right in the heart of it. They were all made with something glossy, enough that the bottle seemed to glow with the reflection from the lamp. Kurt picked up the bottle and held it closer to his eyes.
“My origami skills are obviously pretty limited,” Kurt heard Blaine say beside him, self-deprecating smile obvious even if Kurt wasn’t looking.
Kurt was honestly a little stunned. He ran his fingers over the glass, and the cork stopper at the top. It was extremely pretty. Kurt could imagine Blaine sitting in his bed late at night, leaning over his knees, folding each star as carefully as he could, the pile in the box growing hour by hour. The image made something warm bloom in the center of Kurt’s chest.
“You’re the big star,” Blaine added.
Kurt let out a breath. “What are the little ones?”
“Everyone else.” Blaine shifted against him, laying his head against Kurt’s shoulder to look at the bottle held up in his hands. “I’ve kind of been freaking out a little for the last few days. About NYADA. You going to NYADA, I mean.”
Kurt winced a little, leaning closer towards Blaine. “I haven’t exactly been calm about it, either.”
Blaine snorted, wry. “I totally couldn’t tell by the way you burst in here screaming about it.” He lifted one hand and gently tapped the glass, three resonant little ringing sounds. “You’re the brightest thing in my life, and I was kind of scared that all of the lights will go out when you leave.”
Kurt deflated a little. “I’m not actually in yet.”
“You’re going to get in,” Blaine said, immediately. “Definitely. Without question. One hundred percent guaranteed.” He smiled, probably at the way Kurt felt his face starting to heat. “So I was scared. But, I have other lights.” He tapped around at the other stars, blue and red and yellow and purple. “You’ll still be bright enough for me to see you. You’ll just be further away. That doesn’t really matter as much, when it comes to stars. The more luminous ones are still visible, even if they’re really far away.”
Kurt had to tamp down very hard on the urge to start crying, and he knew that he wasn’t going to be completely successful. It was so sweet. Completely, impossibly, ridiculously sweet. Blaine’s painkiller-addled brain was a beautiful place. A little jar of people he loved, little lights to take with him to New York. “I don’t need this to remember you,” he said, his voice breaking a little. He pressed a palm over one eye, trying to keep it together.
“I know,” Blaine said. He leaned up and pressed a kiss to Kurt’s cheek. “I just like the idea of you having all of us.”
Kurt laughed, a little. He sniffed, and then started to fumble at the cork, thumbing it off.
“What’re you doing?” Blaine asked, totally baffled.
Kurt put the cork aside and reached into the neck of the bottle very, very carefully, with two fingers like pincers, to pinch the edge of the biggest star. He drew it slowly up, out of the other stars, and even more slowly out of the neck. He held it up in his palm, letting it catch the light and shine. Then he turned and gave it to Blaine.
“You keep that,” he said.
Blaine smiled. It was goofy and delighted. “Why?”
“You’ll still have me,” Kurt said. He put the cork back in and shook the bottle a little, letting the stars settle back into place. “And I’ll have you, and everyone else.” He looked at Blaine, meeting his gaze. “Thank you.”
Blaine smiled at him, then reached out and pointed at one of the stars. “I’m the one that’s kind of unraveling.”
Kurt set the bottle gently back into the box, surrounded by its little bed of stars, and leaned over the other side of the bed to set the box on the floor before turning back to Blaine. “Show me how to make them,” he said.
Blaine grinned, then nodded, and reached over rummage around in his bedside table for the ribbon and scissors. Kurt watched him, smiling, feeling like the top of his head was going to fall off. Blaine had perfect confidence that Kurt was going to get into NYADA. Blaine had given him something beautiful and sweet to take with him, to remind him that he wasn’t alone. And Blaine had that, too. Kurt was the brightest thing in Blaine’s life, and he wasn’t disappearing.
When he made it to New York, Kurt was going to send Blaine envelopes and envelopes of stars.