[Glee fic] Cherish, Kurt/Blaine, R
Title: Cherish
Rating: R
Characters: Kurt/Blaine, Lauren Zizes, Emma Pillsbury, Rachel Berry
Summary: After the debacle with Chandler, Blaine feels like he needs to be as honest as possible with Kurt about what he needs, no matter how uncomfortable.
Contents you should be aware of: Lots of discussion of BDSM; cultural appropriation aided and abetted by Rachel Berry
Notes: This started as a random thing I wrote in ten minutes and threw up on Tumblr as a response to 3.17 (hence if the opening looks familiar). Now it's a finished fic.
I.
By the time they’re done singing with the rest of the Glee club, Blaine sitting sweetly on the piano bench and gazing up at Kurt perched on top of the piano, Kurt’s ready to take Blaine home and worship him, because wow, Kurt really, really needs to show his boyfriend his appreciation about now.
Kurt tells him as much once they’re in his room and Kurt’s pulling Blaine out of his shirt, and Blaine goes with it until he pushes him down on his bed and starts gently kissing down his torso.
“Wait,” Blaine says, sitting back up. “If were… if we’re being honest about stuff… again, I need to tell you something. Some things. Stuff.”
Kurt sits back on his heels and Blaine can’t help marvel at the way he manages an expression somewhere between placid and terrified.
“It’s not anything bad… I mean, not about you. You’re not doing anything wrong, or anything… it’s just… fuck, I really don’t want to say this,” Blaine says looking anywhere but Kurt.
“Total honesty,” Kurt reminds him, and Blaine can’t stand that his voice sounds watery and scared again.
This is his fault, because this is the moment he’s decided, ridiculously, to share this information, but he can’t not, not now that they’re okay again and not now that he’s starting to understand what he needs. So he takes a deep breath, because he can do this, be an adult, he really can. Right. Yes. Sure.
“Kurt, I love the way you just always want to make me feel good. That’s… that’s great. And I don’t want that to change, but… look, there’s a reason I’m always happier to sit on the floor when we watch movies with Finn or that I loved looking up at you on that piano today.” He says it nervously, willing Kurt to understand, but it’s clear from his boyfriend’s face he doesn’t.
“I need more than that, Blaine,” Kurt says hesitantly.
Blaine laughs, but then takes a deep breath and closes his eyes, clenching his fists in the fabric of Kurt’s duvet. “I wear ties because I like the pressure on my throat; I follow after you because I feel like you should lead; and when you were wearing that damn scarf with the chain on it today I just kept thinking that it should have been on me. And I know I’m weird and have terrible timing and am probably freaking you out, but obviously I know you’re going to miss me, but I think I just need to know I’m yours.”
Kurt lightly touches Blaine’s knee. It’s a request for his boyfriend to look at him, and Blaine understands that instinctively and tries to relax, blinking his eyes open.
“Is this about my leaving, or….?” Kurt asks delicately.
“Not really,” Blaine says carefully. “It’s probably pretty much about porn I watch on the Internet.”
Kurt laughs in spite of it all and Blaine follows.
"Are you freaked out?” he asks.
Kurt shrugs. “It can’t be worse than doing research on lesbian bed death.”
Blaine starts to speak and then snaps his mouth shut. “I’m… I’m not going to ask.”
“It’s probably better that way,” Kurt admits. Then, “what do you need right now?”
"To take care of you, I think,” Blaine says.
“Okay,” Kurt says cautiously unfolding himself and scooting up the bed, still fully dressed. As he leans back against the headboard he remembers the scarf at his throat, and unknots it.
He stares at it in his hands for a moment, then tracks on Blaine still kneeling on the mattress half-dressed watching him through lowered lashes, not shy, but hopeful.
“Take the rest of your clothes off,” Kurt says, his voice high and thready and nervous. “Then I’ll put it on you.” It comes out as a question, and he’s a little ashamed of that, but the way Blaine’s shoulders relax makes him smile.
This is good enough for now, and if they’re talking about it, it can get better later, and Kurt guesses that’s what matters most.
II.
A month into what is clearly not an experiment - it can’t be, not for Blaine - and two weeks before graduation, Kurt finally, finally decides he can’t do this alone, not like he’s the only person who’s ever done this.
He’s pretty sure his advice options are limited to Tina or to Lauren. But also he’s pretty sure Tina and Mike are playing at this thing (oh god, how he wishes he and Blaine were just playing sometimes) and that Lauren doesn’t know what play is unless it involves wresting or pulling the wings off flies.
So his choice, really, is easy, even if it’s uncomfortable.
*
“Lauren!” Kurt finally just shouts, sick of trying to push through the between class crowds to catch up with her when he’s already fairly sure she’s heard him and just doesn’t want to care.
“Look, Hummel, I appreciate that your little troupe of terminally crisis plagued misfits have finally realized they’re lacking a certain je ne sais quois without the raw sexual energy of the Zizes --
“Wow, you really dated Puck too long,” Kurt interjects.
“But I’m not rejoining the good ship Berry unless I can be the iceberg.”
“This isn’t about glee.”
“Well it better not be about Puck.”
Kurt huffs before relaxing down into the voice he uses for confession. “It’s about me.”
“I know you already got it on with Brittany, so I’m guessing this isn’t about these either,” she says, cupping her breasts for someone’s amusement.
“No,” Kurt says firmly. “It’s about me and Blaine. And I need to talk to you.”
“What’s in it for me?” Lauren asks, suddenly cheerful.
“Lunch and the ability to ruin my life,” Kurt says, frankly.
“Surprisingly, you know the way to my deliciously gooey center."
*
They go to Breadstix on a Saturday afternoon, and all Kurt really wants to do is chicken out, but he’s not made that way, and he has responsibilities now anyway.
“I’ll be frank,” he says to Lauren. “I don’t want to be here, and my temptation to call the whole thing off is not insignificant, but I’ve been put in a position… no --" Kurt stops himself, wanting to be precise -- “I agreed to take something on where I’m responsible to someone else in a way I don’t really know how to be yet, but I think you do. God, I hope you do.”
Lauren nods at him sagely, and Kurt’s grateful that she’s never really thought he’s an idiot.
“So, what? Blaine likes to be spanked and you want my advice on your follow through?” she asks, bored, around a bread stick.
“That is so the bare edge of this thing,” Kurt blurts at out at her nervously, but his voice is firm in it, and that part, at least is okay.
Lauren smiles. “Okay, I’m impressed, Hummel. Now tell me everything.”
*
Weirdly, he does, and he leaves lunch with a list of websites he’s not sure he can bring himself to look at (but Lauren swears aren’t strictly porn), the name of a place that will totally let him use PayPal to buy toys (Oh my god, how is this his life?), a ton of actually useful safety information about knots and blood sugar, and a strange, quiet sense of Lauren as deeply gentle and uniquely lonely.
“No one else will ever get what it’s like for you,” Lauren had said to him with a shrug. “Which, I don’t know, maybe you’re used to that anyway. But to hold so much of someone… you better get used to no one else getting it.”
And he knows she’s right. He’s known even since before Blaine’s confession.
III.
The distance is hard, even with Skype and promises and a cuff on Blaine’s right wrist. But the communication is better than Kurt expects, not because Blaine is particularly forthcoming on Skype (he’s not and Kurt can’t meet his eyes because of the way the technology works), but because Kurt makes Blaine keep a journal for him, and Blaine takes to it like water.
That's hokey. What shitty porn are you reading? had been Lauren’s email response to the idea, but Kurt had ignored her, and now every night he is given pages of Blaine’s heart -- fear and boredom and the desperate want of being a teenage boy -- to decipher and, he guesses, guide.
It’s fantastic, and Blaine confesses this often, usually in the pages, but sometimes when they speak, that he likes doing it, that he feels closest to Kurt when he does.
“It’s like I’m serving you,” he says, and Kurt assures him he is. The information is very valuable.
*
“Miss Pillsbury has me keeping a journal too,” Blaine tells him one night, and Kurt can see him fidgeting with his cuff over the blurry video connection.
Kurt feels a sharp stab of jealousy and fear at that, but it’s also hilarious. “How long?” he asks. “Why didn’t you tell me when it started?”
“I didn’t know if I would keep it up,” Blaine says.
“And?”
“It helps. It’s not just you I can talk to better if I write.”
“Okay. That’s good.”
“It’s more structure. I mean, she’d die if she knew."
“I’d die if she knew, Blaine.”
"I feel like it’s another reminder of what I am.”
“What are you, Blaine?” Kurt asks as gently as he can.
“Someone who doesn’t do very well on his own,” he says.
It’s not untrue, but Kurt suspects it’s not exactly what he wants to say.
*
Kurt only debates emailing Miss Pillsbury for as long as he does out of consideration for Blaine’s privacy and Emma’s sensibilities. Yes, he’s started thinking of her as Emma in his head, because if they’re both making Blaine write words so that he can get through the day, then they're peers in a way, even if Emma never needs to know exactly why.
Dear Miss Pillsbury,
Thank you for what you’re doing for Blaine. I know he’s always polite, and I’m sure that he thanks you (do tell me if he doesn’t), but I just wanted to express my appreciation. You know I’m a worrier; your influence helps me to worry less.
Sincerely,
Kurt Hummel
He finds himself almost wishing that she will write back and say Blaine hasn’t thanked her, just so he can impose yet more order and punish his boyfriend.
IV.
“I have a surprise for you,” Kurt says when Blaine arrives in New York to move into his dorm at NYU.
Blaine grins, ducks his head down, and touches, as he always does, the cuff at his wrist. He always likes Kurt’s surprises. Considering that Kurt has managed to cadge a single this year, Blaine suspects he will like this one very much.
*
“There’s barely enough room to swing it in here, but my baton twirling experience means I am exceptional at it,” Kurt says, spinning the handle of the flogger around his hand before whipping the tails through a series of methodical and rhythmic figure eights.
Blaine can barely breathe. He’s half hard and terrified, and they’re not even playing now. Kurt’s just showing off.
“Can I see it?” Blaine breathes, and it’s enough for Kurt to realize he’s scared.
Kurt stops spinning the flogger and sits down on next to him on the narrow bed. “I had them hit me with it, in the store, you know. The leather’s butter soft, and I can make it sting, if you want me to, could probably actually make it really hurt when you need… but it doesn’t have to. It’s just a starting place, and you said you wanted.”
“Yes,” Blaine breathes.
Oh, Kurt realizes, so it’s the good type of fear then. The type that comes with getting what you’ve always wanted. That he can work with.
V.
Moving in together is great, but the act of moving sucks, and while Kurt is frantic and irritated and how could Blaine forget the necessity of labeling boxes on every side, Blaine’s sanguine and lovely until that moment where they’re staring at the islands of cardboard that they are somehow supposed to assemble into their adult life in a tiny studio Kurt swears he can divide into rooms via the artful placement of bookcases.
Then he freezes.
"Ssshhhhh, shhhhh, come on,” Kurt says, wrapping his hands tightly around Blaine’s wrists and squeezing until he comes back to him just a little. “Go sit down on the bed and just breathe for a minute, okay? Write if you need to.”
Blaine nods blankly and goes, and Kurt breathes a sigh of relief. It’s enough.
Later he’ll call his father and panic about sharing such a tiny space with the man he loves, because Kurt needs someone to hold him together too.
*
Having their own shared apartment changes things. While Blaine has never gone down easily, something about playing in a space full only of things they’ve chosen makes him feel safer, and he tends now to go down much, much farther than Kurt has become used to.
It’s gorgeous, but it scares Kurt a little, when he’s holding a glass of juice for his boyfriend having to whisper, “Hey, hey, I know it’s nice down there, but come back to me now, Blaine, you’re so good, but I miss you. Come on, find the surface for me.”
Honestly, it makes Kurt wonder if Blaine’s always just a little bit down for him.
When he frets to Lauren about it -- and how, really, have they maintained this particular friendship for so long with her never giving away the secret? -- all she says is, “You always knew he was a responsibility, so what’s the problem?”
It makes Kurt understand why she’s always seemed so alone.
VI.
They get engaged a couple of months after Blaine turns twenty-five. Kurt asks, Blaine says yes, and it’s all delightful and giddy and normal. At least it is until it’s time to deal with matters of rings and vows.
Because there are things Kurt needs from his fiancé, his best friend, and his always other half.
“I want you not to wear this at the ceremony,” he says, tugging at the same battered leather cuff Blaine has worn since Kurt first left for New York.
Blaine stammers and looks stricken.
“I need you to marry me as a free man. And that includes free of me.”
“You can’t ask me that.”
“I can, and I am. And if you want to have a ceremony about this,” Kurt says, tugging at the cuff, “we can make that happen too, but not my wedding, Blaine.”
*
Blaine doesn’t really give him an answer, and instead just shifts them to the next problem.
“Blaine, if you say obey and I don’t say obey, that’s going to look weird.”
“It’s our wedding,” Blaine grinds out. “It’s not about what other people think.”
“Blaine, did you or did you not go to high school with me and Rachel? Of course it’s about what other people think!”
Blaine smirks at him. “I’m saying obey. So you better figure out what you’re saying.”
“I can say obey too!” Kurt shouts, frantic.
“No.” Blaine says. “You can’t.”
*
Somehow they settle on love, honor, and obey and love, honor, and cherish, although Kurt keeps freaking out that cherish and love are redundant.
When he emails Lauren about it, her reply is simple: But don’t you love him redundantly?
Kurt laughs and takes to telling Blaine this.
“I love you redundantly,” he says over coffee, over wine, over dinner, and before bed.
“I feel the need to point out that you never say you cherish me redundantly,” Blaine notes, “Which means that clearly, they don’t actually mean the same thing.”
Kurt laughs, because Blaine has a point.
*
“I won’t wear it for the ceremony,” Blaine eventually concedes about the cuff, “but I want to kneel for you before."
“So I can take it off,” Kurt realizes.
“Yes, and kneel for you after. Because I get what you need, Kurt, but this is what I need. You don’t know what it’s like to feel untethered.”
“Yes I do,” Kurt says.
“No you don’t. Not when that’s all that you’ve ever been."
Kurt tilts his head, curiously. “Do you resent it?”
“What?”
“Being the way you are? Asking for the things you have? Getting what you want?”
Kurt knows he’s being cruel, but can’t imagine what else he is supposed to do, especially now that Blaine is on his knees, with his head in his lap as Kurt runs fingers through his curls.
*
Rachel, somehow, actually solves the problem, because in some vague attempt to be Kurt and actually be good at wedding planning, even though she is officially not involved, she starts babbling about yichud.
“Wait,” Kurt says. “Stop. Go back. We can exchange vows and then immediately have some time together without other people and it won’t be weird?”
“Not to Jews,” Rachel says apologetically. “Not to my dads.”
Blaine tilts his head towards Kurt’s and says, conspiratorially, “It’ll still be weird,” and Kurt knows Blaine probably means to his family.
“Oh my god, do you care?” he replies, his fingers reaching out automatically for Blaine’s cuff.
Rachel raises an eyebrow, but neither of them notices.
“Well, other than no one getting it and it being totally appropriative, no, I don’t care,” Blaine snaps a little giddily. “Rachel, can we confuse our guests and appropriate your culture?”
“Totally! That’s why I told you about it.”
Kurt sighs. “I am surrounded by crazy people.”
*
It’s less easy than Kurt expects to get everyone to go away for long enough before the ceremony for Blaine to get on his knees before him and hold up his wrist. Kurt takes the cuff from him, kisses it, and slips it into his breast pocket.
“Still mine,” Kurt says, kissing Blaine’s lips as he tugs him up. “Let’s go get married.”
*
When Kurt takes Blaine’s hands to say his vows, he doesn’t so much as miss as move by instinct, and wraps his hands around Blaine’s wrists. When Blaine twists in his grip so that he can hold Kurt’s wrists in turn, they both grin at each other, and Kurt can tell Blaine is trying not to laugh.
“This is all I’ve ever wanted,” Kurt murmurs under his breath, before they get down to the serious business.
*
After their vows, they take their moment alone while Rachel makes a speech about how they have always existed together in a world separate from other people. Kurt can hear her faintly through the walls, as he slips Blaine’s cuff out of his jacket, and thinks about how wrong she is.
Because the world they exist in is hardly unpopulated. There are their friends and their unwitting accomplices.
There is Emma, who Blaine will dance with later and who will smile down at his cuff and say that she thinks it sweet he still wears the token of a boy he went to high school with.
There is Lauren, who has never understood them, but has always known everything about them; she and Kurt will drink too much, but probably never speak too loudly.
And there are all the people they don’t know, and probably never will, who live quietly and not, in worlds at least similar to their own.
But for Kurt, today and every day since he was sixteen-years-old, there is Blaine, who doesn’t kneel now, but holds his wrist out to him with a smug smirk, and it’s that, more than anything, that lets Kurt know he has, somehow, done well and right by this man he adores.
Rating: R
Characters: Kurt/Blaine, Lauren Zizes, Emma Pillsbury, Rachel Berry
Summary: After the debacle with Chandler, Blaine feels like he needs to be as honest as possible with Kurt about what he needs, no matter how uncomfortable.
Contents you should be aware of: Lots of discussion of BDSM; cultural appropriation aided and abetted by Rachel Berry
Notes: This started as a random thing I wrote in ten minutes and threw up on Tumblr as a response to 3.17 (hence if the opening looks familiar). Now it's a finished fic.
I.
By the time they’re done singing with the rest of the Glee club, Blaine sitting sweetly on the piano bench and gazing up at Kurt perched on top of the piano, Kurt’s ready to take Blaine home and worship him, because wow, Kurt really, really needs to show his boyfriend his appreciation about now.
Kurt tells him as much once they’re in his room and Kurt’s pulling Blaine out of his shirt, and Blaine goes with it until he pushes him down on his bed and starts gently kissing down his torso.
“Wait,” Blaine says, sitting back up. “If were… if we’re being honest about stuff… again, I need to tell you something. Some things. Stuff.”
Kurt sits back on his heels and Blaine can’t help marvel at the way he manages an expression somewhere between placid and terrified.
“It’s not anything bad… I mean, not about you. You’re not doing anything wrong, or anything… it’s just… fuck, I really don’t want to say this,” Blaine says looking anywhere but Kurt.
“Total honesty,” Kurt reminds him, and Blaine can’t stand that his voice sounds watery and scared again.
This is his fault, because this is the moment he’s decided, ridiculously, to share this information, but he can’t not, not now that they’re okay again and not now that he’s starting to understand what he needs. So he takes a deep breath, because he can do this, be an adult, he really can. Right. Yes. Sure.
“Kurt, I love the way you just always want to make me feel good. That’s… that’s great. And I don’t want that to change, but… look, there’s a reason I’m always happier to sit on the floor when we watch movies with Finn or that I loved looking up at you on that piano today.” He says it nervously, willing Kurt to understand, but it’s clear from his boyfriend’s face he doesn’t.
“I need more than that, Blaine,” Kurt says hesitantly.
Blaine laughs, but then takes a deep breath and closes his eyes, clenching his fists in the fabric of Kurt’s duvet. “I wear ties because I like the pressure on my throat; I follow after you because I feel like you should lead; and when you were wearing that damn scarf with the chain on it today I just kept thinking that it should have been on me. And I know I’m weird and have terrible timing and am probably freaking you out, but obviously I know you’re going to miss me, but I think I just need to know I’m yours.”
Kurt lightly touches Blaine’s knee. It’s a request for his boyfriend to look at him, and Blaine understands that instinctively and tries to relax, blinking his eyes open.
“Is this about my leaving, or….?” Kurt asks delicately.
“Not really,” Blaine says carefully. “It’s probably pretty much about porn I watch on the Internet.”
Kurt laughs in spite of it all and Blaine follows.
"Are you freaked out?” he asks.
Kurt shrugs. “It can’t be worse than doing research on lesbian bed death.”
Blaine starts to speak and then snaps his mouth shut. “I’m… I’m not going to ask.”
“It’s probably better that way,” Kurt admits. Then, “what do you need right now?”
"To take care of you, I think,” Blaine says.
“Okay,” Kurt says cautiously unfolding himself and scooting up the bed, still fully dressed. As he leans back against the headboard he remembers the scarf at his throat, and unknots it.
He stares at it in his hands for a moment, then tracks on Blaine still kneeling on the mattress half-dressed watching him through lowered lashes, not shy, but hopeful.
“Take the rest of your clothes off,” Kurt says, his voice high and thready and nervous. “Then I’ll put it on you.” It comes out as a question, and he’s a little ashamed of that, but the way Blaine’s shoulders relax makes him smile.
This is good enough for now, and if they’re talking about it, it can get better later, and Kurt guesses that’s what matters most.
II.
A month into what is clearly not an experiment - it can’t be, not for Blaine - and two weeks before graduation, Kurt finally, finally decides he can’t do this alone, not like he’s the only person who’s ever done this.
He’s pretty sure his advice options are limited to Tina or to Lauren. But also he’s pretty sure Tina and Mike are playing at this thing (oh god, how he wishes he and Blaine were just playing sometimes) and that Lauren doesn’t know what play is unless it involves wresting or pulling the wings off flies.
So his choice, really, is easy, even if it’s uncomfortable.
*
“Lauren!” Kurt finally just shouts, sick of trying to push through the between class crowds to catch up with her when he’s already fairly sure she’s heard him and just doesn’t want to care.
“Look, Hummel, I appreciate that your little troupe of terminally crisis plagued misfits have finally realized they’re lacking a certain je ne sais quois without the raw sexual energy of the Zizes --
“Wow, you really dated Puck too long,” Kurt interjects.
“But I’m not rejoining the good ship Berry unless I can be the iceberg.”
“This isn’t about glee.”
“Well it better not be about Puck.”
Kurt huffs before relaxing down into the voice he uses for confession. “It’s about me.”
“I know you already got it on with Brittany, so I’m guessing this isn’t about these either,” she says, cupping her breasts for someone’s amusement.
“No,” Kurt says firmly. “It’s about me and Blaine. And I need to talk to you.”
“What’s in it for me?” Lauren asks, suddenly cheerful.
“Lunch and the ability to ruin my life,” Kurt says, frankly.
“Surprisingly, you know the way to my deliciously gooey center."
*
They go to Breadstix on a Saturday afternoon, and all Kurt really wants to do is chicken out, but he’s not made that way, and he has responsibilities now anyway.
“I’ll be frank,” he says to Lauren. “I don’t want to be here, and my temptation to call the whole thing off is not insignificant, but I’ve been put in a position… no --" Kurt stops himself, wanting to be precise -- “I agreed to take something on where I’m responsible to someone else in a way I don’t really know how to be yet, but I think you do. God, I hope you do.”
Lauren nods at him sagely, and Kurt’s grateful that she’s never really thought he’s an idiot.
“So, what? Blaine likes to be spanked and you want my advice on your follow through?” she asks, bored, around a bread stick.
“That is so the bare edge of this thing,” Kurt blurts at out at her nervously, but his voice is firm in it, and that part, at least is okay.
Lauren smiles. “Okay, I’m impressed, Hummel. Now tell me everything.”
*
Weirdly, he does, and he leaves lunch with a list of websites he’s not sure he can bring himself to look at (but Lauren swears aren’t strictly porn), the name of a place that will totally let him use PayPal to buy toys (Oh my god, how is this his life?), a ton of actually useful safety information about knots and blood sugar, and a strange, quiet sense of Lauren as deeply gentle and uniquely lonely.
“No one else will ever get what it’s like for you,” Lauren had said to him with a shrug. “Which, I don’t know, maybe you’re used to that anyway. But to hold so much of someone… you better get used to no one else getting it.”
And he knows she’s right. He’s known even since before Blaine’s confession.
III.
The distance is hard, even with Skype and promises and a cuff on Blaine’s right wrist. But the communication is better than Kurt expects, not because Blaine is particularly forthcoming on Skype (he’s not and Kurt can’t meet his eyes because of the way the technology works), but because Kurt makes Blaine keep a journal for him, and Blaine takes to it like water.
That's hokey. What shitty porn are you reading? had been Lauren’s email response to the idea, but Kurt had ignored her, and now every night he is given pages of Blaine’s heart -- fear and boredom and the desperate want of being a teenage boy -- to decipher and, he guesses, guide.
It’s fantastic, and Blaine confesses this often, usually in the pages, but sometimes when they speak, that he likes doing it, that he feels closest to Kurt when he does.
“It’s like I’m serving you,” he says, and Kurt assures him he is. The information is very valuable.
*
“Miss Pillsbury has me keeping a journal too,” Blaine tells him one night, and Kurt can see him fidgeting with his cuff over the blurry video connection.
Kurt feels a sharp stab of jealousy and fear at that, but it’s also hilarious. “How long?” he asks. “Why didn’t you tell me when it started?”
“I didn’t know if I would keep it up,” Blaine says.
“And?”
“It helps. It’s not just you I can talk to better if I write.”
“Okay. That’s good.”
“It’s more structure. I mean, she’d die if she knew."
“I’d die if she knew, Blaine.”
"I feel like it’s another reminder of what I am.”
“What are you, Blaine?” Kurt asks as gently as he can.
“Someone who doesn’t do very well on his own,” he says.
It’s not untrue, but Kurt suspects it’s not exactly what he wants to say.
*
Kurt only debates emailing Miss Pillsbury for as long as he does out of consideration for Blaine’s privacy and Emma’s sensibilities. Yes, he’s started thinking of her as Emma in his head, because if they’re both making Blaine write words so that he can get through the day, then they're peers in a way, even if Emma never needs to know exactly why.
Dear Miss Pillsbury,
Thank you for what you’re doing for Blaine. I know he’s always polite, and I’m sure that he thanks you (do tell me if he doesn’t), but I just wanted to express my appreciation. You know I’m a worrier; your influence helps me to worry less.
Sincerely,
Kurt Hummel
He finds himself almost wishing that she will write back and say Blaine hasn’t thanked her, just so he can impose yet more order and punish his boyfriend.
IV.
“I have a surprise for you,” Kurt says when Blaine arrives in New York to move into his dorm at NYU.
Blaine grins, ducks his head down, and touches, as he always does, the cuff at his wrist. He always likes Kurt’s surprises. Considering that Kurt has managed to cadge a single this year, Blaine suspects he will like this one very much.
*
“There’s barely enough room to swing it in here, but my baton twirling experience means I am exceptional at it,” Kurt says, spinning the handle of the flogger around his hand before whipping the tails through a series of methodical and rhythmic figure eights.
Blaine can barely breathe. He’s half hard and terrified, and they’re not even playing now. Kurt’s just showing off.
“Can I see it?” Blaine breathes, and it’s enough for Kurt to realize he’s scared.
Kurt stops spinning the flogger and sits down on next to him on the narrow bed. “I had them hit me with it, in the store, you know. The leather’s butter soft, and I can make it sting, if you want me to, could probably actually make it really hurt when you need… but it doesn’t have to. It’s just a starting place, and you said you wanted.”
“Yes,” Blaine breathes.
Oh, Kurt realizes, so it’s the good type of fear then. The type that comes with getting what you’ve always wanted. That he can work with.
V.
Moving in together is great, but the act of moving sucks, and while Kurt is frantic and irritated and how could Blaine forget the necessity of labeling boxes on every side, Blaine’s sanguine and lovely until that moment where they’re staring at the islands of cardboard that they are somehow supposed to assemble into their adult life in a tiny studio Kurt swears he can divide into rooms via the artful placement of bookcases.
Then he freezes.
"Ssshhhhh, shhhhh, come on,” Kurt says, wrapping his hands tightly around Blaine’s wrists and squeezing until he comes back to him just a little. “Go sit down on the bed and just breathe for a minute, okay? Write if you need to.”
Blaine nods blankly and goes, and Kurt breathes a sigh of relief. It’s enough.
Later he’ll call his father and panic about sharing such a tiny space with the man he loves, because Kurt needs someone to hold him together too.
*
Having their own shared apartment changes things. While Blaine has never gone down easily, something about playing in a space full only of things they’ve chosen makes him feel safer, and he tends now to go down much, much farther than Kurt has become used to.
It’s gorgeous, but it scares Kurt a little, when he’s holding a glass of juice for his boyfriend having to whisper, “Hey, hey, I know it’s nice down there, but come back to me now, Blaine, you’re so good, but I miss you. Come on, find the surface for me.”
Honestly, it makes Kurt wonder if Blaine’s always just a little bit down for him.
When he frets to Lauren about it -- and how, really, have they maintained this particular friendship for so long with her never giving away the secret? -- all she says is, “You always knew he was a responsibility, so what’s the problem?”
It makes Kurt understand why she’s always seemed so alone.
VI.
They get engaged a couple of months after Blaine turns twenty-five. Kurt asks, Blaine says yes, and it’s all delightful and giddy and normal. At least it is until it’s time to deal with matters of rings and vows.
Because there are things Kurt needs from his fiancé, his best friend, and his always other half.
“I want you not to wear this at the ceremony,” he says, tugging at the same battered leather cuff Blaine has worn since Kurt first left for New York.
Blaine stammers and looks stricken.
“I need you to marry me as a free man. And that includes free of me.”
“You can’t ask me that.”
“I can, and I am. And if you want to have a ceremony about this,” Kurt says, tugging at the cuff, “we can make that happen too, but not my wedding, Blaine.”
*
Blaine doesn’t really give him an answer, and instead just shifts them to the next problem.
“Blaine, if you say obey and I don’t say obey, that’s going to look weird.”
“It’s our wedding,” Blaine grinds out. “It’s not about what other people think.”
“Blaine, did you or did you not go to high school with me and Rachel? Of course it’s about what other people think!”
Blaine smirks at him. “I’m saying obey. So you better figure out what you’re saying.”
“I can say obey too!” Kurt shouts, frantic.
“No.” Blaine says. “You can’t.”
*
Somehow they settle on love, honor, and obey and love, honor, and cherish, although Kurt keeps freaking out that cherish and love are redundant.
When he emails Lauren about it, her reply is simple: But don’t you love him redundantly?
Kurt laughs and takes to telling Blaine this.
“I love you redundantly,” he says over coffee, over wine, over dinner, and before bed.
“I feel the need to point out that you never say you cherish me redundantly,” Blaine notes, “Which means that clearly, they don’t actually mean the same thing.”
Kurt laughs, because Blaine has a point.
*
“I won’t wear it for the ceremony,” Blaine eventually concedes about the cuff, “but I want to kneel for you before."
“So I can take it off,” Kurt realizes.
“Yes, and kneel for you after. Because I get what you need, Kurt, but this is what I need. You don’t know what it’s like to feel untethered.”
“Yes I do,” Kurt says.
“No you don’t. Not when that’s all that you’ve ever been."
Kurt tilts his head, curiously. “Do you resent it?”
“What?”
“Being the way you are? Asking for the things you have? Getting what you want?”
Kurt knows he’s being cruel, but can’t imagine what else he is supposed to do, especially now that Blaine is on his knees, with his head in his lap as Kurt runs fingers through his curls.
*
Rachel, somehow, actually solves the problem, because in some vague attempt to be Kurt and actually be good at wedding planning, even though she is officially not involved, she starts babbling about yichud.
“Wait,” Kurt says. “Stop. Go back. We can exchange vows and then immediately have some time together without other people and it won’t be weird?”
“Not to Jews,” Rachel says apologetically. “Not to my dads.”
Blaine tilts his head towards Kurt’s and says, conspiratorially, “It’ll still be weird,” and Kurt knows Blaine probably means to his family.
“Oh my god, do you care?” he replies, his fingers reaching out automatically for Blaine’s cuff.
Rachel raises an eyebrow, but neither of them notices.
“Well, other than no one getting it and it being totally appropriative, no, I don’t care,” Blaine snaps a little giddily. “Rachel, can we confuse our guests and appropriate your culture?”
“Totally! That’s why I told you about it.”
Kurt sighs. “I am surrounded by crazy people.”
*
It’s less easy than Kurt expects to get everyone to go away for long enough before the ceremony for Blaine to get on his knees before him and hold up his wrist. Kurt takes the cuff from him, kisses it, and slips it into his breast pocket.
“Still mine,” Kurt says, kissing Blaine’s lips as he tugs him up. “Let’s go get married.”
*
When Kurt takes Blaine’s hands to say his vows, he doesn’t so much as miss as move by instinct, and wraps his hands around Blaine’s wrists. When Blaine twists in his grip so that he can hold Kurt’s wrists in turn, they both grin at each other, and Kurt can tell Blaine is trying not to laugh.
“This is all I’ve ever wanted,” Kurt murmurs under his breath, before they get down to the serious business.
*
After their vows, they take their moment alone while Rachel makes a speech about how they have always existed together in a world separate from other people. Kurt can hear her faintly through the walls, as he slips Blaine’s cuff out of his jacket, and thinks about how wrong she is.
Because the world they exist in is hardly unpopulated. There are their friends and their unwitting accomplices.
There is Emma, who Blaine will dance with later and who will smile down at his cuff and say that she thinks it sweet he still wears the token of a boy he went to high school with.
There is Lauren, who has never understood them, but has always known everything about them; she and Kurt will drink too much, but probably never speak too loudly.
And there are all the people they don’t know, and probably never will, who live quietly and not, in worlds at least similar to their own.
But for Kurt, today and every day since he was sixteen-years-old, there is Blaine, who doesn’t kneel now, but holds his wrist out to him with a smug smirk, and it’s that, more than anything, that lets Kurt know he has, somehow, done well and right by this man he adores.