Epilogue:

The world spins and shakes and the stars move rapidly across the velvet sky until they rattle and fall and the clouds swallow them as they plummet downwards. The sun is up and the moon is resting peacefully in the shade. Two boys startle awake, cold and dizzy. The world is still, but it shook them hard. They exchange a glance and for that split second, they know. They lay down naked and close and they sleep, the knowledge embedded in the back of their minds, out of sight, out of reach, but always, always there.

They feel the millions of others, other thems that exist across space and time and on every plane and they know they will love each and every one of the other unconditionally and forever.

As quickly as it comes, it goes and the boys are left with a feeling of serenity, of peace, but there is an underlying disturbance, one they won't feel again, not in this life. This world is disarray, chaos and disorderly, a mistake almost, but not quite. It changes everything. It presses them flush to one another and urges them to understand the love they feel, that they have always felt. This world has failed them, but they have not failed this world.

It is between the pristine halls and among the smiling faces and inside the surrounding walls of safety and security that a young boy, beautiful and broken roams. He's balancing his studies with his extracurricular activities, but only just. He rushes from class and excuses himself as he slips through the crowds. He checks his watch. Almost late. He walks a little, checks it again, despite knowing nothing can start without him. It's nice, having that kind of control, that kind of role. He is rarely late, never even, a perfectionist in every way, but today he is almost late. It's a strange sensation, but there is an anticipation, one he passes off as mere excitement for the performance to follow.

A second boy, broken, sad, but with a glow, slowly descends the spinning staircase. He does not belong here, not now, not yet. The boy is lonely, scared and wanting and he has no idea why he is here, no idea why he paid any attention to a boy with a Mohawk. But he's here and he's doing it and he feels the pull, feels it telling him to go go gogogogo go. So he does.

The world rushes around him and he watches, as if from afar and he wonders and wants to speak, shout, ask, talk to anyone at all. The moment seizes him before he has the opportunity to seize it first and he tilts his head and speaks.

"Excuse me."

The world slows for a brief moment and there is a boy. He's lovely. He looks up with copper penny eyes and searches and finds Kurt standing there, waiting, breathless. Both breathless.

"Can I ask you a question? I'm new here."

The boy lifts a hand and Kurt takes it. It's like sparks and lightning.

"My name's Blaine."

You are lovely, Kurt wants to say.

It is as if he already knows.

"Kurt."

They share a smile.

Lovely.

Blaine's hand still tingles later on as he watches his friends leave the table. Kurt, this wonderful, strange, familiar boy sits across from him, tears hovering in his eyes, waiting to fall. Blaine wants to tell him he can, that they have no secrets, but he doesn't, because he forgets almost as soon as he thinks it. Kurt is alone and Blaine gives him his smile, shows him he knows, that he feels it, too, even if he isn't aware of just how much that is the truth.

We can be alone together, he thinks and he gives him his entirety in that first encounter.

The world crashes upside down and it's an almost reversal, like Blaine needs Kurt to love him, to want him. In the world we know, order is in place and it is Blaine who doesn't notice, doesn't realise that Kurt is right there, almost screaming for him to just turn around and know that what he has always wanted is right under his nose. Instead, Blaine sings to a boy who doesn't want him back and Kurt's heart falls a little more under the knowledge. It is the first time he tells him and he doesn't say it back. It doesn't change a thing. They're friends, closer than most, and individually, now, not quite together yet, they are both lovers. It keeps them connected, together.

Kurt begins to fall apart after the incident with Karofsky. In our world, Blaine is there with courage and hope. In another world, a world of seasons and decay, there is no Blaine, not yet. When it happens, the Blaine of that world is still fighting his own demons. They are very much present, very much alive and vicious. He keeps them at bay with his music and they remain on the sidelines, waiting and watching and wanting to take him down like before.

The Blaine of this world is left damaged and severely hurt. In our world, the boy he takes to the dance stays and stands with him. In the broken world, he runs and leaves Blaine to fend them off by himself. The hospital stay lasts much longer. The outer scars heal, but the inner ones deteriorate and run deeper as time ticks by.

The change begins much earlier than this. The world is lost and uneven. It spins and fights to find its way back to that very staircase, but time has changed and moved and wilted and died and there aren't enough minutes left to contain it all the way it is supposed to happen. Instead, the world runs wild. The sky is down, the ocean, up and the palest of the boys is left near mad. The other boy is confused and yearning for something he cannot understand.

As he stands on the steps in the world we know, it is the failing light in his eyes he sees first, the blue fading grey and dimming and dying, a mirror of his, but with underlying hope. Blaine tells him no lies, for worse or for better. As time trickles by, Kurt falls under his curse and Blaine, under Kurt's spell, despite his denial. He fights himself, tries to keep him from the ugly until he sees the tears in his eyes, black and sad as the wings flutter no more. So he pours from his soul and kisses his lips. Yet after years of having him near, the distance of lovers makes the heart still, they tumble downhill and off the fast-pivoting sphere when the inevitable makes itself present. Hand in hand they press their way back above, back to earth, back to life, back to them, back in love.

The staircase is the beginning and it is also the end of a war.

Blaine can feel it, if only briefly as his arms circle Kurt. It is like a memory, a dream. A staircase that spins like the cogs of his mind. Kurt reaches out and stops him, his world and his heart. It was love at that very moment. The stars seem to blink awake and align as they run hand in hand down narrow halls, fingers entwined, like missing pieces who have been torn apart. Kurt's beauty is like prize winning art, astonishing, breath taking, like an original piece he is desperate to find.

In every world, fate takes a turn and tears them apart, stands in their way, a barrier to their forever. In the life of the night they are broken and torn and when they close their eyes that night they are restless until the sun comes up. The pain is still fresh in the dark of the day. Gradually, the pain becomes less and each dark day grows bright and each slumber is calm as it takes them.

They make it out alive, in almost every life. No one can understand, no one can explain, no one knows. Another mystery. Each life knows nothing of the other, but this one, the life of winter songs and summer tears is a life of disarray, chaos. It mirrors the world we know, mirrors every world anyone has ever known. It gives them that sense of deja vu and they think they know, until they don't any more. This world contradicts everything logical, everything any of us has ever known and we wait for the realisation that never comes.

The world is a mystery and deconstructs everything but the love of two boys.

Run away from the lighthouse. There's no safety there now.

Run away from the lighthouse. There's no safety there now.

Run away from the lighthouse. There's no safety there now.

Run away from the lighthouse. There's no safety there now.

Run away from the lighthouse. There's no safety there now.

A cold wind blows.

Blaine Anderson, senior at McKinley High, lost alone and frightened. He twists and turns in his bed at night and fights the feeling rising in him, fights the doubt and the anger and the loss, the striking loss of someone who is there, but not here. A tiny lighthouse beckons him and he hopes to find what he needs there, but afterwards, he feels only used, dirty and deceitful.

That night, he allows the tears to spring from his eyes and soak his pillow, where the boy he loves so often laid his head. It doesn't smell like him any more.

When Kurt returns, the corpses of leaves in his hair, he cries. There is no safety in the lighthouse.

He takes his hand and they flee, like in the hallway.

Sometimes, worlds collide.

Secrets are not better.

Blaine will always tell him the truth.

So he kisses him, tells him he loves him.

This is in every world.

The music he hears dancing through the air as he searches the trees for the culprit hits him again where he sits. The doors slide open and he's there, all in darkness, but still lighting up, as always. And then he sings. Blackbird singing in the dead of night. He remembers and then he forgets, but he feels as though his eyes have been pried open and the world is in technicolour instead of black and white.

Sometimes it is not the song, but the person singing it. Sometimes, the song he sings is enough to silence and calm even the fiercest of wolves. Other times, it is not.

He seals it with a kiss.

Kurt has always felt it, like a part of him is missing. He wakes in the night and turns, expects him to be there, but he isn't. And when the world tests him to the point of madness, he runs and his bare feet take him there, to him and when he sees him he is instantly stunned, instantly scared because he knew something he can't have known. Then he smiles and for that brief moment, it is alright.

He whispers goodbye to a brother in every single life and they have to live on, Finn-less. It never gets easier.

He runs because this world is too intense, far more so than the world we are used to. There is no order and that is terrifying. So he runs and disappears for a long time, too long to keep track. The lights take him, but slowly, he is called back. When his arms encircle Blaine again, he knows he will never leave. It is as if a band has been placed around his skin and ties him to him, for all eternity.

Is this world a dream? An alternative reality? A journey inside the unstable mind?

It is not a dream, for it can feel like a nightmare.

The alternative? There is too much of the same.

A journey into the unstable mind? Perhaps.

Perhaps we can never know.

They stand on a staircase, familiar, strange, and they look at one another and they feel it, feel something they cannot quite put words to. It is like a hum, a blur of light and serenity. It is like the world, every world, flashing and flashing, flickering by like the slides of an old projector. It comes uncannily close to an idea, a thought and then it is gone and all that is left is two boys, staring, feeling something, an array of things and when their fingers touch, their lives touch and the thread connects and keeps them together, no matter how far apart they drift and then come back again.

Something fights to rip them apart, but they prevail, make it together. When they meet again back where they belong, it is like coming home.

We met right here. I took this man's hand and we ran down that hallway. Those of you who know me know I'm not in the habit of taking the hands of people I've never met before, but I think that my soul knew something that my body and my mind didn't know. It knew that our hands were meant to hold each other fearlessly and forever. Which is why it's never really felt like I was getting to know you, it's always felt like I was remembering you from something. As if in every lifetime you and I have ever lived we've chosen to come back and find each other and fall in love all over again, over and over again for all eternity. And I just feel so lucky that I've found you so soon in this lifetime because all I want to do, all I've ever wanted to do, is spend my life loving you. So, Kurt Hummel, my amazing friend, my one true love, Will you marry me?

In every world, life, every hour, minute, on every continent, planet, the answer is always yes. In this world of mayhem, this pandemonium, the stars realign and it happens on a staircase, somewhere, anywhere. The boys blink awake, feel it in their souls. Every Kurt and Blaine in every life closes their eyes at the same moment, feeling a sense of serenity, like the world they live in is at ease.

Finally, they sleep and when they wake, there is structure in place. The sun rises in the morning and the moon wakes at night. The stars flicker in the darkness of the sky. They are the hope the world craves. Eternal lovers in a less than perfect world. The wind breathes a breath of relief, seasons change and die, two boys link their fingers together and life goes on.

The ice of the winter cannot hurt them now.
From here, there is only sun with storms in between.
The storms are brief.
Every night, the stars appear.
Over and over for all eternity.
And life goes on.

The End.