Fic: If you just hold in your breath, till you come pack up in full
Tittle: If you just hold in your breath, till you come pack up in full
Rating: PG 13. violence, minor character death
Word count: ~11,800
Betas: I want to thank the lovely mockingj91, and the amazing Kyra (I really don't know how you could bear with me). You two are just too wonderful <3
Summary: Sets in wwii, this is a story of a prince and a boy. They met on the shore, going in opposite directions.
Written for the Glee Reverse Big Bang, the amazing art is by Alicia
Disclaimer: Glee and its characrers are creation of FOX Entertainment. The title of the fic is from Genius Next Door by Regina Spektor.
Other songs mentioned in this fic are: Lullaby for a Stormy Night by Vienna Teng, Keep Breathing by Ingrid Michaelson
Prologue
I just want to sail away.
The sea drowned the broken scream to a violent death, scattering its pieces with smashing waves. Unforgiving wind strangled the sobs and blasted the charcoal camouflage of the clouded sky, sucking desperate breaths out from the tiny contracting throat.
And the Gods were furious. The sea and the sky were at odds with each other, at odd with themselves, trying to figure out where they had gone wrong to let the things happening happen. And Gods, poor Gods, they had no idea how the unthinkable was caused by their very own finest creature. The world had only them to blame.
And the sand caved in, crumbled under the weight of crumbling eight-year-old knees. The never-ending shore was lapping the never-ending water, all in muted silver, just like the sky. O how the sky and the sea could be in such perfect harmony wrapped in pure animosity. Forget the sea, forget the sky, forget the vast defeated Gods, for there was a little bluebird trying to fly out through his suffering.
Fall my boy, my little dove
Weep and
though your tears cannot fly
they shall dive
in the immortal sea
***
It was a hiding day. The sky and the sea were in their usual colour: dark and dreadful, like embers going to their death. No one said anything when Blaine swam away to land, they never did. Perhaps, everyone was too busy to notice that he was gone, or more possibly, they didn’t want him to be where they were anyway. So that was what he did, on afternoons like that, afternoons that had turned into months and years: anytime the higher Gods distressing themselves doing their bounden duty, and they were getting busier and busier, he would go to that desolate, abandoned beach where the sand was grey, and the sky was grey, and the sea was just as grievingly grey. But at least it was quiet: no more cries of humans, no more bangs of cannons, no more sighs of the Gods. O how the great Gods were all suffering for their own children. The helpless kind of suffering.
But today the shore was not empty. In the mist of the foggy afternoon- it wasn’t really fog though, it was shadows of deaths and blown up souls, fragments bare and light and some heavy- he saw a body, a human lying facedown, as if it had come from the sea. Blaine took a careful step towards it, feeling his legs getting a bit more comfortable. Cooper missed one, Blaine thought. Something was profoundly wrong that a body had drifted there. It was not supposed to. This was just not right. This was land. There weren’t supposed to be dead humans. There was supposed to be alive humans. And other alive things. Blaine felt himself terribly wronged by all that wrongness. All of a sudden, he was afraid: he had never been this close to a human before.
Blaine knelt down. The boy looked just as young as him, though he knew mortals didn’t age the ways Gods did; the boy just looked just unbearably young. Half his face was against the sand, eyelids swollen, the line of his nose sharp and curled up. So human. Blaine felf himself aching inside his body, aching for something he didn’t have a name for.
The icy wind must have taken away the living breaths of the boy; his skin was so pale that it made Blaine thought of the half-broken plaster statue he once found near his playground down at sea. And the boy’s eyelashes, coloured a bit darker than his chestnut hair, were fluttering. Blaine put his face so close to the boy’s to look at the puzzling shape of the freckles arranged ever so faintly on his face. Blaine could feel warm breaths uttering out. Warm breaths uttering out! The boy’s Alive! Blaine jumped back from the boy in panic, stumbling on his own clumsy feet. He fell and it hurt, but Blaine made himself get up and run to the stab of rock nearby. He had to hide away his human form.
The boy didn’t move. He didn’t wake up. Blaine was at a lost as to what he should do, so he just started throwing little pieces of rock at him, pieces of Blaine’s desperate hope that the boy was really, really alive.
“Hey hey….”
“Hey... Are you…alive?”
Blaine’s mind was racing with each swing of his arm. He was so excited seeing the boy’s legs twitch as the rocks landed on him that he threw some more much faster, much more forcefully. He threw and threw until one hit the boy on his back, making him flinch. The boy’s muffled yet distinct cry stopped Blaine mid-throw, but one more piece of rock flew out of his hand.
“What... what are you doing? Stop throwing rocks at me!” The boy stirred and sat up slowly; he looked disoriented and unreasonably irritated at Blaine.
“Oh I’m…Sorry?” Blaine offered an apologetic smile, the one he often used with Cooper when he was trying to get out of trouble. Blaine hoped the boy was not mad at him. He didn’t want the first and maybe only human he ever talked to to be mad at him.
Please don’t be mad at me.
The boy stared at Blaine, still furious while his hands stroking his back, his legs. He lifted his chin up slightly, as if for a moment he had made his mind about this stranger.
“What are You doing hiding behind that rock?”
“Oh no no, I no, I’m not… hiding or anything, I...I just... I honestly thought you were dead.” Blaine turned his face down, cheeks burning. He had never been confronted by a human before; it felt even worse than being chided by his dad. And the rage of the God of the Sea was not something anyone would dare to take lightly. Blaine thought he would trade anything to be under the water right then. Fortunately, though, and incomprehensibly, the boy seemed to believe what Blaine said; he didn’t press further.
“Well, I’m not… ‘dead’.” Blaine realized how his voice was terribly high but so bruised and broken, still breaking. His eyes drifted away, staring at the sea; he seemed to have forgotten Blaine’s presence altogether. Blaine turned and looked too. The Gods had finished their job for the day. The water had become quieter now; it darkened, but in a clearer way, just as it was supposed to. The sea was going to rest with the rising moon. Seamless waves returned to being so gentle and uniform that they became invisible again.
The boy looked lost in thoughts. Or more like, he looked lost. Blaine didn’t know what else to say but he didn’t feel like leaving yet. So he just stayed there, stayed silent, standing behind the rock. He let himself taste the salted wind and feel the rhythmic waves crashing, washing over his feet so cold, so fresh. He listened to the songs, the songs from those shells forever lying under the ocean, forever with an extraordinary story to tell, songs from the musical hair of the sea’s creatures laughing with pearls. The sea was never lost.
Blaine finally stole a glance at the boy. He was sitting with his legs against his chest, arms holding tight, tight and tight and Blaine could see a hurricane building up inside the boy. He was shaking with rage, yet so quietly, as though all his screams had just got murdered in his head, turning to ragged breaths. He let out dry sobs, pressing his face onto his rigid arms, his stretched neck; his eyes closed, trying to swallow in all the tears, swallowing all the misery. All those times Blaine had followed Cooper to human battlefields, Blaine had seen his share anguished souls, but none had ever made him ache like this.
The boy started really sobbing now, uncontrollably, and Blaine was so confused because he didn’t seem hurt or bleeding. All the humans he had seen crying like that were severely injured with blood all over, or with holes in their legs or something. But he figured it was different because the boy wasn’t begging or praying to Gods either. Blaine didn’t know what to do; he thought of carrying the boy into the sea with him, like everyone in his family did to silence dying mortals. But their faces always got so distorted. Blaine didn’t want the boy’s face to become like that.
They boy was still sobbing when Blaine heard a loud cry.
”Kurt! Kurt? Where are you kid?” A man was running towards them... Instinctively, Blaine jumped right into the water, shying away. He dodged under, let the water wrap him safely inside, home and warm and so calming that it was so easy to just dive in, but Blaine stayed around because honestly, he was curious. He wanted to know what humans did around one another, except for killing and dying, of course.
And because the boy-Kurt Kurt- was really pretty.
“Kurt. Kurt!” The boy opened this reddened eyes, looking up with his nose still watering, his face unfolded. Yielding, giving in. “Papa, Papa.” He let go of his legs, his shoulders slumped, and his body became body again: not so rigid, not so enraged, just human. He cried, helplessly: “Papa!”
Blaine recognized the older man, the fisherman he sometimes saw out at sea while he played around with Cooper on the rare beautiful days. He loved watching humans working like that; the reflections of beads of sweat on their foreheads looked even more beautiful than sea gems, transparent in the colour of rainbows, just like glitter, like something that seemed so fair and just.
“Oh kiddo..”
Kurt was sobbing openly now, burying his face in the fisherman’s shoulder, with arms wrapped so desperately around his neck. He looked unbearably tiny.
“It’s okay now. Let’s go… let’s go home Kurt.” The man carried Kurt away, holding tightly on to the little human in his arms. He was crying.
“I thought I’d lost you too.”
~
For days Blaine didn’t see the boy again on the beach, nor the fisherman at sea. He was tired. The sea was tired. Battlefields with exploded ships and torn flags soaked in blood, with broken sails and broken humans falling down wore out all the Gods. Everybody in his family was utterly exhausted; Blaine got told off when Cooper caught him sneaking there. It’s not your place, Blaine. Not yet. You still have some time left. Now go play and leave us to work. Blaine didn’t know exactly what Cooper and his cousins did all days, being so close to those humans. He did know, though, that it was their duty and they did not like it one bit. When he was younger, he used to sit in his cave looking up, watching others lead mortals down with their bodies rigid and their faces frozen right at the moment they touched the water. No one ever told him where they took the humans to. The waves splashed each time a scream dyed the sea red a little more. He hadn’t gotten it then, nor did he now, but now at least he got that it was mortals’ pain. The screams, they were the pain of dying, of failing at living as humans, to be exact. The whole thing puzzled him, and it appeared to have puzzled all the Gods, too. No one seemed to have the answer; no one knew why that was happening, why mortals were acting the way they were. His Dad never talked to him about it, he just kept shaking his head, saying “those foolish mortals” so helplessly that sometimes Blaine couldn’t recognize the God, the ruler of the great Sea in him anymore. And those times Blaine just wanted to hug his papa and asked him to make everything better. But the greatest God Blaine ever knew just replied with resigned bitterness: “My son, it is not our choice.” Blaine felt even worse that Cooper had changed so much too. He wasn’t his playful brother who would take him to forbidden places in the kingdom and go hunting for treasures with him anymore. Now Cooper was just weary and crestfallen all the time. He missed his Cooper two years ago. Mortals became foolish two years ago. That, he knew.
So he kept looking, wandering the waters where he often found the fisherman, and he looked on the abandoned beach too, but it remained abandoned. He imagined meeting Kurt again, a name so peculiar, he thought, feeling that it didn’t belong there, among humans. It just seemed too heavenly. Blaine imagined a boy with a button nose and eyes bluer than any part of the sea he had ever seen, greyer than the smokiest sky, eyes so deep and voice so high that he couldn’t help wondering how it would be like when he laughed. The sound inside his head broke his heart.
Blaine gave up searching on the third Sunday and found himself alone again, enjoying the tranquility of the absence of deaths, but there was no living either. For the first time, he thought about mortals’ meaning of living, of being alive. The sky lifted up and Blaine could see the sun above piercing through the water, divine as ever while the sea lay quietly, a thousand times more magnificent in its noiselessness. Cooper finally had a break that day, fading into heavenly sleep. Blaine didn’t want to bother him so he went back to the shore by himself; daylight was glittering on this feet. He still felt oddly strange about it, the tingling feeling when he transformed. Cooper said he would get used to it; he said “That’s the thing about Gods. We just need to live long enough to get used to anything … except for mortals. But still, we keep trying to.” Cooper always said things that Blaine felt he would never fully understand, but he believed him anyways. And he really wanted to get used to walking. He wanted to go into town and see humans and squares and houses like the stories he heard from all his older cousins when he was still the Little Prince. His dad never encouraged him to go on land, or to have any interaction with humans whatsoever, “Nothing good comes with mortals.” But Cooper was okay with it. Blaine wondered if it was because Cooper got it, the craving to just take leave and go, or because he just wanted Blaine to get the idea out of his system. Cooper showed Blaine the place to get clothes “Don’t question. It’s a mortal thing,” telling Blaine to try to blend in, and be careful. “Don’t let yourself troubled too much about the casualty of being humans”. But Blaine was convinced that there must be something on land that was so wonderful, there must be, something, that mortals could go back to from battlefields at sea and keep living. Something that made being human bearable.
So on that beautiful Sunday when Gods could rest, Blaine found himself overtaken by a violent sense of wanderlust as he aimlessly walked down the beach. He didn’t expect to see the boy again but there he was, heading towards him, holding something against his chest, eyes downcast with an ever present layer of sadness that sounded like crashing waves. Blaine took a longer look at the boy and yes, he was…he was Kurt.
Blaine uttered in a nervous voice,
“Hi”
Kurt looked up. He seemed greatly surprised seeing Blaine, or perhaps anyone, there.
“Hi?”
“Yeah.. Uhm..” Quit being shy Blaine, he scolded himself. You’re a freakin’ sea prince. Stop it! “I’m Blaine.”
“Kurt”
Blaine nodded, whispering without even realizing it: I know.
Kurt eyed Blaine skeptically, “What are you doing there? You’re not from the village, are you?”
“No.Um.. I..uh..” Blaine stuttered. He had spent three weeks thinking of meeting the boy but it never crossed his mind what he would say to him. All of a sudden, he was terribly conscious of his legs. Despite Cooper’s reassurance that his tail would transform the moment Blaine got himself out of the water and that his legs were supposed to look exactly like humans’, Blaine just felt they were…different. Blaine always had those sensations in his legs while walking that he never felt with his tail. He was terrified. Do humans have the feelings on their legs just like this? Would Kurt notice that my legs are not really…human?
“Fine,” Kurt said, in a voice of faint bitterness and indifference when Blaine didn’t answer. “Don’t tell me.” He rolled his eyes. “I’m used to kids not wanting to talk to me anyway.”
“No, it’s not that...”
But Kurt seemed to have shut himself off, sitting down and just staring at the sea again. Blaine was struggling to figure out what to say next when he noticed what Kurt was holding: a notebook. He gingerly stepped closer and sat down next to him.
“So... what do you have there?”
Kurt snapped his head to Blaine as if he had just been forcefully pulled out of his world by the collar. He flinched back a bit, obviously uncomfortable with Blaine sitting too close.
“What?”
“Oh… I asked what you have there,” Blaine said quietly as if he was afraid he would startle Kurt, pointing at the notebook for good measure.
“Oh, it’s my storybook. Mine and ...Mama’s.” There, that sadness haunting Kurt’s face again. Blaine mustered his courage, trying to keep the boy from drifting off. Is it always this hard talking to humans?
“Stories? What are they about?”
“What else? The sea out there!” Just like that, Kurt lit up. “Have you been? It’s wonderful, isn’t it?”
“…Uhm...No, I hav...”
“Me neither! But one day. One day...But I know about it. Mama always told me these stories and I copied all of them down. I even wrote my own. “
“Uh yeah?”
“Yes! I’m going out there. One day, I will go and see how true those stories are. How amazing!”
“What’s so great about the sea?” Suddenly Blaine got rather upset he didn’t even know why.
“Are you kidding? Everything! Don’t you think it’s incredible that there is a whole different world out there, stunning and spectacular?”
“…”
“It’s living Blaine. Out at sea with all those adventures and actions. The thrills, the dangers. Glorious! It’s the only place you can find happiness.”
Blaine looked at him and felt… amazed. Kurt’s face was busting in excitement as he talked breathless, smiling broadly, dreamily at the sea afar, a sea so foreign to Blaine. Blaine was utterly bewildered how Kurt’s vision could be so different from his reality, how Kurt could possibly be talking about his home. Blaine remembered Cooper’s saying about how insane mortals were with their deranged hallucination. “That was what made them do all those foolish things. Such foolishness.”
“Tell me your story,.” Blaine said before he could stop himself. Honestly, he was desperate to see the world this boy imagined.
“I want to know how it is out there too.”
Kurt was beaming then. Blaine hadn’t seen such a dazzling smile. There was no longer the aching anguish of the day they first met that caused Blaine’s skin to combust as if the layer underneath were setting itself on fire,. This smile was just so fresh and so young with teeth like tiny pearls hidden waiting for treasure hunters.
“Once upon a time…”
~
It became their routine: Kurt would tell Blaine his stories: stories with godlike warriors and monstrous creatures, with a princess that never dies and a prince forever cursed. And Blaine would just sit in silence with a faint smile, letting Kurt’s truth become his truth. They both marveled at the astounding world out there. Achingly beautiful. Kurt wrote new stories too, mapping out all the places and creatures at sea. He painted a whole marvelously bizarre world with his blunt pencil and unlined paper. He was the creator of his world, and Blaine’s too.
At first, Kurt did ask Blaine about his story, his home, his family. He seemed hurt that Blaine was always reluctant to tell him anything. By the end of the week Blaine had to explain that it was not like that he wanted to keep secret from him; he just honestly would rather not talk about it. Blaine tried so hard to be a good friend to Kurt because this boy, this boy was amazing with his stories and his voice was more enchanting than any mermaid’s on the Entrance Gulf.
Blaine was almost tempted to tell Kurt the truth, that he was the Prince of the Sea and that every day he saw his family dragging mortals’ souls to the other side. Souls that evacuated from their bodies in time of war. But he didn’t want Kurt to know that out there, in between the beginning and the end of any second, the water would expand and swallow humans’ agony in full. Kurt must still believe that the songs at sea were the wondrous tunes of life and happiness, not muffled moans and laments from too many cursed souls waiting in line to be taken away. Kurt must believe so for Blaine to believe it himself, to forget that he, too, would soon be called up to serve his duty.
Perhaps, seeing Blaine so defeated, Kurt finally relented:
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
Kurt never asked Blaine about his family again. In fact, Kurt never asked Blaine anything after that. He did almost all the talking for them and Blaine loved it that way. Kurt said he got it somehow. He, too, used to be good at just curling up into himself, not discussing or even thinking about anything at all. He told Blaine a way to cope with life was to just close his eyes and block out people’s voices, untrue and unkind.
“Just listen carefully and the sea will tell you all the myths you want to know about the world afar.”
~
“What about here?” Blaine asked one day when they were watching the sun setting down the undisturbed horizon. “You never tell any stories about the village. Would you… would you take me there some time?”
Kurt seemed rather surprised; he looked at Blaine and then turned, going back to counting the endless waves lapping the shore. He let out a soft sigh with his mouth slightly open:
“You are one strange kid, Blaine. You’d better not go. Strange kids are in for trouble in the village. It’s full of ordinary people with their ordinariness. They will just hate you… And you’ll come to hate them too.”
Instead, Kurt started to read some journal pieces from his notebook for Blaine because he seemed dying to know what Kurt’s life was like when he wasn’t wandering on the beach. Kurt read about the days when he was little and everything was still okay, days when he would play with other kids and Elizabeth, his mom would bring sandwiches to the playground for him. Blaine could see it, Kurt smiling the brightest and happiest with arms wrapping around her waist while she ruffled his hair. She sounded like a wonderful woman with a smell like lilac. Blaine wondered how the God who had to take her away must have felt.
~
There were times Blaine found Kurt sitting on the shore with dark bruises on his elbows and tears staining his stormy eyes. Those were the times Blaine felt most helpless, just like when he watched all those humans falling down into the sea. It hurt how much Blaine wished Elizabeth was there; he didn’t know what to do or even what to say to soothe the crying boy. Once, he just sat down next to Kurt and started to sing that song he heard from mermaids whispering to calm lost men. He couldn’t remember all the words so he made them up as he carried the tunes:
“The storm is coming but I don't mind
People are dying, I close my blinds…”
Kurt laid his head on Blaine’s shoulder and fell asleep by the time Blaine finished. Just like that, Blaine knew Kurt was a crashing wave that would always come to shore after adventures from the faraway sea. Breaking, but always home. Blaine breathed in when Kurt breathed in, feeling his heart falling with each mortal breath.
~
Kurt read Blaine the pages he wrote on his last days with Elizabeth. He talked about how he brought the seashells to her sick bed to let her listen to the songs of the ocean, to let the waves, the winds and the coolness of it all wash over her, heal her in the way only they could. But the pulling and pushing over and over of the water still wasn’t able to make her strong enough to go collecting more shells with him. He told Blaine how he always took them back to the beach so that they could keep recording and singing back those melodies. “Those shells will forget how to sing if you keep them ashore for too long.”
Kurt believed his mother had gone back to the sea where all humans came from. He said it was not dying, it was coming home. How fortunately misguided, Blaine thought. Mortals will just vanish when they are done with this world, simply fleeting and insignificant.
And Kurt was a mortal.
~
“It’s been three weeks since she’s gone. Papa is trying so hard to be strong for me and I know it’s awful but I wish he just cries. Why isn’t he crying like he did when granny died. Everybody keeps coming over and saying things, saying that they are sorry but their stupid sorries are useless. Take all your sorries away from my mom! They just want to say it so that it’s over with, done. But it’s not. I don’t want to ‘get over it’. I don’t want to ‘move on’.I don’t understand. How can people move on from a person just because she is dead? “
Kurt voice was questioning but so, so calm that Blaine wonder if that was really Kurt. “I took a walk on the abandoned beach today, the one I ran to the day she died, the one where the sand is not quite sand but more like tiny, hard rocks that hurt my bare feet, rocks that are almost sand but not quite. They are getting there but not quite. The wind was still blowing and the waves were still smashing but I was not angry anymore. And I stopped asking why the God had to take her away, how they never learn of the feeling of loss and how unfair it all was.”
Blaine could feel Kurt’s calmness shaking when he closed his eyes and took a deep shuddering breath.
“Kurt, you don’t have to re…”
“I met a boy on the shore.
He has a mob of dark curly hair.
I told him her stories.”
~
“I’m glad that I met you, you know.” Kurt said when he looked up from his notebook, staring straight into Blaine eyes. “For if I didn’t have you to tell the stories I would just be that kid without any friends, that kid who curls up into himself only to find that he’s now a motherless child. That kid no one sings to sleep. So I’m glad that I met you.”
…
Me too.
And your eyes make me feel like home.
~
Blaine found Kurt getting a little bit more cheerful every day. He laughed when they chased each other along the beach, when Blaine found him two starfish and named them Kurt and Blaine. Kurt’s laughter got Blaine laughing too. Suddenly, the sea was not as dreadful to Blaine anymore, for he could always come on shore and let Kurt tell him his never ending tales. With Kurt, he felt ecstatically, foolishly human.
He did, until it was time for him to do his God-bound duty: delivering mortals’ souls.
For the first time, the battlefields were his. For the first time, he saw with his own eyes humans killing other humans, forgetting how they were just mortals, forgetting how they were just playing pretend that they were Gods. A headless soldier holding his flag, a screaming mother collecting the pieces of her blown-up child, all were singing themselves to forever doom under the darkest sea- a divine anthem to the accompaniment of cannons and gun powder. Then, Blaine truly felt how it was to be human.
You will get used to it.
Blaine never told a word about what he saw to Kurt. He closed up, silenced himself even more than before. He just let Kurt did what he did best, healing the wounds that would soon be torn open the next day, making living bearable. Kurt never asked.
~
“Take me to the village today?”
“Blaine, I told you, people there are no fun.”
“I know. Take me anyway?”
“…”
“…”
“Okay.”
So Kurt did. They went to a fish market and Kurt showed Blaine how the selling and buying and bargaining going on were all pointless. “All those menial things make people so small, so sickeningly content.” Kurt commented on everything they saw with utter resentment except for when they passed by his school.
“Sometimes, I am thankful that I went to that school, you know. It is the reason I know for sure I’m sailing away,” Kurt said as they walked back towards the beach.
“Oh, let me show you my favourite spot here besides our beach.”
Kurt led Blain to the port. Ships were staring to come back for the day; the smell of freshly caught fish and salted nets and stale sweat mingled with yelling from tall, roughened fishermen trying to anchoring their second home to sleep. It was vibrantly life.
“I love it here. People going in and out of places. Living. Papa has a boat here too. He stopped sailing for a while after she was gone but he’s going back now. That’ll make him a bit less miserable, you know.” Kurt breathed out a gentle smile, looking at the boats returning home. “This is my first ever daydreaming place. I would go here with mom to help papa sail off. And as his boat floating away, I would picture the day I’d own one of those and sail out to the sea.”
Kurt took Blaine into the village every week after that. Blaine always asked to stop by the playground next to the town square full of children running and giggling. Kurt brought Blaine over to his home to meet Burt. Although the man didn’t know that Blaine would swim by his boat every morning, looking out for him, he still welcomed Blaine as a part of the family. Blaine guessed it was because he said something about his parents always being faraway doing oversea deliveries. He was even invited when Burt got remarried to Carole. Blaine was glad Kurt had one more person to be there for him. And Finn too. Finn was Carole’s son and Kurt’s new brother. Blaine never talked much to Finn though, for he was always busy working after Quinn got pregnant. Kurt told Blaine that Finn had dropped out of school after he married Quinn. He had to work for Burt to support his wife and kid. Kurt did beg his father to let him go with him too but Burt made it clear that he had to stay in school.
One time, Blaine came over when Kurt wasn’t home from school yet.
“Looking for Kurt? He should be here any minute now.”
“Oh, thanks Sir,” Blaine fidgeted.
Burt laughed, still working on his net. “The kid’s quite something ha?”
“Yeah, he’s strange. Oh, no, I mean I like it…his strangeness, like I like...I don’t mind, I enjoy being his friend. A lot.”
“Oh relax buddy. Have a seat... I think he likes your strangeness too.”
With that Burt turned back to his work, leaving Blaine to keep checking the door for Kurt.
“Keep him as long as you can kid,” he said after a while, without even looking up at Blaine. “Once he sails out there, he ain’t gonna come back”.
I know. Blaine didn’t answer Burt. He realized that they’re both trying to reconcile with that fact.
“Burt?”
“Yeah?
“I’ll look after him, okay?”
Burt snorted, in his own term of being friendly.
“Yeah, okay. I have you to count on then.”
[ part 2]
Rating: PG 13. violence, minor character death
Word count: ~11,800
Betas: I want to thank the lovely mockingj91, and the amazing Kyra (I really don't know how you could bear with me). You two are just too wonderful <3
Summary: Sets in wwii, this is a story of a prince and a boy. They met on the shore, going in opposite directions.
Written for the Glee Reverse Big Bang, the amazing art is by Alicia
Disclaimer: Glee and its characrers are creation of FOX Entertainment. The title of the fic is from Genius Next Door by Regina Spektor.
Other songs mentioned in this fic are: Lullaby for a Stormy Night by Vienna Teng, Keep Breathing by Ingrid Michaelson
Prologue
I just want to sail away.
The sea drowned the broken scream to a violent death, scattering its pieces with smashing waves. Unforgiving wind strangled the sobs and blasted the charcoal camouflage of the clouded sky, sucking desperate breaths out from the tiny contracting throat.
And the Gods were furious. The sea and the sky were at odds with each other, at odd with themselves, trying to figure out where they had gone wrong to let the things happening happen. And Gods, poor Gods, they had no idea how the unthinkable was caused by their very own finest creature. The world had only them to blame.
And the sand caved in, crumbled under the weight of crumbling eight-year-old knees. The never-ending shore was lapping the never-ending water, all in muted silver, just like the sky. O how the sky and the sea could be in such perfect harmony wrapped in pure animosity. Forget the sea, forget the sky, forget the vast defeated Gods, for there was a little bluebird trying to fly out through his suffering.
Fall my boy, my little dove
Weep and
though your tears cannot fly
they shall dive
in the immortal sea
***
It was a hiding day. The sky and the sea were in their usual colour: dark and dreadful, like embers going to their death. No one said anything when Blaine swam away to land, they never did. Perhaps, everyone was too busy to notice that he was gone, or more possibly, they didn’t want him to be where they were anyway. So that was what he did, on afternoons like that, afternoons that had turned into months and years: anytime the higher Gods distressing themselves doing their bounden duty, and they were getting busier and busier, he would go to that desolate, abandoned beach where the sand was grey, and the sky was grey, and the sea was just as grievingly grey. But at least it was quiet: no more cries of humans, no more bangs of cannons, no more sighs of the Gods. O how the great Gods were all suffering for their own children. The helpless kind of suffering.
But today the shore was not empty. In the mist of the foggy afternoon- it wasn’t really fog though, it was shadows of deaths and blown up souls, fragments bare and light and some heavy- he saw a body, a human lying facedown, as if it had come from the sea. Blaine took a careful step towards it, feeling his legs getting a bit more comfortable. Cooper missed one, Blaine thought. Something was profoundly wrong that a body had drifted there. It was not supposed to. This was just not right. This was land. There weren’t supposed to be dead humans. There was supposed to be alive humans. And other alive things. Blaine felt himself terribly wronged by all that wrongness. All of a sudden, he was afraid: he had never been this close to a human before.
Blaine knelt down. The boy looked just as young as him, though he knew mortals didn’t age the ways Gods did; the boy just looked just unbearably young. Half his face was against the sand, eyelids swollen, the line of his nose sharp and curled up. So human. Blaine felf himself aching inside his body, aching for something he didn’t have a name for.
The icy wind must have taken away the living breaths of the boy; his skin was so pale that it made Blaine thought of the half-broken plaster statue he once found near his playground down at sea. And the boy’s eyelashes, coloured a bit darker than his chestnut hair, were fluttering. Blaine put his face so close to the boy’s to look at the puzzling shape of the freckles arranged ever so faintly on his face. Blaine could feel warm breaths uttering out. Warm breaths uttering out! The boy’s Alive! Blaine jumped back from the boy in panic, stumbling on his own clumsy feet. He fell and it hurt, but Blaine made himself get up and run to the stab of rock nearby. He had to hide away his human form.
The boy didn’t move. He didn’t wake up. Blaine was at a lost as to what he should do, so he just started throwing little pieces of rock at him, pieces of Blaine’s desperate hope that the boy was really, really alive.
“Hey hey….”
“Hey... Are you…alive?”
Blaine’s mind was racing with each swing of his arm. He was so excited seeing the boy’s legs twitch as the rocks landed on him that he threw some more much faster, much more forcefully. He threw and threw until one hit the boy on his back, making him flinch. The boy’s muffled yet distinct cry stopped Blaine mid-throw, but one more piece of rock flew out of his hand.
“What... what are you doing? Stop throwing rocks at me!” The boy stirred and sat up slowly; he looked disoriented and unreasonably irritated at Blaine.
“Oh I’m…Sorry?” Blaine offered an apologetic smile, the one he often used with Cooper when he was trying to get out of trouble. Blaine hoped the boy was not mad at him. He didn’t want the first and maybe only human he ever talked to to be mad at him.
Please don’t be mad at me.
The boy stared at Blaine, still furious while his hands stroking his back, his legs. He lifted his chin up slightly, as if for a moment he had made his mind about this stranger.
“What are You doing hiding behind that rock?”
“Oh no no, I no, I’m not… hiding or anything, I...I just... I honestly thought you were dead.” Blaine turned his face down, cheeks burning. He had never been confronted by a human before; it felt even worse than being chided by his dad. And the rage of the God of the Sea was not something anyone would dare to take lightly. Blaine thought he would trade anything to be under the water right then. Fortunately, though, and incomprehensibly, the boy seemed to believe what Blaine said; he didn’t press further.
“Well, I’m not… ‘dead’.” Blaine realized how his voice was terribly high but so bruised and broken, still breaking. His eyes drifted away, staring at the sea; he seemed to have forgotten Blaine’s presence altogether. Blaine turned and looked too. The Gods had finished their job for the day. The water had become quieter now; it darkened, but in a clearer way, just as it was supposed to. The sea was going to rest with the rising moon. Seamless waves returned to being so gentle and uniform that they became invisible again.
The boy looked lost in thoughts. Or more like, he looked lost. Blaine didn’t know what else to say but he didn’t feel like leaving yet. So he just stayed there, stayed silent, standing behind the rock. He let himself taste the salted wind and feel the rhythmic waves crashing, washing over his feet so cold, so fresh. He listened to the songs, the songs from those shells forever lying under the ocean, forever with an extraordinary story to tell, songs from the musical hair of the sea’s creatures laughing with pearls. The sea was never lost.
Blaine finally stole a glance at the boy. He was sitting with his legs against his chest, arms holding tight, tight and tight and Blaine could see a hurricane building up inside the boy. He was shaking with rage, yet so quietly, as though all his screams had just got murdered in his head, turning to ragged breaths. He let out dry sobs, pressing his face onto his rigid arms, his stretched neck; his eyes closed, trying to swallow in all the tears, swallowing all the misery. All those times Blaine had followed Cooper to human battlefields, Blaine had seen his share anguished souls, but none had ever made him ache like this.
The boy started really sobbing now, uncontrollably, and Blaine was so confused because he didn’t seem hurt or bleeding. All the humans he had seen crying like that were severely injured with blood all over, or with holes in their legs or something. But he figured it was different because the boy wasn’t begging or praying to Gods either. Blaine didn’t know what to do; he thought of carrying the boy into the sea with him, like everyone in his family did to silence dying mortals. But their faces always got so distorted. Blaine didn’t want the boy’s face to become like that.
They boy was still sobbing when Blaine heard a loud cry.
”Kurt! Kurt? Where are you kid?” A man was running towards them... Instinctively, Blaine jumped right into the water, shying away. He dodged under, let the water wrap him safely inside, home and warm and so calming that it was so easy to just dive in, but Blaine stayed around because honestly, he was curious. He wanted to know what humans did around one another, except for killing and dying, of course.
And because the boy-Kurt Kurt- was really pretty.
“Kurt. Kurt!” The boy opened this reddened eyes, looking up with his nose still watering, his face unfolded. Yielding, giving in. “Papa, Papa.” He let go of his legs, his shoulders slumped, and his body became body again: not so rigid, not so enraged, just human. He cried, helplessly: “Papa!”
Blaine recognized the older man, the fisherman he sometimes saw out at sea while he played around with Cooper on the rare beautiful days. He loved watching humans working like that; the reflections of beads of sweat on their foreheads looked even more beautiful than sea gems, transparent in the colour of rainbows, just like glitter, like something that seemed so fair and just.
“Oh kiddo..”
Kurt was sobbing openly now, burying his face in the fisherman’s shoulder, with arms wrapped so desperately around his neck. He looked unbearably tiny.
“It’s okay now. Let’s go… let’s go home Kurt.” The man carried Kurt away, holding tightly on to the little human in his arms. He was crying.
“I thought I’d lost you too.”
~
For days Blaine didn’t see the boy again on the beach, nor the fisherman at sea. He was tired. The sea was tired. Battlefields with exploded ships and torn flags soaked in blood, with broken sails and broken humans falling down wore out all the Gods. Everybody in his family was utterly exhausted; Blaine got told off when Cooper caught him sneaking there. It’s not your place, Blaine. Not yet. You still have some time left. Now go play and leave us to work. Blaine didn’t know exactly what Cooper and his cousins did all days, being so close to those humans. He did know, though, that it was their duty and they did not like it one bit. When he was younger, he used to sit in his cave looking up, watching others lead mortals down with their bodies rigid and their faces frozen right at the moment they touched the water. No one ever told him where they took the humans to. The waves splashed each time a scream dyed the sea red a little more. He hadn’t gotten it then, nor did he now, but now at least he got that it was mortals’ pain. The screams, they were the pain of dying, of failing at living as humans, to be exact. The whole thing puzzled him, and it appeared to have puzzled all the Gods, too. No one seemed to have the answer; no one knew why that was happening, why mortals were acting the way they were. His Dad never talked to him about it, he just kept shaking his head, saying “those foolish mortals” so helplessly that sometimes Blaine couldn’t recognize the God, the ruler of the great Sea in him anymore. And those times Blaine just wanted to hug his papa and asked him to make everything better. But the greatest God Blaine ever knew just replied with resigned bitterness: “My son, it is not our choice.” Blaine felt even worse that Cooper had changed so much too. He wasn’t his playful brother who would take him to forbidden places in the kingdom and go hunting for treasures with him anymore. Now Cooper was just weary and crestfallen all the time. He missed his Cooper two years ago. Mortals became foolish two years ago. That, he knew.
So he kept looking, wandering the waters where he often found the fisherman, and he looked on the abandoned beach too, but it remained abandoned. He imagined meeting Kurt again, a name so peculiar, he thought, feeling that it didn’t belong there, among humans. It just seemed too heavenly. Blaine imagined a boy with a button nose and eyes bluer than any part of the sea he had ever seen, greyer than the smokiest sky, eyes so deep and voice so high that he couldn’t help wondering how it would be like when he laughed. The sound inside his head broke his heart.
Blaine gave up searching on the third Sunday and found himself alone again, enjoying the tranquility of the absence of deaths, but there was no living either. For the first time, he thought about mortals’ meaning of living, of being alive. The sky lifted up and Blaine could see the sun above piercing through the water, divine as ever while the sea lay quietly, a thousand times more magnificent in its noiselessness. Cooper finally had a break that day, fading into heavenly sleep. Blaine didn’t want to bother him so he went back to the shore by himself; daylight was glittering on this feet. He still felt oddly strange about it, the tingling feeling when he transformed. Cooper said he would get used to it; he said “That’s the thing about Gods. We just need to live long enough to get used to anything … except for mortals. But still, we keep trying to.” Cooper always said things that Blaine felt he would never fully understand, but he believed him anyways. And he really wanted to get used to walking. He wanted to go into town and see humans and squares and houses like the stories he heard from all his older cousins when he was still the Little Prince. His dad never encouraged him to go on land, or to have any interaction with humans whatsoever, “Nothing good comes with mortals.” But Cooper was okay with it. Blaine wondered if it was because Cooper got it, the craving to just take leave and go, or because he just wanted Blaine to get the idea out of his system. Cooper showed Blaine the place to get clothes “Don’t question. It’s a mortal thing,” telling Blaine to try to blend in, and be careful. “Don’t let yourself troubled too much about the casualty of being humans”. But Blaine was convinced that there must be something on land that was so wonderful, there must be, something, that mortals could go back to from battlefields at sea and keep living. Something that made being human bearable.
So on that beautiful Sunday when Gods could rest, Blaine found himself overtaken by a violent sense of wanderlust as he aimlessly walked down the beach. He didn’t expect to see the boy again but there he was, heading towards him, holding something against his chest, eyes downcast with an ever present layer of sadness that sounded like crashing waves. Blaine took a longer look at the boy and yes, he was…he was Kurt.
Blaine uttered in a nervous voice,
“Hi”
Kurt looked up. He seemed greatly surprised seeing Blaine, or perhaps anyone, there.
“Hi?”
“Yeah.. Uhm..” Quit being shy Blaine, he scolded himself. You’re a freakin’ sea prince. Stop it! “I’m Blaine.”
“Kurt”
Blaine nodded, whispering without even realizing it: I know.
Kurt eyed Blaine skeptically, “What are you doing there? You’re not from the village, are you?”
“No.Um.. I..uh..” Blaine stuttered. He had spent three weeks thinking of meeting the boy but it never crossed his mind what he would say to him. All of a sudden, he was terribly conscious of his legs. Despite Cooper’s reassurance that his tail would transform the moment Blaine got himself out of the water and that his legs were supposed to look exactly like humans’, Blaine just felt they were…different. Blaine always had those sensations in his legs while walking that he never felt with his tail. He was terrified. Do humans have the feelings on their legs just like this? Would Kurt notice that my legs are not really…human?
“Fine,” Kurt said, in a voice of faint bitterness and indifference when Blaine didn’t answer. “Don’t tell me.” He rolled his eyes. “I’m used to kids not wanting to talk to me anyway.”
“No, it’s not that...”
But Kurt seemed to have shut himself off, sitting down and just staring at the sea again. Blaine was struggling to figure out what to say next when he noticed what Kurt was holding: a notebook. He gingerly stepped closer and sat down next to him.
“So... what do you have there?”
Kurt snapped his head to Blaine as if he had just been forcefully pulled out of his world by the collar. He flinched back a bit, obviously uncomfortable with Blaine sitting too close.
“What?”
“Oh… I asked what you have there,” Blaine said quietly as if he was afraid he would startle Kurt, pointing at the notebook for good measure.
“Oh, it’s my storybook. Mine and ...Mama’s.” There, that sadness haunting Kurt’s face again. Blaine mustered his courage, trying to keep the boy from drifting off. Is it always this hard talking to humans?
“Stories? What are they about?”
“What else? The sea out there!” Just like that, Kurt lit up. “Have you been? It’s wonderful, isn’t it?”
“…Uhm...No, I hav...”
“Me neither! But one day. One day...But I know about it. Mama always told me these stories and I copied all of them down. I even wrote my own. “
“Uh yeah?”
“Yes! I’m going out there. One day, I will go and see how true those stories are. How amazing!”
“What’s so great about the sea?” Suddenly Blaine got rather upset he didn’t even know why.
“Are you kidding? Everything! Don’t you think it’s incredible that there is a whole different world out there, stunning and spectacular?”
“…”
“It’s living Blaine. Out at sea with all those adventures and actions. The thrills, the dangers. Glorious! It’s the only place you can find happiness.”
Blaine looked at him and felt… amazed. Kurt’s face was busting in excitement as he talked breathless, smiling broadly, dreamily at the sea afar, a sea so foreign to Blaine. Blaine was utterly bewildered how Kurt’s vision could be so different from his reality, how Kurt could possibly be talking about his home. Blaine remembered Cooper’s saying about how insane mortals were with their deranged hallucination. “That was what made them do all those foolish things. Such foolishness.”
“Tell me your story,.” Blaine said before he could stop himself. Honestly, he was desperate to see the world this boy imagined.
“I want to know how it is out there too.”
Kurt was beaming then. Blaine hadn’t seen such a dazzling smile. There was no longer the aching anguish of the day they first met that caused Blaine’s skin to combust as if the layer underneath were setting itself on fire,. This smile was just so fresh and so young with teeth like tiny pearls hidden waiting for treasure hunters.
“Once upon a time…”
~
It became their routine: Kurt would tell Blaine his stories: stories with godlike warriors and monstrous creatures, with a princess that never dies and a prince forever cursed. And Blaine would just sit in silence with a faint smile, letting Kurt’s truth become his truth. They both marveled at the astounding world out there. Achingly beautiful. Kurt wrote new stories too, mapping out all the places and creatures at sea. He painted a whole marvelously bizarre world with his blunt pencil and unlined paper. He was the creator of his world, and Blaine’s too.
At first, Kurt did ask Blaine about his story, his home, his family. He seemed hurt that Blaine was always reluctant to tell him anything. By the end of the week Blaine had to explain that it was not like that he wanted to keep secret from him; he just honestly would rather not talk about it. Blaine tried so hard to be a good friend to Kurt because this boy, this boy was amazing with his stories and his voice was more enchanting than any mermaid’s on the Entrance Gulf.
Blaine was almost tempted to tell Kurt the truth, that he was the Prince of the Sea and that every day he saw his family dragging mortals’ souls to the other side. Souls that evacuated from their bodies in time of war. But he didn’t want Kurt to know that out there, in between the beginning and the end of any second, the water would expand and swallow humans’ agony in full. Kurt must still believe that the songs at sea were the wondrous tunes of life and happiness, not muffled moans and laments from too many cursed souls waiting in line to be taken away. Kurt must believe so for Blaine to believe it himself, to forget that he, too, would soon be called up to serve his duty.
Perhaps, seeing Blaine so defeated, Kurt finally relented:
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
Kurt never asked Blaine about his family again. In fact, Kurt never asked Blaine anything after that. He did almost all the talking for them and Blaine loved it that way. Kurt said he got it somehow. He, too, used to be good at just curling up into himself, not discussing or even thinking about anything at all. He told Blaine a way to cope with life was to just close his eyes and block out people’s voices, untrue and unkind.
“Just listen carefully and the sea will tell you all the myths you want to know about the world afar.”
~
“What about here?” Blaine asked one day when they were watching the sun setting down the undisturbed horizon. “You never tell any stories about the village. Would you… would you take me there some time?”
Kurt seemed rather surprised; he looked at Blaine and then turned, going back to counting the endless waves lapping the shore. He let out a soft sigh with his mouth slightly open:
“You are one strange kid, Blaine. You’d better not go. Strange kids are in for trouble in the village. It’s full of ordinary people with their ordinariness. They will just hate you… And you’ll come to hate them too.”
Instead, Kurt started to read some journal pieces from his notebook for Blaine because he seemed dying to know what Kurt’s life was like when he wasn’t wandering on the beach. Kurt read about the days when he was little and everything was still okay, days when he would play with other kids and Elizabeth, his mom would bring sandwiches to the playground for him. Blaine could see it, Kurt smiling the brightest and happiest with arms wrapping around her waist while she ruffled his hair. She sounded like a wonderful woman with a smell like lilac. Blaine wondered how the God who had to take her away must have felt.
~
There were times Blaine found Kurt sitting on the shore with dark bruises on his elbows and tears staining his stormy eyes. Those were the times Blaine felt most helpless, just like when he watched all those humans falling down into the sea. It hurt how much Blaine wished Elizabeth was there; he didn’t know what to do or even what to say to soothe the crying boy. Once, he just sat down next to Kurt and started to sing that song he heard from mermaids whispering to calm lost men. He couldn’t remember all the words so he made them up as he carried the tunes:
“The storm is coming but I don't mind
People are dying, I close my blinds…”
Kurt laid his head on Blaine’s shoulder and fell asleep by the time Blaine finished. Just like that, Blaine knew Kurt was a crashing wave that would always come to shore after adventures from the faraway sea. Breaking, but always home. Blaine breathed in when Kurt breathed in, feeling his heart falling with each mortal breath.
~
Kurt read Blaine the pages he wrote on his last days with Elizabeth. He talked about how he brought the seashells to her sick bed to let her listen to the songs of the ocean, to let the waves, the winds and the coolness of it all wash over her, heal her in the way only they could. But the pulling and pushing over and over of the water still wasn’t able to make her strong enough to go collecting more shells with him. He told Blaine how he always took them back to the beach so that they could keep recording and singing back those melodies. “Those shells will forget how to sing if you keep them ashore for too long.”
Kurt believed his mother had gone back to the sea where all humans came from. He said it was not dying, it was coming home. How fortunately misguided, Blaine thought. Mortals will just vanish when they are done with this world, simply fleeting and insignificant.
And Kurt was a mortal.
~
“It’s been three weeks since she’s gone. Papa is trying so hard to be strong for me and I know it’s awful but I wish he just cries. Why isn’t he crying like he did when granny died. Everybody keeps coming over and saying things, saying that they are sorry but their stupid sorries are useless. Take all your sorries away from my mom! They just want to say it so that it’s over with, done. But it’s not. I don’t want to ‘get over it’. I don’t want to ‘move on’.I don’t understand. How can people move on from a person just because she is dead? “
Kurt voice was questioning but so, so calm that Blaine wonder if that was really Kurt. “I took a walk on the abandoned beach today, the one I ran to the day she died, the one where the sand is not quite sand but more like tiny, hard rocks that hurt my bare feet, rocks that are almost sand but not quite. They are getting there but not quite. The wind was still blowing and the waves were still smashing but I was not angry anymore. And I stopped asking why the God had to take her away, how they never learn of the feeling of loss and how unfair it all was.”
Blaine could feel Kurt’s calmness shaking when he closed his eyes and took a deep shuddering breath.
“Kurt, you don’t have to re…”
“I met a boy on the shore.
He has a mob of dark curly hair.
I told him her stories.”
~
“I’m glad that I met you, you know.” Kurt said when he looked up from his notebook, staring straight into Blaine eyes. “For if I didn’t have you to tell the stories I would just be that kid without any friends, that kid who curls up into himself only to find that he’s now a motherless child. That kid no one sings to sleep. So I’m glad that I met you.”
…
Me too.
And your eyes make me feel like home.
~
Blaine found Kurt getting a little bit more cheerful every day. He laughed when they chased each other along the beach, when Blaine found him two starfish and named them Kurt and Blaine. Kurt’s laughter got Blaine laughing too. Suddenly, the sea was not as dreadful to Blaine anymore, for he could always come on shore and let Kurt tell him his never ending tales. With Kurt, he felt ecstatically, foolishly human.
He did, until it was time for him to do his God-bound duty: delivering mortals’ souls.
For the first time, the battlefields were his. For the first time, he saw with his own eyes humans killing other humans, forgetting how they were just mortals, forgetting how they were just playing pretend that they were Gods. A headless soldier holding his flag, a screaming mother collecting the pieces of her blown-up child, all were singing themselves to forever doom under the darkest sea- a divine anthem to the accompaniment of cannons and gun powder. Then, Blaine truly felt how it was to be human.
You will get used to it.
Blaine never told a word about what he saw to Kurt. He closed up, silenced himself even more than before. He just let Kurt did what he did best, healing the wounds that would soon be torn open the next day, making living bearable. Kurt never asked.
~
“Take me to the village today?”
“Blaine, I told you, people there are no fun.”
“I know. Take me anyway?”
“…”
“…”
“Okay.”
So Kurt did. They went to a fish market and Kurt showed Blaine how the selling and buying and bargaining going on were all pointless. “All those menial things make people so small, so sickeningly content.” Kurt commented on everything they saw with utter resentment except for when they passed by his school.
“Sometimes, I am thankful that I went to that school, you know. It is the reason I know for sure I’m sailing away,” Kurt said as they walked back towards the beach.
“Oh, let me show you my favourite spot here besides our beach.”
Kurt led Blain to the port. Ships were staring to come back for the day; the smell of freshly caught fish and salted nets and stale sweat mingled with yelling from tall, roughened fishermen trying to anchoring their second home to sleep. It was vibrantly life.
“I love it here. People going in and out of places. Living. Papa has a boat here too. He stopped sailing for a while after she was gone but he’s going back now. That’ll make him a bit less miserable, you know.” Kurt breathed out a gentle smile, looking at the boats returning home. “This is my first ever daydreaming place. I would go here with mom to help papa sail off. And as his boat floating away, I would picture the day I’d own one of those and sail out to the sea.”
Kurt took Blaine into the village every week after that. Blaine always asked to stop by the playground next to the town square full of children running and giggling. Kurt brought Blaine over to his home to meet Burt. Although the man didn’t know that Blaine would swim by his boat every morning, looking out for him, he still welcomed Blaine as a part of the family. Blaine guessed it was because he said something about his parents always being faraway doing oversea deliveries. He was even invited when Burt got remarried to Carole. Blaine was glad Kurt had one more person to be there for him. And Finn too. Finn was Carole’s son and Kurt’s new brother. Blaine never talked much to Finn though, for he was always busy working after Quinn got pregnant. Kurt told Blaine that Finn had dropped out of school after he married Quinn. He had to work for Burt to support his wife and kid. Kurt did beg his father to let him go with him too but Burt made it clear that he had to stay in school.
One time, Blaine came over when Kurt wasn’t home from school yet.
“Looking for Kurt? He should be here any minute now.”
“Oh, thanks Sir,” Blaine fidgeted.
Burt laughed, still working on his net. “The kid’s quite something ha?”
“Yeah, he’s strange. Oh, no, I mean I like it…his strangeness, like I like...I don’t mind, I enjoy being his friend. A lot.”
“Oh relax buddy. Have a seat... I think he likes your strangeness too.”
With that Burt turned back to his work, leaving Blaine to keep checking the door for Kurt.
“Keep him as long as you can kid,” he said after a while, without even looking up at Blaine. “Once he sails out there, he ain’t gonna come back”.
I know. Blaine didn’t answer Burt. He realized that they’re both trying to reconcile with that fact.
“Burt?”
“Yeah?
“I’ll look after him, okay?”
Burt snorted, in his own term of being friendly.
“Yeah, okay. I have you to count on then.”
[ part 2]