"Santana?" Blaine called down the hall, ducking around the corner. The mass of ebony hair that had been stalking away paused, as did the consistent click-tap, click-tap of her boots. "Santana, wait up."

"What, Blaine?"

"Hi," he said instead of actually bringing up a topic, catching up to her just as she turned to face him.

Her eyes were red. A lump rose in his throat at the sight. "What?" she asked again.

"What was that about?" He made sure his words were gentle, but not so gentle they were over-stimulating for her; she could only handle half as much love as she could hate, which was a weakness she saw as a strength.

"It was about the fact that we can't help," Santana snapped.

"So why are you blaming us all?" And he couldn't help the slight bit of acid that leaked into his voice.

Oddly enough, that acid seemed to dissolve a bit of her temper, and she took a moment to compose herself before she responded to him. "I'm not blaming anyone," she contradicted. "That means I'm saying it's someone's fault. I'm not saying it's anyone's fault. We can't help this."

"I gathered," he remarked dryly. "You said as much. You said we can't help."

"I want to," she told him suddenly, and he raised his eyebrows. "I want to help. But I can't. We can't. I hate feeling helpless."

He wondered how long it had taken her to get that off her chest, and pulled her into his, wrapping his arms around her before she could say something else. Against his expectations - which she seemed to be frequently these days - she hugged him back, but against his wishes she did so lightly. "Don't be afraid to hold on to me," he whispered, and he knew he'd said the wrong thing. 'Don't be afraid' - something that should never be said to Santana or anyone like her, anyone who prided themselves on their ability not to be frightened. 'To hold on to me' - something that implied she needed someone to hold on to instead of someone to hold, that she was the weaker one and not the one giving comfort. Again, not very Santana-esque.

And yet her response was to stop half-hugging him and cling to him. He was reminded horribly and yet relievingly of their first fight in the apartment and how they'd hung on each other afterwards like drapes - and the first thing that came to mind was, "I love you, San." And so he sad it.

She gasped a little at the words, and burrowed further into the crook of his neck. "Love you t-too, B." She said it exactly like she had the first time. And, like the first time, he squeezed his arms around her as tightly as he could, so that they both felt their lungs constrict from the lack of air.

When he started loosening his grip, she dug her fingers into the material of his shirt and forced him to take back his actions with the tearful words, "No, I need to hold on!"

"Hey, Brittany," Blaine said into his phone, Santana's hand clasping his with so much force he was starting to lose feeling in it. "We're still at the hospital, but I think Santana and I are done for the night. Is it alright if we stay over there?" Santana's heel clicked impatiently against the floor.

"I'm not at my house tonight," Brittany answered. "I'm staying with Sam at the Hummels'. But you can both stay here with us."

Blaine looked sideways at Santana and repressed a sigh.

And suddenly: "Awake? He's awake?!"

"Already?" Blaine asked, startled, when Santana jerked up so her back was as straight as she used to tell people she was. "He's already awake?" He looked; her eyes were stuck on the figure running towards them from the corner - Rachel. She was waving her arms frantically and mouthing the words they'd both been repeating.

Awake. "Brittany, I think we might be later than anticipated. Burt just woke up."

Santana was the last one in the room.

When she walked in, she took in everything she could. There was a nurse standing in front of Finn, but he was so freakishly tall she could still see him. The nurse was bent so she could check on the medical things hooked up to Burt. Kurt was sitting on her other side, his hand in his father's, and he was either crying or laughing, she couldn't tell. Carole had her hands over her mouth and her eyes shut tightly and she was bending over so her forehead rested on Burt's. Rachel had gone straight to Finn's side and the height difference obscured her from Santana's view. And Blaine was standing stock-still a few feet in front of her, and behind his back she was the only one who could see him wringing his hands.

"Burt?" Blaine asked. But everyone was already talking at the man on the bed that Santana couldn't see because of the people, and his meek voice was unheard. Blaine's shoulders drooped and she was glad that she couldn't see his face, because she didn't want to have to deal with it.

But she didn't want him to be making the face she was sure he was making anyway, so she stepped up beside him, took one of his hands forcefully from the other, stared straight ahead and marched him to the end of Burt's bed.

"Burt?" she asked, because Blaine was silent.

"Santana?" Burt's voice, much weaker than she'd come to expect from him, came from under Carole's head, and she lifted her head to look at her warily. And then Burt, pale and with those bags under his eyes - but the eyes were open - saw Blaine. "Blaine, you're here."

"I'm here," Blaine repeated.

"He's here with us," Kurt confirmed, though it was useless. Santana repressed the urge to roll her eyes at the repetition.

Blaine shifted uncomfortably and even the nurse picked up on the silence and averted her eyes. "He's also dating your son again," Santana said, when nobody else spoke up.

"Alright, Mr. Hummel, someone will be coming in to check on you shortly," said the nurse, busying her hands and not making eye contact. "Try to keep levels of stress and noise down, we don't need his heart any more pressured," she instructed them, and then hurried out of the room. Nobody cared enough to as much as watch her leave.

"You're dating again, huh?" Burt asked, completely nonplussed, to Kurt, who blushed ever-so-slightly.

"Yeah," Kurt answered. "Yeah, we are."

And Burt laughed. It was brief and quiet and more of a jagged breath than an actual laugh but it was clearly a laugh and it was clearly meant to accompany the smirk he bore. "About damn time."

Blaine's reaction was not one that anybody expected - he laughed with Burt.

"What?" Kurt demanded. "What's funny?"

"We made a bet," Burt chuckled. "I think I just lost."

"I'd make you pay up, but I'm pretty sure waking up was enough payment," Blaine told him, and moved to stand closer, beside Kurt, dragging Santana with him.

"What was the bet?" Kurt trilled.

"I bet him you'd get your head out of your ass and take him back after you left Adam about three months ago," Burt said. "He bet you never would. So technically, Anderson, neither of us won."

Blaine laughed again, and Santana had never heard a sound more beautiful than his laugh at that moment. Seriously, how fantastic is laughing? You have to release this weird, unique sound, and only you can do it exactly the way you do, and you can only do it for real when your body is physically incapable of handling the joy it's been given. Most peoples' laughs just sounded like... laughs. Blaine's laugh sounded like what it meant. And she thought it was beautiful.

And then he pulled away from her so he could wrap his arms around Burt as much as he could as he bent over him, and he hugged him tightly. Burt moved to hug him back, but only did so weakly, though it was made obvious to everyone else present that he wanted to hug him a lot tighter. "I'm so glad you woke up," Blaine murmured, and Santana couldn't even feel selfish about him letting go of her hand because he hadn't had a parent to hold on to in months.

"Blaine?"

"Mm?"

With Burt asleep next to them - or rather, pretending to be asleep, because Kurt was Kurt and knew when his dad was faking - and Blaine's arms around his torso on the chair they shared, as comfortable as they could be on the small plastic seat, he felt it an appropriate time to bring up the question he'd had since he'd found out. "After the shooting... at McKinley. What did your parents do?"

Blaine was silent and still and Kurt couldn't blame him one bit. This was a boy who had cut himself and estranged himself and hated himself for what was way over a year, maybe even two, and had just started healing. He'd been through bullying and beatings at his former school, he'd been through pressure to leave Dalton (from Kurt, no less), he'd been through bullying and pressure and a slushie that scratched his cornea and a school shooting at McKinley, and at NYADA he'd been through a car accident, a bad fall, and now this. The last thing he needed to think about was his failed relationship with his parents.

But he finally spoke. "I told Tina that we stayed up all night talking and hugging and crying." He swallowed. "Part of it's true. They did hug me, but only once each, and then mostly each other for the rest of the night. We stayed up all night talking, but it wasn't a good kind of talk. And we all cried. But I was crying because my mom was the first one I called when the All Clear was given and my mom was crying because she almost wished I hadn't been able to."

"What?!"

"Shh, baby," Blaine said automatically, and Blaine was trying to comfort him, holy crap. Did he ever think of himself at all? "It's okay. My parents couldn't love me like they were supposed to, and that's not their fault, it's how they were told to live and they can't just give it up."

"But -" and then Kurt remembered that he'd been the one to want the answer, and of course Blaine wouldn't interrupt him, he'd left him go on forever. "Sorry. Go on."

"Alright," Blaine agreed quietly. "Well, basically, they told me that they loved me and they wished they could love me more. And they said they were really happy I wasn't hurt or dead and that I was their son by blood. And then they hugged me each and told me to go to bed but instead I just sat out in the hallway crying because I could hear them crying inside because they wanted to be better parents."

"They... cried?" It was foreign to Kurt. There are always bad guys in a story, right? And not every bad guy has some twisted past or was ever a victim. Sometimes they're just ignorant, sometimes they're truly sadistic. Blaine's parents were supposed to be the bad guys here - but bad guys aren't supposed to want to reform. That's a Disney movie and life is no Disney movie. "They said they wanted to be better parents?"

"To each other, yes," Blaine responded dryly. "Never to me." Kurt had never heard him speak so bitterly of his parents, but here it was, in its true form. Blaine was jealous beyond belief of the strength his parents built on their trust in each other and he wanted it. He wanted that level of commitment and love and he was being denied it and it mattered to him. "But that's alright. They needed to admit it more than I needed it admitted to me."

"So why did they... um..."

"Disown me?" Blaine suggested, and Kurt flinched at the term but nodded, and Blaine smiled gently at him and ran his fingers through his hair. "None of us could be or have what we wanted, I guess."

"Mm." Kurt blinked a few times, afraid each time that he might drift off before Carole came back from the cafeteria or their friends came back and that he might drift off into another nightmare where Blaine would be in his arms, not the other way around, and he'd be as dead outside as he was mostly inside. "I love you."

Blaine's laugh wasn't real but it was there and it was a try and it was good enough. "I love you, too."

"Is that what you thought about?" Kurt asked suddenly, the new question awakening him a bit further from the drift he was fighting not to succumb to.

"When?"

"While you were in lockdown," Kurt specified. "Is that what you thought about? That you loved me?"

"Present tense, Kurt, always present tense, it'll always be true," Blaine corrected him, almost mutely, the words barely seeming to pass his lips because the rest of him was impassive. "Actually, I'm not really sure what I thought or that I could pinpoint it."

"What do you mean?"

"Well... I kind of stopped thinking with thoughts and started thinking with concepts, if that makes any sense," Blaine tried to explain, furrowing his brow. "I thought that maybe it wasn't bullets. I thought maybe it wasn't a gun, and I said it out loud, but they all shushed me. I thought I had to barricade the door and so I moved the piano. I thought I needed to get Artie down because he was in his chair. I thought everything was too loud. Noise, any noise, all noise, even my breathing, my talking, begging Ryder to turn the phone off because it was ringing, hiding in a little ball when Sam was screaming to go after Brittany in the bathroom, hearing everyone give their last messages, talking about their parents and their friends and their loves and their lives and how much they'd miss them and Tina wasn't there and I couldn't say anything into the camera because my parents didn't want to hear anything like that from me and you would be hurt if I said anything to you or about you at all and -"

"I'm sorry, I'm so sorry I asked," Kurt cut across his endless flow of words, and reached his hand up to cup Blaine's face tenderly, thinking that maybe if he did the pale, dead look would go away and he wouldn't be cold under his fingers. He was colder than normal, but not very - nobody else wold have been able to tell - and as soon as Kurt's palm traced against his cheek lightly the color flooded back and his eyes were golden again, even if a tear slid down his downward-facing expression and dropped onto Kurt's own cheek. It was warmer than Blaine was himself, but then, so was the tear that slipped from Kurt's eye. "I'm sorry I asked. I won't make you talk about it again, I'm sorry. I know it hurts."

"I was so scared, Kurt," Blaine trembled, and Kurt let his middle knuckle on his ring finger slide down Blaine's jawline, an action he knew from experienced could soothe him when excited in a bad way and excite him when soothed in a bad way.

"You're safe here," Kurt promised, only barely managing to make the words loud enough to hear. "You're safe right here."

"I'll be okay?"

"You'll be amazing." Kurt smiled at him then, smiled at his eyes, smiled at his lips, at his hair, his nose, his skin, his hands, his shoulder, his neck, his waist, his legs, him. "You already are. You're amazing and you're safe here. Nothing's going to hurt you."

Kurt could tell he'd struck a nerve he hadn't meant to, and he was about to apologize hastily when Blaine said, "Nothing?"

Kurt understood. "Nothing," he assured. "Not even you."

Blaine sniffed once, and then blinked back the tear that threatened to join his other one, and smiled a watery, wavering smile. And when he leaned down and nuzzled his nose against Kurt's and then pressed their lips together, Kurt could feel the smile on his own, despite the tears that were pressed between them. He kissed Blaine like he ought to have been doing for the past year and Blaine kissed him like he was made of pure gold and he was the greediest man alive.

Blaine and the others never actually spent the night with Sam and Brittany - but that was alright, because they showed up again the next day, along with the other ND. They appeared in couples or small groups off and on throughout the day, and they'd all talk to the people in the room or the halls or cafeteria, and they'd inquire as to Burt's health - even if they didn't know him at first - and then they'd wish everyone goodbye and take their leave. It was good to see his friends again, Blaine knew. He'd missed them. Marley and Jake were still holding hands, Ryder still clutched his phone, Unique still demanded respect, Kitty was still as compassionate but sassy as she'd been since after the shooting, Artie was as laid back as ever via phone call and when all the graduated ND got in touch the way he had they had great fun just passing phones around the room on speaker so everyone could contribute to the conversation.

And yet Blaine knew they had a flight to catch before midnight, and so when everyone else went to get dinner, he squeezed Kurt's hand and said he'd be down in a couple minutes. Burt hadn't seemed surprised.

As soon as the door was shut, Burt asked him, "So when are you proposing?"

Blaine actually squeaked. "Proposing?"

Burt nodded. "I know when you two didn't get together at graduation or any time after that that as soon as you eventually did you'd want to marry him. Right?"

"Well, I... I've always intended to... um..." Blaine's face was flushed crimson and his eyes flitted about the room. "I mean, I love him a lot and I never ever want to hurt him ever again, but I... I was going to ask if I could have -"

"My permission?" Burt finished, amused. "Kid, you've always had my permission."

"But..." Blaine had no idea where his sentence was going. The room seemed hot, overly hot, and he tugged at the collar of his shirt. "I mean, I don't want to get married now. No, no!" he added hastily as Burt raised his eyebrows. "I want to marry him, I always want to marry him, but I mean we're really young and it costs a lot of money and I'm still just barely settling in."

"I know," Burt scoffed. "Listen, kid, I'm not expecting you to propose and then run off and get married in the same week like Carole and I. That was quick and I know it, but only because we were grown adults and were absolutely certain and had everything settled about it. You're not even in your twenties yet, neither of you, and you're not ready for that."

"So why are you giving me permission?" The more Blaine tried to understand the more confused he got.

Burt chuckled at him and for a second Blaine scratched at his ankle absentmindedly, raising it up so he could simply drop his shoulder and get to it. "Because you're ready to be ready. You love each other and if you hadn't had that joke of a beak-up you'd be engaged right now."

"So you're really... you're really okay with this?" Blaine murmured.

"You're already my son," Burt told him, seriousness taking control. "So I'm fine with you asking Kurt if he wants to make it official on paper."

Blaine shook his head. "I really didn't expect this to be how this would go."

For the rest of the day, Blaine was preoccupied. Even when Emma and Will visited and made jokes about how Will had had a cold last week and Emma had been obsessed with keeping everything clean and hadn't yet gotten sick.

Santana stepped out into the hall with Brittany and Sam stayed in the room with Blaine. It was wonderful to catch up with him, but when Santana came back in angry and Brittany came back in sad both of the boys had shared a look of discomfort.

"I'm sorry, Dad. I'll call every day."

"It's not like it's your fault, buddy."

The plane ride was short. Blaine was fidgeting the entire time because he still had no clue what he was doing. Who would? Looking over at Kurt, he found that he was incapable of thinking anything but that he was beautiful.

And that he felt oddly congested, but he didn't pay it any mind.

He saw how Kurt kept ducking his head and taking a deep breath every few minutes, and he wondered just how hard this was for him. Blaine knew it was hard on himself, but on Kurt? Kurt had lost his mother when he was eight and even though it was over eleven years ago he obviously was still horrified and lost whenever he recalled it. He'd nearly lost his father, too, and this was how many times now? And it was entirely possible he'd lose him far too quickly anyway. He'd lose him someday regardless of all that, too.

And it was starting to show. "You look sad," Blaine told him, and Kurt turned to face him, surprised he'd spoken.

"I'm not sad," Kurt said, brows furrowing.

And that was the end of that because neither of them knew what to say or do. Kurt went back to his magazine and tutting at the fashions every now and then, and Blaine went back to staring at him and wanting to say something.

He should have expected Kurt's curiosity to lead to the questions he asked. He should have expected Kurt's reaction, or even his own. The words had come out in a jumbled mess, leaving and running together and with odd pauses and stresses among them; but Kurt had seem genuinely shocked and bothered that his parents had felt at all bad about their parenting.

Naive was the last word Blaine wanted to apply to Kurt, but he had to in this case. Kurt's life had been horrible and he knew it, but it had always been vaguely black and white with his perception of people. He only ever saw the bad or the good in people - or, with people like Rachel, he saw both frequently but his perception of them was already one way so everything seemed to fit into that one way. There were no exceptions to the rule. But people aren't like that and Blaine was aware of this; good people do bad things and bad people do good things and sometimes a person is as nuetral as the world they live in.

People who disown their sons because of ignorance can be good people. And his parents were good people. But Kurt had viewed them as the opposite and because of that he seemed incapable of seeing them any other way.

"Nobody's just black or white, you know," Blaine told him.

"Actually, I'm pretty sure there are a lot of people who aren't interracial." Kurt looked up yet again.

"I didn't mean like that." Blaine shook his head. "I mean everybody's got a little bit of bad and a little bit of good inside them and the way you see them personally can't get rid of either."

Kurt didn't respond because they'd be damned if they broke a silence that thick simply to hear what they could already hear in it out loud. Blaine had always been frankly astounded by his ability to converse with Kurt in a way that seemed to be written all over him in invisible ink, a language he'd never even had to study but spoke fluently.

Kurt dropped his right shoulder a little so he was leaning closer, only the arm of the seat between them. I want you to say more.

Blaine let his eyes wander across Kurt's face. There's nothing more to say.

Kurt licked his lower lip gently. But I don't like it ending there.

Blaine let the end of his mouth turn up sadly. I never like how things end.

"Agathokakological," Kurt supplied when the silence has run out of unspoken words. "Composed of both good and evil. That's what you mean, right?"

He asked a question and questions needed answers. If no answer was given, the question wasn't truly done, and only if one was answered completely and thoroughly and with as much detail as possible could it be considered so. "Yes," Blaine responded. It was as much as he could make himself say aloud. Kurt was avoiding a real ending, and he knew it. They both did.

"Let's go home," Santana whispered.

He wasn't sure which one of them took the other's hand, but either way they walked with their fingers intertwined and their palms pressed together up the stairs and away from the street, where Kurt and Rachel were still in the cab going to their own apartment.

"Let's go home," he repeated.