“Would you say it was Montauk that changed everything, or that Christmas?” Blaine asked thoughtfully, eyes trained upon the picture of him and Kurt simultaneously kissing Kristy on each cheek. It had been taken on Boxing Day not five feet from where they sat—Carole had whipped out her camera mere minutes after Kristy announced that she wanted to be their surrogate. We were all so young, he mused, taking in the unwrinkled faces and hair without a trace of gray. Of course, Kristy still hadn't yet gone gray—or if she had, she was doing a fantastic job of covering it.

“I think it was just that entire year,” Kurt said. “A lot of big changes happened, all at once. And we changed along with them. That's why we kept the blog.”

“You're right.”

“When aren't I?”

“True.”

A brief silence settled in the close space between them, and Blaine let his gaze roam across the grounds at the front of the house (he'd never been able to call the wide expanse of grass and greenery a 'yard'), watching fireflies dance through the blooms on the rhododendron bushes across from the cherry tree that they planted above McQueen's ashes in 2031. It was certainly true that he and Kurt had lived in two apartments, along with the town house in Cobble Hill they bought shortly after their wedding where they still spent most of their time, but this over-the-top and grand, yet cozy and beautiful house had always been the place that Blaine had felt most at home, and he knew it was because they bought it with the intention of having a get-away, somewhere to spend weekends with their kids. Now that it was empty once more, save for the two of them...

“Honey, what's wrong? You're about to break my fingers.”

Kurt's voice cut through Blaine's reverie and he immediately loosened his grasp, not even having realized that he had taken Kurt's hand. “I think it just hit me that they're gone,” he said quietly, slumping in his seat and letting his chin drop to his chest. “I miss them.”

Kurt marked their page in The Book with the fortune from his cookie (given the fact that they were spending the evening lost in their memories, they had both smiled upon reading, sometimes the object of the journey is not the end, but the journey itself), and moved to crouch in front of Blaine, forearms on his knees and chin resting upon them.

“I'm looking into a mirror,” he sing-songed with a wry smile, and Blaine huffed a humorless laugh, toying with the sleeve of Kurt's cardigan.

“What was it that I said to you yesterday, when their cars were just turning out of the gate?” he asked, voice heavy.

“You said, 'our daughter's going to be President and our son's going to be the best doctor in the whole world. They're both going to be amazing, but in order to do that, they have to be set free',” Kurt answered. “It's true, you know, and you've helped me see that tonight.”

“It's bullshit,” Blaine grumbled. “I want them back.”

“Language,” Kurt said, using his sharp and authoritative 'Papa' voice before catching himself and shooting Blaine a look that bordered on awe. “Oh my god. We can swear.”

Finally, Blaine's smile contained a little mirth, and he took Kurt's hands to steady him as he slowly returned to a standing position.

“Let's go inside,” Kurt said. “It's getting chilly and we're at the last picture.”

Blaine stretched his arms above his head, suppressing a yawn. “What time is it?”

“Does it matter, honey?” Kurt asked softly. Blaine shook his head, picking up The Book from where Kurt had set it down and letting himself back into the house with Kurt close behind, carrying their glasses and the bottle of wine.

As he locked the door and set the alarm, he felt Kurt's hand brush across his shoulder and he smiled to himself, listening to the soft sound of Kurt padding up the carpeted stairs. He paused in front of the switch for the porch light—thinking back, Blaine couldn't recall a single instance in the past eighteen years that it had been turned off while they were there. Fingers flexing before the innocuous plastic fixture, he finally thought better of switching it off. Some small, sad part of him was still holding a flickering candle of hope that the twins would come bursting through the door any minute, Audrey with her nose buried in a copy of The New Republic and Oliver clutching thick medical volumes that would leave Blaine wide-eyed and wondering how he ended up with two such intelligent kids.

Sighing heavily, he toed off his shoes at the foot of the stairs and lined them up neatly next to Kurt's. Another light switch for the foyer, and his hand stilled again as his eyes came to rest upon the oldest frame in the series that progressed with the incline of the winding staircase—the very staircase that had sold them on the house in the first place, with its similarities to what they came to call 'their' staircase back at Dalton. The colors had faded with time, and there was still the errant blur of a clumsy finger in the bottom right corner, but there they were—Kurt on his back, covered in sand with nine-year-old Audrey and Oliver dog-piled on top of him in the middle of their ruined beach fort, all caught mid-laugh and looking so young and free.

Blaine took the stairs slowly, leaning on the banister, and for once it was nothing to do with the age in his bones that he could feel gradually creeping up on him. His eyes roamed over the photographs, the immortalized moments that could so easily have been lost or forgotten, and he relived them all as he went. Himself on stage presenting the VMAs; Audrey at eleven, holding up a poem she had written that emblazoned with an A+ in red ink, accompanied by a gold star; Kurt reading lonely, eight-year-old Oliver a bedtime story while Audrey was away at her first ever sleepover; one of the holiday portraits that Kurt insisted on every year, the teenaged twins (fourteen? Fifteen? Blaine had lost count) both caught mid-yawn and Blaine grinning playfully at his less-than-impressed husband.

When he reached their cozy library, Kurt was already in the small storage closet, his scrap-booking caddy propping the door open while he pulled a box marked 'For The Book' from the top shelf. Blaine watched him quietly from their shared mahogany desk, shifting and settling into his chair—the ugly, ergonomic one that Oliver had insisted upon rather than the black leather executive chair Blaine had been eyeing since May.

“Your back's already bad enough, Dad,” he'd said with perfect authority, as if he'd been a practicing chiropractor for thirty years rather than an eighteen-year-old who, days earlier, had run into the kitchen clutching his acceptance letter from Johns Hopkins.

Later that night, Audrey—ever the diplomat—had kissed him on the cheek and whispered that even though the executive chair looked really cool, her boyfriend Dylan's masseuse mother was always telling her about the sheer number of high-powered stockbrokers and CEOs she had on her table day in, day out. “I think you should buy the ugly chair, have Papa make it look good, and take all the money you'll save on massages and buy that Les Paul you look at in every new issue of Guitar World.”

For all that they were twins, for all their secret languages and created universes, Audrey and Oliver were polar opposites in some ways—a perfect yin and yang that balanced one another. They'd been as hesitant to leave one another as they had to spread their wings and leave home.

“They're so smart, aren't they?”

Kurt plopped the box down on top of the caddy and wheeled it over to the desk after closing the closet door with a soft click. “It's your brains they inherited, Mister Dalton Academy,” he mused, but before Blaine could protest, he continued, “I never had the head for numbers that Ollie does. And Aud's charm and diplomacy is all you.”

“She got your hair, though,” Blaine joked. “I think Ollie's always hated me a little for that.”

“It didn't help that you started calling him 'Twist',” Kurt replied, a grin tugging at his lips. “He'll never shake that, you know. Everyone will call him 'Doctor Twist'.”

“Ah, he likes it. Audrey told me,” Blaine said, with an almost satisfied smirk.

“He actually admitted it to her?” Kurt asked incredulously. Their son was stubborn as a mule when he wanted to be, and never gave an inch if it meant losing face.

“Not as such. But they have their freaky twin ESPN thing, so I trust her,” Blaine said, placing The Book between them in the center of the desk. “I know tradition dictates that we do this sitting cross-legged on the floor, but—“

“Oh God, no,” Kurt cut across him, shaking his head vehemently as he dropped into his own matching chair next to Blaine's. “No, I'll never get back up again. Here's fine. And I promise I'll fix up these chairs soon.”

“There's no rush, honey. We've got time,” Blaine said, before reaching into the box and pulling out a sheaf of pictures and mementos from Kristy's pregnancy. The first ultrasound scan, where they'd both turned a little pale when the technician informed them that they were expecting twins; a receipt from one of many midnight Taco Bell runs when Kristy was going through a month-long stage of craving burritos like no other; a picture of Kristy's bump showing the clear outline of a foot; her medical wristband from St Luke's when she'd gone into labor two weeks prematurely; photographs of the first time Kurt and Blaine held their son and daughter, swaddled in soft blankets of baby pink and sky blue. Blaine watched as Kurt searched through one of the caddy drawers for the right backing paper, muttering to himself about ribbon and pinking shears.

Within almost no time at all, Kurt had the pages loosely laid out, and angled The Book towards Blaine.

“Looks perfect to me,” he said, chin propped in his hand as he gazed at his husband.

“You haven't even looked at it,” Kurt chided him with a click of his tongue, before his expression softened and he cupped Blaine's cheek affectionately. “But thank you.”

“You're welcome, handsome,” Blaine replied, his smile easy and proud as he turned to look at the pages. “Hmm. How about we put the bracelet down the side, like this?”

“You're right,” Kurt said after examining the page for a moment. “Breaks it up less. We make a good team.”

“Always have.”