Seven Stories I Never Wrote
This is a collection of snippets of fics which started off well, but somewhere along the way hit a snag that wouldn't untangle. Periodically, I like to release these things into the wild, so that I can write new things without hearing their piteous unfinished voices crying out from the Incomplete folder on my hard drive.
Most of these are fairly lengthy, averaging about 1000 words, with two much longer. Some of them were fully planned out, and those are accompanied by some notes about the unwritten parts. They all feel at least a little like stand-alone fics, if sometimes light. Setting them free like this means that I'm almost definitely never going to finish them. They are organized in chronological order, according to what episode they correspond to.
Feel free to jump around to whatever summary piques your interest. Enjoy!
1. If A Body Meet A Body - g - Blaine, OC - After coming out to his parents, pre-series Blaine runs away to New York to see his brother and lose himself in the city.
The bus braked fast enough to jostle Blaine awake. He blinked down into his lap, his head still held up by his arm pillowed against the tinted window, washing everything in a cold dark blue. One of his headphones had fallen out while he was sleeping; it lay caught between his knees, the other still whispering in his ear with the playlist he had made just before he’d left. Shifting his sleep-stiff and aching shoulders to look out of the window didn’t tell him much: a long highway, rain, signs for towns whose names he didn’t recognize, everything wavy and dark and out of focus.
He glanced across the aisle, to the elderly woman seated by herself at the opposite window. Her overhead light was on, a book fanned open in her lap. She was looking at him and smiling. “Still a few hours to go, sweetheart,” she told him softly, and he was aware then of the deep sounds of sleeping breath from the Greyhound stretched out behind them. Her reading glasses caught the yellow light and flashed once. She asked, “Who are you meeting in New York?”
Blaine smiled at her, tired and a little apologetic, and turned back to the window instead of answering. He pressed his lost headphone back into his ear, leaned against the glass and closed his eyes.
To: Joel
I’ll be in NY in about an hour.
To: Blaine
what? no. why?
To: Joel
I know you have to work. I’ll hang out with the dinosaurs until you’re done.
To: Blaine
explain. as fast as humanly possible.
To: Blaine
blaine.
To: Blaine
please don’t get mugged or anything. cp west entrance at 5:30.
Blaine couldn’t remember the last time he had been in New York. He’d been too young to actually take anything in, toddling around Times Square with his hand held firmly in Joel’s eleven-year-old grip during a family vacation that was probably more business than pleasure for their father. But he remembered the dinosaurs. He remembered standing in front of the triceratops and staring at the dark shine of its bones, then turning to ask Joel if they could go and see them alive somewhere. (“Like the zoo,” he’d said, “with the tigers.”) He remember Joel explaining that they couldn’t, that all of the dinosaurs were gone forever, and the memory had remained really strangely clear for his entire life, so much so that whenever he thought of New York City, he thought of dinosaur bones, and of Joel letting him stay up and watch Jurassic Park with him when they got back home to Ohio. (And of how terrified he’d been when the Tyrannosaurus Rex leaned down and pressed the glass ceiling in against the kids in the car. He’d slept with the light on for a week.)
So now, ten years later, the cold October wind bit through Blaine’s coat and scarf while he sat on the steps outside of the American Museum of Natural History. There was a group of pigeons a few tiers down, fighting over the discarded end of a hot dog bun, and a little girl jumping from stair to stair while her mother and grandmother struggled, laughing, with an elaborate stroller, keeping an eye out for cabs. There had been literally nowhere else Blaine knew to go. So he went here; he just stepped off of the bus at Penn Station and stepped on the C train with the nerves knotted in his stomach that he would end up in Queens or somewhere, and from 81st Street everything had just been so stupidly easy he had almost forgotten why he was there in the first place.
The sun was starting to set behind the museum, throwing light over the trees of Central Park across the street. Blaine pulled his coat tighter around himself, tucking his hands together between his knees. The dinosaurs had still been there, still dark and shining. He’d gone to see them first, but then he’d wandered away. He’d slept on a bench in the small Astor Turret until a guard noticed him and asked him politely if he would mind not doing that there.
The thing was, he was disappointed. He’d stood in front of the triceratops, and it was embarrassing, but he’d thought that he would have this wave of nostalgia, or he would be as impressed as he was when he was four and Joel stood next to him and told him about a comet and millions of years and bones dug out of the earth. But he’d just stood there and waited for something to happen, until a woman tapped him on the shoulder with a smile and asked if her children could get a little closer. Her son was staring around Blaine’s knees with big clear eyes, and Blaine shuffled out of the way. He watched the boy press as close as possible to the display, then he turned around and walked away.
(He’d found something sort of like what he’d been looking for, later, wandering aimlessly around the first floor of the museum. He’d turned a corner and then - surprise - a giant blue whale was hanging in front of him, watching him with calm eyes, and it had made him stop. He’d stayed in that room for a while, leaning on a railing, looking back at the whale while a school group in first or second grade ran around beneath it, staring up at the incredible girth of it, daring each other to try and jump high enough to touch it. He’d watched, listening to the tourists next to him discussing the museum map in quiet, indecipherable French. It was almost the same awe he’d felt at four about the dinosaur looming before him; something almost unimaginably large and benign at the same time.)
The museum didn’t hold much for Blaine after the dinosaurs and the whale, which was a surprise. Most of the Halls with behind-glass models of animals were filled with art students; they were sitting against the display walls and using reflective surfaces set in front of them to sketch the models behind them. A few had mirrors, a few had metal pots. One girl Blaine saw had a polished ladle angled in just the right direction, held between her ankles. It was one of the strangest things he had ever seen, and he’d just watched for a while, until she’d glanced up at him and raised an eyebrow. He’d hurried away, embarrassed.
The mother, grandmother and daughter had found a cab and hailed it; they struggled the stroller into the trunk while the driver spoke into his Bluetooth in clipped Italian. When they drove away, the sun caught the windshield and flared, and Blaine shielded his eyes with a hand.
Then Blaine saw him. Just a figure in a dark coat, hurrying down from 81st, but so familiar and welcome it made his chest expand. He didn’t know he was standing or moving until he was in the middle of the sidewalk and Joel was almost running towards him.
He stopped right in front of Blaine, grabbing his arms and ducking to look him in the face. “What the hell were you thinking?” he asked, his eyes sweeping over Blaine’s hair, his clothes, the bag on his shoulders. “You can’t just text me right before you get here. I’ve been freaking out for five hours.”
Blaine didn’t say anything, just looked up at him, like if he blinked then Joel would disappear. He was a little bit older, a few days unshaven with dark stubble pebbling his face. Blaine couldn’t believe that it had actually been two years until he saw Joel like this, different and standing on a sidewalk in New York City with the thick light falling against him and the museum throwing him half in shadow.
“Blaine,” Joel said, looking at him, frowning. “What happened?”
Blaine closed his eyes. “I came out to them.”
Joel took a second, then breathed, “Fuck.” Then his hands were off of Blaine’s arms, and he was pulling Blaine against him, holding Blaine hard against his chest. And Blaine wasn’t going to start crying here, in the middle of the sidewalk with Central Park stretched out to his right and a childhood memory to his left. He wasn’t going to start now if he hadn’t yet. But some important load-bearing thing inside of him chose that second to snap, and he sagged with his face pressed into Joel’s coat, the wetness against his cheeks cold in the chilled autumn air.
It was probably worth all of the trouble he was going to get into, when Joel didn’t let go of him.
“I’m gonna warn you,” Joel said, turning back to look at Blaine with the key halfway into the door of his third-floor apartment, “it’s kind of a wreck.” Blaine shrugged, looking back at him, and Joel’s mouth twitched. “You say that now.”
He turned the key the rest of the way and swung the door open, swiping his arm at the wall to the left to flip the lights on. Blaine peered past him; the apartment started with a kitchen: a green and white tiled linoleum floor with seventies counters and a yellow refrigerator, a round wooden table piled with opened mail and flyers and mugs. Beyond it, the living room, with beige carpets and a thick old red couch, a heavy wooden coffee table which matched nothing, and a TV that Blaine remembered from when Joel used to live at home. There were two hallways where the rooms split, where Blaine imagined the bedrooms must live. (It was, for the record, nowhere near as bad as Joel made it out to be. The mess was the same kind that Blaine always had in his room, a sort of organized chaos of papers and clothes and books with occasional misplaced kitchenware.)
Joel stepped inside and put his bag and the table, then threw his coat over a chair. “My roommates are out of the city visiting family, so no one’s here to be passive-aggressive at me until Wednesday.”
Blaine shrugged his backpack off of his shoulders, then his coat, which he laid overtop of Joel’s on the chair. He looked around, getting a feel for the place. Sort of dim, with only the one light on. It smelled vaguely of things that reminded him of Joel; his old cologne, secondhand books, coffee. The mixture made something cramp in Blaine’s stomach, and he gripped the back of one of the kitchen chairs with white-knuckle fingers.
Joel was watching him, eyes a little dark, head tilted very slightly to the side. After a moment, both of them just standing there quietly, he raised his eyebrows and asked, “So. Want to eat pizza and get drunk and watch The Princess Bride?”
Blaine let out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding. “Yes,” he said, a little desperately.
Joel smirked.
The pizza was amazing and the beer was horrible, but Blaine was most of the way through his by the time Buttercup was kidnapped. (He always wondered what happened to the horse when they took her; did they just leave it there? What did it do when she was gone?) Joel side-eyed him when he drained the rest of brown-tinted bottle in a few swallows. “This is the kind of day I’ve had,” Blaine told him, shaking the bottle. The tiny amount of beer left at the bottom sloshed back and forth.
Joel took it from him, managing both to grin and look uncertain. “I’d worry about you becoming an alcoholic, if you weren’t such a wuss about throwing up.”
“And if I actually enjoyed the taste of alcohol,” Blaine said, wincing at the bitterness still left in his mouth. On the screen, Inigo and Fezzik were trading rhymes. He watched for a few minutes, the words already in his head before they were spoken. He could feel Joel watching him. He glanced over and raised an eyebrow. “What?”
“How long has it been since you slept?”
Blaine blinked at him for a moment, then looked back at the TV. “Define ‘slept.’”
“Blanket. Pillow. Six to eight hours uninterrupted.”
“Then I don’t know.” Blaine reached out for another slice of pizza from the open box on the coffee table. “A long time. Four hours on the bus and a half-hour at the museum.”
“You slept at the museum?” Joel asked, smirking. “How Basil E. Frankweiler of you.”
“They were at the Met, not the ANHM,” Blaine murmured. He was holding the pizza, but not eating it. Suddenly it didn’t really look appetizing. Suddenly he felt like he was probably going to be sick, and it occurred to him that he didn’t know where the bathroom was.
“How are you even conscious right now?”
Blaine shrugged. He watched the screen. He didn’t look at Joel. “I think I’m still running on nervous energy.” There had been a lot of that. There had been a lot of panicking. His stomach rolled and he took a breath through his mouth.
From the corner of his eye, Blaine could see Joel still watching him, looking at him with a closeness that only Joel ever actually had, like Joel knew him, and the worst part was how true that might be. But Joel didn’t say anything. He stood up and moved for the kitchen, and Blaine quickly put the pizza back into the box. He wiped his hands on his jeans, breathing out, swallowing past the nausea.
When Joel came back, he handed Blaine another beer, and met Blaine’s eyes when he took it. Dark, worried and resigned; those were Joel’s eyes. Blaine’s just felt tired, all of a sudden.
In the middle of the second beer, Blaine lost track. Exhaustion and alcohol caught up with him, so the movie became a blur of ROUS’s and torture chambers and suicide threats, until everything slipped away into the pleasant dark.
He woke up to Joel’s voice, still a little dizzy, not all there. Joel was nearby, and quiet, and Blaine didn’t move. He’d learned that trick a long time ago; eavesdropping, appearing to be asleep, all to try and figure out what adults weren’t telling him. (But Joel wasn’t an adult, not really. He was 22 but he was nowhere near an adult.)
“And you just now thought to call me?” Joel was asking. Blaine moved his head enough to see Joel’s profile, sitting at the kitchen table with the light on over his head, casting him in poker-game yellow. He had his phone pressed to his ear. “Little late, don’t you think?”
Blaine’s stomach rolled again, and he closed his eyes. He knew who that was.
“He’s fine. He did great by himself. No surprise there.” A pause. “No, he’s asleep. No. He’s sleeping, mother. You can’t talk to him.” He added in a mutter, “And even if he wasn’t, he ran away for a fucking reason. Whatever you did - no, he hasn’t talked to me about it. I don’t want to hear about it from you. No, I’m not talking about this. He’ll be home on Monday. He can stay with me until then.” A longer pause. “Well, tough.” Then a beep when Joel hung up, and the anxious tap of his phone against the table.
Blaine couldn’t tell if it was a few minutes or a few hours later when Joel kneeled next to him and smoothed the hair back from his forehead. Blaine opened his eyes and blinked up at him. “Monday?” he croaked.
Joel nodded. He pulled a blanket (it had appeared as if by magic, along with a pillow) higher up over Blaine’s shoulder. “You can stay for the weekend.”
“Kind of wanted longer.”
Joel’s mouth twitched. “How long?”
Blaine shrugged into the couch. He watched the medal of St. Christopher swing around Joel’s neck and gleam in the dull light. “Forever.”
Joel’s hand swept Blaine’s hair back again, then stayed there, a warm weight. “No matter how great it would be if you could stay forever, you can’t miss more school.”
Blaine looked up to meet Joel’s eyes. He let out a shaking breath. “School’s really bad now, Joel. So bad.”
Joel’s hand tightened in Blaine’s hair, then loosened and pulled away. He sighed. “I don’t know what to tell you, Blaine. I’m sorry.” He stood up. “Get some sleep. I’ll see you in the morning.”
Blaine listened to Joel walk away. “G’night,” he said, watching the blank television screen across from him.
“Good night,” Joel said, and he turned off the lights.
2. Has There Ever Been A Moment - g - Kurt, Jeff, Nick - After Kurt tells the Warblers that he is going back to McKinley, they begin to drop in on him one at a time.
[Kurt lets drop at the end of Warblers rehearsal that he is going back to McKinley, effective Monday. There's a general murmur of surprise, curtailed by the gavel, and they all file out, everyone pointedly not talking about it. Kurt goes back to him room and faceplants into his bed, thinking about how this feels a lot worse than he thought it would, and he probably should have done it on a night when Blaine didn't have study group until curfew. There's a knock on his door, and there stands Jeff, who sweeps in as though he's always there, which he decidedly isn't. He is Jeff, doing his Jeff-y thing, asking Kurt in the nicest, least-pressing way why he came to Dalton. Kurt tells him about the bullying. Jeff just nods. He says, "I never really knew you as much as I wanted to." Kurt's completely surprised, and while he's still stunned, Jeff gives him a hug and hangs on until Kurt hugs back. Then he grins, wishes Kurt luck, tells him to visit a lot, and leaves, and Kurt's left still feeling off-balance, but in a really nice way. Then:]
It happened again the next day. Blaine didn’t have the same lunch module as Kurt; they missed each other by about forty minutes, which was a shame, but also a good time to catch up on the work he was at times too distracted to get through the evening before. (It was a really nice kind distraction, though. Very warm and comfortable.) So he sat at one of the long wooden tables with his Calculus homework spread out in front of him, taking a piece of fruit from the cup to his right every few minutes, all of his concentration placed on the paper over which his pencil moved.
Until he felt someone slide in next to him on the bench seat. He blinked down at the fuzz of the numbers, then looking over to be met with Nick, sitting close and looking at him uncertainly, a very light blush very high in his cheeks. He smiled slightly, crooking his fingers in a short wave. Kurt put his pencil down and grinned, waving back, which made Nick’s smile widen and his blush deepen.
“Hi,” Nick said finally. “I, um. I wanted to talk to you for a second. Is that okay?”
Kurt nodded. He tilted his head at Nick, taking in the way the boy fidgeted slightly with his cuffs, avoiding Kurt’s eyes. Nick cleared his throat, and focused his gaze on the windows across the way, where storm clouds had gathered overhead, dark and close, everything grey and coolly impending.
“Jeff talked to me last night, about why you left your old school,” he said. He glanced at Kurt to gauge his expression. “I’m sorry. I hope that’s okay. It’s just that we pretty much tell each other anything, and he knows I wouldn’t--”
Kurt waved a hand to stop him. “It’s fine,” he said. “I sort of expected it to get around.”
Nick nodded. He looked back to the windows. “I just, I wanted to tell you--” He broke off, then swallowed and shook his head. “I’m happy for you, that you can go back. I get it, I think. And.” He took a breath. The color in his cheeks got brighter, and he ducked his head. “I wanted you to know that I really admire you.”
Kurt felt his own cheeks get hot. His hand spasmed in surprise over his homework. Nick looked up to see his face, and he smiled very small. “I do,” he said. “You’re being really brave, Kurt. A lot braver--” He stopped, shook his head. “You’re being really brave. I just - I really hope that everything goes okay.” He got a little more quiet, his expression becoming earnest. “If anything happens - anything bad, I mean - you’ll tell us, right? Good things, too, but--” Nick played with his cuff again. “I’m - we’re - going to worry.”
Kurt ducked his head, trying to keep Nick from seeing how much he was blushing, and the probably-ridiculous smile on his face. He cleared his throat. “I will. I promise.”
Nick let out a relieved breath that relaxed his whole body. “Good,” he said, sounding grateful.
Kurt looked up at him, and before he really knew what he was doing, he had thrown his arms around Nick and hugged him tightly, despite the slightly awkward angle. He heard Nick’s surprised intake of breath, but Nick hugged him back immediately. Kurt pressed a kiss against his cheek and said roughly, “Thank you.”
Nick was the one who broke the hug, grinning and blushing madly. He stood up a little too quickly. “I - yeah - I have to get to class. I’ll see you later Kurt. And - you’re welcome.” Another little wave, and he was hurrying away.
Kurt watched him go, sort of shocked, but too happy to give it much more thought than that.
3. We Found Each Other In The Dark, Kurt POV - g - Kurt/Blaine - Moments mentioned but not seen in my post-Prom Queen fic, We Found Each Other In The Dark, told from Kurt's POV. Includes the argument during the car ride back from the prom.
The dashboard light casts a soft blue glow on Kurt’s hands as he stares down at them on the steering wheel, waiting for the light to turn green. His stomach is still rolling. He doesn’t think it’s going to stop for a while, maybe a long while, and he won’t look at Blaine, sitting next to him in the dark, silent. But out of the corner of his eye he can see Blaine’s hands twist in his lap, constantly moving, unfocused.
“We could have gone with them,” he says.
Kurt closes his eyes and breathes out through his nose. “No, we couldn’t.” He can hear that his voice is on the fragile edge, and it makes him wince. He opens his eyes and the light changes.
“It might have--”
“It wouldn’t have made it better,” Kurt says, foot pressing the gas a little too hard. The force makes Blaine fall back against his seat, and Kurt just keeps looking through the windshield, guilty but refusing to look over.
Somewhere between Dancing Queen and the end of the evening, things had soured. As if it wasn’t sour enough. There was an unmovable block in Kurt’s chest, a foreign denseness he couldn’t breathe through or dance off or push away. It got bigger by the minute. It dragged him down, made all of his movements weighted and slow, made his brain trudge through thoughts, his mouth falter and give up on words. It made him pull himself away. And then it made him leave before everyone else and their afterparty plans and their whooping excitement.
Because there was still that angry pity lurking inside of them. He knew that going wherever they were going meant dragging them down with his sudden weight. And they deserved better than that. They didn’t make his mess.
Blaine looks out the passenger window, and Kurt glances over for an incredibly brief second. Only long enough to see the tenseness in Blaine’s neck and jaw, the hard edge of his eyes reflected in the window. Kurt looks back at the road.
“I don’t know how you possibly thought this would go well,” Blaine says, cold and short, toward the window, and a kind of ringing starts in Kurt’s ears. The whole of his skin washes in tingles, from his scalp to his soles.
“That’s really going to help this night get better,” he says, fingers tightening on the steering wheel. “Being pissed at me. Great strategy.”
“I’m not pissed at--”
“You are,” Kurt says. He’s sneaking glances away from the road, and Blaine is looking at him now, eyebrows lowered and frowning and yes, he actually is angry. It only makes Kurt burn more. “Yes, I thought this would go well. Yes, I was wrong. Feel free to keep rubbing my face in it. Like the slow clap and the catcalls didn’t do enough of that.”
“Kurt--”
“So you were right. I shouldn’t go to school dances and I shouldn’t wear kilts and I shouldn’t have any hope of anything ever getting better and I shouldn’t be gay--”
“I never said that--”
“But they do,” Kurt shouts, and he hits the steering wheel, and it’s getting hard to see so he wipes the angry tears out of his eyes with the back of his hand. “And then you try to let them, and then you hold it over me when I try to do something about it and--”
“And you end up getting hurt, like you always do!” Blaine shouts. His chest is rising and falling with his furious breath. His face is flushed, his eyes wide and hard. “Your life would be so much easier if you just stopped for a second!”
They are just idling, now, in front of Kurt’s house. The whole trip has been on autopilot, Kurt far more involved in the fight than the actual act of driving. His hand shakes as he presses the gearshift down to P. He looks down at the middle of the steering wheel. “Everything’s ruined,” he says. “You should just go home.”
Blaine waits for a second. In his peripheral vision, Kurt can see his hands tighten into fists in his lap, his whole body tensing. Then he just - opens the door. Steps out. Slams it. Walks across the street to his car, gets in, rolls the engine over so that the headlights blare up the street. And then he drives away.
Kurt watches him go in the rearview mirror. When all traces of taillights have faded away, he drops his forehead down against the steering wheel, closes his eyes, and cries.
Burt Hummel is crashing around in the kitchen. Ostensibly, it’s to make Kurt something comforting, but he’s just mastered toast, and Kurt is probably never going to be hungry again. He knows that his dad is mostly crashing around in the kitchen because he’s just spent the last twenty minutes crashing around in the living room, shouting about bastard kids and their pranks and their stupid hatred. Kurt knows that his dad is trying to keep himself from exploding in front of him. And he’s sort of grateful. Because his dad is sick, and not angry at him at all, and he’s really tired of being around shouting.
Finn is next to him on the couch, back in jeans and a t-shirt, apparently having had a verbal and literal dressing-down after coming home early from prom for fighting with Jesse. He’s watching Kurt twirl the scepter nimbly between his fingers, like he’s mesmerized by the movement.
“I’m really sorry, man,” Finn finally says. He doesn’t look at Kurt, just watches the blur of the scepter. “I should have been there.”
“It’s okay,” Kurt says. His chin is propped up on his free hand, elbow balanced on his knee, and he’s watching the scepter, too. “It’s better that you weren’t.”
This seems to knock Finn out of his hypnosis. He looks to Kurt’s face, frowning. “Why, dude? I would have gone all Hulk Smash on, like, everyone ever.”
A humorless smirk touches Kurt’s mouth. He stops twirling and grips the scepter tightly in his hand. “That’s why. This whole thing would have been a lot worse if you were suspended for throwing punches at random in a crowd of taffeta and poor color choices.”
Finn nods a little. Then he reaches out and squeezes Kurt’s shoulder. “I’m still sorry.”
Kurt looks over at him. His mouth lifts a little bit, more real this time. “I appreciate it, Finn.” Then he looks away.
“What happened to Blaine? Wasn’t he staying over?”
Kurt’s eyes slam closed. “We - had an argument. In the car. He went back to Dalton.”
“Oh.” Finn sounds confused, and Kurt certainly understands that. “That sucks, man.”
“Yeah,” Kurt sighs. He stands up. “I’m going to bed. Thank my dad for - you know.” He waves in the direction of the kitchen, then starts toward the stairs.
“Hey, Kurt?” Finn calls hesitantly after him. “Do you know if Quinn is, like, really super pissed at me?”
Kurt rolls his eyes to himself without turning around. “She seemed okay,” he said. “But you should call her.”
“Right.”
“Good night, Finn.”
“Night, Kurt.”
[Then Jeff convinces Blaine to come back to Lima, and the rest of We Found Each Other happens.]
4. Walking On Your Hands - g - Blaine, Quinn - During a New Directions party over the summer, Blaine and Quinn have a conversation.
[This story was going to be about how Blaine is Quinn's fairy godmother over the summer, becoming her friend and sort of accidentally helping her find herself again. I didn't have anything really planned past this scene, but I like it enough to want to put it somewhere, even if the fic itself didn't work out.]
Blaine could feel the bass beat from inside of the house vibrating the wood of the deck. It was hot, and he was sprawled in the dark on the wide wooden stairs which wrapped around the back of the house in an imperfect arc, his back and neck resting uncomfortably, but in the sort of lazy, relaxed way that made him not want to move at all. He breathed in the humid summer air, then breathed it out again.
The long ramp down into the grass of the back yard was one of the many small things which made it obvious that this was Artie’s house. His parents were apparently away for one night, and their suggestion of his having a few friends over had somehow evolved into a party with lots of booze, but Blaine wasn’t complaining. This was nice. He loved New Directions. He loved loud places with thumping music and people dancing and smiling, half-drunk and delighted with themselves. He particularly liked this; he liked sitting outside of that chaos and listening to it, knowing he could be involved if he stood up and went back in, but happy to stay for a while and feel the great calm of watching from the sidelines. Or, in this case, listening from the sidelines.
With his head tilted back by the edge of a stair, Blaine had a whole and uninterrupted view of the sky, and the pale stars staring back. He knew nothing about astrology, but he liked to make it up as he went along. He remembered being eleven and laying on top of the picnic table in his parents’ back yard, his hands under his head, looking up and inventing his own constellations because he had no idea what the real ones were. He still had no idea, but he had spent a lot of time amusing Kurt one night, pointing out the lines of stars he was sure meant something different, and telling him the ridiculous stories he had created for them, with Kurt’s hand curled and woven into his, Kurt’s laughter against his neck.
There was a rumbling sound and a swell of music as the sliding glass door opened, and Blaine tilted his head back to look. Quinn stood there, half out of the doorway, a red plastic cup in her hand, her other hand still on the door handle as she watched him. “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know--”
He smiled at her, upside down. “It’s fine,” he said. He patted the stairs beside him. “Plenty of room.”
She glanced back once over her shoulder, hesitating, then stepped all the way out and slid the door closed with a solid tok. The sound of the music muffled itself, and was once again reduced to vibrations. She didn’t come down to sit next to him. She sat at the edge of the first step instead, drawing her knees together beneath her skirt and holding her cup between the fingertips of both hands, looking down at the liquid inside.
She was sitting half inside and half outside of the light falling from the rectangle of the back door, and it made a brilliant contrast out of her; short blonde-gold hair, white cardigan and red babydoll dress split neatly down the center against the muddied version in the dark, the colors darker and indecipherable.
Blaine didn’t know Quinn very well, but he knew that she never looked truly happy, and that seemed more evident tonight, sitting half in the dark, in the silence, with her eyes cast down and her face politely blank.
“Are you not drinking?” she asked, glancing in his direction, sweeping him with her eyes.
He smiled again. “No.” He reached out to pick up his own red plastic cup and held it up to shake its contents. (Coke.) “Designated driver.” (He had insisted that it was Kurt’s turn to let safely loose a little bit, and he was proud of himself that it wasn’t entirely because he was interested to see what Kurt was like when he was drunk. It wasn’t entirely because of that.)
He put his cup back down at looked back up at the sky, and the silence fell between them once again. Crickets chirped in the grass, and cicadas somewhere further, with their strange, ethereal, breathish noise constant and bone-deep. Blaine watched Quinn from the corner of his eye. She took a miniscule sip of her drink and lowered it again. She didn’t look up past the fall of her skirt over her knees. She looked the kind of profoundly unhappy and lost that almost made it difficult for Blaine to breathe.
He sat up, turning slightly to see her better. “What are you up to this summer?”
She looked at him, plainly surprised, her mouth open and searching for words. “Up to?” she finally asked.
He grinned. “Everyone is doing something. I’m performing at Six Flags. Kurt’s writing a musical. I think he said that Rachel’s the lead in shows at three different community theatre companies.”
(“The girl they cast for Young Ti Moune is taller than her,” Kurt had told him breathlessly after sitting in on a rehearsal one evening. “It’s the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.” Blaine had still been mildly jealous, setting aside unfortunate casting decisions. He had always wanted to be in Once on this Island. Despite the obvious and inevitable nicknames, he had always wanted to play Papa Ge.)
Quinn tapped her fingertips against the cup in her hands and looked back at him through the dark. “I’m not really up to anything,” she murmured. She looked away, into the yard, where it faded into nothing in the distance, and didn’t say anything else.
Blaine watched her. He hummed under his breath, resting his elbows on his knees, holding his head up with one hand. “I’m pretty sure you aren’t just sitting in your room staring at the walls.”
She closed her eyes, and her mouth twitched. “That could be exactly what I’m doing, for all you know.”
“You don’t really seem the type.”
She set her cup on the step beside her, then smoothed her skirt with the flat palms of both hands. “I’ve been reading,” she said finally.
Blaine grinned. “Reading what?”
She looked back at him, studying his face. “You’re really interested in this, aren’t you?”
Blaine spread his hands. “I’m nosy. It’s inherent in my character.”
Her mouth twitched again, and this time it looked a little more like a smile. “Fine,” she said. “I’ve been rereading the Harry Potter books.”
Blaine’s eyebrows went up, lost somewhere in his hairline. “Really?” he asked.
Quinn raised one eyebrow of her own. “You’re surprised.”
He shrugged. “Sorry. I was expecting - I don’t know what I was expecting. Which book are you on?”
“The fourth one,” she said. Her eyebrows were lowered; she was looking at him like he was something she didn’t really understand. A math problem or a magic eye puzzle she couldn’t get right.
“I love that one,” he said earnestly. He tilted his head at her, still smiling. “I like to go back and reread books from when I was a kid, too. It makes me remember what it felt like to be that young.”
Quinn hummed, and even as she looked at him he could see her face slowly closing off again, the curtains slowly being pulled back over her eyes and the politely blank expression crawling back over her. “It’s just something to do,” she said, with a smile that didn’t even attempt to reach her eyes, and she rose prettily to her feet. “I’m going back inside.”
“Quinn,” Blaine said, frowning, watching as she spun on her heel and walked to the door. She didn’t stop, didn’t turn back, just pulled the door open and slipped inside, out of his sight.
5. Down In The Tall Grass - g - Sam, Blaine - Before Sam moves away in the summer, he has his final moments with everyone in New Directions.
[Blaine's was the first vignette, and the only one I ever ended up writing, which is sad, because I liked the ideas I had for everyone else, but I'm really happy I got this one out.]
“I used to watch these a lot, when I was little.”
The motel room was quiet, and only sort of half-lit by one of the lamps on the bedside tables, throwing a warm glow over one side of the space. Kurt was asleep on the opposite side of the bed, curled up with Stevie on one side and Stacy on the other. There was a sticker on his forehead, and a smudge of nail polish on one of his cheeks. Stevie and Stacy were a little worse for wear, but Sam didn’t really mind; Stacy had asked for a Kurt do to her nails to look like flowers, and Stevie had asked for Ninja Turtles, and Kurt had looked like he was in makeover heaven the whole time. Sam grinned at them, looking back over his shoulder, before glancing at Blaine and asking quietly, “What? Like, documentaries?”
Blaine was lying on his stomach on the bed, with his legs in the air and his head propped up on his hands. Sam was sitting on the floor next to him, with his back to the mattress, and they were both looking up at the tiny TV, where there was a spinning CG rendering of Saturn being talked about by a voice-over scientist. Blaine glanced down at him, smiling a little. “Yeah,” he said. “Science documentaries. Stuff about the planets and string theory and the nature of the universe. I read a lot of books about it, too. My parents thought I was a prodigy.”
“Yeah?” Sam asked, impressed. “What happened?”
“I didn’t like math.”
Sam laughed. They were sitting very close, Blaine’s arm basically brushing Sam’s shoulder, so they could talk without waking Kurt and his brother and sister, and so they could both see the TV, but also because it was just comfortable. Blaine and Kurt had been helping to babysit Stevie and Stacy since that day at Dalton when Kurt had thrown open the big wooden doors to see Sam standing in the rain on the top step, holding a pizza box. It had been really nice, having them there. They were both really cool, and good with kids, and it had made everything a little easier. And Blaine had turned out to be really easy to talk to. They liked a lot of the same things.
“I’ve always really liked space stuff,” Sam said, shrugging. “I couldn’t read a lot about it, because of my dyslexia, but I used to come home from school and watch Discovery Channel stuff about stars and the planets and everything all the time. We had this stack of VHS tapes in the living room where I recorded, like, every single thing about astronomy and space travel.” He looked at Blaine, grinning. “I liked the stuff about string theory and M theory, too, but I don’t think I’m ever going to actually understand any of it.”
Blaine laughed. “Neither am I, man. I think I just like hearing people talk about it. But it makes me feel smart.”
“You are smart.”
Blaine looked down at Sam, smiling. “So are you, Sam.” He said it really nicely, warmly, like it was obvious. It made Sam smile a little, looking away, like he was embarrassed, but mostly he was just happy that someone would say something like that to him. He’d never felt smart, really. He knew a lot about stars and astronomy, despite totally screwing up that time with Quinn in that science classroom, but that didn’t really feel like it counted, when his tests kept coming back with C’s and D’s. Blaine saying that made something warm glow in Sam’s chest.
And then clamp down just as quickly. His shoulders slumped, bowing forward, and he stared at the frayed tears in the knees of his jeans. He picked at them, his fingers tucking under the edges of the fray and pulling a little. “I’m going back to Tennessee in two weeks.”
Sam could feel Blaine freeze above him. He pulled his shoulders in a little tighter, wincing, but Blaine settled a warm hand against his back. “Your dad got a job?” he asked softly.
Sam let out a breath, folding himself over his knees. His hair fell into his face, but he didn’t tuck it back. “Yeah,” he mumbled. He tucked his fingers further into the tears. “His old one back. We have to live with my grandparents for a while, but - yeah.”
Blaine took his hand away from Sam’s back and let his arms and head fall dramatically over the side of the bed. “No one’s going to be here to talk about superheroes with me.”
Sam laughed a little, knocking sideways to bump Blaine’s arm with his shoulder. “You can text me. I’m going back to my old boarding school, we can talk about how weird uniforms are.”
Blaine paused for a moment, then lifted his head, looking at Blaine with a hesitant expression. “That, um. That might not be a thing we share next year.”
Sam’s eyebrows lowered and knit together. “Huh?”
Blaine sat up very carefully, looking over his shoulder to make sure that Kurt, Stevie and Stacy didn’t move. He slipped his legs over the edge of the bed and slid down to the floor next to Sam, sighing quietly. “I might be transferring. To McKinley.”
Sam watched him, waiting for a moment. “You don’t seem, you know, excited about it.”
Blaine tilted his head back to look over the edge of the bed; Sam followed his gaze to Kurt, shifting slightly, moving his arms a little tighter around Stacy’s waist. Blaine rested his head against the bed and kept looking. “I don’t have the best relationship with public school.”
Sam frowned at him, watching his profile in the low light. Blaine’s jaw was half-tense, but his eyes were soft. Sam thought about Kurt’s relationship with public school, and he felt something cold pulse through his stomach. He let out a breath. “That sucks.”
“Yeah,” Blaine agreed softly. He turned his head so that his cheek was against the blankets hanging over the side of the mattress, looking at Sam. “I have some - stuff, I have to work through. But I want to. And I want to be with Kurt.”
Sam nodded. He smiled a little. “It’s really brave that you’re thinking about going back, man.”
Blaine blushed brightly, his lips curving up, turning his head away a little. “I’m sorry I didn’t know you better, Sam,” he murmured. He looked back to meet Sam’s eyes. “I’m going to miss you.”
Sam slid his arm up and around Blaine’s shoulders, pulling him tight against his side. “You, too,” he said.
They watched the rest of the documentary in silence.
6. Anything For You - pg - Kurt/Blaine - Blaine's walk back home from Scandals in 3.05, and waking up the next morning still feeling terrible.
Blaine was sober by the time he was halfway home. The night was freezing, the autumn air smudged with the scent of firewood burning somewhere nearby, in one of the mostly-dark houses that Blaine was moving past. His loose tie fluttered around his neck, making his shadow strange and animated as he walked into and out of the heavy orangeish light of each new streetlamp, marking his pace by the pattern of light and dark that moved beneath his feet. It was late. He wasn’t sure how late, but it was late, and he was halfway home, and he was sober, finally. And the guilt washed in then, strong, like a tide.
He stopped between the cones of two streetlights, in the dark under the splintered shadow of one towering tree in some stranger’s front yard. All the way from the bar, there had just been the wooly beer-tinged embarrassment and the resentful disappointment chasing each other around inside of his head, like circling koi. They had just been talking about it, about doing it, Kurt was sending mixed signals, how could he have shouted like that -- over and over again. Now all of that was gone, suddenly, and Blaine was thinking with a crispness he didn’t know he had been missing, and now that he was actually thinking, he honestly wished he could stop.
He had really just done that. He said those things to Kurt - to Kurt, who spent ten minutes in iTunes every time they were alone in his room, choosing just the right music. Kurt, who smiled when Blaine touched his shoulder briefly as he passed Kurt’s locker on the way to Geometry. Whose bucket list used the word relations. Kurt, who Blaine was painfully, all-encompassingly in love with, who was the Big Bang singularity of Blaine’s universe, the point from which everything expanded. Blaine had said those things to him.
The guilt wrapped around him, like an ache in his muscles, settling into his skin, rioting in his stomach. It felt awful, like he’d destroyed something beautiful on purpose. Kurt’s face. He’d been so upset, and Blaine had just stood up and walked away from that, not fixing it, just leaving it broken in the middle of a gay bar’s parking lot. He’d screwed it up. Again. He wasn’t ever going to stop screwing it up, really, and he knew that, somewhere deep inside of him, somewhere he couldn’t even touch anymore. He was just going to keep ruining things and keep ruining things until Kurt decided that Blaine wasn’t worth the sacrifice of being with him anymore. And then Kurt would be gone. If he wasn’t already. If this hadn’t been enough to finally end it.
Blaine was never going to be good enough to keep the things he loved.
Standing in the dark, feeling like he was drowning, Blaine shivered helplessly.
Blaine woke up to the needle-thin pierce of morning sunlight against his closed eyes, his phone beeping somewhere to his right. He reached for it without looking, stretching his arm out - and he felt his center of gravity shift over an edge. The spike of falling-panic snapped him fully awake with the hammer of his heart in his chest as he quickly withdrew his arm and rolled back, away from the open space beside him. His shoulder blades hit the back of the couch, and he stared down at the floor with dumb, newly-opened eyes. His phone was vibrating loudly against the hardwood, spinning a few inches every time, the small alarm clock symbol flashing on its face.
He was in the den in the back of his parents’ house. The back wall, made of windows, poured light into the room, making it glow with confusing reflective flares, like fire was trapped inside of everything.
He remembered, then. Turning the key to swing the door open into the empty house, avoiding the stairs and stumbling through the unfamiliar dark into the gaping blackness of the den. Setting his phone to go off in five hours, dropping it and then collapsing onto the couch. It was better than his bedroom, at that moment, because he hadn’t had a hand in decorating any part of the house, but it was most noticeable in his room, covered in reminders of the things he’d done in the past to make his parents happy. Polo, fencing. They were gone. He’d forgotten where, but they wouldn’t be back to find him sleeping in the den, so he hadn’t cared.
It didn’t feel any better, in the daylight. His chest still ached like he had ripped a part of himself away. He had to stand, he knew. He had to get up, shower, change, go to school. He had to keep acting like he’d learned somewhere along the way how to be a functioning human being.
He was going to see Kurt at school, though. He was going to see what he had done. So instead of moving, he just stayed there, spread along the uncomfortable white couch. He watched his phone trying desperately to escape across the floor in tiny circles, until there was nothing he could do anymore but go.
7. There Will Always Be An Ireland - g - Kurt/Blaine, Rory - Rory spends Thanksgiving with the Hummels-plus-Blaine.
[This one couldn't get its feet under it, but the beginning turned out just the way I wanted it to. It was going to be an exploration of Rory missing his family, Kurt being happy to have a family, and Blaine already starting to freak out about Kurt leaving, including a Blaine+Finn reconciliation that ended up making both of them feel better about their partners moving away, through commiseration and an oath to make it work no matter what.]
Rory reasoned that, if nothing else, being in America had given him some fantastic time management skills. He had the hockey team’s schedules fairly memorized, and enough of the school’s layout in his head to be able to avoid them most of the time by hiding in a bathroom or that science classroom that always seemed to be empty. There were still times he had to walk by them, though, and those were the moments when timing was key. He had most of the glee club’s locker numbers written down on a piece of paper in his back pocket, but he’d stopped needing it after the second week. He knew where they were, and when their occupants would be at them, pulling out books and dropping old ones off. If he really needed to be in the same hallway as the boy with the mullet and his bulky mates, it was easier to be near someone he knew when all of his books were pulled from his hands and thrown on the floor. At least then someone might shout after them about leaving him alone. Rory hated confrontation. He didn’t even like to raise his voice. When he did, he always felt a bit of an arse.
Like now, really. “Kurt!” he called, trying to sprint down the crowded hallway and really only managing to hit everyone around him with his bag. “Kurt Hummel!”
Kurt’s locker number was 230, in the main hallway with all of the other seniors. Rory could see him, through the forest of heads and shoulders in front of him; he was leaning on the open locker door, smiling and talking to Blaine Anderson, who was leaning on the locker beside him. Neither of them heard Rory. Rory sometimes felt like he needed a loud hailer, at all times, tucked away somewhere on his person, so that maybe, at some point, someone might hear him when he’s shouting.
“Kurt Hummel!”
Kurt did hear him, then. He turned, eyebrows up, searching down the hall until he caught Rory’s waving arm in the throng. Rory managed to break through the pack and hurry to Kurt’s side, skidding to a halt and leaning on the lockers for a second, trying to get his breath back. Kurt closed his locker and turned to him, quirking an eyebrow. “Talk of the Irish devil. We were just discussing you.”
Blaine peeked over Kurt’s shoulder, grinning sunnily. “Good things, I promise.”
Rory smiled a little weakly back, chest still heaving. God, he wished he hadn’t run that entire way, but he needed to speak to Kurt Hummel before he was gone for the day. Half-days were complete rubbish, in Rory’s opinion. They’d done absolutely nothing in class. He’d had to draw a turkey out of a trace of his hand in Algebra. He shook his head, straightened up away from the lockers, and took a deep breath before letting it out slowly. “Hi,” he said.
Kurt’s mouth twitched. “Hi. Was there a reason you were running down the hallway shouting my full name?”
“Yes.” And Rory took that moment to hesitate. Kurt was extremely intimidating. He was a senior, and he dressed like a film star, and he had this cold sort of look sometimes when something annoyed him, like he was very capable of breaking any number of Rory’s bones with the power of his mind. And Rory was about to ask him something that might instigate that expression. He considered backing out - just turning and running away again; really, he’d done things that were more strange in the four weeks he’d lived in America - but he didn’t. He just stared at Kurt’s face for any stormy change of expression and started talking.
“I’ve already asked Finn Hudson, and he’s said it’s fine, but that I should ask you just in case it interferes with your plans - and if it does, I understand, really, it’s honestly not a problem, I’ve others I can ask, you don’t have to put yourselves out for me if you don’t--”
Kurt interrupted Rory by reaching out and putting a hand on his shoulder. Rory had sort of gone into tunnel vision for a minute, there. Coming back, he saw that Kurt was trying valiantly not to laugh, and his heart sank a little. But Kurt just patted him lightly on the shoulder. “Rory,” he said. “Stop. Finn already talked to me about it.”
Rory’s eyebrows went up in surprise. “Really?” he asked. That was nice of Finn.
“Yes.” Kurt dropped his hand from Rory’s shoulder. “We’ll be happy to have you for Thanksgiving. Carole and I make enough food to feed two small armies. I have to ask, though - what about Brittany’s family?”
Rory flushed. He played with the strap of his bag, not looking at Kurt. “They don’t celebrate Thanksgiving. They said something about smallpox and the Native Americans - I honestly don’t know. I don’t understand them about half of the time.”
“No surprise there,” Kurt said breezily. “Well! Like I said, we’ll be happy to have you. Blaine’s coming, too. His parents are away for work.” Kurt bounced his shoulder against Blaine’s as he spoke.
Rory looked at Blaine and frowned. “Your parents can’t get back for the holiday?”
Rory saw something flash over Blaine’s face - it was very, very fast, almost gone before it was even there. It looked like a grimace, and that made a little alarm ring in the back of Rory’s mind. He couldn’t remember ever having seen Blaine look anything but ecstatic. But Blaine’s face fell into a tight little smile, not bright enough to hide the fact that it was strained, his voice a little bitter. “My parents don’t really come home for anything,” he said, like that was an explanation.
Rory saw the surreptitious movement of Kurt’s hand to brush into Blaine’s and squeeze briefly before letting go. Blaine looked at Kurt, at the concerned expression on his face, and all of the chill in his own seemed to melt. His body sagged a little from the straight-backed posture that Rory hadn’t even notice, and he leaned his shoulder against Kurt’s again, comfortable, looking back to Rory.
“Like Kurt said.” He smiled, real this time. “It’ll be fun to have you. You should experience a really American holiday, all about football and turkey comas and family.”
Rory smiled uncertainly. “I don’t really know much about American football.”
Blaine’s eyes gleamed. “Oh, good,” Kurt told Rory. “You’ve created a monster.” He bumped Blaine away from him with his hip, to be able to reach his bag and pull it open. “Do you have any food allergies that I should be aware of?” he asked, as Blaine smirked and stepped back into his space. Kurt just ignored him.
“Er, not that I know of,” Rory said, smiling back at the wink Blaine gave him over Kurt’s shoulder. “I’ll eat pretty much anything. I’m not fussed.”
“Great,” Kurt said. He pulled out a piece of paper and a pen and used the locker next to him to write something in neat script. “This is my number.” He handed it to Rory. “We’ll pick you up tomorrow morning at about nine at Brittany’s house. Give me a call if anything changes, okay?”
Rory nodded and tucked the paper carefully into his pocket, then looked back up at Kurt. He took a moment before saying, “I really appreciate this.” He honestly did. He wanted to experience American things while he was here, and Thanksgiving was about as American as you could get. When Brittany’s parents had told him that they wouldn’t be doing anything, he’d been really disappointed. This was going to be fun, he was sure. Finn was nice, and Blaine was nice, and Kurt was standing there smiling at him, so he was probably nice, too. (He’d asked about food allergies. Rory would never have thought of that.)
Kurt waved Rory’s words away. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow,” Blaine repeated, grinning.
Rory nodded. “Right. Tomorrow.” He looked down the hall behind him: no red jackets. He looked down the hall beyond Kurt and Blaine: no mullets. Letting out a relieved breath, he gave both of them one last smile before breaking back into the deluge toward the front doors.
Behind him, almost too quiet to hear, he heard Blaine say to Kurt, in an amused voice, “Have you guys even asked your parents yet?”
He heard Kurt sigh, and say a little louder, offhand, “Details.”
Blaine was sitting on the stairs to his front porch by 8:30 the next day. It was a sweetly freezing morning, where every breath was white and visible, and the whole world seemed to glow gray with the sky hanging down dark and closer than usual. He wrapped his arms around his chest and breathed in through a smile, the smell of someone’s fireplace smoky and perfect in his nose. Blaine loved autumn. He loved winter, too; there was something about that omnipresent smell of wood smoke and the sound of leaves -- and then the eerie, beautiful silence of snow - that made him warm and nostalgic. (And, honestly, it was also the way that Kurt looked in the cold, bundled up in a thousand different coats with a thousand different scarves, the rounds of his cheeks and the tips of his ears red. Blaine wasn’t above finding Kurt adorable, even after - everything. He actually though he might have it worse, now.)
The Navigator pulled up to the curb, and Blaine stood, rubbing his arms with his hands and grinning. Kurt took a moment to get out of the car, first turning off the music that had been making muffled little bass sounds, then shutting off the engine. He opened his door and stepped out, and Blaine knew for a fact that he had it worse: Kurt was wearing a longish blue coat with a complicated series of belts, and a soft-looking scarf, and he looked up when he crossed in front of the car and smiled when he saw Blaine standing there, staring at him. Yep. Pink cheeks, pink ears. Blaine had it bad.
“You didn’t have to wait outside,” Kurt called as he walked up the path to the porch.
Blaine shrugged, stepping down the stairs to the pavement. “I don’t mind.” He reached out when Kurt was close enough and pulled him into a hug. Kurt melted right into him, wrapping his arms around Blaine’s back and squeezing briefly.
“It looks like it’s going to snow,” he said, head tilting against Blaine’s shoulder.
Blaine grinned, speaking against Kurt’s temple. “I hope so. I love when it snows this early.”
Kurt pulled back and made a face at him. “You’ve obviously never had to put snow tires on anyone’s car.” He caught Blaine’s hand in his own and started back down the path. “Come on, Rory’s waiting for us.”
Blaine followed him, looking down at their hands clasped between them. (Kurt was wearing black gloves, soft against the bare skin of Blaine’s hand, and it made something warm turn over in Blaine’s stomach. He took a breath through it.) “What did your parents say when you asked them?” he asked, as though he wasn’t thinking about Kurt’s warm hand in his, and the light way Kurt pulled him along until they reached the car and he had to (very regrettably) let go.
“They were fine with it,” Kurt said as he crossed over the front of the car and opened the driver door. Blaine climbed into the passenger seat and buckled himself in as Kurt did the same, looking down at his iPod to restart the music and turn the volume down. “I mean, obviously. Do you think that Carole would ever turn someone away from Thanksgiving dinner? She’d have to turn over her mothering license.” Kurt glanced back and forth on the road for other cars, then signaled and started off. “He’s staying over tonight, too. My dad actually suggested it. You get to share the living room.”
Blaine smirked. “I can’t imagine why your dad would want another person in the living room to be aware of my nighttime movements.”
Kurt blushed, the color crawling over his face as his hands tightened on the steering wheel a little, and that had been Blaine’s goal, so he did a small internal victory dance even when Kurt glanced at him and grinned. “I have no idea,” he said, trying for lofty and failing, “but he seemed pretty pleased about it.”
Blaine laughed.
Note: Please don't post spoilers past Heart in comments! I'm trying to stay as spoiler-free as possible for the rest of the season. Thank you! I appreciate it!
Also, title attributions: Comin' Thro the Rye by Robert Burns; As If We Never Said Goodbye from Sunset Boulevard; The Cave by Mumford & Sons; Secondhand News by Fleetwood Mac; For The Widows in Paradise, for the Fatherless in Ypsilanti by Sufjan Stevens; There Will Always Be An Ireland by The Mountain Goats.
Most of these are fairly lengthy, averaging about 1000 words, with two much longer. Some of them were fully planned out, and those are accompanied by some notes about the unwritten parts. They all feel at least a little like stand-alone fics, if sometimes light. Setting them free like this means that I'm almost definitely never going to finish them. They are organized in chronological order, according to what episode they correspond to.
Feel free to jump around to whatever summary piques your interest. Enjoy!
1. If A Body Meet A Body - g - Blaine, OC - After coming out to his parents, pre-series Blaine runs away to New York to see his brother and lose himself in the city.
The bus braked fast enough to jostle Blaine awake. He blinked down into his lap, his head still held up by his arm pillowed against the tinted window, washing everything in a cold dark blue. One of his headphones had fallen out while he was sleeping; it lay caught between his knees, the other still whispering in his ear with the playlist he had made just before he’d left. Shifting his sleep-stiff and aching shoulders to look out of the window didn’t tell him much: a long highway, rain, signs for towns whose names he didn’t recognize, everything wavy and dark and out of focus.
He glanced across the aisle, to the elderly woman seated by herself at the opposite window. Her overhead light was on, a book fanned open in her lap. She was looking at him and smiling. “Still a few hours to go, sweetheart,” she told him softly, and he was aware then of the deep sounds of sleeping breath from the Greyhound stretched out behind them. Her reading glasses caught the yellow light and flashed once. She asked, “Who are you meeting in New York?”
Blaine smiled at her, tired and a little apologetic, and turned back to the window instead of answering. He pressed his lost headphone back into his ear, leaned against the glass and closed his eyes.
To: Joel
I’ll be in NY in about an hour.
To: Blaine
what? no. why?
To: Joel
I know you have to work. I’ll hang out with the dinosaurs until you’re done.
To: Blaine
explain. as fast as humanly possible.
To: Blaine
blaine.
To: Blaine
please don’t get mugged or anything. cp west entrance at 5:30.
Blaine couldn’t remember the last time he had been in New York. He’d been too young to actually take anything in, toddling around Times Square with his hand held firmly in Joel’s eleven-year-old grip during a family vacation that was probably more business than pleasure for their father. But he remembered the dinosaurs. He remembered standing in front of the triceratops and staring at the dark shine of its bones, then turning to ask Joel if they could go and see them alive somewhere. (“Like the zoo,” he’d said, “with the tigers.”) He remember Joel explaining that they couldn’t, that all of the dinosaurs were gone forever, and the memory had remained really strangely clear for his entire life, so much so that whenever he thought of New York City, he thought of dinosaur bones, and of Joel letting him stay up and watch Jurassic Park with him when they got back home to Ohio. (And of how terrified he’d been when the Tyrannosaurus Rex leaned down and pressed the glass ceiling in against the kids in the car. He’d slept with the light on for a week.)
So now, ten years later, the cold October wind bit through Blaine’s coat and scarf while he sat on the steps outside of the American Museum of Natural History. There was a group of pigeons a few tiers down, fighting over the discarded end of a hot dog bun, and a little girl jumping from stair to stair while her mother and grandmother struggled, laughing, with an elaborate stroller, keeping an eye out for cabs. There had been literally nowhere else Blaine knew to go. So he went here; he just stepped off of the bus at Penn Station and stepped on the C train with the nerves knotted in his stomach that he would end up in Queens or somewhere, and from 81st Street everything had just been so stupidly easy he had almost forgotten why he was there in the first place.
The sun was starting to set behind the museum, throwing light over the trees of Central Park across the street. Blaine pulled his coat tighter around himself, tucking his hands together between his knees. The dinosaurs had still been there, still dark and shining. He’d gone to see them first, but then he’d wandered away. He’d slept on a bench in the small Astor Turret until a guard noticed him and asked him politely if he would mind not doing that there.
The thing was, he was disappointed. He’d stood in front of the triceratops, and it was embarrassing, but he’d thought that he would have this wave of nostalgia, or he would be as impressed as he was when he was four and Joel stood next to him and told him about a comet and millions of years and bones dug out of the earth. But he’d just stood there and waited for something to happen, until a woman tapped him on the shoulder with a smile and asked if her children could get a little closer. Her son was staring around Blaine’s knees with big clear eyes, and Blaine shuffled out of the way. He watched the boy press as close as possible to the display, then he turned around and walked away.
(He’d found something sort of like what he’d been looking for, later, wandering aimlessly around the first floor of the museum. He’d turned a corner and then - surprise - a giant blue whale was hanging in front of him, watching him with calm eyes, and it had made him stop. He’d stayed in that room for a while, leaning on a railing, looking back at the whale while a school group in first or second grade ran around beneath it, staring up at the incredible girth of it, daring each other to try and jump high enough to touch it. He’d watched, listening to the tourists next to him discussing the museum map in quiet, indecipherable French. It was almost the same awe he’d felt at four about the dinosaur looming before him; something almost unimaginably large and benign at the same time.)
The museum didn’t hold much for Blaine after the dinosaurs and the whale, which was a surprise. Most of the Halls with behind-glass models of animals were filled with art students; they were sitting against the display walls and using reflective surfaces set in front of them to sketch the models behind them. A few had mirrors, a few had metal pots. One girl Blaine saw had a polished ladle angled in just the right direction, held between her ankles. It was one of the strangest things he had ever seen, and he’d just watched for a while, until she’d glanced up at him and raised an eyebrow. He’d hurried away, embarrassed.
The mother, grandmother and daughter had found a cab and hailed it; they struggled the stroller into the trunk while the driver spoke into his Bluetooth in clipped Italian. When they drove away, the sun caught the windshield and flared, and Blaine shielded his eyes with a hand.
Then Blaine saw him. Just a figure in a dark coat, hurrying down from 81st, but so familiar and welcome it made his chest expand. He didn’t know he was standing or moving until he was in the middle of the sidewalk and Joel was almost running towards him.
He stopped right in front of Blaine, grabbing his arms and ducking to look him in the face. “What the hell were you thinking?” he asked, his eyes sweeping over Blaine’s hair, his clothes, the bag on his shoulders. “You can’t just text me right before you get here. I’ve been freaking out for five hours.”
Blaine didn’t say anything, just looked up at him, like if he blinked then Joel would disappear. He was a little bit older, a few days unshaven with dark stubble pebbling his face. Blaine couldn’t believe that it had actually been two years until he saw Joel like this, different and standing on a sidewalk in New York City with the thick light falling against him and the museum throwing him half in shadow.
“Blaine,” Joel said, looking at him, frowning. “What happened?”
Blaine closed his eyes. “I came out to them.”
Joel took a second, then breathed, “Fuck.” Then his hands were off of Blaine’s arms, and he was pulling Blaine against him, holding Blaine hard against his chest. And Blaine wasn’t going to start crying here, in the middle of the sidewalk with Central Park stretched out to his right and a childhood memory to his left. He wasn’t going to start now if he hadn’t yet. But some important load-bearing thing inside of him chose that second to snap, and he sagged with his face pressed into Joel’s coat, the wetness against his cheeks cold in the chilled autumn air.
It was probably worth all of the trouble he was going to get into, when Joel didn’t let go of him.
“I’m gonna warn you,” Joel said, turning back to look at Blaine with the key halfway into the door of his third-floor apartment, “it’s kind of a wreck.” Blaine shrugged, looking back at him, and Joel’s mouth twitched. “You say that now.”
He turned the key the rest of the way and swung the door open, swiping his arm at the wall to the left to flip the lights on. Blaine peered past him; the apartment started with a kitchen: a green and white tiled linoleum floor with seventies counters and a yellow refrigerator, a round wooden table piled with opened mail and flyers and mugs. Beyond it, the living room, with beige carpets and a thick old red couch, a heavy wooden coffee table which matched nothing, and a TV that Blaine remembered from when Joel used to live at home. There were two hallways where the rooms split, where Blaine imagined the bedrooms must live. (It was, for the record, nowhere near as bad as Joel made it out to be. The mess was the same kind that Blaine always had in his room, a sort of organized chaos of papers and clothes and books with occasional misplaced kitchenware.)
Joel stepped inside and put his bag and the table, then threw his coat over a chair. “My roommates are out of the city visiting family, so no one’s here to be passive-aggressive at me until Wednesday.”
Blaine shrugged his backpack off of his shoulders, then his coat, which he laid overtop of Joel’s on the chair. He looked around, getting a feel for the place. Sort of dim, with only the one light on. It smelled vaguely of things that reminded him of Joel; his old cologne, secondhand books, coffee. The mixture made something cramp in Blaine’s stomach, and he gripped the back of one of the kitchen chairs with white-knuckle fingers.
Joel was watching him, eyes a little dark, head tilted very slightly to the side. After a moment, both of them just standing there quietly, he raised his eyebrows and asked, “So. Want to eat pizza and get drunk and watch The Princess Bride?”
Blaine let out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding. “Yes,” he said, a little desperately.
Joel smirked.
The pizza was amazing and the beer was horrible, but Blaine was most of the way through his by the time Buttercup was kidnapped. (He always wondered what happened to the horse when they took her; did they just leave it there? What did it do when she was gone?) Joel side-eyed him when he drained the rest of brown-tinted bottle in a few swallows. “This is the kind of day I’ve had,” Blaine told him, shaking the bottle. The tiny amount of beer left at the bottom sloshed back and forth.
Joel took it from him, managing both to grin and look uncertain. “I’d worry about you becoming an alcoholic, if you weren’t such a wuss about throwing up.”
“And if I actually enjoyed the taste of alcohol,” Blaine said, wincing at the bitterness still left in his mouth. On the screen, Inigo and Fezzik were trading rhymes. He watched for a few minutes, the words already in his head before they were spoken. He could feel Joel watching him. He glanced over and raised an eyebrow. “What?”
“How long has it been since you slept?”
Blaine blinked at him for a moment, then looked back at the TV. “Define ‘slept.’”
“Blanket. Pillow. Six to eight hours uninterrupted.”
“Then I don’t know.” Blaine reached out for another slice of pizza from the open box on the coffee table. “A long time. Four hours on the bus and a half-hour at the museum.”
“You slept at the museum?” Joel asked, smirking. “How Basil E. Frankweiler of you.”
“They were at the Met, not the ANHM,” Blaine murmured. He was holding the pizza, but not eating it. Suddenly it didn’t really look appetizing. Suddenly he felt like he was probably going to be sick, and it occurred to him that he didn’t know where the bathroom was.
“How are you even conscious right now?”
Blaine shrugged. He watched the screen. He didn’t look at Joel. “I think I’m still running on nervous energy.” There had been a lot of that. There had been a lot of panicking. His stomach rolled and he took a breath through his mouth.
From the corner of his eye, Blaine could see Joel still watching him, looking at him with a closeness that only Joel ever actually had, like Joel knew him, and the worst part was how true that might be. But Joel didn’t say anything. He stood up and moved for the kitchen, and Blaine quickly put the pizza back into the box. He wiped his hands on his jeans, breathing out, swallowing past the nausea.
When Joel came back, he handed Blaine another beer, and met Blaine’s eyes when he took it. Dark, worried and resigned; those were Joel’s eyes. Blaine’s just felt tired, all of a sudden.
In the middle of the second beer, Blaine lost track. Exhaustion and alcohol caught up with him, so the movie became a blur of ROUS’s and torture chambers and suicide threats, until everything slipped away into the pleasant dark.
He woke up to Joel’s voice, still a little dizzy, not all there. Joel was nearby, and quiet, and Blaine didn’t move. He’d learned that trick a long time ago; eavesdropping, appearing to be asleep, all to try and figure out what adults weren’t telling him. (But Joel wasn’t an adult, not really. He was 22 but he was nowhere near an adult.)
“And you just now thought to call me?” Joel was asking. Blaine moved his head enough to see Joel’s profile, sitting at the kitchen table with the light on over his head, casting him in poker-game yellow. He had his phone pressed to his ear. “Little late, don’t you think?”
Blaine’s stomach rolled again, and he closed his eyes. He knew who that was.
“He’s fine. He did great by himself. No surprise there.” A pause. “No, he’s asleep. No. He’s sleeping, mother. You can’t talk to him.” He added in a mutter, “And even if he wasn’t, he ran away for a fucking reason. Whatever you did - no, he hasn’t talked to me about it. I don’t want to hear about it from you. No, I’m not talking about this. He’ll be home on Monday. He can stay with me until then.” A longer pause. “Well, tough.” Then a beep when Joel hung up, and the anxious tap of his phone against the table.
Blaine couldn’t tell if it was a few minutes or a few hours later when Joel kneeled next to him and smoothed the hair back from his forehead. Blaine opened his eyes and blinked up at him. “Monday?” he croaked.
Joel nodded. He pulled a blanket (it had appeared as if by magic, along with a pillow) higher up over Blaine’s shoulder. “You can stay for the weekend.”
“Kind of wanted longer.”
Joel’s mouth twitched. “How long?”
Blaine shrugged into the couch. He watched the medal of St. Christopher swing around Joel’s neck and gleam in the dull light. “Forever.”
Joel’s hand swept Blaine’s hair back again, then stayed there, a warm weight. “No matter how great it would be if you could stay forever, you can’t miss more school.”
Blaine looked up to meet Joel’s eyes. He let out a shaking breath. “School’s really bad now, Joel. So bad.”
Joel’s hand tightened in Blaine’s hair, then loosened and pulled away. He sighed. “I don’t know what to tell you, Blaine. I’m sorry.” He stood up. “Get some sleep. I’ll see you in the morning.”
Blaine listened to Joel walk away. “G’night,” he said, watching the blank television screen across from him.
“Good night,” Joel said, and he turned off the lights.
2. Has There Ever Been A Moment - g - Kurt, Jeff, Nick - After Kurt tells the Warblers that he is going back to McKinley, they begin to drop in on him one at a time.
[Kurt lets drop at the end of Warblers rehearsal that he is going back to McKinley, effective Monday. There's a general murmur of surprise, curtailed by the gavel, and they all file out, everyone pointedly not talking about it. Kurt goes back to him room and faceplants into his bed, thinking about how this feels a lot worse than he thought it would, and he probably should have done it on a night when Blaine didn't have study group until curfew. There's a knock on his door, and there stands Jeff, who sweeps in as though he's always there, which he decidedly isn't. He is Jeff, doing his Jeff-y thing, asking Kurt in the nicest, least-pressing way why he came to Dalton. Kurt tells him about the bullying. Jeff just nods. He says, "I never really knew you as much as I wanted to." Kurt's completely surprised, and while he's still stunned, Jeff gives him a hug and hangs on until Kurt hugs back. Then he grins, wishes Kurt luck, tells him to visit a lot, and leaves, and Kurt's left still feeling off-balance, but in a really nice way. Then:]
It happened again the next day. Blaine didn’t have the same lunch module as Kurt; they missed each other by about forty minutes, which was a shame, but also a good time to catch up on the work he was at times too distracted to get through the evening before. (It was a really nice kind distraction, though. Very warm and comfortable.) So he sat at one of the long wooden tables with his Calculus homework spread out in front of him, taking a piece of fruit from the cup to his right every few minutes, all of his concentration placed on the paper over which his pencil moved.
Until he felt someone slide in next to him on the bench seat. He blinked down at the fuzz of the numbers, then looking over to be met with Nick, sitting close and looking at him uncertainly, a very light blush very high in his cheeks. He smiled slightly, crooking his fingers in a short wave. Kurt put his pencil down and grinned, waving back, which made Nick’s smile widen and his blush deepen.
“Hi,” Nick said finally. “I, um. I wanted to talk to you for a second. Is that okay?”
Kurt nodded. He tilted his head at Nick, taking in the way the boy fidgeted slightly with his cuffs, avoiding Kurt’s eyes. Nick cleared his throat, and focused his gaze on the windows across the way, where storm clouds had gathered overhead, dark and close, everything grey and coolly impending.
“Jeff talked to me last night, about why you left your old school,” he said. He glanced at Kurt to gauge his expression. “I’m sorry. I hope that’s okay. It’s just that we pretty much tell each other anything, and he knows I wouldn’t--”
Kurt waved a hand to stop him. “It’s fine,” he said. “I sort of expected it to get around.”
Nick nodded. He looked back to the windows. “I just, I wanted to tell you--” He broke off, then swallowed and shook his head. “I’m happy for you, that you can go back. I get it, I think. And.” He took a breath. The color in his cheeks got brighter, and he ducked his head. “I wanted you to know that I really admire you.”
Kurt felt his own cheeks get hot. His hand spasmed in surprise over his homework. Nick looked up to see his face, and he smiled very small. “I do,” he said. “You’re being really brave, Kurt. A lot braver--” He stopped, shook his head. “You’re being really brave. I just - I really hope that everything goes okay.” He got a little more quiet, his expression becoming earnest. “If anything happens - anything bad, I mean - you’ll tell us, right? Good things, too, but--” Nick played with his cuff again. “I’m - we’re - going to worry.”
Kurt ducked his head, trying to keep Nick from seeing how much he was blushing, and the probably-ridiculous smile on his face. He cleared his throat. “I will. I promise.”
Nick let out a relieved breath that relaxed his whole body. “Good,” he said, sounding grateful.
Kurt looked up at him, and before he really knew what he was doing, he had thrown his arms around Nick and hugged him tightly, despite the slightly awkward angle. He heard Nick’s surprised intake of breath, but Nick hugged him back immediately. Kurt pressed a kiss against his cheek and said roughly, “Thank you.”
Nick was the one who broke the hug, grinning and blushing madly. He stood up a little too quickly. “I - yeah - I have to get to class. I’ll see you later Kurt. And - you’re welcome.” Another little wave, and he was hurrying away.
Kurt watched him go, sort of shocked, but too happy to give it much more thought than that.
3. We Found Each Other In The Dark, Kurt POV - g - Kurt/Blaine - Moments mentioned but not seen in my post-Prom Queen fic, We Found Each Other In The Dark, told from Kurt's POV. Includes the argument during the car ride back from the prom.
The dashboard light casts a soft blue glow on Kurt’s hands as he stares down at them on the steering wheel, waiting for the light to turn green. His stomach is still rolling. He doesn’t think it’s going to stop for a while, maybe a long while, and he won’t look at Blaine, sitting next to him in the dark, silent. But out of the corner of his eye he can see Blaine’s hands twist in his lap, constantly moving, unfocused.
“We could have gone with them,” he says.
Kurt closes his eyes and breathes out through his nose. “No, we couldn’t.” He can hear that his voice is on the fragile edge, and it makes him wince. He opens his eyes and the light changes.
“It might have--”
“It wouldn’t have made it better,” Kurt says, foot pressing the gas a little too hard. The force makes Blaine fall back against his seat, and Kurt just keeps looking through the windshield, guilty but refusing to look over.
Somewhere between Dancing Queen and the end of the evening, things had soured. As if it wasn’t sour enough. There was an unmovable block in Kurt’s chest, a foreign denseness he couldn’t breathe through or dance off or push away. It got bigger by the minute. It dragged him down, made all of his movements weighted and slow, made his brain trudge through thoughts, his mouth falter and give up on words. It made him pull himself away. And then it made him leave before everyone else and their afterparty plans and their whooping excitement.
Because there was still that angry pity lurking inside of them. He knew that going wherever they were going meant dragging them down with his sudden weight. And they deserved better than that. They didn’t make his mess.
Blaine looks out the passenger window, and Kurt glances over for an incredibly brief second. Only long enough to see the tenseness in Blaine’s neck and jaw, the hard edge of his eyes reflected in the window. Kurt looks back at the road.
“I don’t know how you possibly thought this would go well,” Blaine says, cold and short, toward the window, and a kind of ringing starts in Kurt’s ears. The whole of his skin washes in tingles, from his scalp to his soles.
“That’s really going to help this night get better,” he says, fingers tightening on the steering wheel. “Being pissed at me. Great strategy.”
“I’m not pissed at--”
“You are,” Kurt says. He’s sneaking glances away from the road, and Blaine is looking at him now, eyebrows lowered and frowning and yes, he actually is angry. It only makes Kurt burn more. “Yes, I thought this would go well. Yes, I was wrong. Feel free to keep rubbing my face in it. Like the slow clap and the catcalls didn’t do enough of that.”
“Kurt--”
“So you were right. I shouldn’t go to school dances and I shouldn’t wear kilts and I shouldn’t have any hope of anything ever getting better and I shouldn’t be gay--”
“I never said that--”
“But they do,” Kurt shouts, and he hits the steering wheel, and it’s getting hard to see so he wipes the angry tears out of his eyes with the back of his hand. “And then you try to let them, and then you hold it over me when I try to do something about it and--”
“And you end up getting hurt, like you always do!” Blaine shouts. His chest is rising and falling with his furious breath. His face is flushed, his eyes wide and hard. “Your life would be so much easier if you just stopped for a second!”
They are just idling, now, in front of Kurt’s house. The whole trip has been on autopilot, Kurt far more involved in the fight than the actual act of driving. His hand shakes as he presses the gearshift down to P. He looks down at the middle of the steering wheel. “Everything’s ruined,” he says. “You should just go home.”
Blaine waits for a second. In his peripheral vision, Kurt can see his hands tighten into fists in his lap, his whole body tensing. Then he just - opens the door. Steps out. Slams it. Walks across the street to his car, gets in, rolls the engine over so that the headlights blare up the street. And then he drives away.
Kurt watches him go in the rearview mirror. When all traces of taillights have faded away, he drops his forehead down against the steering wheel, closes his eyes, and cries.
Burt Hummel is crashing around in the kitchen. Ostensibly, it’s to make Kurt something comforting, but he’s just mastered toast, and Kurt is probably never going to be hungry again. He knows that his dad is mostly crashing around in the kitchen because he’s just spent the last twenty minutes crashing around in the living room, shouting about bastard kids and their pranks and their stupid hatred. Kurt knows that his dad is trying to keep himself from exploding in front of him. And he’s sort of grateful. Because his dad is sick, and not angry at him at all, and he’s really tired of being around shouting.
Finn is next to him on the couch, back in jeans and a t-shirt, apparently having had a verbal and literal dressing-down after coming home early from prom for fighting with Jesse. He’s watching Kurt twirl the scepter nimbly between his fingers, like he’s mesmerized by the movement.
“I’m really sorry, man,” Finn finally says. He doesn’t look at Kurt, just watches the blur of the scepter. “I should have been there.”
“It’s okay,” Kurt says. His chin is propped up on his free hand, elbow balanced on his knee, and he’s watching the scepter, too. “It’s better that you weren’t.”
This seems to knock Finn out of his hypnosis. He looks to Kurt’s face, frowning. “Why, dude? I would have gone all Hulk Smash on, like, everyone ever.”
A humorless smirk touches Kurt’s mouth. He stops twirling and grips the scepter tightly in his hand. “That’s why. This whole thing would have been a lot worse if you were suspended for throwing punches at random in a crowd of taffeta and poor color choices.”
Finn nods a little. Then he reaches out and squeezes Kurt’s shoulder. “I’m still sorry.”
Kurt looks over at him. His mouth lifts a little bit, more real this time. “I appreciate it, Finn.” Then he looks away.
“What happened to Blaine? Wasn’t he staying over?”
Kurt’s eyes slam closed. “We - had an argument. In the car. He went back to Dalton.”
“Oh.” Finn sounds confused, and Kurt certainly understands that. “That sucks, man.”
“Yeah,” Kurt sighs. He stands up. “I’m going to bed. Thank my dad for - you know.” He waves in the direction of the kitchen, then starts toward the stairs.
“Hey, Kurt?” Finn calls hesitantly after him. “Do you know if Quinn is, like, really super pissed at me?”
Kurt rolls his eyes to himself without turning around. “She seemed okay,” he said. “But you should call her.”
“Right.”
“Good night, Finn.”
“Night, Kurt.”
[Then Jeff convinces Blaine to come back to Lima, and the rest of We Found Each Other happens.]
4. Walking On Your Hands - g - Blaine, Quinn - During a New Directions party over the summer, Blaine and Quinn have a conversation.
[This story was going to be about how Blaine is Quinn's fairy godmother over the summer, becoming her friend and sort of accidentally helping her find herself again. I didn't have anything really planned past this scene, but I like it enough to want to put it somewhere, even if the fic itself didn't work out.]
Blaine could feel the bass beat from inside of the house vibrating the wood of the deck. It was hot, and he was sprawled in the dark on the wide wooden stairs which wrapped around the back of the house in an imperfect arc, his back and neck resting uncomfortably, but in the sort of lazy, relaxed way that made him not want to move at all. He breathed in the humid summer air, then breathed it out again.
The long ramp down into the grass of the back yard was one of the many small things which made it obvious that this was Artie’s house. His parents were apparently away for one night, and their suggestion of his having a few friends over had somehow evolved into a party with lots of booze, but Blaine wasn’t complaining. This was nice. He loved New Directions. He loved loud places with thumping music and people dancing and smiling, half-drunk and delighted with themselves. He particularly liked this; he liked sitting outside of that chaos and listening to it, knowing he could be involved if he stood up and went back in, but happy to stay for a while and feel the great calm of watching from the sidelines. Or, in this case, listening from the sidelines.
With his head tilted back by the edge of a stair, Blaine had a whole and uninterrupted view of the sky, and the pale stars staring back. He knew nothing about astrology, but he liked to make it up as he went along. He remembered being eleven and laying on top of the picnic table in his parents’ back yard, his hands under his head, looking up and inventing his own constellations because he had no idea what the real ones were. He still had no idea, but he had spent a lot of time amusing Kurt one night, pointing out the lines of stars he was sure meant something different, and telling him the ridiculous stories he had created for them, with Kurt’s hand curled and woven into his, Kurt’s laughter against his neck.
There was a rumbling sound and a swell of music as the sliding glass door opened, and Blaine tilted his head back to look. Quinn stood there, half out of the doorway, a red plastic cup in her hand, her other hand still on the door handle as she watched him. “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know--”
He smiled at her, upside down. “It’s fine,” he said. He patted the stairs beside him. “Plenty of room.”
She glanced back once over her shoulder, hesitating, then stepped all the way out and slid the door closed with a solid tok. The sound of the music muffled itself, and was once again reduced to vibrations. She didn’t come down to sit next to him. She sat at the edge of the first step instead, drawing her knees together beneath her skirt and holding her cup between the fingertips of both hands, looking down at the liquid inside.
She was sitting half inside and half outside of the light falling from the rectangle of the back door, and it made a brilliant contrast out of her; short blonde-gold hair, white cardigan and red babydoll dress split neatly down the center against the muddied version in the dark, the colors darker and indecipherable.
Blaine didn’t know Quinn very well, but he knew that she never looked truly happy, and that seemed more evident tonight, sitting half in the dark, in the silence, with her eyes cast down and her face politely blank.
“Are you not drinking?” she asked, glancing in his direction, sweeping him with her eyes.
He smiled again. “No.” He reached out to pick up his own red plastic cup and held it up to shake its contents. (Coke.) “Designated driver.” (He had insisted that it was Kurt’s turn to let safely loose a little bit, and he was proud of himself that it wasn’t entirely because he was interested to see what Kurt was like when he was drunk. It wasn’t entirely because of that.)
He put his cup back down at looked back up at the sky, and the silence fell between them once again. Crickets chirped in the grass, and cicadas somewhere further, with their strange, ethereal, breathish noise constant and bone-deep. Blaine watched Quinn from the corner of his eye. She took a miniscule sip of her drink and lowered it again. She didn’t look up past the fall of her skirt over her knees. She looked the kind of profoundly unhappy and lost that almost made it difficult for Blaine to breathe.
He sat up, turning slightly to see her better. “What are you up to this summer?”
She looked at him, plainly surprised, her mouth open and searching for words. “Up to?” she finally asked.
He grinned. “Everyone is doing something. I’m performing at Six Flags. Kurt’s writing a musical. I think he said that Rachel’s the lead in shows at three different community theatre companies.”
(“The girl they cast for Young Ti Moune is taller than her,” Kurt had told him breathlessly after sitting in on a rehearsal one evening. “It’s the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.” Blaine had still been mildly jealous, setting aside unfortunate casting decisions. He had always wanted to be in Once on this Island. Despite the obvious and inevitable nicknames, he had always wanted to play Papa Ge.)
Quinn tapped her fingertips against the cup in her hands and looked back at him through the dark. “I’m not really up to anything,” she murmured. She looked away, into the yard, where it faded into nothing in the distance, and didn’t say anything else.
Blaine watched her. He hummed under his breath, resting his elbows on his knees, holding his head up with one hand. “I’m pretty sure you aren’t just sitting in your room staring at the walls.”
She closed her eyes, and her mouth twitched. “That could be exactly what I’m doing, for all you know.”
“You don’t really seem the type.”
She set her cup on the step beside her, then smoothed her skirt with the flat palms of both hands. “I’ve been reading,” she said finally.
Blaine grinned. “Reading what?”
She looked back at him, studying his face. “You’re really interested in this, aren’t you?”
Blaine spread his hands. “I’m nosy. It’s inherent in my character.”
Her mouth twitched again, and this time it looked a little more like a smile. “Fine,” she said. “I’ve been rereading the Harry Potter books.”
Blaine’s eyebrows went up, lost somewhere in his hairline. “Really?” he asked.
Quinn raised one eyebrow of her own. “You’re surprised.”
He shrugged. “Sorry. I was expecting - I don’t know what I was expecting. Which book are you on?”
“The fourth one,” she said. Her eyebrows were lowered; she was looking at him like he was something she didn’t really understand. A math problem or a magic eye puzzle she couldn’t get right.
“I love that one,” he said earnestly. He tilted his head at her, still smiling. “I like to go back and reread books from when I was a kid, too. It makes me remember what it felt like to be that young.”
Quinn hummed, and even as she looked at him he could see her face slowly closing off again, the curtains slowly being pulled back over her eyes and the politely blank expression crawling back over her. “It’s just something to do,” she said, with a smile that didn’t even attempt to reach her eyes, and she rose prettily to her feet. “I’m going back inside.”
“Quinn,” Blaine said, frowning, watching as she spun on her heel and walked to the door. She didn’t stop, didn’t turn back, just pulled the door open and slipped inside, out of his sight.
5. Down In The Tall Grass - g - Sam, Blaine - Before Sam moves away in the summer, he has his final moments with everyone in New Directions.
[Blaine's was the first vignette, and the only one I ever ended up writing, which is sad, because I liked the ideas I had for everyone else, but I'm really happy I got this one out.]
“I used to watch these a lot, when I was little.”
The motel room was quiet, and only sort of half-lit by one of the lamps on the bedside tables, throwing a warm glow over one side of the space. Kurt was asleep on the opposite side of the bed, curled up with Stevie on one side and Stacy on the other. There was a sticker on his forehead, and a smudge of nail polish on one of his cheeks. Stevie and Stacy were a little worse for wear, but Sam didn’t really mind; Stacy had asked for a Kurt do to her nails to look like flowers, and Stevie had asked for Ninja Turtles, and Kurt had looked like he was in makeover heaven the whole time. Sam grinned at them, looking back over his shoulder, before glancing at Blaine and asking quietly, “What? Like, documentaries?”
Blaine was lying on his stomach on the bed, with his legs in the air and his head propped up on his hands. Sam was sitting on the floor next to him, with his back to the mattress, and they were both looking up at the tiny TV, where there was a spinning CG rendering of Saturn being talked about by a voice-over scientist. Blaine glanced down at him, smiling a little. “Yeah,” he said. “Science documentaries. Stuff about the planets and string theory and the nature of the universe. I read a lot of books about it, too. My parents thought I was a prodigy.”
“Yeah?” Sam asked, impressed. “What happened?”
“I didn’t like math.”
Sam laughed. They were sitting very close, Blaine’s arm basically brushing Sam’s shoulder, so they could talk without waking Kurt and his brother and sister, and so they could both see the TV, but also because it was just comfortable. Blaine and Kurt had been helping to babysit Stevie and Stacy since that day at Dalton when Kurt had thrown open the big wooden doors to see Sam standing in the rain on the top step, holding a pizza box. It had been really nice, having them there. They were both really cool, and good with kids, and it had made everything a little easier. And Blaine had turned out to be really easy to talk to. They liked a lot of the same things.
“I’ve always really liked space stuff,” Sam said, shrugging. “I couldn’t read a lot about it, because of my dyslexia, but I used to come home from school and watch Discovery Channel stuff about stars and the planets and everything all the time. We had this stack of VHS tapes in the living room where I recorded, like, every single thing about astronomy and space travel.” He looked at Blaine, grinning. “I liked the stuff about string theory and M theory, too, but I don’t think I’m ever going to actually understand any of it.”
Blaine laughed. “Neither am I, man. I think I just like hearing people talk about it. But it makes me feel smart.”
“You are smart.”
Blaine looked down at Sam, smiling. “So are you, Sam.” He said it really nicely, warmly, like it was obvious. It made Sam smile a little, looking away, like he was embarrassed, but mostly he was just happy that someone would say something like that to him. He’d never felt smart, really. He knew a lot about stars and astronomy, despite totally screwing up that time with Quinn in that science classroom, but that didn’t really feel like it counted, when his tests kept coming back with C’s and D’s. Blaine saying that made something warm glow in Sam’s chest.
And then clamp down just as quickly. His shoulders slumped, bowing forward, and he stared at the frayed tears in the knees of his jeans. He picked at them, his fingers tucking under the edges of the fray and pulling a little. “I’m going back to Tennessee in two weeks.”
Sam could feel Blaine freeze above him. He pulled his shoulders in a little tighter, wincing, but Blaine settled a warm hand against his back. “Your dad got a job?” he asked softly.
Sam let out a breath, folding himself over his knees. His hair fell into his face, but he didn’t tuck it back. “Yeah,” he mumbled. He tucked his fingers further into the tears. “His old one back. We have to live with my grandparents for a while, but - yeah.”
Blaine took his hand away from Sam’s back and let his arms and head fall dramatically over the side of the bed. “No one’s going to be here to talk about superheroes with me.”
Sam laughed a little, knocking sideways to bump Blaine’s arm with his shoulder. “You can text me. I’m going back to my old boarding school, we can talk about how weird uniforms are.”
Blaine paused for a moment, then lifted his head, looking at Blaine with a hesitant expression. “That, um. That might not be a thing we share next year.”
Sam’s eyebrows lowered and knit together. “Huh?”
Blaine sat up very carefully, looking over his shoulder to make sure that Kurt, Stevie and Stacy didn’t move. He slipped his legs over the edge of the bed and slid down to the floor next to Sam, sighing quietly. “I might be transferring. To McKinley.”
Sam watched him, waiting for a moment. “You don’t seem, you know, excited about it.”
Blaine tilted his head back to look over the edge of the bed; Sam followed his gaze to Kurt, shifting slightly, moving his arms a little tighter around Stacy’s waist. Blaine rested his head against the bed and kept looking. “I don’t have the best relationship with public school.”
Sam frowned at him, watching his profile in the low light. Blaine’s jaw was half-tense, but his eyes were soft. Sam thought about Kurt’s relationship with public school, and he felt something cold pulse through his stomach. He let out a breath. “That sucks.”
“Yeah,” Blaine agreed softly. He turned his head so that his cheek was against the blankets hanging over the side of the mattress, looking at Sam. “I have some - stuff, I have to work through. But I want to. And I want to be with Kurt.”
Sam nodded. He smiled a little. “It’s really brave that you’re thinking about going back, man.”
Blaine blushed brightly, his lips curving up, turning his head away a little. “I’m sorry I didn’t know you better, Sam,” he murmured. He looked back to meet Sam’s eyes. “I’m going to miss you.”
Sam slid his arm up and around Blaine’s shoulders, pulling him tight against his side. “You, too,” he said.
They watched the rest of the documentary in silence.
6. Anything For You - pg - Kurt/Blaine - Blaine's walk back home from Scandals in 3.05, and waking up the next morning still feeling terrible.
Blaine was sober by the time he was halfway home. The night was freezing, the autumn air smudged with the scent of firewood burning somewhere nearby, in one of the mostly-dark houses that Blaine was moving past. His loose tie fluttered around his neck, making his shadow strange and animated as he walked into and out of the heavy orangeish light of each new streetlamp, marking his pace by the pattern of light and dark that moved beneath his feet. It was late. He wasn’t sure how late, but it was late, and he was halfway home, and he was sober, finally. And the guilt washed in then, strong, like a tide.
He stopped between the cones of two streetlights, in the dark under the splintered shadow of one towering tree in some stranger’s front yard. All the way from the bar, there had just been the wooly beer-tinged embarrassment and the resentful disappointment chasing each other around inside of his head, like circling koi. They had just been talking about it, about doing it, Kurt was sending mixed signals, how could he have shouted like that -- over and over again. Now all of that was gone, suddenly, and Blaine was thinking with a crispness he didn’t know he had been missing, and now that he was actually thinking, he honestly wished he could stop.
He had really just done that. He said those things to Kurt - to Kurt, who spent ten minutes in iTunes every time they were alone in his room, choosing just the right music. Kurt, who smiled when Blaine touched his shoulder briefly as he passed Kurt’s locker on the way to Geometry. Whose bucket list used the word relations. Kurt, who Blaine was painfully, all-encompassingly in love with, who was the Big Bang singularity of Blaine’s universe, the point from which everything expanded. Blaine had said those things to him.
The guilt wrapped around him, like an ache in his muscles, settling into his skin, rioting in his stomach. It felt awful, like he’d destroyed something beautiful on purpose. Kurt’s face. He’d been so upset, and Blaine had just stood up and walked away from that, not fixing it, just leaving it broken in the middle of a gay bar’s parking lot. He’d screwed it up. Again. He wasn’t ever going to stop screwing it up, really, and he knew that, somewhere deep inside of him, somewhere he couldn’t even touch anymore. He was just going to keep ruining things and keep ruining things until Kurt decided that Blaine wasn’t worth the sacrifice of being with him anymore. And then Kurt would be gone. If he wasn’t already. If this hadn’t been enough to finally end it.
Blaine was never going to be good enough to keep the things he loved.
Standing in the dark, feeling like he was drowning, Blaine shivered helplessly.
Blaine woke up to the needle-thin pierce of morning sunlight against his closed eyes, his phone beeping somewhere to his right. He reached for it without looking, stretching his arm out - and he felt his center of gravity shift over an edge. The spike of falling-panic snapped him fully awake with the hammer of his heart in his chest as he quickly withdrew his arm and rolled back, away from the open space beside him. His shoulder blades hit the back of the couch, and he stared down at the floor with dumb, newly-opened eyes. His phone was vibrating loudly against the hardwood, spinning a few inches every time, the small alarm clock symbol flashing on its face.
He was in the den in the back of his parents’ house. The back wall, made of windows, poured light into the room, making it glow with confusing reflective flares, like fire was trapped inside of everything.
He remembered, then. Turning the key to swing the door open into the empty house, avoiding the stairs and stumbling through the unfamiliar dark into the gaping blackness of the den. Setting his phone to go off in five hours, dropping it and then collapsing onto the couch. It was better than his bedroom, at that moment, because he hadn’t had a hand in decorating any part of the house, but it was most noticeable in his room, covered in reminders of the things he’d done in the past to make his parents happy. Polo, fencing. They were gone. He’d forgotten where, but they wouldn’t be back to find him sleeping in the den, so he hadn’t cared.
It didn’t feel any better, in the daylight. His chest still ached like he had ripped a part of himself away. He had to stand, he knew. He had to get up, shower, change, go to school. He had to keep acting like he’d learned somewhere along the way how to be a functioning human being.
He was going to see Kurt at school, though. He was going to see what he had done. So instead of moving, he just stayed there, spread along the uncomfortable white couch. He watched his phone trying desperately to escape across the floor in tiny circles, until there was nothing he could do anymore but go.
7. There Will Always Be An Ireland - g - Kurt/Blaine, Rory - Rory spends Thanksgiving with the Hummels-plus-Blaine.
[This one couldn't get its feet under it, but the beginning turned out just the way I wanted it to. It was going to be an exploration of Rory missing his family, Kurt being happy to have a family, and Blaine already starting to freak out about Kurt leaving, including a Blaine+Finn reconciliation that ended up making both of them feel better about their partners moving away, through commiseration and an oath to make it work no matter what.]
Rory reasoned that, if nothing else, being in America had given him some fantastic time management skills. He had the hockey team’s schedules fairly memorized, and enough of the school’s layout in his head to be able to avoid them most of the time by hiding in a bathroom or that science classroom that always seemed to be empty. There were still times he had to walk by them, though, and those were the moments when timing was key. He had most of the glee club’s locker numbers written down on a piece of paper in his back pocket, but he’d stopped needing it after the second week. He knew where they were, and when their occupants would be at them, pulling out books and dropping old ones off. If he really needed to be in the same hallway as the boy with the mullet and his bulky mates, it was easier to be near someone he knew when all of his books were pulled from his hands and thrown on the floor. At least then someone might shout after them about leaving him alone. Rory hated confrontation. He didn’t even like to raise his voice. When he did, he always felt a bit of an arse.
Like now, really. “Kurt!” he called, trying to sprint down the crowded hallway and really only managing to hit everyone around him with his bag. “Kurt Hummel!”
Kurt’s locker number was 230, in the main hallway with all of the other seniors. Rory could see him, through the forest of heads and shoulders in front of him; he was leaning on the open locker door, smiling and talking to Blaine Anderson, who was leaning on the locker beside him. Neither of them heard Rory. Rory sometimes felt like he needed a loud hailer, at all times, tucked away somewhere on his person, so that maybe, at some point, someone might hear him when he’s shouting.
“Kurt Hummel!”
Kurt did hear him, then. He turned, eyebrows up, searching down the hall until he caught Rory’s waving arm in the throng. Rory managed to break through the pack and hurry to Kurt’s side, skidding to a halt and leaning on the lockers for a second, trying to get his breath back. Kurt closed his locker and turned to him, quirking an eyebrow. “Talk of the Irish devil. We were just discussing you.”
Blaine peeked over Kurt’s shoulder, grinning sunnily. “Good things, I promise.”
Rory smiled a little weakly back, chest still heaving. God, he wished he hadn’t run that entire way, but he needed to speak to Kurt Hummel before he was gone for the day. Half-days were complete rubbish, in Rory’s opinion. They’d done absolutely nothing in class. He’d had to draw a turkey out of a trace of his hand in Algebra. He shook his head, straightened up away from the lockers, and took a deep breath before letting it out slowly. “Hi,” he said.
Kurt’s mouth twitched. “Hi. Was there a reason you were running down the hallway shouting my full name?”
“Yes.” And Rory took that moment to hesitate. Kurt was extremely intimidating. He was a senior, and he dressed like a film star, and he had this cold sort of look sometimes when something annoyed him, like he was very capable of breaking any number of Rory’s bones with the power of his mind. And Rory was about to ask him something that might instigate that expression. He considered backing out - just turning and running away again; really, he’d done things that were more strange in the four weeks he’d lived in America - but he didn’t. He just stared at Kurt’s face for any stormy change of expression and started talking.
“I’ve already asked Finn Hudson, and he’s said it’s fine, but that I should ask you just in case it interferes with your plans - and if it does, I understand, really, it’s honestly not a problem, I’ve others I can ask, you don’t have to put yourselves out for me if you don’t--”
Kurt interrupted Rory by reaching out and putting a hand on his shoulder. Rory had sort of gone into tunnel vision for a minute, there. Coming back, he saw that Kurt was trying valiantly not to laugh, and his heart sank a little. But Kurt just patted him lightly on the shoulder. “Rory,” he said. “Stop. Finn already talked to me about it.”
Rory’s eyebrows went up in surprise. “Really?” he asked. That was nice of Finn.
“Yes.” Kurt dropped his hand from Rory’s shoulder. “We’ll be happy to have you for Thanksgiving. Carole and I make enough food to feed two small armies. I have to ask, though - what about Brittany’s family?”
Rory flushed. He played with the strap of his bag, not looking at Kurt. “They don’t celebrate Thanksgiving. They said something about smallpox and the Native Americans - I honestly don’t know. I don’t understand them about half of the time.”
“No surprise there,” Kurt said breezily. “Well! Like I said, we’ll be happy to have you. Blaine’s coming, too. His parents are away for work.” Kurt bounced his shoulder against Blaine’s as he spoke.
Rory looked at Blaine and frowned. “Your parents can’t get back for the holiday?”
Rory saw something flash over Blaine’s face - it was very, very fast, almost gone before it was even there. It looked like a grimace, and that made a little alarm ring in the back of Rory’s mind. He couldn’t remember ever having seen Blaine look anything but ecstatic. But Blaine’s face fell into a tight little smile, not bright enough to hide the fact that it was strained, his voice a little bitter. “My parents don’t really come home for anything,” he said, like that was an explanation.
Rory saw the surreptitious movement of Kurt’s hand to brush into Blaine’s and squeeze briefly before letting go. Blaine looked at Kurt, at the concerned expression on his face, and all of the chill in his own seemed to melt. His body sagged a little from the straight-backed posture that Rory hadn’t even notice, and he leaned his shoulder against Kurt’s again, comfortable, looking back to Rory.
“Like Kurt said.” He smiled, real this time. “It’ll be fun to have you. You should experience a really American holiday, all about football and turkey comas and family.”
Rory smiled uncertainly. “I don’t really know much about American football.”
Blaine’s eyes gleamed. “Oh, good,” Kurt told Rory. “You’ve created a monster.” He bumped Blaine away from him with his hip, to be able to reach his bag and pull it open. “Do you have any food allergies that I should be aware of?” he asked, as Blaine smirked and stepped back into his space. Kurt just ignored him.
“Er, not that I know of,” Rory said, smiling back at the wink Blaine gave him over Kurt’s shoulder. “I’ll eat pretty much anything. I’m not fussed.”
“Great,” Kurt said. He pulled out a piece of paper and a pen and used the locker next to him to write something in neat script. “This is my number.” He handed it to Rory. “We’ll pick you up tomorrow morning at about nine at Brittany’s house. Give me a call if anything changes, okay?”
Rory nodded and tucked the paper carefully into his pocket, then looked back up at Kurt. He took a moment before saying, “I really appreciate this.” He honestly did. He wanted to experience American things while he was here, and Thanksgiving was about as American as you could get. When Brittany’s parents had told him that they wouldn’t be doing anything, he’d been really disappointed. This was going to be fun, he was sure. Finn was nice, and Blaine was nice, and Kurt was standing there smiling at him, so he was probably nice, too. (He’d asked about food allergies. Rory would never have thought of that.)
Kurt waved Rory’s words away. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow,” Blaine repeated, grinning.
Rory nodded. “Right. Tomorrow.” He looked down the hall behind him: no red jackets. He looked down the hall beyond Kurt and Blaine: no mullets. Letting out a relieved breath, he gave both of them one last smile before breaking back into the deluge toward the front doors.
Behind him, almost too quiet to hear, he heard Blaine say to Kurt, in an amused voice, “Have you guys even asked your parents yet?”
He heard Kurt sigh, and say a little louder, offhand, “Details.”
Blaine was sitting on the stairs to his front porch by 8:30 the next day. It was a sweetly freezing morning, where every breath was white and visible, and the whole world seemed to glow gray with the sky hanging down dark and closer than usual. He wrapped his arms around his chest and breathed in through a smile, the smell of someone’s fireplace smoky and perfect in his nose. Blaine loved autumn. He loved winter, too; there was something about that omnipresent smell of wood smoke and the sound of leaves -- and then the eerie, beautiful silence of snow - that made him warm and nostalgic. (And, honestly, it was also the way that Kurt looked in the cold, bundled up in a thousand different coats with a thousand different scarves, the rounds of his cheeks and the tips of his ears red. Blaine wasn’t above finding Kurt adorable, even after - everything. He actually though he might have it worse, now.)
The Navigator pulled up to the curb, and Blaine stood, rubbing his arms with his hands and grinning. Kurt took a moment to get out of the car, first turning off the music that had been making muffled little bass sounds, then shutting off the engine. He opened his door and stepped out, and Blaine knew for a fact that he had it worse: Kurt was wearing a longish blue coat with a complicated series of belts, and a soft-looking scarf, and he looked up when he crossed in front of the car and smiled when he saw Blaine standing there, staring at him. Yep. Pink cheeks, pink ears. Blaine had it bad.
“You didn’t have to wait outside,” Kurt called as he walked up the path to the porch.
Blaine shrugged, stepping down the stairs to the pavement. “I don’t mind.” He reached out when Kurt was close enough and pulled him into a hug. Kurt melted right into him, wrapping his arms around Blaine’s back and squeezing briefly.
“It looks like it’s going to snow,” he said, head tilting against Blaine’s shoulder.
Blaine grinned, speaking against Kurt’s temple. “I hope so. I love when it snows this early.”
Kurt pulled back and made a face at him. “You’ve obviously never had to put snow tires on anyone’s car.” He caught Blaine’s hand in his own and started back down the path. “Come on, Rory’s waiting for us.”
Blaine followed him, looking down at their hands clasped between them. (Kurt was wearing black gloves, soft against the bare skin of Blaine’s hand, and it made something warm turn over in Blaine’s stomach. He took a breath through it.) “What did your parents say when you asked them?” he asked, as though he wasn’t thinking about Kurt’s warm hand in his, and the light way Kurt pulled him along until they reached the car and he had to (very regrettably) let go.
“They were fine with it,” Kurt said as he crossed over the front of the car and opened the driver door. Blaine climbed into the passenger seat and buckled himself in as Kurt did the same, looking down at his iPod to restart the music and turn the volume down. “I mean, obviously. Do you think that Carole would ever turn someone away from Thanksgiving dinner? She’d have to turn over her mothering license.” Kurt glanced back and forth on the road for other cars, then signaled and started off. “He’s staying over tonight, too. My dad actually suggested it. You get to share the living room.”
Blaine smirked. “I can’t imagine why your dad would want another person in the living room to be aware of my nighttime movements.”
Kurt blushed, the color crawling over his face as his hands tightened on the steering wheel a little, and that had been Blaine’s goal, so he did a small internal victory dance even when Kurt glanced at him and grinned. “I have no idea,” he said, trying for lofty and failing, “but he seemed pretty pleased about it.”
Blaine laughed.
Note: Please don't post spoilers past Heart in comments! I'm trying to stay as spoiler-free as possible for the rest of the season. Thank you! I appreciate it!
Also, title attributions: Comin' Thro the Rye by Robert Burns; As If We Never Said Goodbye from Sunset Boulevard; The Cave by Mumford & Sons; Secondhand News by Fleetwood Mac; For The Widows in Paradise, for the Fatherless in Ypsilanti by Sufjan Stevens; There Will Always Be An Ireland by The Mountain Goats.