Day 022: Monday 8th October, 2012
Black Waltz (Virginia)

"I know I had a bad reaction to it the first time, but I was only fourteen."

"A census taker tried to test me once. I ate his liver, with some—"

"Blaine, finish that sentence at your own peril."



"Huh. I guess things really did change while I was in London," Blaine said, sitting back in his seat. "You used to hate Rihanna."

"Still do," Kurt replied through gritted teeth.

"Then why are we listening to Shut Up And Drive?" Blaine asked. "Were you going for irony?"

"I didn't even notice," Kurt said. It was true—Blaine had spent most of the song with his head and the upper half of his torso hanging out of the passenger side window like an overgrown puppy getting his first ride in a car, and while Kurt had to inwardly admit that he was divertingly appreciative of the view, his grip on the steering wheel was only now loosening as Blaine rolled his window two thirds of the way back up. "Skip it?"

"Definitely," Blaine said, and reached forward to switch to the next song on shuffle.

Kurt smiled faintly after the first few seconds that it took him to recognize Radical Face's Welcome Home, the quiet and atmospheric sounds of soft wind chimes underscoring the relaxed and low strumming of an acoustic guitar. "Much better."

"Clouds are coming up on us," Blaine murmured, eyes trained on his wing mirror. "Do you think we'll outrun them?"

Kurt glanced into his mirror at the dark plumes gaining on the azure that stretched out above them, and shook his head. "We might've if you hadn't insisted on using a map instead of the GPS."

"Hey, you were the one who wanted to drive when this was my big surprise for you," Blaine countered, holding his hands up. "At least we're nearly there."

"What's in Luray, anyway?" Kurt asked, taking in the land surrounding the highway that would in the coming months become winter scrub, and the white siding of the farmhouse-style homes beyond it.

"Just keep following the road," Blaine said, gesturing ahead. "And believe me, you're going to love it. Coop and I made our parents take us, like, once a month. We used to run around the place pretending we were Indiana Jones. Well—Cooper was Indiana Jones, I was always his sidekick."

Kurt bit the inside of his cheek and schooled his expression—Blaine had always been a little touchy about being in his older brother's shadow, though Kurt knew that despite his level of self-involvement, Cooper generally meant well. "So it's somewhere you can have adventures, then."

"The best adventures."

"And Indiana Jones generally preferred running around jungles and caves..." Kurt trailed off, a horrible thought forming itself from the jumbled mess that had taken up residence in his mind somewhere in Delaware. "Last time I checked, there were no jungles in Virginia."

"Turn right."

"Blaine, where—" Kurt abruptly fell silent as he pulled the R.V. to a stop at the red light before the turning. He leaned forward over the steering wheel and looked disbelievingly at the tall green sign topped with something resembling a stout, misshapen dog bone, its white letters proclaiming 'Luray Caverns.' "Seriously?"

Blaine didn't even seem to be listening, rather he was grinning out of the window like someone possessed, looking giddy with the joy of being somewhere that Kurt realized represented only good things. As the light turned green and Kurt slowly swung the R.V. to the right, Blaine bounced once in his seat and shot Kurt a radiant smile.

"Does it really feel that good to be back?" Kurt asked.

"It really does," Blaine said, leaning so far forward over the dashboard that his seatbelt locked. "You'll come exploring with me, right?"

"Just so long as I don't have to wear a fedora," Kurt answered, worrying his lip and hoping against hope that whatever tour upon which they were about to embark didn't involve episodes of total darkness. "I'm not nearly swarthy enough to rock that look."

Blaine laughed at that, and carried on smiling as they parked and made their way past the tall walls of the Garden Maze and into the visitor's center. Once he had handed over their tickets and signed them in with no small measure of glee, all of which Kurt observed with a half-amused, half-trepid smile, they were met by a girl who looked to be no older than a college freshman. Over a plain white button-down tucked into a pair of khakis, she wore a hunter green blazer, the chest pocket branded with 'Luray Caverns' above the tagline, what will you discover? Kurt simply hoped he would discover the way out or, failing that, the gift shop. At the very least he could buy Blaine something suitably tacky and obnoxious as punishment for dragging him into the midst of all this nature.

"Hi, guys! I'm Jen," the guide introduced herself, her long brown ponytail swinging from side to side as she looked between them before balancing her clipboard on her hip to shake each of their hands in turn.

"I'm Blaine, and this is Kurt," Blaine provided, shooting her a charming smile.

"Happy to have you both," she said brightly. "Have either of you visited Luray before?"

"He has," Kurt said, inclining his head toward Blaine.

"He isn't really much for nature, but I'm hoping to change that," Blaine chimed in, and bumped his hip against Kurt's.

"Honestly," Jen began, leaning closer and lowering her voice conspiratorially, "I hate nature. But that's the great thing about this experience, because it's more about the history and what you take away from it.

"Now, we're pretty quiet around here today, and usually they don't run the tours without at least eight people," she continued, and from the corner of his eye, Kurt saw Blaine's shoulders droop. "But since you guys are the only booking for the next hour or so, I don't see why we can't go do our thing."

"Great!" Blaine exclaimed, before turning a thousand-watt smile on Kurt. "What do you think?"

Kurt looked at him, taking in the flush of amber hope in Blaine's eyes and the slight twitch in the very tips of his fingers as he brought his hands together and clasped them in front of his chest with a pout. Already beginning to feel his resolve crumble, Kurt glanced around the brightly-lit and inviting visitor's center, the snapshots of the caverns adorning the walls sparking in him a somewhat foreign sense of intrigue.

"Alright, let's go."



The caverns were magnificent; there were no other words to describe them. Kurt found himself unexpectedly enthralled in each and every room, and despite their repeated attempts to draw him into their chatter, he paid almost no attention to Jen and Blaine's animated discussion about the history of the place. He was strangely spellbound by the quiet, natural grandeur of the place, and by the time the tour was nearly over, his neck was aching from how much time he had spent looking up.

"Told you this place was magical," Blaine said, his voice carrying over the harmonies resonating from the Great Stalacpipe Organ. Kurt could feel the lower notes reverberating deep within his chest, and he shot Blaine a genuine and humbled smile.

"You were right," he conceded, quickly adding, "but please don't do the told-you-so dance. We're still in a cave."

"I swear, you guys make one of the cutest couples I've ever seen," Jen intoned, and both Kurt and Blaine turned to her in alarm.

"Oh no, we're not—I mean, um, we're..." Blaine trailed off, stammering.

"Yeah, no, we're—we're just friends," Kurt agreed, feeling almost inexplicably as if he was lying through his teeth.

"But—crap, I'm sorry," Jen said, glancing down at her clipboard and back up again. "It's just—you guys, with all your sniping at each other, and the—the looks, you know, you're like one of those fabulous married couples and... And I'm just going to stop talking now."

The organ's music faded for a few moments as one song ended and the next began, and during the pregnant silence, Kurt could feel Blaine's eyes on him. He didn't dare look back. Since Rehoboth Beach, they had each retreated to their separate trenches. Whatever lay between them had become as no-man's land: to be traversed carefully—if at all—and with no small measure of trepidation. And most definitely not in a damned cave.

"Only as awkward as we let it be," Jen finally said with a bright smile, and as she inclined her head toward the next archway to begin leading them on, Kurt breathed a sigh of relief.

When they were in the final room of the tour, Blaine turned to Jen with all lingering traces of awkwardness swept away and asked, "Do you guys still do the same thing with the lights in here?"

"How do you keep remembering this stuff?" Jen asked incredulously, and Blaine shrugged with a grin.

"What thing with the lights?" Kurt asked, looking to Jen for the answer.

"Okay, so we usually finish out the tour by turning off all the lights and letting people experience what true darkness is like, and what it would have been like for the first people to discover the caves," Jen explained, and Kurt immediately tensed. "Really get a feel for it, you know? I mean, there's nothing else like it. Usually there are two guides with a group, and one of us will go switch off the lights while the other stays down here, but since there's only one of me, can I trust you guys not to go insane and start creating havoc?"

"Of course," Blaine answered matter-of-factly, waving her off.

"Alright, then. I'll be back in a couple minutes," Jen said, and turned on her heel, striding away towards the exit and calling over her shoulder, "Stay put, guys!

Kurt let out a weak, nervous chuckle, trying to square his shoulders and hold his head high. It wasn't that he was afraid of the dark. Not at all. On the contrary, he had always found a solitary kind of peace in being enshrouded by it. Getting up to use the bathroom only an hour after turning in and following the thin line of yellow around a doorframe, or waking up before sunrise in the middle of winter and wrapping his cold fingers around a mug of coffee in the morning silence of his kitchen were things that he found calming.

Spending three pitch-black minutes in the middle of a cave, on the other hand...

"Hey. You okay?" Blaine asked, stepping a little closer and carefully examining Kurt's face.

"Fine. Forewarned is forearmed, right?" Kurt joked feebly, and Blaine's brow furrowed.

"Are you sure? I can call her back and—"

Darkness fell as sharp and quick as the blade of a guillotine, and Kurt's head snapped upwards almost involuntarily, a gasp getting caught in the back of his throat. He turned his head from side to side, suddenly feeling as if it wasn't just the light that was gone, but his sight as well. Never before had he experienced this kind of complete, oppressively encompassing darkness, and after a few seconds it seemed to close about him.

"Kurt?" Blaine asked, tentatively. His voice was loud, as if he was mere inches away, but Kurt could have sworn they had been standing further apart than that. "Kurt? You okay?"

"Mmhmm," Kurt managed, his own voice sounding louder than normal. It was as if the darkness was acting as an amplifier, a giant bowl where every single rustle of fabric and distant trickle of water wound him up tighter and tighter. He wrapped his arms around his torso, closing in on himself as even the sound of his breathing became louder and he heard Blaine shifting from one foot to the other.

It was cold down in the caves, far colder than the cloudy yet mild day outside, and even so, as soon as Kurt began to think about how far underground they were, his palms began to sweat and his breathing became shallow, as if the oxygen was hard to come by. He felt a pressure on his chest, his heart racing the more he panicked and gasped for air, and he pressed his palm to the base of his collarbone to try and counter the band squeezing him, but it was suffocating, he couldn't breathe, he couldn't—

"Hey, hey," Blaine whispered, taking Kurt's hand in the darkness, and Kurt's heart began to race even faster, deafening and surely Blaine could hear it, hear the effect a mere touch had even when Kurt was panicking more than he could process. "Kurt, it's okay, I'm right here. Just come towards me, okay?"

Kurt blithely followed Blaine's words, shuffling closer with his breathing becoming harsher and harsher, clear air an almost forgotten sensation that he chased after even though it felt fruitless. There was a roaring whoosh tearing through his head, and he only dimly registered Blaine pulling him closer, flush against his body with his fingers carding into the back of Kurt's hair and Kurt's forehead pressed to his temple.

"Just focus on me, okay? Just focus on me," Blaine whispered rapidly, swaying them both on the spot. "Breathe, sweetheart."

Kurt closed his eyes and tried to focus on their movement back and forth, back and forth, but there was no discernible rhythm and every time he thought he'd found one to count along to it evaded him again and his breath kept on stuttering, stammering, getting stuck on the way to where it needed to be and just as he was beginning to feel lightheaded, Blaine started to hum. Quietly at first, almost too quiet to hear even in the utterly concentrated silence of the cave, but the melody formed and grew until Kurt recognized it, until Blaine found its rhythm and swayed them in time.

"Somewhere over the rainbow way up high," he sang, voice low and clear and cutting through the dark, "there's a land that I heard of once in a lullaby."

Back and forth, slowly in and slowly out, somewhere over the rainbow, back and forth, slowly in and slowly out, skies are blue. Degree by degree, Kurt got his breathing under control. He found himself almost wrapped around Blaine, in itself an entirely different kind of containment, one of safety and care that took him back to a boy of only six years old, the very first time they had watched The Lion King together and Kurt had had no idea what was going to happen when the antelope began their stampede. Blaine had held his hand and then all of him, keeping him together just as he was doing now.

"Someday I'll wish upon a star and wake up where the clouds are—"

Blaine stopped short as light flooded back in, and for the first time since he had taken his hand, Kurt felt the slightest of tremors in Blaine's body. They swayed on the spot for a moment more, until Blaine cleared his throat and smoothed his fingers over the back of Kurt's hair. Shakily, Kurt exhaled the last breath he had taken, feeling it flow warmly between them.

He opened his eyes, still unwilling to move so much as an inch, and wondered if a kiss on the cheek to say thank you would be a step too far into no-man's land.

"Are you okay?" Blaine whispered, and Kurt nodded, finally shifting his weight back onto his own two feet. The hand Blaine had worked into his hair slid down the side of his neck and brushed off his shoulder, taking warmth with it. "Sure?"

When Kurt didn't respond, Blaine ducked into his downcast eye line and looked at him searchingly. The space between them was dense with tension, Blaine unconsciously licking his full lips, and Kurt scrabbled around for something to say instead of watching the movie reel unfurling in his head; a swell of music or maybe none at all, lighting just the right amount of dim and atmospheric, and Kurt rocking forward on his toes to crush his mouth to Blaine's, hands fisted in the front of his soft maroon cardigan.

"Do you think Parks and Rec was right about cave sex?" he asked, simply blurting the first thing that came into his head, and immediately wanted to slap himself across the face.

"I don't know, do you wanna find out?" Blaine countered, his tone one of innocence and earnest, yet still somehow loaded.

Kurt let out a tremulous chuckle and stepped completely out of Blaine's hold, brushing himself off and feeling as if he really had become that six-year-old boy again, needing his best friend to hold him together because he couldn't quite do it himself.

"Come on," he said when he glanced up and saw Jen approaching from around the corner. "Let's go find the gift shop. There's probably an obnoxious t-shirt that I can buy for you."

"Virginia is for lovers?" Blaine asked, and Kurt smiled thinly.

"Something like that."



Distance: 1,583 miles