We Found Each Other In The Dark
Title: We Found Each Other In The Dark
Rating: PG-13 [language]
Characters: Kurt/Blaine, Jeff
Words: ~3,000
Spoilers: 2.20, Prom Queen
Summary: When Kurt and Blaine have an argument after prom, Jeff talks Blaine through to a logical conclusion, and Blaine tries to fix what he can.
When the door opens and closes, Jeff looks up from Joseph’s desk and smiles. “Hey,” he says. “Joseph’s on a date and Nick is, like, blasting Katy Perry or something in our room, so Joe said--” And then he stops. His smile drops, his eyebrows drawing together, and he actually looks for a second at Blaine’s face as Blaine leans back against the door with his eyes closed, his hand still white-knuckled around the doorknob. “Blaine,” he says softly. “You okay?”
Blaine lets out a breath through pursed lips that seems to evacuate all of the air from his lungs. “Yeah,” he says, and doesn’t open his eyes. “Yes.” His hand still clutches the doorknob like a lifeline.
Jeff turns a little more in his chair. He tilts his head, his hair sort of falling into his face. “I’m sorry, man,” he murmurs, “but that wasn’t, like, a completely credible answer.”
A smile that sort of looks like a spasm moves across Blaine’s face, pained and uncomfortable and detached, and he drops his head back against the wood of the door. “Not a great night,” he says quietly.
Jeff’s frown creases deeper. “Joe told me you were supposed to stay over at Kurt’s.” On the couch, he’d said, waggling his eyebrows. Like they won’t find a way to make it work.
Blaine’s hand releases the doorknob like it’s suddenly burning him. “Yeah. Didn’t work out that way.” He opens his eyes, then blinks like he’s noticing Jeff for the first time, focusing on him. “I’m sorry. Where’d you say Joseph was?”
“Date,” Jeff repeated, his voice careful. “You want to talk about it?”
Blaine moves from the door, his steps kind of unsteady, and falls back to sit on his bed with a massive creak of springs. He rests his arms on his thighs and just stares at the floor between his knees. “Not particularly.”
Jeff lets the silence spin out a little bit, watching Blaine. The flowers pinned to his chest (Jeff knows there’s a name for them, but he forgets, because Dalton doesn’t have a prom and also he doesn’t care) are pink and a little crushed, but still there, clinging to his jacket. “You look appropriately suave,” he tries, without much effort behind it, a halfhearted lift at the corner of his lips. “Probably had the public school ladies all over you.”
Blaine puts his face in his hands and rubs fast up and down, like he’s trying to wake up, or sober up. “I’m sorry that Joe thought I’d be gone all night,” he murmurs, and Jeff can see Dalton Blaine rearing up inside of the deflated tuxedo sitting on the bed, the Dalton Blaine who is charming and perfect and kind of weird and plastic, “but I’m really tired and I’d like to go to bed. Could you use the common room?” Jeff hasn’t seen Dalton Blaine for a little while. Not really since Kurt showed up and started kicking Blaine’s ass all over the place and making him actually mean the things he says. He really didn’t miss Dalton Blaine very much.
“Apologies, guy,” he says, standing up from the chair and, instead of moving to the door, moving to sit on Joseph’s bed across from Blaine, “but I kind of don’t want to leave you alone right now.”
Annoyance flashes over Blaine’s face before he can reign it in, and it’s a whole lot better than the plastic thing. “Jeff, please--” he starts, but doesn’t finish, because he looks up and sees Jeff just looking at him across the way, elbows on knees, chin on hands and eyebrows up, waiting. He lets out another breath and slumps, exhausted and defeated. “What?” he asks.
“Tell me about your not a great night,” Jeff says.
Blaine’s face goes right back into his hands and just stays there, with his elbows on his knees and his shoulders slumped in a posture that would make Wes force him into some kind of back brace for a week if he caught sight of it. “We went to prom,” he says, entirely monotone.
“I thought you were just wearing that because tuxes are back in fashion.”
“Decidedly no.” Blaine’s voice is muffled by his hands.
Jeff actually does smile a little weakly at that. “You were telling us about it, before,” he says. “You didn’t seem - you know. Excited.”
“I was,” Blaine says. “I wasn’t. I don’t actually know what I was thinking. But I’m just - really stupid.”
“I’m not going to argue with you.” No reaction. Jeff pauses, then leans forward a little. “Why are you stupid?”
Blaine’s hands curl into fists, pressed against the sockets of his eyes. The effect kind of makes Jeff’s insides quiver, because it lets him see how much Blaine’s hands are shaking, the tension in his arms, the painful line of his lips pressed tight together. Blaine takes in a shaking breath. “Kurt was prom queen.”
Something sharp lodges in Jeff’s chest. “They voted him--”
“Write-in ballots,” Blaine says. “The whole school.” His voice shakes on the words whole and school. “And he just - he was so mad--” And now his voice is breaking on all of the words, “-and upset and I couldn’t do anything, I couldn’t fix it for him--” And his shoulders start shaking, lifting and dropping, his fists pressed harder against his eyes and his mouth open and making these wrecked little sobbing noises, and Jeff is across the room in half a second with his arms around him.
“Hey, man, hey,” he murmurs, pulling tighter. “Shh. It’s okay.” Blaine doesn’t lean into him, but Jeff didn’t expect him to. He’s never seen Blaine cry before. Tears push out from his tight-squeezed eyes and around his hands. One that Jeff can see rolls down to Blaine’s wrist and is swallowed by his sleeve. Jeff pulls still tighter. “I’m sorry.”
Blaine shakes his head. He flattens his hands against his eyes and doesn’t pull away, which makes Jeff weirdly happy in a horrible way. “It was mortifying for him. He tried to own it, but it was still awful.”
Jeff sets his head against Blaine’s. “They actually, like, announced it? Officially? In front of the crowd?”
Blaine nods. It’s short and his voice is bitter. “That principal is an idiot. Such an idiot.”
Jeff is sort of aghast. “No question there,” he says faintly. “Why did Kurt go back to that school, again?”
“That is an excellent goddamn question.” Complete acid. Blaine pulls away a little bit. “I’m sorry. This is ridiculous. I have to go to sleep.” He stands up out of Jeff’s arms and moves jerkily over to his dresser to pull out the top drawer, curse quietly, then pull out the second.
Jeff watches him, pulling his arms back to rest against his knees. “Why didn’t you end up staying over?”
“To quote Kurt,” Blaine says, rifling violently through his clothes, “everything is ruined, you should just go home.”
Jeff frowns. “And you actually did that?”
Blaine stops and looks over his shoulder at Jeff. All of that violence is suddenly focused with scalpel’s-edge sharpness at Jeff’s face. “Yes,” Blaine says, his teeth gritting together, “I actually did that.”
Jeff holds up his hands as if to block himself from the waves of annoyance rolling off of Blaine. “Woah, hey,” he says. “Sorry. Just - really?” He lowers his hands. “Did you guys fight?”
Blaine sighs. He sets his forehead down against the top of his dresser. “Maybe it wasn’t a fight,” he murmurs. His eyes close. “Maybe it was just a really tense conversation with a lot of displaced anger.”
Jeff’s lips twitch. “Like Bambi’s mother is just sleeping?”
Blaine rolls his forehead back and forth on the scuffed wood. “Like Mr. Jingles is a circus mouse.”
Jeff pushes himself off of the bed and walks over to Blaine. He puts a hand on Blaine’s shoulder, squeezing a little. “I’m really sorry this happened,” he says, and here is the part where he thinks maybe Nick or David would be better for Blaine right now. “It sucks. It’s completely ridiculous, and it sucks, and those people are, like, animals, and I hope that they all get into car accidents or something.” But he doesn’t really, and he immediately regrets saying it. He touches the wood of the dresser surreptitiously three times with his fingertips. “Kurt didn’t deserve that. Kurt’s awesome. You’re awesome.”
Blaine’s shoulders slump again, and it looks like most of his weight is being held up by the dresser. “If it was me. If I’d been the one elected for prom queen?” He turns his head and looks Jeff in the face, and Jeff can see everything just right there, a whole night’s worth of emotion in one expression, and it makes his chest twinge. “I would have run away from that school and probably not stopped running until I was forced to by the ocean. Then I’d start swimming.”
Jeff is a little breathless when he asks, “What did Kurt do?”
“He ran out,” Blaine says. He rolls his face away again. “Then he went back in and got coronated and joked about the royal wedding. And then we danced to ABBA.”
Jeff smiles. He smiles huge. “I fucking love Kurt.”
With his eyes closed, Blaine smiles, too. Actually smiles. Faint, but present, and fond, and it makes Jeff feel a little better. “I do, too.”
Jeff claps him on the shoulder. “I think you should go back to Lima.”
Blaine straightens up and pushes the dresser drawer closed. “I think you should bite me.”
“That doesn’t really change my stance on the whole thing.”
Blaine glances at Jeff through the sides of his eyes, and Jeff can see it sort of settle over him. Normal Blaine. The one who doesn’t cry, but also doesn’t act like a Stepford Boy. The one who’s kind of wry and ridiculous and climbs on furniture too much when he’s singing. The one Jeff really likes and really looks up to in a totally not-creepy way, and Jeff smiles again. And Blaine smiles back.
“Get out so I can change into normal human clothing.”
“But you’re so pretty, Mr. Anderson.”
“Out, or I’m going to scandalize you.”
“I’m going, I’m gone.”
The fact that this is an eighties movie cliché actually makes it work better for Blaine.
He grew up on a steady diet of John Hughes movies. He would sit and watch Some Kind of Wonderful, and then rewind it and watch it again. This is just kind of perfect. Prom night gone horribly wrong. Weird, tense, uncomfortable fight during the car ride home. Parting on uncertain terms. Friend at preppy boarding school talking him into going and doing something about it. He might as well be John Cusack.
It’s just that he’s kind of sitting in his car, staring up at Kurt’s window, his phone sitting on his knee, not doing anything. Because this isn’t actually a movie, and he doesn’t know if he can roll this off of their shoulders so easily. Because Kurt was actually hurt tonight, wounded deep just when he thought things might be healing over, and Blaine might not be good at this.
But Blaine really fucking loves him.
His phone buzzes. Jeff.
To: Blaine
Don’t sing to him. At least not about what he can leave in his drawers.
To: Jeff
I will relieve you of your drawers.
To: Blaine
That is a only weakly lolworthy.
He looks back up at Kurt’s window. Still dark. The thin green light from his dashboard clock spills through 3:47AM, and the weird, warm humidity is fogging the windshield and making the sodium-orange streetlights dazzle and halo through the glass. He slowly unbuckles his seatbelt. He opens the door. He steps out of the car, and his shoes make contact with the road, and he can feel the solidity of it, real and hard and slightly wet in the dark-bright nighttime of May, and he feels like he can actually do this.
To: Kurt
Tap.
To: Kurt
Tap tap tap.
To: Blaine
What are you doing?
To: Kurt:
I’m throwing pebbles at your window.
It takes three minutes for Kurt to appear at the window and pull it open, and they are maybe some of the longest minutes of Blaine’s life. He spends them watching the curtains on the other side of the glass, anxiously looking for twitches, for any sign that Kurt didn’t just roll over and go back to sleep. But they sweep aside, and there’s Kurt in a grey t-shirt hefting the window up and looking out into the dark, looking down at Blaine standing on the front lawn looking up at him with a kind of hopeful smile. Kurt moves a little, doesn’t say anything, and Blaine’s phone buzzes in his hand.
To: Blaine
You’re ridiculous. I can’t shout down at you, I’ll wake the whole house up.
To: Kurt
Come down here.
To: Blaine
This is decidedly less romantic than Romeo and Juliet.
To: Kurt
He speaks, yet he says nothing. His eye discourses, I will answer it.
He looks up to see Kurt get the text. When Kurt reads it, he raises his head and arches one sardonic eyebrow, and Blaine’s heart does something in his chest, because he has him. Kurt moves away from the window, and Blaine slips his phone into his pocket and shifts off of the dewy grass and onto the path to the front door to wait in silence.
It’s a few minutes before the door creaks open slowly, an inch at a time, and Kurt presses through the smallest possible space before turning and closing it just as slowly again, entirely silent. Then he turns, and looks up, and Blaine can see him in the half-shadow of the doorway, utterly calm and quiet and ethereal, just looking, just watching. And then he starts to move, down the path, towards Blaine, and his face is schooled and cautious, and his eyes are present and focused, and Blaine can do nothing but reach out when Kurt is close enough for fingertips and pull him closer by the edges of his shirt, press him hard and curl his arms around Kurt’s waist, put his head against Kurt’s shoulder. And Kurt just relaxes into him, just fits against him perfectly, and it’s okay.
“I’m sorry,” Blaine murmurs. “We did this wrong.”
“I started the fight.” Kurt’s breath against his neck sends a chill down his spine.
“We were both on edge,” he says. “Tonight sucked.”
Kurt snorts into his shoulder. “The understatement of the century, courtesy Blaine Anderson.”
He flattens his hands against Kurt’s back, trying to feel as much of him as possible, experience as much of him as possible. He breathes the scent of Kurt’s shampoo and numerous moisturizers. Then he pulls away a little to look Kurt in the face. “I didn’t get a chance to really dance with you tonight.”
Kurt’s lips twitch a little with a suppressed smile. “I seem to remember some Dancing Queen in there at some point."
Blaine slides a hand down Kurt’s arm and twines their fingers together. “I hate that song and everything it chooses to be.” He turns and starts down the path back toward the street, over the sidewalk and the belt of grass, onto the asphalt and around his car to the driver’s side window, with Kurt’s hand in his the entire way. He leans through the window, turns the key to Acc, and fumbles one-handed for his iPod.
Kurt laughs. “What are you doing?”
“Dee-jaying.” He scrolls through the songs, finds the one he’s looking for, selects it, turns the volume knob up and turns around to find Kurt very, very close and very, very smiling. He smiles back. “Would you like to dance?”
The music starts. Kurt’s smile softens. “Yes.”
Blaine leads him out into the middle of the road, with all of the windows in the houses around them like glass eyes shut black and tight in sleep. He slips his arms around Kurt’s waist, and Kurt slips his arms around Blaine’s shoulders, and they fit together like puzzle pieces in the warm dark.
“This is incredibly Nicholas Sparks,” Kurt murmurs in his ear.
“I’m going to forget you said that,” Blaine murmurs back, and Kurt just laughs softly and lays his head against Blaine’s shoulder. They sway like that, pressed close, Kurt in his strangely understated pajamas, Blaine in whatever he could find in ten minutes. Blaine watches the sodium lights sparkle in the hazy air, like stars, or gold, dripping down to the street and all around them. It’s beautiful. All of it. Kurt. The music. The lights. The air.
“I want to be able to make up for tonight,” Blaine says with his chin on Kurt’s shoulder. “For everything that happened.”
“That isn’t your job.” Kurt’s hands move in soothing little strokes down Blaine’s back. “I’m going to get over it. I promise.” He pauses. “This is helping.”
Blaine leans back a little to look at Kurt’s face. His eyes reflect the gold from the streetlamps, his mouth curled in a smile that is soft and private and entirely beautiful, and Blaine feels for the ten thousandth time that wonderful tug in his stomach, that drop of his heart. “I feel safe when I am with you,” he sings along softly, “and I feel warm when you want me, too. I am cured when we are alone. I’m all right.”
Kurt leans in and kisses him, soft and open, slow. And when he pulls away, there’s color in his cheeks, and he smiles.
And Blaine says it. “I love you.”
Kurt’s eyebrows raise. His eyes widen. The blush deepens, and his breath seems to have caught somewhere, because it shakes when he finally draws it in. “Really?” he asks.
Blaine smiles. “Yes.”
And Kurt kisses him again. In the dark. In the gold. In the middle of the street, in the middle of a sleeping town, in the middle of one of the worst nights in a long time, Kurt kisses Blaine with the humidity wrapped around them and the music drifting softly from a car stereo, and he means I love you back, and Blaine thinks they’re rolling it off of their shoulders. He thinks they’re doing it fine.
They’re slow dancing in the middle of the street, they’re tugging at the edges of something new, and they’re doing it fine.
Rating: PG-13 [language]
Characters: Kurt/Blaine, Jeff
Words: ~3,000
Spoilers: 2.20, Prom Queen
Summary: When Kurt and Blaine have an argument after prom, Jeff talks Blaine through to a logical conclusion, and Blaine tries to fix what he can.
When the door opens and closes, Jeff looks up from Joseph’s desk and smiles. “Hey,” he says. “Joseph’s on a date and Nick is, like, blasting Katy Perry or something in our room, so Joe said--” And then he stops. His smile drops, his eyebrows drawing together, and he actually looks for a second at Blaine’s face as Blaine leans back against the door with his eyes closed, his hand still white-knuckled around the doorknob. “Blaine,” he says softly. “You okay?”
Blaine lets out a breath through pursed lips that seems to evacuate all of the air from his lungs. “Yeah,” he says, and doesn’t open his eyes. “Yes.” His hand still clutches the doorknob like a lifeline.
Jeff turns a little more in his chair. He tilts his head, his hair sort of falling into his face. “I’m sorry, man,” he murmurs, “but that wasn’t, like, a completely credible answer.”
A smile that sort of looks like a spasm moves across Blaine’s face, pained and uncomfortable and detached, and he drops his head back against the wood of the door. “Not a great night,” he says quietly.
Jeff’s frown creases deeper. “Joe told me you were supposed to stay over at Kurt’s.” On the couch, he’d said, waggling his eyebrows. Like they won’t find a way to make it work.
Blaine’s hand releases the doorknob like it’s suddenly burning him. “Yeah. Didn’t work out that way.” He opens his eyes, then blinks like he’s noticing Jeff for the first time, focusing on him. “I’m sorry. Where’d you say Joseph was?”
“Date,” Jeff repeated, his voice careful. “You want to talk about it?”
Blaine moves from the door, his steps kind of unsteady, and falls back to sit on his bed with a massive creak of springs. He rests his arms on his thighs and just stares at the floor between his knees. “Not particularly.”
Jeff lets the silence spin out a little bit, watching Blaine. The flowers pinned to his chest (Jeff knows there’s a name for them, but he forgets, because Dalton doesn’t have a prom and also he doesn’t care) are pink and a little crushed, but still there, clinging to his jacket. “You look appropriately suave,” he tries, without much effort behind it, a halfhearted lift at the corner of his lips. “Probably had the public school ladies all over you.”
Blaine puts his face in his hands and rubs fast up and down, like he’s trying to wake up, or sober up. “I’m sorry that Joe thought I’d be gone all night,” he murmurs, and Jeff can see Dalton Blaine rearing up inside of the deflated tuxedo sitting on the bed, the Dalton Blaine who is charming and perfect and kind of weird and plastic, “but I’m really tired and I’d like to go to bed. Could you use the common room?” Jeff hasn’t seen Dalton Blaine for a little while. Not really since Kurt showed up and started kicking Blaine’s ass all over the place and making him actually mean the things he says. He really didn’t miss Dalton Blaine very much.
“Apologies, guy,” he says, standing up from the chair and, instead of moving to the door, moving to sit on Joseph’s bed across from Blaine, “but I kind of don’t want to leave you alone right now.”
Annoyance flashes over Blaine’s face before he can reign it in, and it’s a whole lot better than the plastic thing. “Jeff, please--” he starts, but doesn’t finish, because he looks up and sees Jeff just looking at him across the way, elbows on knees, chin on hands and eyebrows up, waiting. He lets out another breath and slumps, exhausted and defeated. “What?” he asks.
“Tell me about your not a great night,” Jeff says.
Blaine’s face goes right back into his hands and just stays there, with his elbows on his knees and his shoulders slumped in a posture that would make Wes force him into some kind of back brace for a week if he caught sight of it. “We went to prom,” he says, entirely monotone.
“I thought you were just wearing that because tuxes are back in fashion.”
“Decidedly no.” Blaine’s voice is muffled by his hands.
Jeff actually does smile a little weakly at that. “You were telling us about it, before,” he says. “You didn’t seem - you know. Excited.”
“I was,” Blaine says. “I wasn’t. I don’t actually know what I was thinking. But I’m just - really stupid.”
“I’m not going to argue with you.” No reaction. Jeff pauses, then leans forward a little. “Why are you stupid?”
Blaine’s hands curl into fists, pressed against the sockets of his eyes. The effect kind of makes Jeff’s insides quiver, because it lets him see how much Blaine’s hands are shaking, the tension in his arms, the painful line of his lips pressed tight together. Blaine takes in a shaking breath. “Kurt was prom queen.”
Something sharp lodges in Jeff’s chest. “They voted him--”
“Write-in ballots,” Blaine says. “The whole school.” His voice shakes on the words whole and school. “And he just - he was so mad--” And now his voice is breaking on all of the words, “-and upset and I couldn’t do anything, I couldn’t fix it for him--” And his shoulders start shaking, lifting and dropping, his fists pressed harder against his eyes and his mouth open and making these wrecked little sobbing noises, and Jeff is across the room in half a second with his arms around him.
“Hey, man, hey,” he murmurs, pulling tighter. “Shh. It’s okay.” Blaine doesn’t lean into him, but Jeff didn’t expect him to. He’s never seen Blaine cry before. Tears push out from his tight-squeezed eyes and around his hands. One that Jeff can see rolls down to Blaine’s wrist and is swallowed by his sleeve. Jeff pulls still tighter. “I’m sorry.”
Blaine shakes his head. He flattens his hands against his eyes and doesn’t pull away, which makes Jeff weirdly happy in a horrible way. “It was mortifying for him. He tried to own it, but it was still awful.”
Jeff sets his head against Blaine’s. “They actually, like, announced it? Officially? In front of the crowd?”
Blaine nods. It’s short and his voice is bitter. “That principal is an idiot. Such an idiot.”
Jeff is sort of aghast. “No question there,” he says faintly. “Why did Kurt go back to that school, again?”
“That is an excellent goddamn question.” Complete acid. Blaine pulls away a little bit. “I’m sorry. This is ridiculous. I have to go to sleep.” He stands up out of Jeff’s arms and moves jerkily over to his dresser to pull out the top drawer, curse quietly, then pull out the second.
Jeff watches him, pulling his arms back to rest against his knees. “Why didn’t you end up staying over?”
“To quote Kurt,” Blaine says, rifling violently through his clothes, “everything is ruined, you should just go home.”
Jeff frowns. “And you actually did that?”
Blaine stops and looks over his shoulder at Jeff. All of that violence is suddenly focused with scalpel’s-edge sharpness at Jeff’s face. “Yes,” Blaine says, his teeth gritting together, “I actually did that.”
Jeff holds up his hands as if to block himself from the waves of annoyance rolling off of Blaine. “Woah, hey,” he says. “Sorry. Just - really?” He lowers his hands. “Did you guys fight?”
Blaine sighs. He sets his forehead down against the top of his dresser. “Maybe it wasn’t a fight,” he murmurs. His eyes close. “Maybe it was just a really tense conversation with a lot of displaced anger.”
Jeff’s lips twitch. “Like Bambi’s mother is just sleeping?”
Blaine rolls his forehead back and forth on the scuffed wood. “Like Mr. Jingles is a circus mouse.”
Jeff pushes himself off of the bed and walks over to Blaine. He puts a hand on Blaine’s shoulder, squeezing a little. “I’m really sorry this happened,” he says, and here is the part where he thinks maybe Nick or David would be better for Blaine right now. “It sucks. It’s completely ridiculous, and it sucks, and those people are, like, animals, and I hope that they all get into car accidents or something.” But he doesn’t really, and he immediately regrets saying it. He touches the wood of the dresser surreptitiously three times with his fingertips. “Kurt didn’t deserve that. Kurt’s awesome. You’re awesome.”
Blaine’s shoulders slump again, and it looks like most of his weight is being held up by the dresser. “If it was me. If I’d been the one elected for prom queen?” He turns his head and looks Jeff in the face, and Jeff can see everything just right there, a whole night’s worth of emotion in one expression, and it makes his chest twinge. “I would have run away from that school and probably not stopped running until I was forced to by the ocean. Then I’d start swimming.”
Jeff is a little breathless when he asks, “What did Kurt do?”
“He ran out,” Blaine says. He rolls his face away again. “Then he went back in and got coronated and joked about the royal wedding. And then we danced to ABBA.”
Jeff smiles. He smiles huge. “I fucking love Kurt.”
With his eyes closed, Blaine smiles, too. Actually smiles. Faint, but present, and fond, and it makes Jeff feel a little better. “I do, too.”
Jeff claps him on the shoulder. “I think you should go back to Lima.”
Blaine straightens up and pushes the dresser drawer closed. “I think you should bite me.”
“That doesn’t really change my stance on the whole thing.”
Blaine glances at Jeff through the sides of his eyes, and Jeff can see it sort of settle over him. Normal Blaine. The one who doesn’t cry, but also doesn’t act like a Stepford Boy. The one who’s kind of wry and ridiculous and climbs on furniture too much when he’s singing. The one Jeff really likes and really looks up to in a totally not-creepy way, and Jeff smiles again. And Blaine smiles back.
“Get out so I can change into normal human clothing.”
“But you’re so pretty, Mr. Anderson.”
“Out, or I’m going to scandalize you.”
“I’m going, I’m gone.”
The fact that this is an eighties movie cliché actually makes it work better for Blaine.
He grew up on a steady diet of John Hughes movies. He would sit and watch Some Kind of Wonderful, and then rewind it and watch it again. This is just kind of perfect. Prom night gone horribly wrong. Weird, tense, uncomfortable fight during the car ride home. Parting on uncertain terms. Friend at preppy boarding school talking him into going and doing something about it. He might as well be John Cusack.
It’s just that he’s kind of sitting in his car, staring up at Kurt’s window, his phone sitting on his knee, not doing anything. Because this isn’t actually a movie, and he doesn’t know if he can roll this off of their shoulders so easily. Because Kurt was actually hurt tonight, wounded deep just when he thought things might be healing over, and Blaine might not be good at this.
But Blaine really fucking loves him.
His phone buzzes. Jeff.
To: Blaine
Don’t sing to him. At least not about what he can leave in his drawers.
To: Jeff
I will relieve you of your drawers.
To: Blaine
That is a only weakly lolworthy.
He looks back up at Kurt’s window. Still dark. The thin green light from his dashboard clock spills through 3:47AM, and the weird, warm humidity is fogging the windshield and making the sodium-orange streetlights dazzle and halo through the glass. He slowly unbuckles his seatbelt. He opens the door. He steps out of the car, and his shoes make contact with the road, and he can feel the solidity of it, real and hard and slightly wet in the dark-bright nighttime of May, and he feels like he can actually do this.
To: Kurt
Tap.
To: Kurt
Tap tap tap.
To: Blaine
What are you doing?
To: Kurt:
I’m throwing pebbles at your window.
It takes three minutes for Kurt to appear at the window and pull it open, and they are maybe some of the longest minutes of Blaine’s life. He spends them watching the curtains on the other side of the glass, anxiously looking for twitches, for any sign that Kurt didn’t just roll over and go back to sleep. But they sweep aside, and there’s Kurt in a grey t-shirt hefting the window up and looking out into the dark, looking down at Blaine standing on the front lawn looking up at him with a kind of hopeful smile. Kurt moves a little, doesn’t say anything, and Blaine’s phone buzzes in his hand.
To: Blaine
You’re ridiculous. I can’t shout down at you, I’ll wake the whole house up.
To: Kurt
Come down here.
To: Blaine
This is decidedly less romantic than Romeo and Juliet.
To: Kurt
He speaks, yet he says nothing. His eye discourses, I will answer it.
He looks up to see Kurt get the text. When Kurt reads it, he raises his head and arches one sardonic eyebrow, and Blaine’s heart does something in his chest, because he has him. Kurt moves away from the window, and Blaine slips his phone into his pocket and shifts off of the dewy grass and onto the path to the front door to wait in silence.
It’s a few minutes before the door creaks open slowly, an inch at a time, and Kurt presses through the smallest possible space before turning and closing it just as slowly again, entirely silent. Then he turns, and looks up, and Blaine can see him in the half-shadow of the doorway, utterly calm and quiet and ethereal, just looking, just watching. And then he starts to move, down the path, towards Blaine, and his face is schooled and cautious, and his eyes are present and focused, and Blaine can do nothing but reach out when Kurt is close enough for fingertips and pull him closer by the edges of his shirt, press him hard and curl his arms around Kurt’s waist, put his head against Kurt’s shoulder. And Kurt just relaxes into him, just fits against him perfectly, and it’s okay.
“I’m sorry,” Blaine murmurs. “We did this wrong.”
“I started the fight.” Kurt’s breath against his neck sends a chill down his spine.
“We were both on edge,” he says. “Tonight sucked.”
Kurt snorts into his shoulder. “The understatement of the century, courtesy Blaine Anderson.”
He flattens his hands against Kurt’s back, trying to feel as much of him as possible, experience as much of him as possible. He breathes the scent of Kurt’s shampoo and numerous moisturizers. Then he pulls away a little to look Kurt in the face. “I didn’t get a chance to really dance with you tonight.”
Kurt’s lips twitch a little with a suppressed smile. “I seem to remember some Dancing Queen in there at some point."
Blaine slides a hand down Kurt’s arm and twines their fingers together. “I hate that song and everything it chooses to be.” He turns and starts down the path back toward the street, over the sidewalk and the belt of grass, onto the asphalt and around his car to the driver’s side window, with Kurt’s hand in his the entire way. He leans through the window, turns the key to Acc, and fumbles one-handed for his iPod.
Kurt laughs. “What are you doing?”
“Dee-jaying.” He scrolls through the songs, finds the one he’s looking for, selects it, turns the volume knob up and turns around to find Kurt very, very close and very, very smiling. He smiles back. “Would you like to dance?”
The music starts. Kurt’s smile softens. “Yes.”
Blaine leads him out into the middle of the road, with all of the windows in the houses around them like glass eyes shut black and tight in sleep. He slips his arms around Kurt’s waist, and Kurt slips his arms around Blaine’s shoulders, and they fit together like puzzle pieces in the warm dark.
“This is incredibly Nicholas Sparks,” Kurt murmurs in his ear.
“I’m going to forget you said that,” Blaine murmurs back, and Kurt just laughs softly and lays his head against Blaine’s shoulder. They sway like that, pressed close, Kurt in his strangely understated pajamas, Blaine in whatever he could find in ten minutes. Blaine watches the sodium lights sparkle in the hazy air, like stars, or gold, dripping down to the street and all around them. It’s beautiful. All of it. Kurt. The music. The lights. The air.
“I want to be able to make up for tonight,” Blaine says with his chin on Kurt’s shoulder. “For everything that happened.”
“That isn’t your job.” Kurt’s hands move in soothing little strokes down Blaine’s back. “I’m going to get over it. I promise.” He pauses. “This is helping.”
Blaine leans back a little to look at Kurt’s face. His eyes reflect the gold from the streetlamps, his mouth curled in a smile that is soft and private and entirely beautiful, and Blaine feels for the ten thousandth time that wonderful tug in his stomach, that drop of his heart. “I feel safe when I am with you,” he sings along softly, “and I feel warm when you want me, too. I am cured when we are alone. I’m all right.”
Kurt leans in and kisses him, soft and open, slow. And when he pulls away, there’s color in his cheeks, and he smiles.
And Blaine says it. “I love you.”
Kurt’s eyebrows raise. His eyes widen. The blush deepens, and his breath seems to have caught somewhere, because it shakes when he finally draws it in. “Really?” he asks.
Blaine smiles. “Yes.”
And Kurt kisses him again. In the dark. In the gold. In the middle of the street, in the middle of a sleeping town, in the middle of one of the worst nights in a long time, Kurt kisses Blaine with the humidity wrapped around them and the music drifting softly from a car stereo, and he means I love you back, and Blaine thinks they’re rolling it off of their shoulders. He thinks they’re doing it fine.
They’re slow dancing in the middle of the street, they’re tugging at the edges of something new, and they’re doing it fine.