Was there a fire? An emergency of some kind? An impending nuclear attack such that they were meant to hide under their beds? He hopped out of bed, his heart pounding as he grabbed his robe and tried to shrug it on while walking. He yanked open the door to find a rain-soaked, disheveled Blaine on the other side, breathing hard, face rosy pink with cold and exertion and an emotion Kurt couldn't quite read in this light. "Blaine-"

"I'm sorry, I shouldn't be over here so late, you were asleep, I just-...I know you're angry with me. I shouldn't-"

"Blaine?" Sam's confused, sleepy voice came from the bed where he was still tucked under a heap of blankets.

Blaine looked trapped, panicked as though it suddenly had occurred to him that Kurt wasn't the only one in his room, that Kurt didn't have the single like he did by virtue of his year, and he shifted onto his back foot as though preparing to leave...but never quite moved. "You're soaked," Kurt pointed out quietly. Blaine looked like a drowned rat -a drowning, terrified rodent searching so hard for any way off the sinking ship that he was about to start running aimlessly into walls in the hope of hitting a hole somewhere.

"Yeah, it's raining," Blaine replied, stating the obvious as if it was news to him.

Kurt wanted to turn him away. To tell him that he'd had his chances and he was done. To tell Blaine that if he tried to destroy one more dream he would no longer even be counted among friends. But he looked too pathetic, too scared, too desperate for something to hold onto, and while Kurt had been accused of being heartless by many of his fellow students at McKinley, there was something about Blaine that made it impossible to stay genuinely upset with him. Kurt hated that part even if he couldn't hate the boy. "Come in and get dry," he urged quietly. "You'll get caught breaking curfew if you go back." Or if he kept standing around, Kurt added silently. How Blaine gotten over in the first place, he had no idea. He thought about asking but guessed Blaine wouldn't be coherent enough to give him a real response to that.

"What's going on?" Sam asked, fumbling for his glasses as he sat up part-way and looked blearily in the direction of the door as Kurt pulled Blaine gently by the wrist into the room and closed the door behind him.

"Nothing, Sam, go back to sleep," Kurt whispered, nudging Blaine in the direction of the bathroom as he went to his bureau.

"Blaine, are you okay?"

There was silence for a moment, both of them staring at the surprise visitor. Kurt knew no answer he could give would suffice at the moment, but he wasn't entirely sure whether Blaine was in a place where he could come up with something that would put Sam's mind at ease in his current state - not as shaken as he looked. Kurt wondered if Sam could see the way Blaine drew in a deep breath before he stood a little straighter and plastered on his most confident smile. In an instant he went from seeming frantic to being the Warbler everyone knew, trusted, and admired. "I'm fine," Blaine replied, and Kurt almost cringed as he realized that a few months ago he would have believed that. Sam certainly seemed to. "Go back to sleep, I'll just get dried off and camp out here until curfew ends." Sam nodded and laid back down, but Blaine didn't let his guard back down right away.

"Go start drying off, I'll get you clothes," Kurt instructed quietly, and Blaine disappeared into the bathroom. By the time Kurt had selected a pair of pajama and grabbed an extra towel from the closet, he expected Blaine would have stripped out of his wet clothes so he kept his eyes trained on the ceiling as he pushed open the bathroom door, light spilling out into the dorm room before he shut it behind him. "If you lay your clothes over the-"

Blaine was still clothed, wet garments sticking to him awkwardly, as he paced through the small bathroom - back and forth in front of the shower, with a sloshing sound on each step and a quiet squeak of his wet shoes as he turned. "You know, things like that aren't just wrong, they're irresponsible."

"What are?" Kurt asked, confused. He held the clothes and towel in Blaine's direction, but the boy was too busy pacing and looking troubled to notice them or respond. After a second attempt to hand them over went ignored, Kurt set the folded items on the edge of the sink and continued to watch.

"The report," Blaine stated, and Kurt crossed his arms defensively over his chest.

"Did you seriously wake me up in the middle of the night after coming over here - in the pouring rain, I might add - just to dash my dreams some more?" he asked dryly. He had expected Blaine might not be willing to talk about these things, but more and the more he just seemed cruel. Not at all like the nice, sweet guy Kurt had thought he was. Certainly no better than Finn or any of his friends - at least they were honest about their contempt for him, unlike Blaine who would swoop in and destroy everything he could before he swooped back out again and left a path of destruction in his wake.

"That's it," Blaine replied, turning to face him finally as he stopped pacing. "That's exactly what I'm saying. You have dreams now, because of it. You rely on reports like that to tell you that you're not sick, that you're-...that you're okay and you can be normal and have things that you want, but the fact is that isn't true, Kurt, it can't-" He swallowed hard, looking away for a moment before concluding, "It can't happen like that, it never..."

He wanted things now, he wanted them so much, and the report just made him want them more. He wanted things that were fundamentally incompatible with one another - he wanted boys but he wanted to blend in. He wanted boys but he wanted to be healthy. He wanted to live a productive, happy life but also wanted things that would guarantee him a life of misery, poverty, sickness, being shunned from every corner of society. He wanted Kurt, but he wanted so badly to stop feeling crazy, and Kurt...Kurt made him feel that way. Kurt made him feel like he was losing his mind, losing control, losing every semblance of who he was supposed to be because when the boy smiled at him - let alone when he sang, oh god...

"I never happens like that, Kurt." He tried to keep his voice even, but it trembled. "The people who are sick like we are...they don't get to be like the people in those reports. They either get better, or they live out their lives in agony. They either fight their- our disease, and they learn to like the women their parents choose for them, and they do what they're meant to have done the entire time, or they spend their entire lives being miserable. Things like this report, they don't tell the whole story. It's political, it's an attempt to make people think that there's any hope for something better."

He hated that it worked. That it made him think for a second, for just a fleeting moment that maybe- But he knew otherwise. He knew too much and he almost hated Kurt for not hating it. ...Not really, he couldn't hate the boy, not really, but almost. He hated that Kurt could be naive enough to believe in the kinds of things the report was painting as possible. That wasn't the way it worked in the real world, it was just what men were reporting. Men who were flagrantly stating that they weren't sick just because they didn't want to admit to it. Men who were at least a little bit delusional if they thought there even was such a thing as a homosexual marriage let alone that they could be entitled to something like that. Men who were, by definition, incredibly ill individuals who had severe impairments and therefore couldn't be trusted to adequately or accurately represent their status.

He had known of men like that, men who came to his father as difficult cases. Severe, difficult cases who didn't want to change and didn't think there was anything wrong with them, but there was. They were just as diseased as the rest of the patients - more, really, because they didn't even have enough of a sense of reality to know-

Why couldn't he got a day without finding some symptom that meant he was even more of a lost cause than he thought?

But these men, they talked about wanting a husband like they were women. They talked about being happy when men smiled lecherously at them. They talked about playing with feminine toys and feeling no shame about it.

(Blaine had hidden his toy horse, with his long soft mane and little doll in English riding gear, in the back of his closet after that and tried to never think about it again, how much he'd liked making pretend jumps out of the end of his bed. He felt plenty of shame whenever he did, and guilt for having not felt shame at first, which meant he must be all right after all.)

The men in those reports didn't get happy endings. The only ones who did were the ones who sought treatment, and weren't beyond help, and the rest...the ones like he was now...

"Because there is," Kurt stated quietly, his voice firm. "There is hope, Blaine, we...find somewhere else. We find places where there are other people like us, and we live our lives."

He shook his head, going back to pacing. "It isn't that simple, I- I wish you understood that, that I didn't have to try and explain it to you. Because if you knew what I knew...I wish you were right, I honestly do, I wish you could be right about any of that-"

"Why can't I?" Kurt replied. "Who says?"

"Everyone."

"And how do they know? Most people don't even know we exist, how do they know what we are or aren't capable of having? Most of the people around here have never even left the state, how do they know what there might be out there for us? In California or New York or Washington?"

"Because they're medical professionals," Blaine replied, frustrated. Why didn't Kurt get it? Why did he keep trying to justify his own failure to reason like that? Why couldn't Kurt just accept that life was the way it was, even as unfair as it was, and move on already? Why did he keep having to try and-

Why couldn't he just play by the rules like everyone else? Settle down with Rachel and learn to be happy? Build a home and a family and a life and suppress everything the way adults were meant to do? Why couldn't Kurt just be normal and accept it and stop trying to convince him?

Wasn't his willpower being tested enough just with Kurt looking that way, let alone talking about things like that?

"So is Dr. Hooker," Kurt stated. He sat on the floor beside the toilet, looking tired of the conversation in so many ways. His eyes were narrowed slightly as he studied Blaine, his posture stiff but naturally-so, his arms wrapped around his knees in such a way that Blaine could see the little pop of a vein in his forearm against the dark silk of Kurt's pajamas, and he looked...quiet. Still. Confident enough that he didn't need to fight him tooth and nail because he knew what he knew and that was enough.

Why did he get to be so confident in that? Why didn't he even have to question it?

Why did he have to be so damned beautiful? So strong and confident and attractive that it felt like Blaine was being pulled in by some magnetic force he couldn't fight anymore?

"Blaine." Kurt's voice was soft as he looked up at him, and all Blaine could think of was how pale and creamy his skin looked next to the white porcelain tiles. "Why did you come over here tonight?" When he didn't immediately have an answer, Kurt added, "Because - and I say this more-or-less fondly - you woke me up at almost 4 on a school night, and you do have your own bathroom to pace in. And you don't strike me as the kind of person who insists on having the same argument multiple times, so I doubt it's that you came over because you needed to tell me I was wrong again."

"You are," Blaine snapped automatically, and Kurt raised his eyebrows and held out his hands, palms up, as if to say 'then leave already.'

But he couldn't.

He should, he knew that, especially because the urges to do something - anything - were always stronger when he was in Kurt's physical presence. But if Kurt really was wrong, if the only thing that was giving Kurt comfort was wrong...

...then what hope did he have left?

As wrong as the report was, it was all he had. As wrong as Kurt was, as naive as his assumptions might be, as uniformed as he was about the true nature of the world and their affliction, as much as Kurt had no idea what their lives were really going to hold...without it, he was back to where he'd been before the Showcase. He was back to being in a position where literally the only thing that would keep him from feeling like this was killing himself and he didn't-...he didn't know that he wanted to.

He didn't want to actually die, he just wanted life to stop feeling like this.

He could feel tears starting to prick at the back of his eyes, and he loathed them. What good did they do anyway? What were they but a sign of complete weakness and submission to everything that was challenging him? They were a sign of giving in, of giving up, and he couldn't-

"I can't help if you won't let me." Kurt's voice was barely a whisper, but it felt like it was echoing through the bathroom, out into the dorm room, where everyone could hear but no one could do anything.

"You can't," Blaine murmured back, shaking his head and staring at the ceiling and trying to will himself to not do something pathetic like start crying now because what good would that do? It would only make him feel worse and embarrass them both.

"Why not? I want to."

Blaine almost asked why, because after the past few days he couldn't imagine any reason for Kurt to be even remotely charitable toward him, but instead he sank down slowly against the bathroom wall, shivering at the feeling of the cold tile through his soaked-through shirt. "Because it isn't that simple," he replied. "You-" His breath caught as he tried to speak before he managed to stutter out, "You scare me, Kurt. You make me feel all of these things so intensely. I've wanted things before, wanted this, I've always known I was sick, but you make it all so much harder. I could stop it before, but ever since I met you it's just gotten so much worse, so much more severe, and more difficult. I thought maybe...maybe if I could figure out why you were okay with all of this, why you didn't walk around looking like you want to hide from it, that I could feel better. But that report..."

"What about it?" He could see Kurt's eyes shining at this distance, see the faint dark shadow against the skin of his pale cheek, and from here he looked almost more handsome than beautiful. It made Blaine feel worse.

"It doesn't talk about how to feel better about being sick, it just says we aren't and leaves it at that. But I can't believe that. I- I wish I could. It would be so, so much easier if I could, but we are."

"Why not?" Kurt's question was more insistent this time, and Blaine wasn't sure why he just kept asking. The answer was always going to be the same.

"Because I've seen them," he said finally. "I know how their lives turn out. They might start out thinking things are fine - many of them do. Many of them think they can just go along with no one knowing, but something happens. Either someone finds out, or they get arrested at some disgusting spot where they congregate and thrown in jail, their name dragged through the mud when the newspaper prints their photograph and their name, or a coworker sees them and they get fired, or they lose their entire family and end up living homeless in the park all winter. Then they go to people like my father and he does what he can but it's-" He swallowed hard, thinking about it. His father glossed over it like it was nothing, like treatment was as matter-of-fact as a teacher mentioning he had given a test that day, but it wasn't. It was gruesome, it was barbaric and painful, like pulling out teeth or cutting out tumours without anesthesia. It was necessary but torturous. If it worked, then it was worth it, but with decreasing success rates and an increasing patient load, there were so many more people out there who had undergone it, who had tried to get better and failed. "-not as effective as it once was."

No one was sure why. His father claimed it was because of the War, because when men were left with no women for months during their formative years, it warped their minds and made it more difficult to function properly in society like they were meant to. Blaine had wondered what that meant about places like Dalton. He'd had the impunity to ask, concerned for his own welfare - at 14 and just beginning to feel these unwanted things - and was met with swift condemnation. Of course these sorts of school weren't breeding grounds for that kind of illness; they made boys into Men just as long as those boys knew the path they should tread.

Knowing and being able to were two different things, but Blaine hadn't been dumb enough to say that, even then.

"But the entire point is that we don't need treated," Kurt pointed out. His words and tone were deliberate, head leaning forward as he said them as if he wanted to physically press the idea into Blaine's head with his own somehow.

"It's still an illness," Blaine replied. "Any justifications you try to use about why it's not that bad, it's still an illness. We're still sick."

"Because psychotherapists have classified it that way. There are plenty of things that are considered a disease, considered wrong, before we understand them. Left-handedness has been beaten out of kids for years before scientists started figuring out it was doing them more damage and now only the fringe Catholics do it. People thought redheads were witches for centuries. Just because they think we're sick now doesn't mean there's actually anything wrong with us."

Kurt said it so matter-of-factly, so logically. There was no earnestness, no desperate desire to convince them both. He didn't need convincing, Blaine realized. He already knew it, he wasn't trying to force himself into thinking he was right. He could just know that sometimes people were wrong, that sometimes even doctors were wrong, and could just accept that. Blaine couldn't fathom it. He couldn't imagine just accepting that sometimes everything you've heard your entire life is more fake than you thought. Is outright wrong.

If this was wrong, what else might be? What other things he'd thought he had known were just figments of the not-very-creative imaginations of men like his father?

He didn't even know what to say. When he didn't respond, Kurt continued - pushing a little further this time, pressing him. "Is it right that Mercedes and I have to go to two different schools?"

"Of course not," he replied immediately, because it wasn't. He couldn't understand the people who thought it was, who honestly believed that people of different skin colours were so foreign to one another that they couldn't even go to the same school or sit on the same bus without society falling down around them. Those who thought the natural order of things was to be completely isolated from one other based on something so at once arbitrary and immutable baffled him.

"And are you actually worth any less as a person because of your family's background?"

In the context of the previous question, Blaine didn't need to ask which part of the background he meant. He started to reply with an immediate negative response, emphatic as he remembered the comments and jokes and things he'd overheard at his old school. The way his former classmates would have treated him differently had they known, the way they made assumptions that divided him from his cousins...they were wrong. Of course they were.

But his father wouldn't agree with that, would he?

His father spent his entire life trying to stop being even remotely Asian, and not just around other people. Not just around people who might have preconceived notions or have prejudices that would harm his ability to be a valued member of society and a professional businessman who had to rely on word-of-mouth and reputation to gather a client base. Blaine could understand that part; he could understand trying to be something palatable around people who needed to have a high opinion of you. They all did that, everyone at Dalton, every person at his parents' parties, and he'd have been willing to bet that almost every person he'd ever known did some version of that. Perhaps not Kurt's family, at least not based on the weekend he'd spent there in October, but most people and certainly everyone within particular echelons of society. It was more than commonplace; it was essential. Crossing that line was a violation of everything that the civilized society held dear, as his mother could attest to - or could have if she weren't practically a robot programmed by her husband and his slew of psychosuppressant medications.

But it ran deeper for his father. That much had been clear from an early age. Unlike some of his cousins who were allowed to know their heritage within the protective confines of their house only - could speak the language, even, a jumble of words that sounded to Blaine like poorly-pronounced nonsense-Spanish - there was no such freedom in the Anderson home.

If that even was his last name. He had no idea what it should have been, though he was reasonably certain Anderson had come from somewhere else - his father selecting it in the phone book to conceal his origins. It, like everything else, went unasked.

His father didn't just hide things in public the way everyone else did; he hid them in private, too. If Blaine had to hazard a guess, he would say his father tried to hide them even from himself.

And that hurt. Blaine knew that much firsthand. Trying to hide things from yourself, the amount of effort all of that took, the amount of energy that had to be poured daily into loathing an unchangeable part of one's self - to say nothing of the amount of energy it took to pretend not to hate that part because it was so deeply hidden that as far as the rest of the world was concerned it didn't even exist...That kind of effort wasn't casual. It required hating that part so deeply, so fervently, finding it so fundamentally repulsive and wanting so badly to get rid of it...

That was how badly his father had to hate himself, had to believe he wasn't a good enough society man and person because of where his family had come from.

For the first time in his life, he felt an honest kinship with the man. A fleeting moment of warmth from the person who had been nothing but a cold, detached presence at the end of the dinner table, someone who made icy knots form in his stomach whenever he spoke. For a second, Blaine felt almost as if he understood and as if maybe - just maybe - his father honestly believed he had Blaine's best interest at heart.

"No," he replied quietly, meeting Kurt's eyes. "We're not."

If Kurt was confused by the change in pronouns, he didn't let it show on his face. "Then why can't you accept that maybe people are wrong about this, too? Honestly. If you were to ask the people in my town the two things I just asked you, they'd have a completely different answer. Why does the fact that they think we're wrong matter to you?"

The warmth quickly turned hot, rage and frustration bubbling up from somewhere within him as he thought of every dinner he had ever sat through and listened to his father talk about his day and about fixing people like him while he sat petrified at the center of the table and felt like there was far more than 6 feet between him and each of his parents - felt like there was an entire universe between them and no way to bridge it except by trying harder and harder to stop being this, to stop feeling this way. Thinking about every single agonizing day when he couldn't push down the thoughts, the feelings, the desire far enough. He absently rubbed the heel of his hand over his chest, above the place above his left nipple where the phantom jab of his Warbler pin still lingered. For the first time, thinking about what it meant hurt more than thinking about the event or about the physical pain subsiding.

There was silence and he wasn't sure if he was supposed to answer Kurt or not. He had no idea how to even begin to answer, because the problem was that he still thought it mattered. It did - it mattered that the entire world would hate him and shun him. It mattered that the second he started to feel these things he had ended his ability to be ordinary or normal or well because it was still an illness in medical books if not in Kurt's mind. It mattered what people thought of you, it always did. It always would. At school, or in college, or when he got out of college and went into whatever it was he was forced into, people needed to have respect for him if he wanted to make it anywhere. And this was not something anyone could ever change their minds enough to respect.

Him thinking that maybe Kurt might be right that theoretically it might not be wrong was one thing; everyone else knowing it was another matter entirely and would never, ever happen.

"Can I ask you something?" Kurt asked quietly, lowering his knees and leaning a little more toward Blaine. "And answer honestly."

"We've always been honest," Blaine replied softly, because it was true - with Kurt, unlike anyone else in his life, he had chosen honesty. He could have lied in the car. He could have lied any other time Kurt asked him. He deflected, which wasn't right maybe but wasn't dishonest.

Kurt gave a bit of a wry smile - he appreciated the slight intellectual dishonesty it required to agree they'd been honest with one another, but he didn't eschew it or correct Blaine's statement. "When you feel these things for me...do they feel wrong?"

Ten minutes ago, Blaine would have said that of course they did. They hurt. They made him want to hurl himself off the nearest tall building - a building much taller than any on campus would have to do - or take a handful of the strongest psychiatric tranquilizers he could find or marry the next girl he saw to try and make everything easier. Simpler. These feelings for Kurt had him in absolute agony and he wanted nothing more than for them to stop.

But now he wasn't so sure. Nothing felt certain anymore.

"I don't know," he murmured, hand quivering as he leaned his cheek against it.

Kurt nodded and seemed to accept that answer before asking his followup. "If they do...is it because the actually feel wrong, or because other people tell you they're supposed to feel wrong?" Blaine opened his mouth and had no idea what to say, so Kurt continued. "Does it feel unnatural for you? Or do other people just have ideas of what you're supposed to be?"

How was he supposed to know what felt natural or unnatural for himself? It seemed like an absurd question. Who knew anything that was foreign to himself?

But he did know, he realized. He knew because Jean - as lovely as she was, as funny and attractive as she was - never felt like this. Or rather, he never felt like this about her. He felt affection for her, to be sure, and he enjoyed being around her, but the blooming, undeniable attraction he felt every time he saw Kurt so much as look at him - let alone talk to him, let alone seek him out to spend time together...that deep magnetism buried beneath the hatred of what it all meant, the thing that made him keep trying to talk to Kurt even when he didn't honestly believe anything could help him, the thing that dragged him out of bed and across campus after curfew and in the rain...that he only felt for Kurt. Somehow he knew he could only feel it for Kurt. And even lesser versions of it, the paler but nonetheless alarming sensations he'd had for other boys in his youth and his first years at Dalton...he could never feel it for Jean. Or for Rachel or Laura or any of the other girls he'd ever known.

If it wasn't his natural proclivity to be unnatural, would it have been so hard to change it?

He shifted forward into a kneeling position, wet jeans awkward against the slick floor, and reached out to touch Kurt's face. The way Kurt's eyes fluttered shut and he drew in a soft gasp but looked so achingly sad, as if he was expecting Blaine to touch him and then dash out the door again...he couldn't anymore. He just-...he couldn't keep doing what he'd been doing. None of it.

Maybe Kurt really was right. He wanted to believe he was, at least. He wanted to believe in it so much, to think maybe there was still something out there that wouldn't hurt as much as the past few years. And for right now...

He leaned in and kissed Kurt's lips softly, wanting to draw the boy into his arms and just hold him close, feel his warm, feel him like some sort of reassuring presence. Kurt gave a surprised little moan, his hands settling awkwardly on Blaine's shoulder. After a few moments Blaine pulled back, and the look of resignation of Kurt's face almost killed him. "I'm sorry," he murmured. Kurt drew in a sharp breath, rolling his eyes as they clouded with tears and shaking his head angrily at the certain abandonment, but Blaine settled beside him on the floor, resting his head on Kurt's shoulder.

"Wh-...What are you doing?" Kurt asked quietly, his voice quivering.

Blaine lifted his head. "I'm sorry, should I-"

"Nono. This is...it's fine, Blaine, I just didn't think you'd-"

stay was the word they both filled in silently as Blaine laid his head back on Kurt's shoulder.

* * * * *

Kurt didn't remember the last time he'd felt so exhausted. Even after his mom had died and nightmares had plagued him leading to nights of sleeplessness, he didn't remember being quite this tired - beyond tired, really. Drained of all energy. Like if he closed his eyes he might just nosedive into his physics book in a most undignified way in the Dining Hall.

He couldn't have that, so he forced his eyes to stay open and kept his posture ramrod straight so it would be harder to surrender to the temptation to slump over and drift off against his hand, elbow propped on the table, like he'd seen several of his fellow students do. He had far more grace and discipline than they did.

Blaine had finally left around 6, and while Kurt knew that 5 hours of sleep was hardly his record low it wasn't nearly enough for his purposes. His skin felt tight and dry despite using the extra-strength moisturizing regimen this morning - the kind usually reserved for high-stress times such as finals, holiday meal-planning, and the lead-up to the Oscars - and no amount of deliberate loosening could make his tie lay correctly. He wouldn't trade any of that for the hour and change spent on the floor of the bathroom with Blaine close to him; the boy hadn't smelled like he usually did, more musty and stale than the usual fresh cleanness of his generic-brand soap and spicy aftershave, and his pajamas would never recover from the water stains he feared, but Blaine hadn't fled out the door after kissing him the way Kurt had expected.

He just had no idea what any of this meant.

He didn't want to get his hopes up. One kiss and a great hour sitting together saying absolutely nothing were just an hour and a kiss, it didn't mean anything at all. He'd been through this several times already, he didn't want to start it all over again. Not as much as it had hurt last time. But something felt different now, and maybe Blaine really had absorbed any of what he'd been trying to convey last night. This morning. Whatever they were calling it. He seemed like he had, like he was at least open to the idea, but Kurt honestly didn't know. He ran so hot and cold that there was no way to tell.

Which was why he was supposed to be done. To walk away and be over it all. Only he couldn't, not really, not when Blaine showed up with soaked ringlets of hair stuck to his forehead and looking like he was going to die without Kurt's help. Not when he touched him and leaned his head on his shoulder for an hour just to be close.

"Hey, Kurt."

Blaine's voice startled him, and he jumped before he looked up. Blaine chuckled softly, and Kurt couldn't help but note with envy that the Warbler who was the cause of his exhaustion managed to look as presentable as ever. It wasn't fair, really - he should look even more tired. He looked perfectly put-together, charming as ever, with the same confident smile he used to disarm everyone but that Kurt knew by now didn't actually mean anything.

His heart leapt at the same moment his stomach sank, because that meant he'd done it again - he'd let himself think for a couple minutes that maybe things were different when they weren't (but that smile...that boy...) Blaine was back to pretending just as much as ever, which meant the fact that he was even seen speaking to Kurt was novel enough.

"I wanted to thank you - for this morning." Blaine's voice was even, almost enthusiastic but not overly so. It sounded genuine even through its generally put-on confidence.

He needed to stop trying to analyze Blaine's tone so much. This was how he'd gotten into trouble in the first place, reading into things where he shouldn't have. "I would say 'any time', but I do occasionally need my beauty sleep."

Blaine seemed to want to say something but stopped himself, then glanced around and asked quietly, "Do you want to maybe do...something on Friday night?"

No, Kurt told himself firmly. Blaine didn't mean it like that. He did not mean did Kurt want to join him on a night that every other Dalton student who could find a girl to take out went on dates in town. He did not mean that. He meant...something else. He meant did Kurt want to work on arrangements with him in full view of students who might pass by. Or he meant did Kurt want to grab Sam and help him finally get out of the dorms because even now with fewer hours of obsessive studying nightly thanks to improved systems to make his work time more efficient and effective Sam still didn't really go out - he was getting obsessed instead with catching up on comics and starting some project involving rockets that Kurt didn't understand.

He didn't mean any of the things Kurt's derranged little fantasy-loving mind was coming up with. None of them. Not a single one. He needed to just keep reminding himself of that every few seconds so he wouldn't let himself slip and envision dinner in town and a movie-

"Sure," Kurt said slowly, trying not to let his voice sound as breathless at he felt. He knew the fantasies weren't real, but there was something intoxicating about them anyway, about the possibilities they contained. "What did you have in mind?" he added. The quicker he brought himself back to reality, the better.

"I..." Blaine looked around a moment to see who else might be nearby. "I'm not sure. I'm not really good at this kind of thing, Kurt, I never know where to start. Usually the guys pick something for the group, or there are rules, but we can't...do most of that, so I don't know if..."

"Would you like me to plan something?" Kurt asked, adding quietly and hoping his voice didn't go too high on the end, "for our...date?"

Blaine's smile was shy, almost terrified, but it was there and it was genuine, unlike the rest of the overly-confident smiles he pasted on for everyone else. "But not like...you understand what we can't do, right?"

The list was long and involved anything where anyone might see them or knew who they were, but Kurt didn't care. It took everything in him not to clasp his hands together and grin like an imbecile and practically squeal with delight. His actual response was far more reserved as he smiled and in a breathless voice replied, "Of course. Don't worry - I'll take care of everything."

Blaine nodded, and he looked almost stunned by his actions, as though he couldn't believe he had done that but in the best possible way. "Okay. Then I'll...see you then. Or - at Warbler practice today? 3:00?"

"Yes," Kurt replied, his mind already racing a million miles a minute, envisioning every possible dinner and activity and apartment they could have together. "I'll see you then."