Chapter 4:

Blaine's parents leave again and the house is quiet, peaceful, home again. They laze around the house and cook and watch movies and sing along to the silly songs and jingles and they kiss and kiss and kiss until their lips are bruised and swollen and strawberry red. Each boy has learnt the curves of the other's body and they feel cold when they are not pressed flush together in an embrace, warm and safe. Kurt cries sometimes. Blaine doesn't know why and he doesn't ask questions. He did, the first time, but Kurt had simply kissed him and told him that he was letting the cold out, so Blaine had moved closer and held him so that he didn't freeze, despite the warm, sultry day outside the weather glazed windows.

Kurt insists on driving to the Lima Bean for coffee every day now. He doesn't get out of the car. He stays inside, wearing Blaine's pyjamas and wrapped up in a patchwork quilt. Blaine goes inside and orders a mocha and a medium drip and Kurt sips on it for hours, long after it's gone cold. Blaine asks what it is about the Lima Bean that makes Kurt stare longingly, a haunting gleam in his eye. Kurt shrugs and tells him it reminds him of New York. Blaine asks him if he's been to New York and Kurt closes his eyes, curls into his side and breathes.

"I've been a thousand times," Kurt says sadly. "But only inside my head."

Blaine holds him after that, lets him get it out of his system. Later, he's back to his usual, bubbly self, kissing Blaine spontaneously and telling him about the stars and the wolves and the fact that he swears the wind is classically trained. Blaine laughs and smiles and enjoys the way their fingers curl so perfectly together and he's still confused and he still has no idea from whence Kurt came, but he doesn't care about any of that, because for once, he's happy and more importantly, in love.

He makes the mistake of telling Kurt this.

"If you had a time machine, where would you go?" Kurt asks one day.

They're in the back garden, down beneath the shade of the trees, lying nude in the prickling grass, their fingers sticky and tongues stained from the raspberries they've been sharing. Blaine looks to the sky as if it has suggestions, but it doesn't and he tries to think of a magical place he can vociferate, for he knows that Kurt, in all his magnificence, will undoubtedly tell him something spectacular.

"I think I'd like to see the dinosaurs. But from afar."

Kurt giggles and turns over onto his stomach, his elbows propping him up.

"I want to go back and find you again," Kurt tells him. "There were days when I could feel you out there and I couldn't find you and I needed you so many times, but I didn't know where you were. I could feel you. I knew you were close, but I couldn't find you. I want to go back and see where you were and then make myself go to you."

Blaine still doesn't understand, but he thinks it's beautiful and he leans in to kiss Kurt's sweet lips. He means it only to be chaste and brief, but Kurt laughs quietly, eyes darkening, and he dives forward until Blaine is pinned beneath him. Blaine feels the hot hardness against his thigh then. Blaine realises then that they've rolled out from under the shade and that if anyone looks out their window, they'll see them there; two naked boys pressed together, arousal obvious.

"Someone will see," Blaine tells Kurt.

"I want the whole world to see," Kurt says in a whisper as he kissed Blaine's mouth slow and dirty.

The smallest sounds makes Blaine stop, freeze in the warmth. "Can we...inside?" Blaine asks against Kurt's lips.

"I can't tell if you want to be inside," Kurt says, eyes darting towards the house and back again, "or inside." And this time, he takes Blaine's right hand and lifts it behind him until his fingers are pressed along the line of his backside.

Blaine swallows hard. Kurt laughs out loud and bends to kiss him again, but before he does he says, "Or maybe you want me inside you."

Blaine comes after minimal stroking and Kurt comes soon after against his leg. They go into the house later and they shower and fall asleep together on the living room floor, curled around one another, smiling in their sleep.

The paths turn orange and brown and it gets darker sooner and Blaine rakes the leaves while Kurt lays in the pile and watches him. It's chilly and there is a feeling of dread in Blaine's stomach, because he is to return to school in a week's time. He knows he'll have to board at Dalton sometimes, but at Dalton he can't have his Kurt.

He pulls the leaves with a grating sound and then he's being pulled into the pile. He finds himself with an armful of Kurt and he's being kissed and it's nice. Kurt pulls away, smiles, reaches up and strokes his hair.

Blaine opens his mouth and he says it, breathless, all at once and quickly, before the words run away and hide.

"I love you."

He says it because he means it, because it's been dancing on the tip of his tongue for a long time and because he thinks it'll fix that which is broken and that which is likely to break.

It doesn't.

Kurt's bright eyes darken and water and he dives from the leaves and disappears back inside the house. Later, Blaine finds him on the floor of the shower, naked and crying and cold. He scoops him up in his arms, feeling his clothes getting soaked but not caring and he holds him until the tears run dry and he's being kissed so hard that his lips feel blackberry-bruised and his skin is burning from the touch of long, thin fingers.

They fall together and Blaine's frightened he'll break the boy in his arms, but in all his fragility, Kurt is strong as the bonds which hold him and he holds Blaine together as Blaine holds him and they're two halves of a whole as their bodies form one, skin touching, lips pressing, hands leaving red shapes. It's late when they drift off to sleep, thoughts fading and dying for another day. It's warm and it's quiet and right before he succumbs to slumber, Blaine hears the small snuffles and he tighten his grip and keeps them both safe.

He cries quiet, heart-draining tears when he wakes before the sun the following morning. He looks down at the lonely boy and his breath catches at the thought of leaving him, but he knows. He knows.

He cries and watches as the tears drop down and form tea drops on the tanned skin of his friend, his boy, his Blaine and he's cold, shivering, so he drops and tries to gain heat from Blaine's body, but all he can hear is the drum beat of his heart and the faint, distant, cold whisper of those three words that have changed everything and nothing all at once.

Blaine curls against him like a flower opening its petals, like he's welcoming him, telling him he can stay 'til he dies, just like the flowers as the winter falls in. Suddenly, he's hit with the realistion that it's like the seasons, that they're like the seasons, when warmth turns to icy cold in a matter of days. They're the seasons. Blaine is summer; warmth, flowers, sun and citrus heat and Kurt, he's winter; cold and dark and wet and poisonous, a cool layer of ice which covers everything before it has the chance to get away.

Blaine, he's still safe because the Autumn is still to come and Kurt knows more than ever what he must do.

The tears and the shakes and the regret and want and need and pain shudder and infect his entire body and he knows that if he stays a moment longer, golden eyes will open and fill with curiosity and he will be forced to explain and find the words to express everything he feels and he cannot do it, cannot find the right things to say or do or maybe he'll give in and let them die, let his poison seep into the veins of goodness and everything that is right and beautiful and promising. He cannot let that happen.

Kurt lifts himself up and bends to press a final, sweet, cold, burning kiss to Blaine's soft, pink lips and he knows his tears are on the other boy's cheeks, knows, without question, that his own tears will be there when the sun rises and wakes him from his temporary death. He considers inking an excuse, considers a voice message, considers everything and anything and still, arrives back where he began. Kurt rises like the sun, but earlier and sadder and more toxic and he closes his eyes, breathes in his scent a final time, pulls on Blaine's clothes, before climbing out the window and down the trellis and disappearing into the treacherous, dark, cold woods, where he will wander aimlessly for an X amount of time. He knows nothing, only that he has done what is right.

Blaine opens his eyes with the burn of the sun. It's yellow and beaming and bright and he turns to find the empty space in the bed. It's cold and it's warm, but it's mostly cold and he wishes with his all that he's in a bad dream, a nightmare from which he will soon be pulled only to be kissed by a boy with a smile warmer than the summer sun on a summer's day.

He never wakes up.

He stays where he is for a while and he wonders if Kurt is in the bathroom, in the kitchen, in the garden, but he knows, he knows, he knows: He's gone.

Blaine stays where he is for longer than is documented and then he dresses and goes outside and calls his name until his throat is dry and rough and hurting, but he never finds him. He goes back inside and he sits by the window and watches, as if he is back at the beginning. He had been empty then, but now, he feels as if he has lost part of himself. It hurts.

That night he dreams of a pale boy with icy eyes and a beautiful everything, but when he wakes, he's back where he began, sore and empty, alone and wanting.

He knows not to expect what he is expecting, but he does it anyway: He waits.