Fic: Dream a Little Dream of Me
Title: Dream a Little Dream of Me
Media: Fic
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: Through 2.14 (BIOTA)
Characters: Kurt Hummel, Blaine Anderson, Finn Hudson, Rachel Berry, Mercedes Jones, Burt Hummel; Kurt/Blaine, Kurt-Finn brothers
Length: ~10,000 words
Warnings: Language, vague allusions to sexual activity
Summary: Kurt had always imagined having Blaine in his bed would be a dream come true. Instead, it was turning into a nightmare-or multiple bizarre nightmares that would have been funny if they weren’t his, to be more precise.
Notes: Many thanks to my beta, safenthecity. In addition to the Glee spoilers, there are also spoilers for When Harry Met Sally, Inception, and Star Wars. No, this is not a cross-over; the characters are just movie buffs.
Dream a Little Dream of Me
Kurt still thought Rachel’s fantasizing about her funeral was flat-out bizarre, but she was far from the only one guilty of distant-future daydreams. Kurt’s favorite part of When Harry Met Sally was not the faked orgasm scene, or even the New Year’s Eve speech. No, it was the stories the elderly couples told about falling in love. (He had cried the day he found out they were actors and not real couples. At least the stories themselves were true, or he didn’t think he could have ever watched the movie again.)
Often, when his mind wandered in class, or when he was waiting in line somewhere, or right before he fell asleep, Kurt would imagine himself sitting beside Blaine on that peach loveseat in the room with the garish wallpaper. He could see the two of them perfectly (Blaine would look so ridiculously good graying at the temples), Blaine pressed up against him from knee to shoulder, his hand on Blaine’s leg, both smiling like lovesick kids, except with laugh lines. (Or maybe in forty years they’d invent something that did away with wrinkles without paralyzing your face like Botox did. That would certainly be nice.)
The problem with this fantasy was Kurt could only play it in his head on mute. Months ago, he would have been comfortable using the “Teenage Dream” story as their moment, and maybe he would be again, someday. For now, though, given all the very unromantic drama that had occurred in the interim, the story needed to have more to it than a serenade about tight clothing followed by a long stint in the friends-zone. Kurt tried to play out possible stories in his head-because, let’s face it, you have to practice if you want a line as great as “I knew the way you know about a good melon” or “Nine extra floors”-but it wasn’t the same. He longed for the moment that both of them would look back on and say, “Yes, that was when we knew.”
As cliché as it would have been, Kurt had even half-way hoped that, despite the fact that Rachel threw parties that rivaled Mary Tyler Moore’s for disastrousness, her party could provide his and Blaine’s “I love that it takes you an hour and a half to order a sandwich” moment. (And yes, Kurt knew that wasn’t the moment Harry and Sally used in their peach loveseat interview, but really, they made a lousy choice. Who talks about coconut cake when you have “When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible”? That was why one had to practice these things ahead of time.)
Of course, like every other inchoate fantasy Kurt had crafted as a candidate for the further fantasy of the Forty Years Later loveseat interview, the party one had crashed and burned. It had crashed harder than Blaine had when he’d fallen off the stage during his and Rachel’s encore performance of “Broken Wings.” Between the kiss and the duets and the fact that Blaine had drunk past cutely uninhibited to fairly embarrassing, the evening had gone from a story to tell the grandkids to a night Kurt would rather forget. But because Kurt and Finn both agreed that leaving Blaine passed out at Rachel’s was a recipe for even greater disaster, Kurt knew the horrors of the night had only just begun.
“Man, he’s heavy for such a small guy,” Finn grunted as he and Kurt turned, pointing Blaine at the stairs. They had to squeeze in closer together to make it up the stairway three abreast. Blaine clung to their shoulders even tighter when he apparently forgot how to move his right leg.
“’M not small,” Blaine protested way too loudly for sneaking into a house at one in the morning.
Kurt shushed Blaine, then said to Finn, “Don’t bring up his height. He has a bit of a Napoleon complex.”
Finn asked, “What’s a Napoleon-”
“At least, I don’t think I’m small,” Blaine interrupted. “I’ve never had a boyfriend, but porn over-exasperates-er, over-exaggerates.”
Kurt was impressed that Finn didn’t pull away. He just cringed, and hell, Kurt was cringing, too, though probably for slightly different reasons. “I’m sure you’re perfectly adequate, Blaine, but right now you need to be quiet, like shhhh, okay? We’re sneaking you into my house without waking my parents, remember?”
Blaine nodded with that drunk variety of serious that one definitely could not trust. “Right, ‘cause you’re brothers, you’ve got the same parents, ‘cept you just got brotherhooded recently, so yeah but not really. You guys are awesome brothers. Finn, seriously. Like, seriously. And Kurt-” Blaine swiveled his head too fast. Kurt and Finn halted their progress down the hall while he regained his balance and checked his gag reflex.
“And Kurt,” Blaine continued, the sincerity of his expression marred by the blast of peppermint schnapps breath that hit Kurt’s face as soon as he opened his mouth. “Kurt, you’re the best. You’re my best. Best friend ever. And that shirt looks really nice on your chest. And that rhymes. And it’s really soft…” Blaine dropped his head to Kurt’s shoulder. He shifted so almost all his weight was on Kurt. Finn held on, though he was really just keeping Blaine from knocking Kurt over with dead weight.
“Yep, he’s definitely the needy, cuddly guy drunk archetype. It’s a rarer archetype among guys than girls, but he wouldn’t be the first,” Finn observed in a hushed voice. “Which drunk archetype are you?”
Kurt flashed back to traumatic visions of Bambi standing in a hallway at McKinley, wearing (formerly) perfectly polished gold pumps and wailing about the bacteria count in the average teenage stomach. “Weepy drunk,” Kurt whispered back. “So, I take it you’re enjoying your SAT-prep word-a-day calendar?”
“Yeah. Thanks for that, by the way,” Finn said. “I admit, I kind of thought it was a lame birthday present at first, but now, I’m really getting into it. I even try to use the word in conversation five times that day so I don’t forget it.”
Kurt nodded. “Ah. Was that five times for ‘archetype’ now?”
“Actually, that was ten. I’m doing twice as much today so I can skip tomorrow. I looked ahead, and I don’t think I can get ‘prurient’ in five times on a Saturday that Puck is out of town.”
“Way to plan ahead,” Blaine said.
Not knowing where to even start mocking that exchange, Kurt simply shook his head and opened his bedroom door. Finn let go of Blaine, and Kurt maneuvered him through the doorway. It was too much of a struggle just keeping Blaine upright for Kurt to turn on the light switch. For once, Kurt was happy his room wasn’t in the basement anymore; a streetlight outside his window provided enough illumination for them to see where they were going fairly well.
“There’s a bear on your bed. Or a Chewbacca,” Blaine said right before he flopped onto Kurt’s faux beaver fur blanket, face-first.
“What’s a Chewbacca?” Kurt muttered at Finn, who was still standing in the doorway. He worked at removing Blaine’s shoes, though it was tricky to do backwards like that.
“Seriously?” Finn whispered. “Dude, we so have to fix this gap in your pop culture knowledge tomorrow. One p.m., living room, Star Wars marathon. Be there or be square.”
Kurt stopped what he was doing to dramatically stare at Finn in horror.
Finn calmly answered, “I won’t make you suffer through the prequels, but more importantly, you still owe me for sitting through Burlesque.”
Kurt rolled his eyes in surrender-that didn’t mean he was actually going to attend this sci-fi movie marathon thing, but it would be enough to get Finn to drop it for now. With one last yank, he got Blaine’s shoe off. He surveyed Blaine’s prone form for a moment to come up with a strategy, then moved to the other side of the bed so he could take hold of his wrists and pull him completely onto the bed.
Finn crossed his arms and lowered his brow. “You sure about this?”
Kurt paused again to evaluate whether it was possible to get Blaine under any of the covers, then decided he was probably warm enough anyway with all his clothes on. “I’m not going to molest my friend in his drunken stupor, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Kurt spat more harshly than he’d intended. He tried to soften it by adding, “After all, I’m not like Rachel after she’s got four green apple wine coolers in her system.”
Finn winced. “I didn’t mean it like that. I’m not worried about you doing anything. Him, I don’t trust so much.”
Kurt shot Finn an even dirtier look at that. It was awkward defending Blaine’s honor, especially when on a few occasions he’d maybe fantasized about Blaine being dishonorable and just shoving his tongue down his throat already, niceties be damned, but he felt it was his duty as Blaine’s friend.
“Not saying he’s a bad guy or anything, just that if he’s drunk enough to try to eat Rachel’s face, he’s seriously not thinking about what he’s doing right now.” Kurt was tempted to take a pot shot at Finn for phrasing it so it sounded like anyone was crazy to kiss his own ex-girlfriend, but he refrained. Finn continued, “Anyway, the bigger issue here is that Burt will blow a less huge gasket if he finds Blaine sleeping off a hangover on the floor than in your bed.”
Kurt had been thinking about the inevitable Dad problem since Blaine handed over his car keys. If it hadn’t been for Rachel making out with Blaine with the intensity and suction of a vacuum cleaner, he would’ve been tempted to leave Blaine to crash at her place and bring him his car in the morning. That way, there would be no chance of his dad’s first substantial interaction with Blaine being a drunken one.
“Thank you for your concern, but my dad is not going to see Blaine in my bed. In fact, he’s not even going to know Blaine was here. Blaine will sleep it off, I’ll wake him up before Dad gets up at seven-thirty, and I’ll shove him out the door with a thermos of coffee. Dad will never know that Rachel’s party wasn’t a Julie Andrews movie marathon, and we can all just forget this night ever happened.”
Finn looked at Kurt skeptically, but he finally shrugged. “Okay, I won’t say anything. Better give me Blaine’s keys, though.”
“Huh?”
“Somebody’s got to park his car a few blocks away so Burt doesn’t look out the window tomorrow morning and see it’s still in the driveway.”
Well, shit. Kurt hadn’t thought about that near-disaster. What else was he not thinking about? This is what you get for spending your childhood rebelling via fashion rather than sex and illicit substances, Kurt thought to himself.
“Thank you so much.” He tossed Finn the keys. “I take back every joke I ever made about your IQ’s similarity to Brittany’s geometry exam scores.”
Finn smiled and shrugged again. “It’s nothing. What are brothers for, right?”
That word coming out of Finn’s mouth still had the power to make Kurt automatically smile. “Still. Thanks.”
“Good luck,” Finn said, saluting Kurt with the keys in his hand and pulling the bedroom door shut as he left.
Kurt surveyed Blaine again, still sprawled face down on the comforter.
“Blaine, you asleep?”
“Mrrrmpgh.”
“I’m going to do my nightly skincare routine, so if you need anything, just knock on the bathroom door, all right? Okay.”
Kurt grabbed a pair of pajamas from his dresser and retreated into his bathroom. He usually showered in the mornings, but just being at that party had left him feeling sticky and smelly. He undressed, which took a while (harnesses might be in vogue this season, but they were a bitch to unbuckle by yourself), and gave his red shirt an extra-harsh toss across the small room. (Blaine had said red looked good on him. Apparently he’d just been trying to convince Kurt that he could work the Dalton red sweater vest into his uniform rotation. Sweater vests. The horror.)
The hot water beating down on Kurt’s shoulders wasn’t as soothing as he’d hoped. All he could think about was how he had fantasized this very same, very ridiculous scenario so many times, only with both him and Blaine barely inhibition-looseningly tipsy, and with no Rachel-kissing. The daydream version continued with Blaine startling Kurt by slipping into the shower and wrapping his arms around him from behind. Kurt felt sick even thinking about it now. There had been a certain safety and comfort in the absurdity of the scenario that was gone now that Blaine was lying in the next room.
Kurt had just finished exfoliating when he heard Blaine bang open the door. His daydream was dangerously close to coming true, except for how it was playing out more like a nightmare. What about this situation did I think was hot and not just mortifying? he thought to himself. He poked his head out of the shower, clutching the curtain up near his chin.
“Uh, Blaine? What are you-”
An odd mix of relief and second-hand embarrassment hit Kurt when he saw that Blaine had his hand clamped over his mouth. He dropped to his knees and slid towards the toilet in a much less graceful version of the move he’d pulled with the socks at the end of “When I Get You Alone.” Kurt decided to skip the remainder of his skincare routine (and if that isn’t love, Blaine, I don’t know what is), grabbed his bathrobe off the hook by the tub, put it on, and then emerged from behind the shower curtain. He sighed and knelt beside Blaine as he vomited up more than Kurt had thought a human stomach could hold. Kurt reflected on how lucky they were that Kurt’s bathroom was ensuite instead of down the hall as he smoothed his hand up and down Blaine’s back. He wasn’t sure if the gesture did any good, but it was the only help he could think of to give.
How the hell did Robbie still find Julia cute when she threw up in The Wedding Singer? Kurt marveled silently. Cute enough he’d put a line in his song about it? There is absolutely nothing romantic about this.
The gagging petered out. Kurt asked, “Feel better now? Oops, no no, don’t-I may be mildly obsessive-compulsive when it comes to cleaning, but you really shouldn’t use even that toilet seat for a pillow.”
Blaine sat back on his heels and held his head in his hands. Kurt hadn’t thought he could look any more rumpled than when Kurt and Finn had half-carried him to the car. Now, Blaine’s clothing looked like it’d spent a week at the bottom of Finn’s dirty laundry pile before he pulled them on. “Sorry. I really wish I’d put a toothbrush in my wallet.”
“Blaine, that doesn’t make any sen-oh. Is that drunk for, ‘My mouth tastes like vomit, and I want it not to?’ Okay, I can handle that.”
Two teeth-brushings and one very awkward mouthwash later (“Don’t you dare swallow! No more alcohol of any kind for you!”), and all Kurt could think of to say was, “How is it that after all that, you still smell like peppermint schnapps?”
Blaine made a face. “I didn’t actually drink much of it. Brittany poured some in my hair, though.”
Kurt sighed. “I don’t even want to know how that happened. Go back to bed. I still have to get dressed. If you need to throw up again before I’m out of here, just use the wastebasket.”
Blaine nodded meekly and stumbled out of the bathroom, pulling the door shut behind him.
Kurt dressed quickly and cut down his post-shower skin treatment to one emergency coat of lotion; he wasn’t going to risk leaving Blaine alone any longer than necessary. When he returned to the bedroom, much to his dismay, he found Blaine snuggled under the sheets on the right side of the bed and staring at him under drooping eyelids. So much for Blaine sleeping on top of the covers.
“Did I take your side of the bed?” Blaine asked, apparently noticing Kurt’s expression.
Kurt refrained from pointing out that it was all his bed. “You’re fine,” he said tiredly, already turning to search for a throw to cover up with.
“Where’re you going?” Blaine asked. Kurt turned and saw that Blaine had flipped back the covers on the empty side of the bed and was patting the opposite pillow.
Kurt was exhausted. “Screw chivalry,” he muttered.
He crawled into bed, though he did slide between the covers so that he was under the fur blanket and comforter but on top of the flat sheet. Blaine flopped over on his side, facing away from Kurt, but he sent his legs sprawling diagonally across the bed. Kurt turned onto his side and carefully curled his legs towards his chest so they wouldn’t accidentally touch, even though he could never sleep in that position. He felt stupid, worrying so much about the appearance of propriety, particularly when the only audience was himself and a guy who was too drunk to be able to remember any of this gentlemanliness in the morning.
He felt even more stupid for ever having fantasized about this happening. And Kurt had, more times than he would ever admit, even to Mercedes. He’d come up with dozens of ridiculous scenarios for why Blaine would have to stay over: a blizzard, a collaborative class project requiring an all-nighter, a fire at Blaine’s house, an earthquake (hey, Dalton’s new Earth Sciences teacher had said the New Madrid fault line was due for a big shift one of these days), a government quarantine in response to a terrorist attack or fast-spreading zombie virus. The fantasies had always been much fuzzier about why Blaine had to sleep in Kurt’s bed with him-usually Blaine and Kurt just naturally came to that decision, and Dad and Carole were snowed in elsewhere or too busy zombie-proofing the neighborhood to care. Then he and Blaine would just as naturally progress from accidental touching to cuddling to kissing to…well, things got a little fuzzy after that, not to mention that how far things progressed depended on where exactly it was Kurt was doing his fantasizing.
There was a reason Kurt had to twist reality into a pretzel to come up with a good story, he now realized: it was because the most likely scenario was awkward and embarrassing and smelled too much like Rachel Berry and the contents of her dads’ liquor cabinet. Really, he should’ve learned after the Finn debacle that fantasy and reality didn’t much resemble each other. He looked over his shoulder at Blaine’s back, shoulders rising and falling with his breathing. At least he’d done better setting up some boundaries this time. Sort of.
Kurt turned back over and closed his eyes. He murmured to himself as he felt sleep tugging him down into unconsciousness, “Apparently it’s not enough for Rachel to ruin my actual shot at getting something remotely like action tonight. No, she had to go and ruin my shot at getting any in my imagination, too…”
“You know that part in Inception where they talk about how you never remember how your dreams start, but you never actually question it? Like in the movie, when they don’t remember how they got to the little street corner coffee shop?” Mercedes said as she contemplated the Lima Bean’s menu board.
“Dreams are weird like that,” Kurt commented. For some reason, the words on the board wouldn’t come into focus, no matter how much Kurt concentrated and squinted. It didn’t matter, since he already knew his order.
“It’s completely false, anyway,” Rachel cut in as she pulled her wallet out of her jacket pocket. “Just last week, I had a dream in which I knew I was dreaming and clearly remembered how I went from my bedroom to Broadway.”
“Well, aren’t you special,” Mercedes deadpanned in a way that suggested she was anything but.
“Inception was such a good movie. I just got it on DVD,” Blaine added. He patted Kurt’s shoulder playfully. “I keep trying to get Kurt to watch it with me, but he won’t budge.”
Kurt wondered to himself why the hell he would turn down any opportunity to watch a DVD with Blaine (particularly if they lowered the lights, and maybe played it on his laptop so they had to sit really close for both of them to see the screen). For some reason, that inconsistency didn’t bother him all that much. He answered, “I simply don’t do science fiction. The only exception I ever made was for the Star Wars movie where Natalie Portman dressed in Asian-inspired haute couture.”
“How did that go?” Mercedes asked.
Kurt made a face. “For the life of me, I can’t figure out why they wasted so much time on the Jedis when they’re all dressed like tae kwon do students with brown bathrobes.”
Rachel moved up to the counter and said, “I’ll have an iced maté latte, and...ooh, the biscotti looks good.”
“It’s excellent. I highly recommend it,” Blaine said. Then he turned back to Kurt. “There are three incontrovertibly good reasons you should watch Inception: one, Leonardo DiCaprio, two, Joseph Gordon Levitt, and three, Marion Cotillard.”
Rachel gasped in delight. “Oh, Marion Cotillard! Isn’t she amazing?”
Blaine’s face lit up. “Amazing. Did you see her Vogue cover?”
Having already had this conversation a few times, Kurt chose to tune it out and ordered his coffee. Then he must have spaced off for a minute, because the next thing he knew, he was sitting beside Mercedes at their normal table, Blaine across from him and Rachel beside Blaine, drinks in hand and a big plate of biscotti between them.
Blaine was still chatting with Rachel. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m thrilled that she has such mainstream appeal now. But don’t you ever sort of wish for the days when her fans were fewer but they had all seen La Vie en Rose?”
“Mmm, this biscotti is so good,” Rachel said enthusiastically, her voice pitched lower than normal.
Blaine took a bite and moaned. “I know.”
Rachel nibbled again, then dropped her head back and ran her hand down her throat, making noises the whole time.
“Can I try?” Kurt asked. He tried to reach for the plate, but much to his surprise, his arm wouldn’t move. There was nothing obstructing his range of motion, nothing hurt-his arm simply would not respond to his brain’s dictates. “Hey! What the hell…”
Blaine was too caught up in his biscotti to care. He took another bite, and his eyes rolled back in his head. “Oh, God…”
Kurt turned to Mercedes, looking for help with his arm, but she just sat and drunkenly giggled at her frappe. “Hee, Puck totally spiked my coffee…hee hee…they’re funny…”
Kurt’s gaze followed her finger as she pointed across the table at Blaine and Rachel. Rachel was writhing in her chair, whipping her hair around and pounding her fists on the table in ecstasy. Blaine wasn’t moving nearly as much. He was sprawled in his seat like his limbs were limp noodles, but he was much more vocal. Even though they were sitting side by side and not touching at all, Blaine’s moans of “oh God, oh, yes, yes, YES!” were perfectly in sync with the rhythm of Rachel’s gyrations.
Kurt yanked on his arm to no avail. “No! Blaine, you agreed I get to be Meg Ryan! I don’t care how good that fucking biscotti is, I’m the only one allowed to fake an orgasm in a café. You’re Billy Crystal, damn it! And you, Rachel Berry, are Carrie Fisher, so back the fuck off my classic scene!”
Kurt woke from the dream with a start. It took him a minute to calm his breathing and remember he was in his bedroom. It took another moment to recognize the light buzz saw of a snore beside him as Blaine. Finally, it dawned on him why he hadn’t been able to move his arm in the dream. He had thrown it out away from his body as he slept, and despite Kurt’s gentlemanly attempts at separation with the bed sheet business, Blaine had somehow rolled on top of his arm. In fact, upon closer inspection, Kurt realized Blaine wasn’t merely lying on it; he was sort of…cuddling it under his body, such that Kurt’s completely-numb pinky was touching Blaine’s cheek.
“You still reek, but that’s…that’s pretty cute,” Kurt admitted, smiling at him and glad that there was no one around to see what a soppy dork he must’ve looked like. Blaine shifted, but he didn’t wake up. The tingle of decreased blood flow to Kurt’s hand was starting to hurt. “Cute or not, I need my arm back now, please.”
At first, he tried to slip his arm out from underneath Blaine without disturbing him. When that didn’t get him anywhere, Kurt rolled Blaine onto his side with his free arm, then yanked his trapped arm out of the way before letting go. Blaine flopped back into position, burying his nose in his pillow.
Kurt carefully resituated himself on the other side of the bed, flat on his back and hands clasped over his chest so they wouldn’t wander again. Cute arm-thievery or no, the whole situation was still far more awkward than it was worth. In fact, it was even more awkward now that he could visualize Blaine’s “O” face from the dream. He considered giving up and moving to the couch in the living room but ultimately decided against it. Not only would his dad likely wake up before he did, find him on the sofa, and realize something was fishy, but leaving Blaine alone to possibly wander the house if he woke up was too big of a risk as well.
Resigned to his fate, Kurt closed his eyes and counted backward from one hundred in multiples of three, hoping to bore himself to sleep. He gave up when he hit negative two hundred thirty-four. He tried reciting things out loud-quietly enough not to wake Blaine, but then again, a freight train running through the room probably wouldn’t have woken Blaine. Presidents. States and capitals. French royalty. Song lyrics. Friends’ phone numbers. Project Runway contestants, in ascending order of bitchiness.
“Blaine, are you awake?” Kurt finally whispered without turning his head when he’d run out of things to recite. Blaine merely snored a little louder. “Thought so. Not to begrudge you your fun, but the fact that I’m the responsible one, and yet you’re the one who’s having both the more fun and the more comfortably guilt-free night is so not fair. In a fair universe, you should be the one staring at the ceiling, whining about the unfairness of life and how this night turned out nothing like it was supposed to.”
Kurt yawned, then said, “Yes, I’m pissed about spin-the-bottle-not so much at you, or at Rachel, just at the universe in general-well, okay, maybe a little bit at Rachel. Mostly, though, I’m pissed about…this,” he said, gesturing at the bed.
He looked over at Blaine. Blaine was facing Kurt’s side of the bed now, though lying mostly on his stomach. He looked much younger when he was asleep. Unfairly beautiful. “Is it really too much to ask that the first time I share a bed with a boy be the slightest bit romantic? Or even just special? According to all the literature, boys like you are supposed to smell like boy, and this smell is supposed to be intoxicating. I’m sorry, but you smell like an alcoholic resident of Candyland.
“I did think this first might be with you, you know. I thought I might get a lot of firsts with you,” Kurt admitted, not bothering to mask his disappointment. “I don’t understand you sometimes. You never hesitate when you really want something-grabbing my hand the day we met, petitioning the Warblers to serenade the GAP employee, even the kiss with Rachel. And don’t think I didn’t notice how smooth it was for a drunken kiss.” Kurt tried to raise his eyebrow in disdain, but the haughtiness of the expression got lost in another yawn. “You may have never had a boyfriend before, but you’ve certainly had a make-out session with somebody.
“But that’s beside the point. My point is, why do I have to be the one thing you hesitate on? You clearly understood my When Harry Met Sally reference. If you truly weren’t interested at all, you would’ve clarified or countered with My Best Friend’s Wedding or something, wouldn’t you?” Then he added more to himself, “Or it could be that I chose to compare us to a movie where the will-they-won’t-they goes on for twelve years, so your waffling is actually right on target. Nice job, Kurt.”
Kurt huffed and felt his eyelids flutter shut. “Maybe we should carry on the entirety of our relationship in song, if you can be so honest when you perform like you say you are. Then again, apparently you can’t serenade anyone you really like without a troupe of back-up singers. Honestly, you’re worse than all my girl friends who can’t go to the bathroom by themselves…”
“You know what the most confusing type of dream is?” Blaine asked, pushing the heavy faux-beaver fur blanket off the bed so all that was left were the red satin sheets.
“Which kind?” Kurt asked, crossing his legs so he was sitting Indian-style on the bed. He wondered for a moment why he’d chosen red sheets, because he thought he’d bought white, and anyway light blue complemented his skin tone much better, but he lost his train of thought in the flicker of candlelight reflected in Blaine’s eyes.
Blaine sat up fully and said, “The kind that take place in the location where you fell asleep. That makes it much harder to distinguish the separation between reality and the dream. It’s even worse when the dream ends in the same place, because it takes you a while once you wake up to accept that the dream was a dream.”
“Is it really that difficult?” Kurt asked. “I know this is a dream.”
Blaine smiled. “No it’s not.”
“Yes it is.”
“No, you were dreaming before,” Blaine said, still grinning. “That’s what I meant about the confusion when the dream-place is the same as the place you fell asleep in reality. This is reality.” He placed his hands on Kurt’s knees and scooted closer.
Well, that was certainly…pleasantly distracting. Kurt cleared his throat, a little nervous. “I know this is a dream, because I actually did see Inception this summer with Finn and Puck and Mike. Hence, the coffee shop was a dream, then I woke up, and now I’m dreaming again.” Suddenly, he wondered if maybe this was one of those dreams-within-dreams that the movie had been going on and on about. He wished for the first time that he’d paid better attention to Leonardo DiCaprio’s blatant expositing rather than focusing so intently on Joseph Gordon Levitt’s eyes and impeccably tailored suits.
Then Blaine challenged his logic in a way Kurt hadn’t been prepared for at all.
“Oh yeah?” His voice was low and breathy. He moved in so close his curls tickled Kurt’s forehead. “Don’t you want this to be reality?”
Kurt took one shaky breath and inhaled the scent of boy-and good god, what a wonderfully heady, hormone-jolting smell it was-before Blaine’s lips pressed against his. Blaine tasted like root beer Lip Smackers, which was odd, but Kurt was in no state to complain about details.
Suddenly and for absolutely no reason, Kurt knew with utter certainty that he was about to lose some permutation of his virginity. Only then did it register with him that the evidence of their planning was all around him: candles, tacky satin bed sheets, new underwear (which, it now dawned on him, was all they were wearing), certain items he knew were in the bed stand drawer. Blaine was too busy worshipping Kurt’s collarbone with his mouth to notice Kurt’s shock at this revelation.
Kurt blurted, “Oh, shit. This better not be a wet dream.”
That made Blaine look up, but he was grinning fondly. “Now you’re just being silly. You need to relax.”
He directed Kurt to lie on his stomach, then started massaging his shoulders. Kurt sighed into the pillow, only wondering a little at how completely comfortable he felt. They’d obviously worked very hard on making sure all the other clichés of first times were there, what with the candles and everything. The only things missing were virginal reticence and Marvin Gaye.
As if on cue, Blaine started to sing. “I’ve been really trying, baby, trying to hold back these feelings for so long…”
Then Kurt heard the classic wah-wah-wah guitar riff, though he could tell it wasn’t being produced by a guitar. He laughed when he realized what was up. “I can’t believe you actually got the Warblers to record an acapella arrangement of ‘Let’s Get It On’ for you.”
“They didn’t record it,” Blaine said nonchalantly. Every muscle in Kurt’s body tensed. “You wouldn’t be able to get this nice surround-sound feel from a recording.”
Kurt’s stomach iced over. He turned over very, very slowly, only to discover each and every Warbler arranged in a semi-circle around his bed, swaying in unison and harmonizing the let’s get it ons.
Not too many things could render Kurt absolutely speechless. This was one of the few.
Blaine noticed his slack-jawed expression-he would’ve had to have been blind to miss it. “Don’t you like ‘Let’s Get It On’? We could do ‘Can’t Get Enough of Your Love, Baby,’ though I don’t really have the lower range to do Barry White justice.”
Kurt’s vocal chords were still frozen when Wes broke ranks, looking very serious. “This is highly irregular, changing to a new song in a performance before finishing the first. The last time that happened was in 1928, when Headmaster Henry Hernshaw ordered the Warblers to immediately cease singing ‘Henry’s Made a Lady Out of Lizzie’ during a school assembly, for fear it would feed into rumors of the Headmaster’s possible dalliance with Mrs. Lizzie Leiderschmidt, Dalton’s then-head cook.”
“Please? You were willing to sing in the GAP for Jeremiah. Won’t you do this for Kurt?” Blaine begged sweetly. Wes huffed but relented. “Great. There’s a pitch pipe in the bedside table drawer, right next to the condoms.”
Finally, Kurt found his voice and screamed.
“Kurt!” Blaine said. Kurt sat up and tried to push a pair of hands off his shoulders. “Kurt, wake up! I think you were having a nightmare.”
You think so, Sherlock? What was your first clue? Kurt opened his eyes and did his best not to roll them at Blaine. He was still trying to catch his breath, though.
“I’m okay,” Kurt finally told Blaine. “Sorry to wake you.”
Blaine was sitting up in bed beside him. Kurt could see from the early-morning light slitting through the blinds that Blaine’s eyes were still bleary, but he looked far more lucid than he had a few hours ago. He was staring at Kurt with concern, squeezing his shoulder tenderly.
“Are you sober yet?” Kurt asked.
Blaine thought about it for a moment, then grimaced and sank back into his pillow.
“I’ll take that as a ‘no.’”
Blaine kneaded his fingers against his forehead, but it didn’t appear that it helped. Then, to Kurt’s surprise, Blaine refocused on him. “What was your nightmare about? Sounded like a bad one.”
Kurt tried to brush it off, but Blaine made an insistent sound and patted the pillow beside him. Kurt tentatively accepted the invitation and lay back down, facing Blaine. “It’s…kind of hard to explain.” Especially without mentioning the part where we almost had sex. “Have you ever seen the episode of The Muppet Show where pink monsters pop up out of nowhere and start singing every time Kermit says the word ‘phenomena’?”
Kurt thought it sounded like he was the one who was drunk, but was pleasantly surprised when Blaine nodded and sang, “Do doo do do do do,” in response.
“Like that, only with the Warblers, and at very inopportune moments.”
Blaine winced in sympathy. “Yikes. Wes is scary enough when he gives fair warning, let alone popping up randomly.”
Kurt burrowed deeper under the blanket. He knew that this should feel awkward, but curling up across the bed from Blaine and just talking like this made him feel more comfortable than he had all night. “I take it you’ve slept well.”
“Nah-ugh,” Blaine said, shaking his head and then cringing at the motion. “I had strange, bad dreams, too. You know the part in Dumbo where Dumbo and Timothy accidentally get drunk and then hallucinate dozens of scary pink elephants that nearly step on them?”
“‘Pink Elephants on Parade’?” Kurt chuckled. He could feel himself relaxing and his eyelids growing heavy. “That’s rather cliché for a drunk dream, isn’t it?”
Blaine closed his eyes. “If you’d been there, you would’ve thought it was scary, too. Well, you were there, as in you were in it, but not there there, obviously.”
“I think our subconsciouses are trying to tell us something,” Kurt murmured.
“Pink singing monsters, pink singing elephants-maybe that we’re traumatized by Rachel screaming that her drink tasted pink?”
“I’m traumatized by Rachel in general, but that’s nothing new.”
Kurt never heard Blaine’s response, if there was one.
The next thing Kurt knew, he was waking to the sound of the blender going in the kitchen.
“Oh shit.” He was instantly fully awake and sitting up in bed. He looked over at his alarm clock. 8:53 a.m. He must have accidentally set the alarm for 7:00 p.m. rather than a.m. He looked over at the other side of the bed, where Blaine was now lying on his stomach with his head under a pillow. “Oh shit.”
He thought through his options for a moment. Dad was up and in the kitchen, so that meant he’d already been in the living room that morning and seen that nobody had slept there the night before. So, no shot at admitting Blaine had spent the night but not admitting where. They’d have to walk past the kitchen to get from the foot of the stairs to either the front or back door, so no hope of sneaking Blaine past Dad while he was still making breakfast, either. Their only chance was for Blaine to lie low until Kurt was sure the coast was clear, which could be a while.
If the ruse was going to work, Kurt knew he had to go about his morning like it was a normal Saturday. He’d already overslept, but neither Dad nor Carole would find that alone weird. He decided to take a shower again, because that’s what he did every morning, but also because he still didn’t feel clean even after last night’s shower. He told himself it was because he cut his hygiene routine short, but he had a niggling suspicion that wasn’t really it.
He was able to shower and dress without interruption. When he came back into his room, he smiled when he saw that Finn had hung Blaine’s car keys on the doorknob on the inside of the door, complete with a little note saying he’d parked the car on the street in front of the Hansons’ house. For some reason, that soothed his nerves considerably.
In fact, Kurt was just sitting down at his vanity to stave off a stress-induced breakout and mentally patting himself on the back for how his plan was actually going to work when he heard his dad’s voice booming from the bottom of the stairway.
“Hey Kurt! Come give me a hand with these eggs.”
It was only then that Kurt remembered he and his dad had planned a Father-Son Cooking/Bonding Saturday for this morning. Oh crap oh crap oh crap. Stay cool. “I’ll be down in a minute,” he called out.
“What the hell is a shirred egg? Is that the same thing as a scrambled egg?”
Kurt froze in terror when he heard Dad’s footsteps up the stairs. There wasn’t time to hide Blaine. Kurt’s only hope was to take the same approach one should use when encountering a grizzly bear: speak calmly, act normally, avoid making any quick movements. If Kurt didn’t act like anything was wrong, no matter what, maybe Dad would buy into that theory, too.
The door opened.
“Hey, what’s this? Today was the day you were gonna teach me all about brunch!” Dad tapped on the cookbook, from all appearances genuinely excited about making eggs.
The fact that Dad was talking to the bed was not good. Blaine wasn’t exactly visible, though, besides the boy-shaped lump under the covers that could’ve just as easily been a pillow. Kurt leaned around to catch Dad’s eye and said, “I’ll be down in a sec.” He might still be able to get Dad out without blowing it.
Then, Blaine blew it.
“Where am I?” To Kurt’s horror, Blaine chose that moment to pop up and rub his bloodshot eyes. It didn’t even appear that Blaine registered Dad’s presence before he crashed back into the bed.
Kurt kept his own shock from creeping into his expression, but the same could most definitely not be said of his dad. “Oh. Uh, I’m sorry. My bad,” he said, eyes huge.
Kurt looked at him coolly, like he couldn’t fathom what his dear father could think was wrong with this tableau. It didn’t matter; Dad’s eyes were locked on the bed and Blaine the whole time, until he literally stumbled out of the room.
As soon as Dad was out of earshot, Kurt exhaled the breath he didn’t know he’d been holding. “Well, shit.”
Kurt finished his skincare regimen on autopilot. Of all the ways Dad could’ve found out about Blaine staying over, the only ones Kurt could think of that would’ve been worse were those involving himself actually having gotten some action the previous night, which would’ve made up for the fallout at least somewhat. But honestly, his dad had handled the whole situation a lot better than Kurt had ever thought he would. He’d expected yelling and grounding and Dad lifting Blaine up by his shirt collar and dragging him out of the room. The shock was understandable, expected even, but Dad was being really cool about the whole situation.
Unless he’d gone back downstairs to get the shotgun.
“Okay, Blaine, ready or not, it’s time to go.” Kurt flipped the pillow off Blaine’s head and tossed the car keys onto the bed.
Blaine yawned and stretched, then picked up his keys. “Thanks. Was that Finn, bringing these in for me?”
“Uh, yeah,” Kurt said. It was better if Blaine didn’t know he’d just made it appear to Dad that he’d drunkenly deflowered the man’s son last night. Blaine was too polite; he’d insist on apologizing and explaining, which could lead to nothing but more trouble. “Are you sure you’re sober? I mean, you should be getting home, but I’m not going to send you on the road if you’re still too drunk to recognize people.”
“No, I woke out of a dead sleep and was disoriented, that’s all.” Blaine still looked pretty rough, as was only natural, but he did seem lucid. “You’re right, though. I’ve already imposed far too much. I should be getting home.”
Kurt gasped. “Oh no. Your parents! I never thought to call or text them with a cover story for you. I’ve done such a horrible job of being the evil mastermind behind your night of drunken debauchery.”
Blaine laughed. “Wasn’t much for debauchery. Oh wait, you’re serious?” he said off Kurt’s look of confusion. “Of course my parents are strict on the no drunk driving rule, as well they should be, so they expected I’d stay over at someone else’s place. They’ll be a little angry I didn’t call, but it’s not that big of a deal.”
Kurt blinked in astonishment. If he or Finn had stayed out all night without calling home, not only would their parents have killed them once they did get home, but Dad and Carole would have most likely spent the whole night frantically calling their friends and searching ditches for them. On the one hand, it was good to know Kurt hadn’t completely screwed up Blaine’s life by being such a lousy liar. On the other hand, as annoying and embarrassing and sometimes downright frustrating as his dad could be, Kurt felt a little sorry for Blaine for not having somebody who would be too worried to sleep if he didn’t come home on time.
“Anyway, I’m sorry for imposing in the first place,” Blaine said, breaking the awkward silence. “I hope I didn’t cause you too much inconvenience. I know I snore,” he added in an awkward attempt to lighten the mood.
Kurt slapped a fake but convincing smile on his face and bustled about the room, pretending to tidy up so he didn’t have to meet Blaine’s eyes. “No trouble at all. You’re welcome to crash here any time you need to.”
“Thank you. I really appreciate that.” The tone of Blaine’s voice warmed. “I don’t think it’s possible to have a pleasant night’s sleep any night that involves vomiting, but last night was-it felt natural, I guess.”
“Why wouldn’t it? It was perfectly natural. I share a bed with Mercedes when I go to sleepovers at her house all the time,” Kurt answered quickly. He only looked up after he’d spoken.
“Just like Mercedes. Right.” He could see Blaine’s expression fading from something into disappointment. Kurt mentally kicked himself for not turning around fast enough to see what emotion that something had been. Whatever it was, the walls had already come up again. “Thanks again, for everything. I’ll show myself out.”
Of course, Kurt showed Blaine out. It was the polite thing to do, and, more importantly, it was his best hope of ensuring against an awkward confrontation between Blaine and Dad. As soon as Blaine was out the door, Kurt frantically tried to think of ways he could avoid an awkward confrontation between himself and Dad.
That was when Finn plodded down the stairs, still half-asleep and wearing his Power Rangers t-shirt. Six feet and three inches of salvation, Kurt thought.
“Morning, Kurt. I smelled bacon and wondered what must’ve happened to you and Burt’s cooking lesson. I couldn’t believe you’d let Burt have bacon. It’s kind of the anti-heart-healthy breakfast food.”
“I only let turkey bacon in the house,” Kurt said dismissively. He caught Finn’s shoulder, steering him away from the kitchen and toward the living room. “How many of these Star Wars movies are there? I think we’d better get an early start if we want to fit them all in, don’t you?”
Finn’s eyebrows scrunched together. “Uh, three that I’m willing to recognize, then another three that I try to forget except for some kickass lightsaber fights and Natalie Portman being hot in a jumpsuit. It’s cool that you’re so excited about this, but I’m kind of hungry, even if it is fake bacon…”
Three movies meant at least six hours of not talking to Dad. Good. Very good. “Hunger is for the weak. Don’t the Jedis say that?”
“No,” Finn said slowly. “Also, more than one Jedi is still ‘Jedi,’ not ‘Jedis.’”
It took Kurt a moment to recover from the shock of Finn correcting his grammar, but he said, “See, I have so much to learn! It’s obvious that we need to start remedying my ignorance immediately.”
And that was how Finn and Kurt ended up sitting on the couch together at ten in the morning on a Saturday, watching Harrison Ford (wow, hotter than Kurt had thought he would be young), Carrie Fisher (why were there no bras in space?), and he couldn’t remember Luke Skywalker’s real name (could have been Sam’s older brother) running around a spaceship with a seven-foot-tall guy in a dog-monkey suit.
“So that’s a Chewbacca?” Kurt asked. Finn nodded, and Kurt turned back to the screen. “That comparison to my faux fur blanket was an insult to my interior decorating skills.”
Then Dad walked in the room, and dread roiled in the pit of Kurt’s stomach.
“Kurt, I think we need to-wait, Star Wars?”
Kurt stuck to his play-it-cool game plan. “Yes. Finn recommended it. It’s fascinating,” Kurt said very seriously. “John Williams’s score really is impressive, and I like the shiny gold butler.”
“Protocol droid,” Finn corrected. Then he turned back to Dad. “Yep. We’ve got a big afternoon of sci-fi bro-bonding planned,” Finn added, punching Kurt’s shoulder affectionately.
Dad tugged his hat back and scratched his head. “That’s cool that you’re bonding. It’s great to see you guys doing stuff together.” He paused again, bewildered. “Bonding over Star Wars?”
Kurt looked up at his dad as if he had no idea why he was so befuddled by this turn of events. “Yes, Star Wars. Did you have something you wanted to say to me, Dad? Because I’m really kind of caught up in the movie.”
Dad’s mouth hung open a little. “Uh, it can wait ‘til you and Finn are done. Have fun.”
“Oh, we are,” Finn said. “Burt, not to put you out or anything, but do you have any of that bacon left? It just feels wrong, watching movies without snacks.”
“Yeah. I’ll, uh, go get you guys some stuff to eat.”
Kurt waited until he was munching contentedly on a whole-wheat bagel, Finn was scarfing down a turkey bacon sandwich, and Dad and Carole had gone out for a walk before he spoke again. “Thanks for doing this with me, Finn.”
“No problem,” Finn said. “Trust me, I totally get wanting to avoid awkward parent conversations.”
“I-you know I’m doing this to avoid Dad?” Kurt asked, startled.
Finn was unruffled. “Dude, you were more excited about watching Star Wars than you were for Black Friday. I may not be the brightest crayon in the box, but I’m not stupid.”
“Sorry,” Kurt said, hoping that it would cover both underestimating Finn and using him as a father-son chat shield.
“Like I said, it’s not a big deal. Don’t worry about it. I take it Burt found out about Blaine.”
“Yeah,” Kurt sighed. “He walked in on Blaine in my bed.”
“Ooh, ouch.” Finn chewed thoughtfully on a bite of sandwich, then continued, “I’m sorry about last night. I didn’t do very well helping you out.”
Kurt turned away from the movie and looked at Finn, confused. “What? No, you were great.”
Finn shook his head. “I should’ve offered to let Blaine sleep in my bed. I didn’t think of it ‘til this morning.” Kurt’s eyes widened. Finn saw it and added, “Not that I would’ve been grossed out or anything by sharing my bed with you and putting Blaine in your room, either. It’s just that putting Blaine with me would’ve been the least awkward arrangement all around. I’m totally cool with you, Kurt. But you know, I’m sure Luke and Leia are totally cool with each other, but with the kiss and the weird sexual tension between them, I bet they’d feel a little awkward sleeping together after they find out they’re both Darth Vader’s kids, too.” Then Finn got what Santana called his ‘gassy baby expression.’ “Oh crap. I just spoiled, like, most of the next two movies for you. I’m so sorry.”
Kurt couldn’t have cared less about the spoilers. He smiled. “Doesn’t matter. Thank you.” He settled back into the couch cushions. “So, are there any good costumes coming up in these next two movies?”
Finn screwed his face up in thought. “Well, there’s the Slave Leia costume, but…I don’t think you’re gonna be as interested in that one as a lot of guys are.”
They sat in silence through a space battle before Finn spoke up again. “Maybe I’m butting into something that’s not really any of my business, but take it easy on Burt when you guys get around to talking about what happened with Blaine, okay? You and Burt are way too solid to let some boy get in the way of that, no matter how much you like him.”
“I’m not going to talk to Dad about it. That was the whole point of the movie marathon, remember?”
“Yeah you are,” Finn said. Kurt sat up and looked at him skeptically. “It’s pretty clear Burt doesn’t really want to talk about it, either, or he would have by now. But Blaine is bothering both of you enough that one of you is gonna crack eventually.”
Kurt stared at Finn as he finished off a juice box with a loud slurp. How was it that the same person who cheated off Brittany’s vocabulary quizzes all through eighth grade could understand how Kurt’s brain worked better than Kurt did himself sometimes?
“Mom and Burt would’ve grounded me ‘til graduation if I’d brought a girl home to sleep it off in my bed, you know,” Finn commented.
“But I can’t get Blaine pregnant,” Kurt said.
Finn shrugged. “Mom set Quinn up in my bed and made me sleep on the couch when she was pregnant. I don’t think that’s the only reason parents worry about it. Just-take care of yourself with this guy, all right?”
Kurt flushed to the tips of his ears.
Finn saw Kurt’s reaction, and his cheeks turned pink, too. “I didn’t mean physically-though, yeah, that too, however guys are supposed to do that with other guys. I was talking about not falling too hard for him. You kind of have a tendency to do that.”
“Seriously, Finn, I appreciate the whole ‘big brother gives sage advice’ thing, but you’re only six weeks older than me,” Kurt said in an attempt to cut off the conversation.
“I do have more experience dating than you do, though. I would think at least this much would apply to dating guys the same way it does to dating girls. Plus, six weeks is six weeks,” Finn said, smirking and breaking the tension a little. “All I’m saying is, Blaine seems like a decent guy, and if something ever happens between you and him, that’s cool. But no guy is worth getting all broken up over, and if he can’t see your awesomeness, it’s his loss.”
“Thanks. I’ll try,” Kurt said. He meant it, too. He turned back to the movie. “So, is the Chewbacca actually saying lines in Chewbaccese when he growls like that? Otherwise, I don’t see how Hans Olo can have him as co-pilot of the Millennium Bird.”
Finn stared at Kurt in slack-jawed horror. “There are so many things wrong with those sentences, I don’t even know where to start. You’re totally getting a Star Wars word-a-day calendar for your birthday.”
Late that night, Kurt settled into bed, exhausted from a full day of movie-watching with Finn. (They’d moved on to the prequels after they finished the three good movies, as Finn called them, though Kurt had enjoyed the prequels more because of Natalie Portman’s clothes and Finn joining in Kurt’s snarky running commentary.) Normally, Kurt drifted off to sleep by letting his imagination run wild with his catalog of Blaine-related fantasies in the hope that those pleasant thoughts would follow him into his dreams. That night, none of the old standards felt right. After briefly considering and discarding a fantasy involving Billy Dee Williams (the curly hair, charisma, and fabulous cape were all huge pluses, but the mustache was too eighties porno for Kurt’s taste), he hit on a new idea he liked very much.
He really wasn’t sure if he was still awake or asleep, but Kurt found himself sitting on a loveseat. It wasn’t peach; it was a tasteful if bland beige, spiced up a little by the deep red accent wall behind it. A tall high school girl with neat, pretty brown hair and huge eyes adjusted a camera sitting on a tripod.
She said as she stared at the viewscreen, “You’re both centered in the shot, so we’re all set. Three, two, one, action.”
Finn sat up straighter beside Kurt and looked at the camera like a deer caught in the crossfire of headlights. “Oh, does that mean you want us to start talking now?”
The girl sighed dramatically. “Yes, Dad, that’s what ‘action’ means.”
“Okay. Uh, so, this is for my daughter Eva’s multimedia family history project…thing for school.”
“Dad, they’re going to know that already. Just tell the story.”
“Right, yeah.” Finn moved to run his hand through his hair, which never failed to make Kurt snicker now that Finn was bald. Finn gathered himself and said, “Okay, so, how Uncle Kurt and I became brothers. Not gonna lie, it was a little awkward for us, when your Grandma and Grandpa Hummel first started dating.”
“I set them up,” Kurt cut in. “Even if it wasn’t with the purest of intentions, I think we can all agree that the end result was so good that my original motivations don’t really matter.”
“I thought we were gonna skip that part,” Finn whispered to Kurt.
“The rest of the story doesn’t make sense without some context. I’m still glossing over the details,” Kurt whispered back.
“Anyway,” Finn spoke up and turned to the camera again, “after things came to a head in one really ugly fight, we all started getting along a lot better. Then Grandma and Grandpa got married.”
Kurt said, “Your dad serenaded me at the wedding, and even danced with me. It was kind of embarrassing, honestly, but I was going through a difficult time at school, and it meant a lot to me. ‘Just the Way You Are.’”
Finn smiled. “Still a great song. Now, you’d think that publicly singing to your new step-bro would have to be the moment when the two of you truly became brothers. That’s definitely what I was trying for when I did it.”
“But you can’t plan things like that,” Kurt said. “They have to just…happen. Not saying that the song wasn’t important, and wonderful, but it was more of a beginning to the process of becoming brothers.” Finn nodded in agreement. Kurt chuckled to himself. “Believe me, I would love nothing more than to tell you the story of how Bruno Mars truly made us family. But it wasn’t Bruno Mars. It was George Lucas.”
They both grinned and shook their heads. Finn said, “We watched Star Wars movies together all day one Saturday when Uncle Kurt was trying to avoid having to talk to Grandpa after he caught Uncle Blaine in Uncle Kurt’s bed sleeping off a heck of a hangover. He kinda hated them, but he watched all, like, fourteen hours of it with me. There was something about working together to try to sneak Blaine in the house without waking anybody and then combining forces to try to dodge the fallout the next day that really felt like something brothers would do.”
“Nothing happened in the bed, though!” Kurt added hastily. “I know you’re going to be watching this, Paul and Bernadette, and you so cannot use this as ‘but you did it when you were my age’ ammunition with me and Papa.”
Finn completely broke character, so that Kurt was no longer talking to Forty Years Later Finn, but rather an imaginary version of Current Finn in Forty Years Later Finn’s body. It should’ve felt stranger than it did, but Kurt was used to strange dreams by now. “You’re married to Blaine and have two kids named Paul and Bernadette? Not really taking my advice in terms of not falling too hard, are you?” Finn said.
It was irritating, how even the Finn in his dreams was overly perceptive. Kurt tried to veer the conversation off into less testy territory. “There is nothing wrong with naming my children after Sir Paul McCartney and Bernadette Peters. It’s no worse than Rachel naming all your children after characters from Broadway musicals.”
“What?” Finn said. “I’m not sure if I should be more weirded out by you mentally hooking me up with Rachel or making me bald.”
“You work the bald look much better than Blaine or I could,” Kurt non-answered.
“Speaking of Blaine…”
Kurt sighed. “Yes, I know I’m getting way ahead of myself, but it would weird to have us married to random people we’ve never met, wouldn’t it?” Finn seemed to accept that, but Kurt added, “And anyway, a boy can dream, right?”
Media: Fic
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: Through 2.14 (BIOTA)
Characters: Kurt Hummel, Blaine Anderson, Finn Hudson, Rachel Berry, Mercedes Jones, Burt Hummel; Kurt/Blaine, Kurt-Finn brothers
Length: ~10,000 words
Warnings: Language, vague allusions to sexual activity
Summary: Kurt had always imagined having Blaine in his bed would be a dream come true. Instead, it was turning into a nightmare-or multiple bizarre nightmares that would have been funny if they weren’t his, to be more precise.
Notes: Many thanks to my beta, safenthecity. In addition to the Glee spoilers, there are also spoilers for When Harry Met Sally, Inception, and Star Wars. No, this is not a cross-over; the characters are just movie buffs.
Dream a Little Dream of Me
Kurt still thought Rachel’s fantasizing about her funeral was flat-out bizarre, but she was far from the only one guilty of distant-future daydreams. Kurt’s favorite part of When Harry Met Sally was not the faked orgasm scene, or even the New Year’s Eve speech. No, it was the stories the elderly couples told about falling in love. (He had cried the day he found out they were actors and not real couples. At least the stories themselves were true, or he didn’t think he could have ever watched the movie again.)
Often, when his mind wandered in class, or when he was waiting in line somewhere, or right before he fell asleep, Kurt would imagine himself sitting beside Blaine on that peach loveseat in the room with the garish wallpaper. He could see the two of them perfectly (Blaine would look so ridiculously good graying at the temples), Blaine pressed up against him from knee to shoulder, his hand on Blaine’s leg, both smiling like lovesick kids, except with laugh lines. (Or maybe in forty years they’d invent something that did away with wrinkles without paralyzing your face like Botox did. That would certainly be nice.)
The problem with this fantasy was Kurt could only play it in his head on mute. Months ago, he would have been comfortable using the “Teenage Dream” story as their moment, and maybe he would be again, someday. For now, though, given all the very unromantic drama that had occurred in the interim, the story needed to have more to it than a serenade about tight clothing followed by a long stint in the friends-zone. Kurt tried to play out possible stories in his head-because, let’s face it, you have to practice if you want a line as great as “I knew the way you know about a good melon” or “Nine extra floors”-but it wasn’t the same. He longed for the moment that both of them would look back on and say, “Yes, that was when we knew.”
As cliché as it would have been, Kurt had even half-way hoped that, despite the fact that Rachel threw parties that rivaled Mary Tyler Moore’s for disastrousness, her party could provide his and Blaine’s “I love that it takes you an hour and a half to order a sandwich” moment. (And yes, Kurt knew that wasn’t the moment Harry and Sally used in their peach loveseat interview, but really, they made a lousy choice. Who talks about coconut cake when you have “When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible”? That was why one had to practice these things ahead of time.)
Of course, like every other inchoate fantasy Kurt had crafted as a candidate for the further fantasy of the Forty Years Later loveseat interview, the party one had crashed and burned. It had crashed harder than Blaine had when he’d fallen off the stage during his and Rachel’s encore performance of “Broken Wings.” Between the kiss and the duets and the fact that Blaine had drunk past cutely uninhibited to fairly embarrassing, the evening had gone from a story to tell the grandkids to a night Kurt would rather forget. But because Kurt and Finn both agreed that leaving Blaine passed out at Rachel’s was a recipe for even greater disaster, Kurt knew the horrors of the night had only just begun.
“Man, he’s heavy for such a small guy,” Finn grunted as he and Kurt turned, pointing Blaine at the stairs. They had to squeeze in closer together to make it up the stairway three abreast. Blaine clung to their shoulders even tighter when he apparently forgot how to move his right leg.
“’M not small,” Blaine protested way too loudly for sneaking into a house at one in the morning.
Kurt shushed Blaine, then said to Finn, “Don’t bring up his height. He has a bit of a Napoleon complex.”
Finn asked, “What’s a Napoleon-”
“At least, I don’t think I’m small,” Blaine interrupted. “I’ve never had a boyfriend, but porn over-exasperates-er, over-exaggerates.”
Kurt was impressed that Finn didn’t pull away. He just cringed, and hell, Kurt was cringing, too, though probably for slightly different reasons. “I’m sure you’re perfectly adequate, Blaine, but right now you need to be quiet, like shhhh, okay? We’re sneaking you into my house without waking my parents, remember?”
Blaine nodded with that drunk variety of serious that one definitely could not trust. “Right, ‘cause you’re brothers, you’ve got the same parents, ‘cept you just got brotherhooded recently, so yeah but not really. You guys are awesome brothers. Finn, seriously. Like, seriously. And Kurt-” Blaine swiveled his head too fast. Kurt and Finn halted their progress down the hall while he regained his balance and checked his gag reflex.
“And Kurt,” Blaine continued, the sincerity of his expression marred by the blast of peppermint schnapps breath that hit Kurt’s face as soon as he opened his mouth. “Kurt, you’re the best. You’re my best. Best friend ever. And that shirt looks really nice on your chest. And that rhymes. And it’s really soft…” Blaine dropped his head to Kurt’s shoulder. He shifted so almost all his weight was on Kurt. Finn held on, though he was really just keeping Blaine from knocking Kurt over with dead weight.
“Yep, he’s definitely the needy, cuddly guy drunk archetype. It’s a rarer archetype among guys than girls, but he wouldn’t be the first,” Finn observed in a hushed voice. “Which drunk archetype are you?”
Kurt flashed back to traumatic visions of Bambi standing in a hallway at McKinley, wearing (formerly) perfectly polished gold pumps and wailing about the bacteria count in the average teenage stomach. “Weepy drunk,” Kurt whispered back. “So, I take it you’re enjoying your SAT-prep word-a-day calendar?”
“Yeah. Thanks for that, by the way,” Finn said. “I admit, I kind of thought it was a lame birthday present at first, but now, I’m really getting into it. I even try to use the word in conversation five times that day so I don’t forget it.”
Kurt nodded. “Ah. Was that five times for ‘archetype’ now?”
“Actually, that was ten. I’m doing twice as much today so I can skip tomorrow. I looked ahead, and I don’t think I can get ‘prurient’ in five times on a Saturday that Puck is out of town.”
“Way to plan ahead,” Blaine said.
Not knowing where to even start mocking that exchange, Kurt simply shook his head and opened his bedroom door. Finn let go of Blaine, and Kurt maneuvered him through the doorway. It was too much of a struggle just keeping Blaine upright for Kurt to turn on the light switch. For once, Kurt was happy his room wasn’t in the basement anymore; a streetlight outside his window provided enough illumination for them to see where they were going fairly well.
“There’s a bear on your bed. Or a Chewbacca,” Blaine said right before he flopped onto Kurt’s faux beaver fur blanket, face-first.
“What’s a Chewbacca?” Kurt muttered at Finn, who was still standing in the doorway. He worked at removing Blaine’s shoes, though it was tricky to do backwards like that.
“Seriously?” Finn whispered. “Dude, we so have to fix this gap in your pop culture knowledge tomorrow. One p.m., living room, Star Wars marathon. Be there or be square.”
Kurt stopped what he was doing to dramatically stare at Finn in horror.
Finn calmly answered, “I won’t make you suffer through the prequels, but more importantly, you still owe me for sitting through Burlesque.”
Kurt rolled his eyes in surrender-that didn’t mean he was actually going to attend this sci-fi movie marathon thing, but it would be enough to get Finn to drop it for now. With one last yank, he got Blaine’s shoe off. He surveyed Blaine’s prone form for a moment to come up with a strategy, then moved to the other side of the bed so he could take hold of his wrists and pull him completely onto the bed.
Finn crossed his arms and lowered his brow. “You sure about this?”
Kurt paused again to evaluate whether it was possible to get Blaine under any of the covers, then decided he was probably warm enough anyway with all his clothes on. “I’m not going to molest my friend in his drunken stupor, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Kurt spat more harshly than he’d intended. He tried to soften it by adding, “After all, I’m not like Rachel after she’s got four green apple wine coolers in her system.”
Finn winced. “I didn’t mean it like that. I’m not worried about you doing anything. Him, I don’t trust so much.”
Kurt shot Finn an even dirtier look at that. It was awkward defending Blaine’s honor, especially when on a few occasions he’d maybe fantasized about Blaine being dishonorable and just shoving his tongue down his throat already, niceties be damned, but he felt it was his duty as Blaine’s friend.
“Not saying he’s a bad guy or anything, just that if he’s drunk enough to try to eat Rachel’s face, he’s seriously not thinking about what he’s doing right now.” Kurt was tempted to take a pot shot at Finn for phrasing it so it sounded like anyone was crazy to kiss his own ex-girlfriend, but he refrained. Finn continued, “Anyway, the bigger issue here is that Burt will blow a less huge gasket if he finds Blaine sleeping off a hangover on the floor than in your bed.”
Kurt had been thinking about the inevitable Dad problem since Blaine handed over his car keys. If it hadn’t been for Rachel making out with Blaine with the intensity and suction of a vacuum cleaner, he would’ve been tempted to leave Blaine to crash at her place and bring him his car in the morning. That way, there would be no chance of his dad’s first substantial interaction with Blaine being a drunken one.
“Thank you for your concern, but my dad is not going to see Blaine in my bed. In fact, he’s not even going to know Blaine was here. Blaine will sleep it off, I’ll wake him up before Dad gets up at seven-thirty, and I’ll shove him out the door with a thermos of coffee. Dad will never know that Rachel’s party wasn’t a Julie Andrews movie marathon, and we can all just forget this night ever happened.”
Finn looked at Kurt skeptically, but he finally shrugged. “Okay, I won’t say anything. Better give me Blaine’s keys, though.”
“Huh?”
“Somebody’s got to park his car a few blocks away so Burt doesn’t look out the window tomorrow morning and see it’s still in the driveway.”
Well, shit. Kurt hadn’t thought about that near-disaster. What else was he not thinking about? This is what you get for spending your childhood rebelling via fashion rather than sex and illicit substances, Kurt thought to himself.
“Thank you so much.” He tossed Finn the keys. “I take back every joke I ever made about your IQ’s similarity to Brittany’s geometry exam scores.”
Finn smiled and shrugged again. “It’s nothing. What are brothers for, right?”
That word coming out of Finn’s mouth still had the power to make Kurt automatically smile. “Still. Thanks.”
“Good luck,” Finn said, saluting Kurt with the keys in his hand and pulling the bedroom door shut as he left.
Kurt surveyed Blaine again, still sprawled face down on the comforter.
“Blaine, you asleep?”
“Mrrrmpgh.”
“I’m going to do my nightly skincare routine, so if you need anything, just knock on the bathroom door, all right? Okay.”
Kurt grabbed a pair of pajamas from his dresser and retreated into his bathroom. He usually showered in the mornings, but just being at that party had left him feeling sticky and smelly. He undressed, which took a while (harnesses might be in vogue this season, but they were a bitch to unbuckle by yourself), and gave his red shirt an extra-harsh toss across the small room. (Blaine had said red looked good on him. Apparently he’d just been trying to convince Kurt that he could work the Dalton red sweater vest into his uniform rotation. Sweater vests. The horror.)
The hot water beating down on Kurt’s shoulders wasn’t as soothing as he’d hoped. All he could think about was how he had fantasized this very same, very ridiculous scenario so many times, only with both him and Blaine barely inhibition-looseningly tipsy, and with no Rachel-kissing. The daydream version continued with Blaine startling Kurt by slipping into the shower and wrapping his arms around him from behind. Kurt felt sick even thinking about it now. There had been a certain safety and comfort in the absurdity of the scenario that was gone now that Blaine was lying in the next room.
Kurt had just finished exfoliating when he heard Blaine bang open the door. His daydream was dangerously close to coming true, except for how it was playing out more like a nightmare. What about this situation did I think was hot and not just mortifying? he thought to himself. He poked his head out of the shower, clutching the curtain up near his chin.
“Uh, Blaine? What are you-”
An odd mix of relief and second-hand embarrassment hit Kurt when he saw that Blaine had his hand clamped over his mouth. He dropped to his knees and slid towards the toilet in a much less graceful version of the move he’d pulled with the socks at the end of “When I Get You Alone.” Kurt decided to skip the remainder of his skincare routine (and if that isn’t love, Blaine, I don’t know what is), grabbed his bathrobe off the hook by the tub, put it on, and then emerged from behind the shower curtain. He sighed and knelt beside Blaine as he vomited up more than Kurt had thought a human stomach could hold. Kurt reflected on how lucky they were that Kurt’s bathroom was ensuite instead of down the hall as he smoothed his hand up and down Blaine’s back. He wasn’t sure if the gesture did any good, but it was the only help he could think of to give.
How the hell did Robbie still find Julia cute when she threw up in The Wedding Singer? Kurt marveled silently. Cute enough he’d put a line in his song about it? There is absolutely nothing romantic about this.
The gagging petered out. Kurt asked, “Feel better now? Oops, no no, don’t-I may be mildly obsessive-compulsive when it comes to cleaning, but you really shouldn’t use even that toilet seat for a pillow.”
Blaine sat back on his heels and held his head in his hands. Kurt hadn’t thought he could look any more rumpled than when Kurt and Finn had half-carried him to the car. Now, Blaine’s clothing looked like it’d spent a week at the bottom of Finn’s dirty laundry pile before he pulled them on. “Sorry. I really wish I’d put a toothbrush in my wallet.”
“Blaine, that doesn’t make any sen-oh. Is that drunk for, ‘My mouth tastes like vomit, and I want it not to?’ Okay, I can handle that.”
Two teeth-brushings and one very awkward mouthwash later (“Don’t you dare swallow! No more alcohol of any kind for you!”), and all Kurt could think of to say was, “How is it that after all that, you still smell like peppermint schnapps?”
Blaine made a face. “I didn’t actually drink much of it. Brittany poured some in my hair, though.”
Kurt sighed. “I don’t even want to know how that happened. Go back to bed. I still have to get dressed. If you need to throw up again before I’m out of here, just use the wastebasket.”
Blaine nodded meekly and stumbled out of the bathroom, pulling the door shut behind him.
Kurt dressed quickly and cut down his post-shower skin treatment to one emergency coat of lotion; he wasn’t going to risk leaving Blaine alone any longer than necessary. When he returned to the bedroom, much to his dismay, he found Blaine snuggled under the sheets on the right side of the bed and staring at him under drooping eyelids. So much for Blaine sleeping on top of the covers.
“Did I take your side of the bed?” Blaine asked, apparently noticing Kurt’s expression.
Kurt refrained from pointing out that it was all his bed. “You’re fine,” he said tiredly, already turning to search for a throw to cover up with.
“Where’re you going?” Blaine asked. Kurt turned and saw that Blaine had flipped back the covers on the empty side of the bed and was patting the opposite pillow.
Kurt was exhausted. “Screw chivalry,” he muttered.
He crawled into bed, though he did slide between the covers so that he was under the fur blanket and comforter but on top of the flat sheet. Blaine flopped over on his side, facing away from Kurt, but he sent his legs sprawling diagonally across the bed. Kurt turned onto his side and carefully curled his legs towards his chest so they wouldn’t accidentally touch, even though he could never sleep in that position. He felt stupid, worrying so much about the appearance of propriety, particularly when the only audience was himself and a guy who was too drunk to be able to remember any of this gentlemanliness in the morning.
He felt even more stupid for ever having fantasized about this happening. And Kurt had, more times than he would ever admit, even to Mercedes. He’d come up with dozens of ridiculous scenarios for why Blaine would have to stay over: a blizzard, a collaborative class project requiring an all-nighter, a fire at Blaine’s house, an earthquake (hey, Dalton’s new Earth Sciences teacher had said the New Madrid fault line was due for a big shift one of these days), a government quarantine in response to a terrorist attack or fast-spreading zombie virus. The fantasies had always been much fuzzier about why Blaine had to sleep in Kurt’s bed with him-usually Blaine and Kurt just naturally came to that decision, and Dad and Carole were snowed in elsewhere or too busy zombie-proofing the neighborhood to care. Then he and Blaine would just as naturally progress from accidental touching to cuddling to kissing to…well, things got a little fuzzy after that, not to mention that how far things progressed depended on where exactly it was Kurt was doing his fantasizing.
There was a reason Kurt had to twist reality into a pretzel to come up with a good story, he now realized: it was because the most likely scenario was awkward and embarrassing and smelled too much like Rachel Berry and the contents of her dads’ liquor cabinet. Really, he should’ve learned after the Finn debacle that fantasy and reality didn’t much resemble each other. He looked over his shoulder at Blaine’s back, shoulders rising and falling with his breathing. At least he’d done better setting up some boundaries this time. Sort of.
Kurt turned back over and closed his eyes. He murmured to himself as he felt sleep tugging him down into unconsciousness, “Apparently it’s not enough for Rachel to ruin my actual shot at getting something remotely like action tonight. No, she had to go and ruin my shot at getting any in my imagination, too…”
“You know that part in Inception where they talk about how you never remember how your dreams start, but you never actually question it? Like in the movie, when they don’t remember how they got to the little street corner coffee shop?” Mercedes said as she contemplated the Lima Bean’s menu board.
“Dreams are weird like that,” Kurt commented. For some reason, the words on the board wouldn’t come into focus, no matter how much Kurt concentrated and squinted. It didn’t matter, since he already knew his order.
“It’s completely false, anyway,” Rachel cut in as she pulled her wallet out of her jacket pocket. “Just last week, I had a dream in which I knew I was dreaming and clearly remembered how I went from my bedroom to Broadway.”
“Well, aren’t you special,” Mercedes deadpanned in a way that suggested she was anything but.
“Inception was such a good movie. I just got it on DVD,” Blaine added. He patted Kurt’s shoulder playfully. “I keep trying to get Kurt to watch it with me, but he won’t budge.”
Kurt wondered to himself why the hell he would turn down any opportunity to watch a DVD with Blaine (particularly if they lowered the lights, and maybe played it on his laptop so they had to sit really close for both of them to see the screen). For some reason, that inconsistency didn’t bother him all that much. He answered, “I simply don’t do science fiction. The only exception I ever made was for the Star Wars movie where Natalie Portman dressed in Asian-inspired haute couture.”
“How did that go?” Mercedes asked.
Kurt made a face. “For the life of me, I can’t figure out why they wasted so much time on the Jedis when they’re all dressed like tae kwon do students with brown bathrobes.”
Rachel moved up to the counter and said, “I’ll have an iced maté latte, and...ooh, the biscotti looks good.”
“It’s excellent. I highly recommend it,” Blaine said. Then he turned back to Kurt. “There are three incontrovertibly good reasons you should watch Inception: one, Leonardo DiCaprio, two, Joseph Gordon Levitt, and three, Marion Cotillard.”
Rachel gasped in delight. “Oh, Marion Cotillard! Isn’t she amazing?”
Blaine’s face lit up. “Amazing. Did you see her Vogue cover?”
Having already had this conversation a few times, Kurt chose to tune it out and ordered his coffee. Then he must have spaced off for a minute, because the next thing he knew, he was sitting beside Mercedes at their normal table, Blaine across from him and Rachel beside Blaine, drinks in hand and a big plate of biscotti between them.
Blaine was still chatting with Rachel. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m thrilled that she has such mainstream appeal now. But don’t you ever sort of wish for the days when her fans were fewer but they had all seen La Vie en Rose?”
“Mmm, this biscotti is so good,” Rachel said enthusiastically, her voice pitched lower than normal.
Blaine took a bite and moaned. “I know.”
Rachel nibbled again, then dropped her head back and ran her hand down her throat, making noises the whole time.
“Can I try?” Kurt asked. He tried to reach for the plate, but much to his surprise, his arm wouldn’t move. There was nothing obstructing his range of motion, nothing hurt-his arm simply would not respond to his brain’s dictates. “Hey! What the hell…”
Blaine was too caught up in his biscotti to care. He took another bite, and his eyes rolled back in his head. “Oh, God…”
Kurt turned to Mercedes, looking for help with his arm, but she just sat and drunkenly giggled at her frappe. “Hee, Puck totally spiked my coffee…hee hee…they’re funny…”
Kurt’s gaze followed her finger as she pointed across the table at Blaine and Rachel. Rachel was writhing in her chair, whipping her hair around and pounding her fists on the table in ecstasy. Blaine wasn’t moving nearly as much. He was sprawled in his seat like his limbs were limp noodles, but he was much more vocal. Even though they were sitting side by side and not touching at all, Blaine’s moans of “oh God, oh, yes, yes, YES!” were perfectly in sync with the rhythm of Rachel’s gyrations.
Kurt yanked on his arm to no avail. “No! Blaine, you agreed I get to be Meg Ryan! I don’t care how good that fucking biscotti is, I’m the only one allowed to fake an orgasm in a café. You’re Billy Crystal, damn it! And you, Rachel Berry, are Carrie Fisher, so back the fuck off my classic scene!”
Kurt woke from the dream with a start. It took him a minute to calm his breathing and remember he was in his bedroom. It took another moment to recognize the light buzz saw of a snore beside him as Blaine. Finally, it dawned on him why he hadn’t been able to move his arm in the dream. He had thrown it out away from his body as he slept, and despite Kurt’s gentlemanly attempts at separation with the bed sheet business, Blaine had somehow rolled on top of his arm. In fact, upon closer inspection, Kurt realized Blaine wasn’t merely lying on it; he was sort of…cuddling it under his body, such that Kurt’s completely-numb pinky was touching Blaine’s cheek.
“You still reek, but that’s…that’s pretty cute,” Kurt admitted, smiling at him and glad that there was no one around to see what a soppy dork he must’ve looked like. Blaine shifted, but he didn’t wake up. The tingle of decreased blood flow to Kurt’s hand was starting to hurt. “Cute or not, I need my arm back now, please.”
At first, he tried to slip his arm out from underneath Blaine without disturbing him. When that didn’t get him anywhere, Kurt rolled Blaine onto his side with his free arm, then yanked his trapped arm out of the way before letting go. Blaine flopped back into position, burying his nose in his pillow.
Kurt carefully resituated himself on the other side of the bed, flat on his back and hands clasped over his chest so they wouldn’t wander again. Cute arm-thievery or no, the whole situation was still far more awkward than it was worth. In fact, it was even more awkward now that he could visualize Blaine’s “O” face from the dream. He considered giving up and moving to the couch in the living room but ultimately decided against it. Not only would his dad likely wake up before he did, find him on the sofa, and realize something was fishy, but leaving Blaine alone to possibly wander the house if he woke up was too big of a risk as well.
Resigned to his fate, Kurt closed his eyes and counted backward from one hundred in multiples of three, hoping to bore himself to sleep. He gave up when he hit negative two hundred thirty-four. He tried reciting things out loud-quietly enough not to wake Blaine, but then again, a freight train running through the room probably wouldn’t have woken Blaine. Presidents. States and capitals. French royalty. Song lyrics. Friends’ phone numbers. Project Runway contestants, in ascending order of bitchiness.
“Blaine, are you awake?” Kurt finally whispered without turning his head when he’d run out of things to recite. Blaine merely snored a little louder. “Thought so. Not to begrudge you your fun, but the fact that I’m the responsible one, and yet you’re the one who’s having both the more fun and the more comfortably guilt-free night is so not fair. In a fair universe, you should be the one staring at the ceiling, whining about the unfairness of life and how this night turned out nothing like it was supposed to.”
Kurt yawned, then said, “Yes, I’m pissed about spin-the-bottle-not so much at you, or at Rachel, just at the universe in general-well, okay, maybe a little bit at Rachel. Mostly, though, I’m pissed about…this,” he said, gesturing at the bed.
He looked over at Blaine. Blaine was facing Kurt’s side of the bed now, though lying mostly on his stomach. He looked much younger when he was asleep. Unfairly beautiful. “Is it really too much to ask that the first time I share a bed with a boy be the slightest bit romantic? Or even just special? According to all the literature, boys like you are supposed to smell like boy, and this smell is supposed to be intoxicating. I’m sorry, but you smell like an alcoholic resident of Candyland.
“I did think this first might be with you, you know. I thought I might get a lot of firsts with you,” Kurt admitted, not bothering to mask his disappointment. “I don’t understand you sometimes. You never hesitate when you really want something-grabbing my hand the day we met, petitioning the Warblers to serenade the GAP employee, even the kiss with Rachel. And don’t think I didn’t notice how smooth it was for a drunken kiss.” Kurt tried to raise his eyebrow in disdain, but the haughtiness of the expression got lost in another yawn. “You may have never had a boyfriend before, but you’ve certainly had a make-out session with somebody.
“But that’s beside the point. My point is, why do I have to be the one thing you hesitate on? You clearly understood my When Harry Met Sally reference. If you truly weren’t interested at all, you would’ve clarified or countered with My Best Friend’s Wedding or something, wouldn’t you?” Then he added more to himself, “Or it could be that I chose to compare us to a movie where the will-they-won’t-they goes on for twelve years, so your waffling is actually right on target. Nice job, Kurt.”
Kurt huffed and felt his eyelids flutter shut. “Maybe we should carry on the entirety of our relationship in song, if you can be so honest when you perform like you say you are. Then again, apparently you can’t serenade anyone you really like without a troupe of back-up singers. Honestly, you’re worse than all my girl friends who can’t go to the bathroom by themselves…”
“You know what the most confusing type of dream is?” Blaine asked, pushing the heavy faux-beaver fur blanket off the bed so all that was left were the red satin sheets.
“Which kind?” Kurt asked, crossing his legs so he was sitting Indian-style on the bed. He wondered for a moment why he’d chosen red sheets, because he thought he’d bought white, and anyway light blue complemented his skin tone much better, but he lost his train of thought in the flicker of candlelight reflected in Blaine’s eyes.
Blaine sat up fully and said, “The kind that take place in the location where you fell asleep. That makes it much harder to distinguish the separation between reality and the dream. It’s even worse when the dream ends in the same place, because it takes you a while once you wake up to accept that the dream was a dream.”
“Is it really that difficult?” Kurt asked. “I know this is a dream.”
Blaine smiled. “No it’s not.”
“Yes it is.”
“No, you were dreaming before,” Blaine said, still grinning. “That’s what I meant about the confusion when the dream-place is the same as the place you fell asleep in reality. This is reality.” He placed his hands on Kurt’s knees and scooted closer.
Well, that was certainly…pleasantly distracting. Kurt cleared his throat, a little nervous. “I know this is a dream, because I actually did see Inception this summer with Finn and Puck and Mike. Hence, the coffee shop was a dream, then I woke up, and now I’m dreaming again.” Suddenly, he wondered if maybe this was one of those dreams-within-dreams that the movie had been going on and on about. He wished for the first time that he’d paid better attention to Leonardo DiCaprio’s blatant expositing rather than focusing so intently on Joseph Gordon Levitt’s eyes and impeccably tailored suits.
Then Blaine challenged his logic in a way Kurt hadn’t been prepared for at all.
“Oh yeah?” His voice was low and breathy. He moved in so close his curls tickled Kurt’s forehead. “Don’t you want this to be reality?”
Kurt took one shaky breath and inhaled the scent of boy-and good god, what a wonderfully heady, hormone-jolting smell it was-before Blaine’s lips pressed against his. Blaine tasted like root beer Lip Smackers, which was odd, but Kurt was in no state to complain about details.
Suddenly and for absolutely no reason, Kurt knew with utter certainty that he was about to lose some permutation of his virginity. Only then did it register with him that the evidence of their planning was all around him: candles, tacky satin bed sheets, new underwear (which, it now dawned on him, was all they were wearing), certain items he knew were in the bed stand drawer. Blaine was too busy worshipping Kurt’s collarbone with his mouth to notice Kurt’s shock at this revelation.
Kurt blurted, “Oh, shit. This better not be a wet dream.”
That made Blaine look up, but he was grinning fondly. “Now you’re just being silly. You need to relax.”
He directed Kurt to lie on his stomach, then started massaging his shoulders. Kurt sighed into the pillow, only wondering a little at how completely comfortable he felt. They’d obviously worked very hard on making sure all the other clichés of first times were there, what with the candles and everything. The only things missing were virginal reticence and Marvin Gaye.
As if on cue, Blaine started to sing. “I’ve been really trying, baby, trying to hold back these feelings for so long…”
Then Kurt heard the classic wah-wah-wah guitar riff, though he could tell it wasn’t being produced by a guitar. He laughed when he realized what was up. “I can’t believe you actually got the Warblers to record an acapella arrangement of ‘Let’s Get It On’ for you.”
“They didn’t record it,” Blaine said nonchalantly. Every muscle in Kurt’s body tensed. “You wouldn’t be able to get this nice surround-sound feel from a recording.”
Kurt’s stomach iced over. He turned over very, very slowly, only to discover each and every Warbler arranged in a semi-circle around his bed, swaying in unison and harmonizing the let’s get it ons.
Not too many things could render Kurt absolutely speechless. This was one of the few.
Blaine noticed his slack-jawed expression-he would’ve had to have been blind to miss it. “Don’t you like ‘Let’s Get It On’? We could do ‘Can’t Get Enough of Your Love, Baby,’ though I don’t really have the lower range to do Barry White justice.”
Kurt’s vocal chords were still frozen when Wes broke ranks, looking very serious. “This is highly irregular, changing to a new song in a performance before finishing the first. The last time that happened was in 1928, when Headmaster Henry Hernshaw ordered the Warblers to immediately cease singing ‘Henry’s Made a Lady Out of Lizzie’ during a school assembly, for fear it would feed into rumors of the Headmaster’s possible dalliance with Mrs. Lizzie Leiderschmidt, Dalton’s then-head cook.”
“Please? You were willing to sing in the GAP for Jeremiah. Won’t you do this for Kurt?” Blaine begged sweetly. Wes huffed but relented. “Great. There’s a pitch pipe in the bedside table drawer, right next to the condoms.”
Finally, Kurt found his voice and screamed.
“Kurt!” Blaine said. Kurt sat up and tried to push a pair of hands off his shoulders. “Kurt, wake up! I think you were having a nightmare.”
You think so, Sherlock? What was your first clue? Kurt opened his eyes and did his best not to roll them at Blaine. He was still trying to catch his breath, though.
“I’m okay,” Kurt finally told Blaine. “Sorry to wake you.”
Blaine was sitting up in bed beside him. Kurt could see from the early-morning light slitting through the blinds that Blaine’s eyes were still bleary, but he looked far more lucid than he had a few hours ago. He was staring at Kurt with concern, squeezing his shoulder tenderly.
“Are you sober yet?” Kurt asked.
Blaine thought about it for a moment, then grimaced and sank back into his pillow.
“I’ll take that as a ‘no.’”
Blaine kneaded his fingers against his forehead, but it didn’t appear that it helped. Then, to Kurt’s surprise, Blaine refocused on him. “What was your nightmare about? Sounded like a bad one.”
Kurt tried to brush it off, but Blaine made an insistent sound and patted the pillow beside him. Kurt tentatively accepted the invitation and lay back down, facing Blaine. “It’s…kind of hard to explain.” Especially without mentioning the part where we almost had sex. “Have you ever seen the episode of The Muppet Show where pink monsters pop up out of nowhere and start singing every time Kermit says the word ‘phenomena’?”
Kurt thought it sounded like he was the one who was drunk, but was pleasantly surprised when Blaine nodded and sang, “Do doo do do do do,” in response.
“Like that, only with the Warblers, and at very inopportune moments.”
Blaine winced in sympathy. “Yikes. Wes is scary enough when he gives fair warning, let alone popping up randomly.”
Kurt burrowed deeper under the blanket. He knew that this should feel awkward, but curling up across the bed from Blaine and just talking like this made him feel more comfortable than he had all night. “I take it you’ve slept well.”
“Nah-ugh,” Blaine said, shaking his head and then cringing at the motion. “I had strange, bad dreams, too. You know the part in Dumbo where Dumbo and Timothy accidentally get drunk and then hallucinate dozens of scary pink elephants that nearly step on them?”
“‘Pink Elephants on Parade’?” Kurt chuckled. He could feel himself relaxing and his eyelids growing heavy. “That’s rather cliché for a drunk dream, isn’t it?”
Blaine closed his eyes. “If you’d been there, you would’ve thought it was scary, too. Well, you were there, as in you were in it, but not there there, obviously.”
“I think our subconsciouses are trying to tell us something,” Kurt murmured.
“Pink singing monsters, pink singing elephants-maybe that we’re traumatized by Rachel screaming that her drink tasted pink?”
“I’m traumatized by Rachel in general, but that’s nothing new.”
Kurt never heard Blaine’s response, if there was one.
The next thing Kurt knew, he was waking to the sound of the blender going in the kitchen.
“Oh shit.” He was instantly fully awake and sitting up in bed. He looked over at his alarm clock. 8:53 a.m. He must have accidentally set the alarm for 7:00 p.m. rather than a.m. He looked over at the other side of the bed, where Blaine was now lying on his stomach with his head under a pillow. “Oh shit.”
He thought through his options for a moment. Dad was up and in the kitchen, so that meant he’d already been in the living room that morning and seen that nobody had slept there the night before. So, no shot at admitting Blaine had spent the night but not admitting where. They’d have to walk past the kitchen to get from the foot of the stairs to either the front or back door, so no hope of sneaking Blaine past Dad while he was still making breakfast, either. Their only chance was for Blaine to lie low until Kurt was sure the coast was clear, which could be a while.
If the ruse was going to work, Kurt knew he had to go about his morning like it was a normal Saturday. He’d already overslept, but neither Dad nor Carole would find that alone weird. He decided to take a shower again, because that’s what he did every morning, but also because he still didn’t feel clean even after last night’s shower. He told himself it was because he cut his hygiene routine short, but he had a niggling suspicion that wasn’t really it.
He was able to shower and dress without interruption. When he came back into his room, he smiled when he saw that Finn had hung Blaine’s car keys on the doorknob on the inside of the door, complete with a little note saying he’d parked the car on the street in front of the Hansons’ house. For some reason, that soothed his nerves considerably.
In fact, Kurt was just sitting down at his vanity to stave off a stress-induced breakout and mentally patting himself on the back for how his plan was actually going to work when he heard his dad’s voice booming from the bottom of the stairway.
“Hey Kurt! Come give me a hand with these eggs.”
It was only then that Kurt remembered he and his dad had planned a Father-Son Cooking/Bonding Saturday for this morning. Oh crap oh crap oh crap. Stay cool. “I’ll be down in a minute,” he called out.
“What the hell is a shirred egg? Is that the same thing as a scrambled egg?”
Kurt froze in terror when he heard Dad’s footsteps up the stairs. There wasn’t time to hide Blaine. Kurt’s only hope was to take the same approach one should use when encountering a grizzly bear: speak calmly, act normally, avoid making any quick movements. If Kurt didn’t act like anything was wrong, no matter what, maybe Dad would buy into that theory, too.
The door opened.
“Hey, what’s this? Today was the day you were gonna teach me all about brunch!” Dad tapped on the cookbook, from all appearances genuinely excited about making eggs.
The fact that Dad was talking to the bed was not good. Blaine wasn’t exactly visible, though, besides the boy-shaped lump under the covers that could’ve just as easily been a pillow. Kurt leaned around to catch Dad’s eye and said, “I’ll be down in a sec.” He might still be able to get Dad out without blowing it.
Then, Blaine blew it.
“Where am I?” To Kurt’s horror, Blaine chose that moment to pop up and rub his bloodshot eyes. It didn’t even appear that Blaine registered Dad’s presence before he crashed back into the bed.
Kurt kept his own shock from creeping into his expression, but the same could most definitely not be said of his dad. “Oh. Uh, I’m sorry. My bad,” he said, eyes huge.
Kurt looked at him coolly, like he couldn’t fathom what his dear father could think was wrong with this tableau. It didn’t matter; Dad’s eyes were locked on the bed and Blaine the whole time, until he literally stumbled out of the room.
As soon as Dad was out of earshot, Kurt exhaled the breath he didn’t know he’d been holding. “Well, shit.”
Kurt finished his skincare regimen on autopilot. Of all the ways Dad could’ve found out about Blaine staying over, the only ones Kurt could think of that would’ve been worse were those involving himself actually having gotten some action the previous night, which would’ve made up for the fallout at least somewhat. But honestly, his dad had handled the whole situation a lot better than Kurt had ever thought he would. He’d expected yelling and grounding and Dad lifting Blaine up by his shirt collar and dragging him out of the room. The shock was understandable, expected even, but Dad was being really cool about the whole situation.
Unless he’d gone back downstairs to get the shotgun.
“Okay, Blaine, ready or not, it’s time to go.” Kurt flipped the pillow off Blaine’s head and tossed the car keys onto the bed.
Blaine yawned and stretched, then picked up his keys. “Thanks. Was that Finn, bringing these in for me?”
“Uh, yeah,” Kurt said. It was better if Blaine didn’t know he’d just made it appear to Dad that he’d drunkenly deflowered the man’s son last night. Blaine was too polite; he’d insist on apologizing and explaining, which could lead to nothing but more trouble. “Are you sure you’re sober? I mean, you should be getting home, but I’m not going to send you on the road if you’re still too drunk to recognize people.”
“No, I woke out of a dead sleep and was disoriented, that’s all.” Blaine still looked pretty rough, as was only natural, but he did seem lucid. “You’re right, though. I’ve already imposed far too much. I should be getting home.”
Kurt gasped. “Oh no. Your parents! I never thought to call or text them with a cover story for you. I’ve done such a horrible job of being the evil mastermind behind your night of drunken debauchery.”
Blaine laughed. “Wasn’t much for debauchery. Oh wait, you’re serious?” he said off Kurt’s look of confusion. “Of course my parents are strict on the no drunk driving rule, as well they should be, so they expected I’d stay over at someone else’s place. They’ll be a little angry I didn’t call, but it’s not that big of a deal.”
Kurt blinked in astonishment. If he or Finn had stayed out all night without calling home, not only would their parents have killed them once they did get home, but Dad and Carole would have most likely spent the whole night frantically calling their friends and searching ditches for them. On the one hand, it was good to know Kurt hadn’t completely screwed up Blaine’s life by being such a lousy liar. On the other hand, as annoying and embarrassing and sometimes downright frustrating as his dad could be, Kurt felt a little sorry for Blaine for not having somebody who would be too worried to sleep if he didn’t come home on time.
“Anyway, I’m sorry for imposing in the first place,” Blaine said, breaking the awkward silence. “I hope I didn’t cause you too much inconvenience. I know I snore,” he added in an awkward attempt to lighten the mood.
Kurt slapped a fake but convincing smile on his face and bustled about the room, pretending to tidy up so he didn’t have to meet Blaine’s eyes. “No trouble at all. You’re welcome to crash here any time you need to.”
“Thank you. I really appreciate that.” The tone of Blaine’s voice warmed. “I don’t think it’s possible to have a pleasant night’s sleep any night that involves vomiting, but last night was-it felt natural, I guess.”
“Why wouldn’t it? It was perfectly natural. I share a bed with Mercedes when I go to sleepovers at her house all the time,” Kurt answered quickly. He only looked up after he’d spoken.
“Just like Mercedes. Right.” He could see Blaine’s expression fading from something into disappointment. Kurt mentally kicked himself for not turning around fast enough to see what emotion that something had been. Whatever it was, the walls had already come up again. “Thanks again, for everything. I’ll show myself out.”
Of course, Kurt showed Blaine out. It was the polite thing to do, and, more importantly, it was his best hope of ensuring against an awkward confrontation between Blaine and Dad. As soon as Blaine was out the door, Kurt frantically tried to think of ways he could avoid an awkward confrontation between himself and Dad.
That was when Finn plodded down the stairs, still half-asleep and wearing his Power Rangers t-shirt. Six feet and three inches of salvation, Kurt thought.
“Morning, Kurt. I smelled bacon and wondered what must’ve happened to you and Burt’s cooking lesson. I couldn’t believe you’d let Burt have bacon. It’s kind of the anti-heart-healthy breakfast food.”
“I only let turkey bacon in the house,” Kurt said dismissively. He caught Finn’s shoulder, steering him away from the kitchen and toward the living room. “How many of these Star Wars movies are there? I think we’d better get an early start if we want to fit them all in, don’t you?”
Finn’s eyebrows scrunched together. “Uh, three that I’m willing to recognize, then another three that I try to forget except for some kickass lightsaber fights and Natalie Portman being hot in a jumpsuit. It’s cool that you’re so excited about this, but I’m kind of hungry, even if it is fake bacon…”
Three movies meant at least six hours of not talking to Dad. Good. Very good. “Hunger is for the weak. Don’t the Jedis say that?”
“No,” Finn said slowly. “Also, more than one Jedi is still ‘Jedi,’ not ‘Jedis.’”
It took Kurt a moment to recover from the shock of Finn correcting his grammar, but he said, “See, I have so much to learn! It’s obvious that we need to start remedying my ignorance immediately.”
And that was how Finn and Kurt ended up sitting on the couch together at ten in the morning on a Saturday, watching Harrison Ford (wow, hotter than Kurt had thought he would be young), Carrie Fisher (why were there no bras in space?), and he couldn’t remember Luke Skywalker’s real name (could have been Sam’s older brother) running around a spaceship with a seven-foot-tall guy in a dog-monkey suit.
“So that’s a Chewbacca?” Kurt asked. Finn nodded, and Kurt turned back to the screen. “That comparison to my faux fur blanket was an insult to my interior decorating skills.”
Then Dad walked in the room, and dread roiled in the pit of Kurt’s stomach.
“Kurt, I think we need to-wait, Star Wars?”
Kurt stuck to his play-it-cool game plan. “Yes. Finn recommended it. It’s fascinating,” Kurt said very seriously. “John Williams’s score really is impressive, and I like the shiny gold butler.”
“Protocol droid,” Finn corrected. Then he turned back to Dad. “Yep. We’ve got a big afternoon of sci-fi bro-bonding planned,” Finn added, punching Kurt’s shoulder affectionately.
Dad tugged his hat back and scratched his head. “That’s cool that you’re bonding. It’s great to see you guys doing stuff together.” He paused again, bewildered. “Bonding over Star Wars?”
Kurt looked up at his dad as if he had no idea why he was so befuddled by this turn of events. “Yes, Star Wars. Did you have something you wanted to say to me, Dad? Because I’m really kind of caught up in the movie.”
Dad’s mouth hung open a little. “Uh, it can wait ‘til you and Finn are done. Have fun.”
“Oh, we are,” Finn said. “Burt, not to put you out or anything, but do you have any of that bacon left? It just feels wrong, watching movies without snacks.”
“Yeah. I’ll, uh, go get you guys some stuff to eat.”
Kurt waited until he was munching contentedly on a whole-wheat bagel, Finn was scarfing down a turkey bacon sandwich, and Dad and Carole had gone out for a walk before he spoke again. “Thanks for doing this with me, Finn.”
“No problem,” Finn said. “Trust me, I totally get wanting to avoid awkward parent conversations.”
“I-you know I’m doing this to avoid Dad?” Kurt asked, startled.
Finn was unruffled. “Dude, you were more excited about watching Star Wars than you were for Black Friday. I may not be the brightest crayon in the box, but I’m not stupid.”
“Sorry,” Kurt said, hoping that it would cover both underestimating Finn and using him as a father-son chat shield.
“Like I said, it’s not a big deal. Don’t worry about it. I take it Burt found out about Blaine.”
“Yeah,” Kurt sighed. “He walked in on Blaine in my bed.”
“Ooh, ouch.” Finn chewed thoughtfully on a bite of sandwich, then continued, “I’m sorry about last night. I didn’t do very well helping you out.”
Kurt turned away from the movie and looked at Finn, confused. “What? No, you were great.”
Finn shook his head. “I should’ve offered to let Blaine sleep in my bed. I didn’t think of it ‘til this morning.” Kurt’s eyes widened. Finn saw it and added, “Not that I would’ve been grossed out or anything by sharing my bed with you and putting Blaine in your room, either. It’s just that putting Blaine with me would’ve been the least awkward arrangement all around. I’m totally cool with you, Kurt. But you know, I’m sure Luke and Leia are totally cool with each other, but with the kiss and the weird sexual tension between them, I bet they’d feel a little awkward sleeping together after they find out they’re both Darth Vader’s kids, too.” Then Finn got what Santana called his ‘gassy baby expression.’ “Oh crap. I just spoiled, like, most of the next two movies for you. I’m so sorry.”
Kurt couldn’t have cared less about the spoilers. He smiled. “Doesn’t matter. Thank you.” He settled back into the couch cushions. “So, are there any good costumes coming up in these next two movies?”
Finn screwed his face up in thought. “Well, there’s the Slave Leia costume, but…I don’t think you’re gonna be as interested in that one as a lot of guys are.”
They sat in silence through a space battle before Finn spoke up again. “Maybe I’m butting into something that’s not really any of my business, but take it easy on Burt when you guys get around to talking about what happened with Blaine, okay? You and Burt are way too solid to let some boy get in the way of that, no matter how much you like him.”
“I’m not going to talk to Dad about it. That was the whole point of the movie marathon, remember?”
“Yeah you are,” Finn said. Kurt sat up and looked at him skeptically. “It’s pretty clear Burt doesn’t really want to talk about it, either, or he would have by now. But Blaine is bothering both of you enough that one of you is gonna crack eventually.”
Kurt stared at Finn as he finished off a juice box with a loud slurp. How was it that the same person who cheated off Brittany’s vocabulary quizzes all through eighth grade could understand how Kurt’s brain worked better than Kurt did himself sometimes?
“Mom and Burt would’ve grounded me ‘til graduation if I’d brought a girl home to sleep it off in my bed, you know,” Finn commented.
“But I can’t get Blaine pregnant,” Kurt said.
Finn shrugged. “Mom set Quinn up in my bed and made me sleep on the couch when she was pregnant. I don’t think that’s the only reason parents worry about it. Just-take care of yourself with this guy, all right?”
Kurt flushed to the tips of his ears.
Finn saw Kurt’s reaction, and his cheeks turned pink, too. “I didn’t mean physically-though, yeah, that too, however guys are supposed to do that with other guys. I was talking about not falling too hard for him. You kind of have a tendency to do that.”
“Seriously, Finn, I appreciate the whole ‘big brother gives sage advice’ thing, but you’re only six weeks older than me,” Kurt said in an attempt to cut off the conversation.
“I do have more experience dating than you do, though. I would think at least this much would apply to dating guys the same way it does to dating girls. Plus, six weeks is six weeks,” Finn said, smirking and breaking the tension a little. “All I’m saying is, Blaine seems like a decent guy, and if something ever happens between you and him, that’s cool. But no guy is worth getting all broken up over, and if he can’t see your awesomeness, it’s his loss.”
“Thanks. I’ll try,” Kurt said. He meant it, too. He turned back to the movie. “So, is the Chewbacca actually saying lines in Chewbaccese when he growls like that? Otherwise, I don’t see how Hans Olo can have him as co-pilot of the Millennium Bird.”
Finn stared at Kurt in slack-jawed horror. “There are so many things wrong with those sentences, I don’t even know where to start. You’re totally getting a Star Wars word-a-day calendar for your birthday.”
Late that night, Kurt settled into bed, exhausted from a full day of movie-watching with Finn. (They’d moved on to the prequels after they finished the three good movies, as Finn called them, though Kurt had enjoyed the prequels more because of Natalie Portman’s clothes and Finn joining in Kurt’s snarky running commentary.) Normally, Kurt drifted off to sleep by letting his imagination run wild with his catalog of Blaine-related fantasies in the hope that those pleasant thoughts would follow him into his dreams. That night, none of the old standards felt right. After briefly considering and discarding a fantasy involving Billy Dee Williams (the curly hair, charisma, and fabulous cape were all huge pluses, but the mustache was too eighties porno for Kurt’s taste), he hit on a new idea he liked very much.
He really wasn’t sure if he was still awake or asleep, but Kurt found himself sitting on a loveseat. It wasn’t peach; it was a tasteful if bland beige, spiced up a little by the deep red accent wall behind it. A tall high school girl with neat, pretty brown hair and huge eyes adjusted a camera sitting on a tripod.
She said as she stared at the viewscreen, “You’re both centered in the shot, so we’re all set. Three, two, one, action.”
Finn sat up straighter beside Kurt and looked at the camera like a deer caught in the crossfire of headlights. “Oh, does that mean you want us to start talking now?”
The girl sighed dramatically. “Yes, Dad, that’s what ‘action’ means.”
“Okay. Uh, so, this is for my daughter Eva’s multimedia family history project…thing for school.”
“Dad, they’re going to know that already. Just tell the story.”
“Right, yeah.” Finn moved to run his hand through his hair, which never failed to make Kurt snicker now that Finn was bald. Finn gathered himself and said, “Okay, so, how Uncle Kurt and I became brothers. Not gonna lie, it was a little awkward for us, when your Grandma and Grandpa Hummel first started dating.”
“I set them up,” Kurt cut in. “Even if it wasn’t with the purest of intentions, I think we can all agree that the end result was so good that my original motivations don’t really matter.”
“I thought we were gonna skip that part,” Finn whispered to Kurt.
“The rest of the story doesn’t make sense without some context. I’m still glossing over the details,” Kurt whispered back.
“Anyway,” Finn spoke up and turned to the camera again, “after things came to a head in one really ugly fight, we all started getting along a lot better. Then Grandma and Grandpa got married.”
Kurt said, “Your dad serenaded me at the wedding, and even danced with me. It was kind of embarrassing, honestly, but I was going through a difficult time at school, and it meant a lot to me. ‘Just the Way You Are.’”
Finn smiled. “Still a great song. Now, you’d think that publicly singing to your new step-bro would have to be the moment when the two of you truly became brothers. That’s definitely what I was trying for when I did it.”
“But you can’t plan things like that,” Kurt said. “They have to just…happen. Not saying that the song wasn’t important, and wonderful, but it was more of a beginning to the process of becoming brothers.” Finn nodded in agreement. Kurt chuckled to himself. “Believe me, I would love nothing more than to tell you the story of how Bruno Mars truly made us family. But it wasn’t Bruno Mars. It was George Lucas.”
They both grinned and shook their heads. Finn said, “We watched Star Wars movies together all day one Saturday when Uncle Kurt was trying to avoid having to talk to Grandpa after he caught Uncle Blaine in Uncle Kurt’s bed sleeping off a heck of a hangover. He kinda hated them, but he watched all, like, fourteen hours of it with me. There was something about working together to try to sneak Blaine in the house without waking anybody and then combining forces to try to dodge the fallout the next day that really felt like something brothers would do.”
“Nothing happened in the bed, though!” Kurt added hastily. “I know you’re going to be watching this, Paul and Bernadette, and you so cannot use this as ‘but you did it when you were my age’ ammunition with me and Papa.”
Finn completely broke character, so that Kurt was no longer talking to Forty Years Later Finn, but rather an imaginary version of Current Finn in Forty Years Later Finn’s body. It should’ve felt stranger than it did, but Kurt was used to strange dreams by now. “You’re married to Blaine and have two kids named Paul and Bernadette? Not really taking my advice in terms of not falling too hard, are you?” Finn said.
It was irritating, how even the Finn in his dreams was overly perceptive. Kurt tried to veer the conversation off into less testy territory. “There is nothing wrong with naming my children after Sir Paul McCartney and Bernadette Peters. It’s no worse than Rachel naming all your children after characters from Broadway musicals.”
“What?” Finn said. “I’m not sure if I should be more weirded out by you mentally hooking me up with Rachel or making me bald.”
“You work the bald look much better than Blaine or I could,” Kurt non-answered.
“Speaking of Blaine…”
Kurt sighed. “Yes, I know I’m getting way ahead of myself, but it would weird to have us married to random people we’ve never met, wouldn’t it?” Finn seemed to accept that, but Kurt added, “And anyway, a boy can dream, right?”