Day 056: Sunday 11th November, 2012
Slow Fix (Missouri)

"What about Winter's Bone? Have you seen it yet?"

"No, I was on deadline from Dmitri the night everyone went out to see it."

"Alright, so Winter's Bone for Missouri. Onto Arkansas..."



It was only when the nights' shadows began to extend that Blaine even realized they had gone beyond the halfway point.

The sun was rising later and going to bed earlier, and he and Kurt were both getting used to long stretches of dark drive time, keeping the lights dimmed in the R.V. after sunset, and leaving a pot of coffee brewing almost around the clock. Blaine's mood, however, was still bright—brighter even than when Kurt had finally given in and kissed him that first time, his lips salted by the ocean air.

So much was changing. So much had already changed. But Blaine found that rather than chasing down the new until he could hold it between his cupped palms, turn it this way and that, for once he was content to pick it up only when it had almost passed by without notice.

"What are you waiting for?" Toby had asked during their dance at the wedding. It was a question seemingly out of the blue until he'd continued, "I see what you guys are trying to do, and I respect that, but seriously, what you have is too special to just piss away like this. So what are you waiting for?"

Blaine had stepped back, needing to feel for a second that he could still bolt if he wanted to, but instead he had composed himself, taken up the dance once more, and simply answered, "Him. I'm waiting for him."

He glanced over to Kurt, sleeping in the passenger seat, and smiled to himself. He'd been driving for hours; his entire body was stiff, and his eyes felt dry and raw, but there was a pleasant sensation growing in the back of his mind. It felt like the slow awakening of a creature in hibernation, yet something about the approaching cold was drawing it out rather than sending it into a deeper sleep. Blaine didn't know what it was, and usually the not knowing would be driving him to distraction, but not this time.

Kurt jerked himself awake in the passenger seat, his body going rigid and his hand flattening against the window. Blaine winced in sympathy as Kurt rubbed at his eyes and relaxed back into his seat with a shuddering sigh.

"Bad dream?" he asked.

"It was like—" Kurt began in a sleep-choked rasp, stopping to clear his throat, "It was like some weird version of The Hunger Games but with congressmen. You were there. And there was so much blood."

"Ugh," Blaine replied. He suppressed a shiver and turned his attention to the GPS. "Well, we're almost there."

Kurt grabbed the GPS from its holder, studying it intently for a moment before programming something new into it. When he returned it to the dashboard, the Kathy Bates sound-alike they still hadn't bothered changing instructed him, "In half a mile, turn left onto Legion Road."

"You'll see," Kurt said in answer to Blaine's questioning look.

When they pulled up outside The Dam Bait Shop, the headlights cast the faded wooden storefront in a harsh shade of yellow. Blaine glanced at Kurt sidelong, and asked, "Are you sure this is where we're meant to be?"

"Yes," Kurt answered, offering no further explanation.

"But it's a bait shop."

"Yes, Captain Obvious, it's a bait shop."

"So... What are we doing here? Are you taking me on a romantic fishing adventure?" Blaine asked, grasping at straws.

"There's no such thing as a romantic fishing adventure, B," Kurt replied with a sigh. Turning in his seat, he gestured toward the bait shop and finally explained, "This is where Dad took me when I was eight. After Mom."

"Is that why you wanted to come here instead of Joplin?" Blaine asked gently, reaching over to intertwine their fingers.

Kurt looked at their joined hands, the corners of his mouth turning downward, and glanced once again out of the windshield, his brow furrowed. "Let's go," he said, exhaling and giving Blaine's hand a single, light squeeze.

They drove on quietly, Blaine merging back onto US-54 and pulling into River View R.V. Park ten minutes later. The night was quiet, the air fresh and a little damp from that afternoon's thunderstorm. While Kurt stayed still in the passenger seat, looking quite lost in his own thoughts, Blaine made quick work of getting them signed in and around to their parking spot.

After retrieving two blankets from the hall closet, Blaine shrugged into his thick Bowdoin hoodie and grabbed Kurt's sweater from the back of the couch. Kurt was in the process of stretching out his arms and legs when Blaine approached him, and as he took in the blankets, raised an eyebrow at him in question.

"Grab your iPod and meet me on the roof," Blaine said, shoving the sweater into Kurt's hands and turning on his heel to go outside.

"The roof?" he heard Kurt ask, but the door closed behind him with a deep click before he could answer. Instead, he made his way to the back of the R.V., tossed the blankets over his shoulder, and climbed the ladder. The metal was cold under his hands, and the night carried with it a chill breeze that made him grateful for the hoodie.

He spread out one of the blankets and sat down, only having to wait thirty seconds or so before he heard Kurt gasping in the sudden cold. Blaine grinned down at him from his vantage point.

"Are you crazy?" Kurt grumbled, craning his neck back. "It's fucking freezing."

"The orchard walls are high and hard to climb," Blaine challenged him, remembering childhood nights where it had been all he could do to get Kurt into Cooper's long abandoned tree house.

In the little slices of moonlight cutting through the clouds overhead, Blaine could see Kurt working his jaw for a moment before he made his way around to the ladder and responded, "Stony limits cannot hold me out." When Kurt had climbed high enough on the ladder to be able to see over the top of the R.V., he grabbed Blaine's wrist, pulled Blaine towards him and whispered against his lips, "Nor dorks like you, apparently."

Something twisted and swooped in Blaine's gut as he kissed Kurt, parting his lips and tasting peppermint. It sometimes happened at the oddest of moments, this sensation of being suspended, weightless and timeless in a world grown quiet save for their breathing and matching heartbeats. When he pulled back, he could see faint tremors in the cotton of Kurt's fitted t-shirt that belied the racing beneath.

"Come on, sweetheart," Blaine said, scooting back to make room.

With a grace in his long limbs that Blaine often envied, Kurt pulled himself up onto the roof and arranged himself to sit between Blaine's legs, back pressing comfortably against his chest. Blaine shook out the second blanket and wrapped it around them both, his breath coming out in barely visible puffs of white.

"So are you going to tell me what we're doing up here?" Kurt asked.

Blaine didn't answer for a moment. He took the iPod from Kurt and, as he scrolled through the extensive library, countered, "Are you going to tell me what's up?"

Just as Blaine found the song he was looking for—Swingset Chain by Loquat, a mellow track that had been a staple of theirs for years—Kurt exhaled heavily. He pulled Blaine's arms snug around his waist and shrugged a little. "Just a few more ghosts to exorcise," he said, and dropped his head back onto Blaine's shoulder. Blaine paused in his scrolling. "Do you remember when Dad came and got me that April in 1999?"

"When you'd been staying at my place?" At Kurt's nod, Blaine added, "Of course I remember."

"Well, this is where he brought me. Lake Ozark," Kurt said. "The drive down was so... I was so pissed off at him for leaving me for three months and then just coming to get me like I'd been at your house for a sleepover or something. I barely spoke to him. Until we got to that stupid bait shop.

"We were looking at the fishing poles, and he was talking to me about them, you know, telling me which ones were better. And then he just looked down at me and asked me, 'So which one do you want, kiddo?' And suddenly it was like, 'Oh. I still actually have my Dad. I didn't lose him and Mom.'"

"You came back different," Blaine said quietly, pressing his lips to the hollow of Kurt's neck.

"It was the first time in three months that I didn't feel like I'd lost everyone," he said quietly.

"You always had me," Blaine said, rocking him from side to side.

"You with your Band-Aids," Kurt reminded him, elbow gently nudging his stomach.

With an almost startling clarity, the image of an eight-year-old Kurt screaming at the sky rose in his mind's eye. When Burt had given him the news about his mother, Kurt had bolted from the house, Blaine at his heels because he'd known exactly what Kurt had been thinking: Simba's dad talked to him from up in the sky, so Kurt's mommy would too, right?

"Why isn't she up there, Blaine?" Kurt had demanded, but there had been nothing that Blaine could think of to say. What could he have said that would have made it all better? It wasn't like that time Kurt fell off his bike in the front yard and his knee got all bloody. There was nothing to clean up or put one of Cooper's cool dinosaur Band-Aids over.

The first time Blaine saw Kurt again after the funeral, however, he'd taken one of those Band-Aids and stuck it onto Kurt's shirt, right over his heart. Even when Cooper yelled at him for stealing his Band-Aids, he'd carried on doing it every time Kurt got sad until they were at least thirteen.

"Why did you stop doing that, by the way?" Kurt asked curiously. "It always cheered me up, no matter how crappy I felt."

"Are you feeling crappy right now? Because we have Band-Aids, you know. They're just the regular kind, but—"

Kurt twisted around and kissed him firmly. His eyes sparkled in the moonlight when he pulled back. "No. Right now, I'm happy."

Blaine wanted to ask, Is it because of me? Are you happy with me, would you let me keep making you happy? Would you trust me with your heart if I promise that you can?

Instead, he shrugged it off and told him, "Me too."

"Good," Kurt said. "So what are we doing up here?"

"We're going to listen to a little music," Blaine began. "We're going to huddle for warmth like penguins, and then we're going to make hot chocolate because I don't know about you, but I'm completely over coffee. And then maybe we could watch our movie. Or we could have sex. Your choice."

Kurt laughed; the sound was melodic yet too loud in the stillness of the night. "Is 'all of the above' an option?"

"Always. Why? Do you want to go inside now?"

Kurt took a deep breath and settled back against him, tugging the sleeves of his sweater down over his hands. "Maybe in a little bit. It's nice up here."

"I do have good ideas sometimes," Blaine quipped.

"Those Band-Aids were one of the best ideas you ever had, you know," Kurt murmured.

"I wanted to take care of you."

"You always have."

Blaine smiled and thought to himself, I always will. He tensed for a second upon catching the thought, but let go as it washed him in warmth. He couldn't quite puzzle out whether the initial tension each time he had such a thought was the remnant of a lifelong habit or a warning sign.

Either way, it was something to which he was no longer paying attention. All that mattered was the man in his arms who, for the first time ever, giggled and joined him in singing the line, "I'm kind of afraid I'm codependent on you."



Distance: 6,794 miles