Not that Kurt was ashamed of his new family per se - though he did wish that the could understand some of the more basic social graces above their station, and he wasn't entirely sure why Finn seemed to think that wearing clothes he'd worn all day at the shop to dinner was perfectly appropriate. It was just that...well, the boy coming over was someone important. Someone important for him to survive at Dalton - the de facto leader of the Warblers, the guy who had all the sway on-campus and with the administration, the guy who had managed to get him a weekend pass during a period when they were meant to be impossible to get. The guy he needed to impress if he ever wanted a shot at solos.

Or anything else.

He'd never felt this nervous just making brunch before.

He didn't understand the anxious flutter in his stomach as he set out four plates, then grabbed a fifth, hesitated, put it back in the cupboard. Blaine had said he'd be over around now-ish, maybe? No definite time, no concrete plans, and Kurt didn't want to be the needy one who asked for all the details because it didn't matter that much and they were both kind of used to Dalton where anything that wasn't strictly scheduled became kind of freeform. It wasn't as though he hadn't eaten every meal with Blaine for the past five weeks, minus the first weekend home and a couple days he'd spent dinner holed up in the library and that one time Blaine had overslept and missed breakfast. Would he be this nervous if Jeff was coming over? Or Sam, for that matter?

No, because he wasn't in love with them.

He shook his head and rolled his eyes, his neck tightening at the reminder. Okay, fine - even if he applied that word to what he felt for Blaine (and he did, he kind of had to, he guessed...and it made him feel a little giddy rush whenever he thought about it)...that didn't mean he should feel this- this- ridiculous and like he was going to either drop the silverware in his hand or burst into uncontrollable giggles at any moment at the prospect of Blaine coming over.

Oh god. Blaine was coming over. To his house. To hang out with him and be led around town by him and spend all day with him, and he was going to have to not do anything to embarrass himself to the point where Blaine never wanted to talk to him again.

That was going to be much harder than convincing Finn not to say anything dumb.

"You're sure you don't want help, sweetie? It's your vacation, shouldn't you get a break?" Carole asked.

Kurt shook his head slightly. "It's okay. One of the things I've missed at school is having a kitchen I'm allowed to use. I enjoy cooking."

It was true, of course - he did like to cook, enjoyed starting with a tray of pieces and creating something from it, something tangible he could enjoy later. And being able to cook, to bake, to have free reign of a kitchen, was one of the things that made him feel homesick at Dalton; unsurprisingly, the all-boys' school lacked even a basic home economics course or any other opportunity to work with ingredients. But it wasn't at all the whole truth.

Cooking gave him something to do, something he could do with his hands and his body. Something that could sufficiently distract him from the fact that the boy he had such strong feelings for was going to be here in some unspecified-but-small number of minutes.

And he didn't trust Carole to make quiche yet.

The merging of the Hummel and Hudson families had been quite a process in and of itself. All Kurt's doing, naturally, with plenty of willing cooperation from Carole and not-entirely-willing cooperation from his father-...well, that wasn't entirely true. His dad had obviously been interested in the relationship, otherwise they wouldn't have gotten married, but he hadn't been so interested in the courtship portion. And Carole...

She wasn't used to being a particularly...womanly woman, was the only way Kurt knew how to put it. It wasn't 'her fault, it wasn't anything wrong, it was just the nature of things. She'd had Finn when she was young but of an appropriate enough age, but when her husband died during the war and she was left with a son to raise by herself...it was okay during the war years, there were never men around and there were plenty of jobs for a woman who wasn't afraid to get her hands dirty, do her part. But then the war ended and most husbands came home and her's...didn't, and she didn't have the luxury of staying home to raise Finn. Not that she wouldn't have liked to, she'd said many times - a little defensively, depending on who was asking - but it just wasn't an option. She needed to work, to get out there, to try to scrimp together enough to make ends meet with a boy who grew out of clothes faster than she could buy them on his way to reaching his final height of six-foot-ridiculous.

And now she was married...and Burt had made clear from the outset that, as a proper guy, as the kind of all-around good man that he was known for being...he wanted to take care of her. Of the whole family. After all, the shop did well enough to provide for all four of them, even with the added expense of Kurt's tuition. Why should Carole have to keep breaking her back working two jobs like she had been?

The housewife role just didn't seem to suit her so well, Kurt had noticed. Unlike Mrs. Jones who took a kind of pleasure in cooking and watching kids play in the yard, Carole seemed a little...lost in it all. And the two of them were never quite-

Kurt wasn't sure how to put it. She had never tried to take his mother's place, and enough time had passed that Kurt wouldn't have minded that part as much. In fact, he almost wished she were filling that void a little more. But it was almost as if he was too housewifey for Carole's taste, and every time he did something like cook dinner - because he enjoyed it and he wanted to - or clean up his room - because he liked things neat and he was used to Mrs. Jones' strict thoughts on the subject...there was an awkwardness there, as if she thought she should probably be doing it but didn't especially want to and didn't know how to tell Kurt to stop being the de facto woman of the house now that she was around. Especially, it seemed, now that Kurt wasn't around much and she was having more of a chance to settle in to taking care of things around the house.

But Kurt knew how to make the favourite dishes the way Mrs. Jones did; she'd taught him from the time he was probably about 12 because he asked so many questions that it was easier to show him. And he was used to keeping things neat anyway because he liked them that way. And it wasn't a matter of trying to usurp anything, it was just...

Anyway. Which brought them to the quiche, which he was reasonably certain his father wouldn't eat and Finn would devour because it was even remotely edible and Carole had probably never made before, and Blaine...

He had no idea, but that didn't matter. After all, he wasn't even sure when Blaine might arrive, and he might not even get here until after brunch. So he wasn't worrying about whether or not Blaine ate quiche.

And he most definitely had not left out the scallions because he'd seen Blaine picking them out of dinner one night. Absolutely not. That would be ridiculous, and he was not a ridiculous person, he was a logical, educated boy who definitely did not go out of his way to impress people he liked. Or to spend more time with them.

Which was why he had basically invited Blaine over before the weekend ever started.

Which was why he had pushed the relationship with his dad and Carole in the first place, for that matter.

At the nauseating realization, he set the silverware down on the counter with a rough clanking noise. Was that what he had been doing with Finn? Trying to get-...to get close to him like that? Because the feeling with Blaine was familiar but so much stronger and he wasn't sure if it had been the same kind of-

It hadn't been intentional, he knew that much. He...he wasn't trying to get Finn into his bedroom to do the kinds of things that had started to fill his dreams, with naked male bodies pressed against each other and- and kissing and touching and groping in obscene ways that felt so disgusting and yet so incredibly needy in an amazing way. No. He hadn't been trying to do that to Finn. It was just that he liked Finn, he wanted to spend more time with him, he liked feeling the way he did when he was around Finn.

Before he'd realized that Finn wasn't all he was cracked up to be and didn't keep his things neat and wore the same shirt three days in a row and could barely string a sentence together sometimes.

Blaine, on the other hand...Blaine's room was certainly neat enough and he could more than string a sentence together.

The fluttery feeling in his stomach was back as he checked the clock - another ten minutes before the quiche needed to come out. He needed something to do, but he was starting to genuinely worry about whether or not he could chop fresh fruit as nervous as he was - his luck he'd lose a thumb or something, and there was no way that Blaine would find that particularly attractive, and he needed to at the very least keep all his fingers so that he could snap in time with the other Warblers for the number at Sectionals coming up. The Council hadn't picked a song yet, but it was sure to involve snapping of some kind and-

The doorbell rang, and while that should have sent him into an even faster tailspin, instead there was almost a sense of relief. Resignation. This was it, now or never. He walked to the front door and opened it to reveal Blaine.

It almost took Kurt a moment to recognize him out of uniform, and it occurred to him that he hadn't actually ever seen Blaine in anything else, except the one night he'd seen the boy on his way out for a date in a suit. This was...different. Still very neat, very preppy - not like Finn at all. Finn didn't wear cardigans, for one thing, and certainly didn't set foot near a pink shirt like the one Blaine was wearing. With cuffed trousers that should have never worked on him and should have just made him look shorter but somehow worked.

He felt dizzy suddenly and wondered if it was a side effect of forgetting to breathe for too long. He reached one hand to grip the doorframe to ensure that he didn't fall over, just...staring. Taking stock.

He approved. And approval from him of fashion was hard to come by.

Even if the shirt was plaid in a scale that should not have existed, and he would have selected a different shade of brown trouser to go with this particular combination of pink and light blue, but overall, he couldn't complain.

He could see Blaine staring at him, too, but he was used to that. With his suede loafers he'd missed so much, and his two-tone collared vest, and the tied bow around his neck...he knew it was hardly typical weekend loungewear, even if one knew he had company coming over. "Why, Blaine, how surprising to see you," he said with a nervous flourish, cursing himself for the overly melodramatic tone it took on.

But Blaine got it and smiled - smiled, looking so-...Kurt felt like he couldn't breathe again. "I hope I'm not too early. I was up and thought..."

"Not a problem," Kurt assured him as he ushered the boy inside. "I was just putting the finishing touches on brunch, and I made enough in case."

"You're sure?" Blaine asked.

"Very," Kurt replied as he led the way into the kitchen.

The first thing Blaine noticed was that the house was noisy.

Not in a bad way, not like a kindergarten classroom kind of noisy, more like...like the people actually had something to say to one another. The television was on in the living room, and there was a joking disagreement about what to watch before the football game started, and there was the smell of food permeating the room - it never smelled like food at Blaine's house. Food just kind of appeared and it wasn't until the plate was in front of you that you even noticed it had a smell. The kitchen was sequestered into an odd part of the house, almost as if his parents didn't want to be bothered by remembering their human needs except when sitting down to actually consume food thrice daily. Here was the smell of something baking and fresh flowers and laundry soap.

It smelled homey. It was homey. It was lived-in, with a few books out of place and a cabinet door still hanging open from where someone had started to retrieve something and forgotten to shut it. It was imperfect and real and so...

Amazing. Warm. Lovely.

"What is that? It smells great," Blaine offered.

Kurt smiled, this odd combination of proud and shy, and replied, "I made quiche. I've missed cooking at school, and - like you - I was awake early and thought, why not."

If Blaine didn't want to leave before...when Kurt smiled like that? He never wanted to go.

Which was exactly why he wanted to bolt.

* * * * *

It was strange showing Blaine around all of his old haunts, Kurt decided, but strange in a way that left him almost giddy in its surreality. By the time Mercedes joined them for an afternoon of shopping, everything about the day had taken on an almost dizzy quality - the same way it had at the house, only he was making sure he actually kept breathing now so he knew that wasn't the problem.

He found himself staring quite a bit, just watching Blaine - the way he moved in clothes that weren't his uniform. The way he mouthed the words to every song that came on as they sifted through racks of shirts at Montgomery Ward (and was Kurt seriously setting foot in there? More like, was Blaine seriously considering clothes from there? But he did have to admit that shade of red would look really great on the guy). The way he leapt onto every curb to walk along it like a balance beam, then gave a sheepish little grin when Kurt saw he was watching him, as if he wanted to apologize for doing something that wasn't exactly proper but he hadn't been able to help himself.

That was the look that really got Kurt's head spinning.

They chattered all day, it felt like - talking about music and musicals and movies...never silent, never even a real lull except when Blaine would try to make it a point to include Mercedes and she'd just give them both a 'get me out of here' look, which Kurt thought was really strange considering how great Blaine was. And how long it had been since he was home - he and Mercedes had so much to catch up on.

Like how great Blaine was.

They met up with the old McKinley glee club gang around 7 downtown, and it felt...odd. Like he'd been gone a thousand years, even though he had seen most of them only a month earlier. Like he was a different person than he'd been the last time he'd seen any of them.

In a way he was, he mused as he watched Brittany and Sandy adjust their ponytails and Finn and Puck talk about some football game they'd watched that afternoon. He couldn't remember ever smiling this much when he had lived here, when he had seen them regularly. Now he listened to Blaine adding comments about some game that was on last week, and he felt like he couldn't keep the grin off his face. It was ridiculous, he didn't know why, he just-...he couldn't help himself.

Until he saw Rachel walking over and the hideous skirt she was wearing. Then he could stop smiling.

No, really. Who combined those colours into a plaid? And her sweater? Had a dog on it. She was a 17-year-old wearing a dog on her sweater and didn't see anything wrong with that.

Oh, he had missed the epic comedy that was her wardrobe.

"C'mon, guys," Finn said, digging his hands into the pockets of his jacket - it wasn't so cold for Ohio in October, but the wind had picked up after the sun went down and was not exactly a temperature conducive to standing outside for awhile for no particular reason - especially for the girls in their skirts, they had to be cold right? "Let's go." He started down the block, and Kurt froze.

There were exactly two restaurants where teenagers in town could hang out: the diner, and Breadstix. Breadstix was less cool and a little more aimed at the adult set, but they didn't complain about groups of students sitting around for hours as long as they kept ordering Cokes, left a decent tip, and didn't make out with the waitresses on their breaks (Puck was to thank for that particular edict). The diner - which had a name but no one ever remembered what it was because everyone just called it "the diner" since there weren't two to confuse or anything - was the go-to choice for McKinley students, especially on a Saturday night.

They also had a track record of not exactly obeying Ohio's newly-passed Civil Rights Act. That pesky law that said that you couldn't ban non-white patrons didn't seem to sway the proprietors of the diner, and certainly didn't sway the customers. Kurt hadn't set foot inside since the time he and Mercedes got chased out in a flurry of slurs (aimed almost more at him than at her, which had been a first) back in March.

Three guesses which one Finn was walking towards.

Kurt had often wondered just how blind Finn was. Yes, his big stepbrother was kind of dumb, but usually it was in an endearing way. How could he honestly not see anything around him? It required a degree of self-involvement that Kurt couldn't even fathom, and he'd been accused of being self-involved on more than a few occasions just because he happened to care about his clothes and his appearance and obsess a little bit about his skin. But it felt like everywhere he went, he saw things that were so ridiculously, unspeakably unfair, and Finn - who lived in the same house, in the same town, with all the same acquaintances prior to this fall - didn't see any of it.

It made him want to scream.

"Where're you going?" Puck asked.

"Oh - I thought the diner, 'cause it's not too late so we can still get a table-"

Puck shook his head. "Breadstix, man, c'mon."

"Why?"

"Because if my girl doesn't get her breadsticks, ain't nobody happy," Puck stated.

"They literally aren't allowed to stop giving them to you. You could eat the entire meal just of breadsticks. And with the sauce? Yeah. We're going." Sandy linked arms with Puck and steered the group up the block in the opposite direction, towards the aforementioned purveyor of neverending overbaked stale bread, and Puck caught Kurt's eye in a sideways glance.

He wondered if Puck saw what Finn didn't. If anywhere that wouldn't let Mercedes in didn't treat Santana too great, either. For that matter, he'd heard people whispering about where Puck's family might be from, and maybe-...either way, he never expected to see the day when Puck would be agreeing with him on where they should go.

It wasn't as though he and Puck had ever liked each other. The guy had tortured him from pretty much his earliest school memory, then sometime around the week Puck had joined glee club it...stopped. Inexplicably. But that didn't mean they actually liked each other, even if Puck was basically Finn's brother from the time they were maybe five years old, and he and Finn were actual brothers now.

But if it meant not having to call Finn out in the middle of Lima's main street and remind Mercedes of the entire incident that she had probably forgotten because that's what happened when you had comments flung at you every single day...if it meant not having to explain to Sam exactly why they couldn't go to the diner because such a thing would never in a million years occur to anyone at Dalton - or having to explain to Brittany that 'racist' had nothing to do with either running really fast or cleaning the things that were used to wipe off blackboards...

He might begrudgingly thank Puck later. Probably not, because that wasn't what they did, but he'd think it in Puck's direction and that was good enough for him.

Breadstix was comparatively empty for a Saturday and they were shown immediately to the big round table in the front window. Despite Kurt's best efforts to the contrary, the table quickly broke into two sub-conversations - Brittany, Sandy, Puck, and Finn talking about the deliciousness of the breadsticks and what they wanted to order and whether this place Puck knew a few towns over had better ravioli, and Rachel and Blaine talking about whether West Side Story signified a radical shift in musical theater styles. Well, that was what Blaine was talking about - Rachel seemed like she was just trying to tell Blaine how great she would sound as Maria and grill him about his range to determine whether he would be perfect as Tony (he would be, Kurt knew, but that wasn't the point).

"I love the traditional musical as much as anyone," Blaine stated, "but I think the way Leonard Bernstein used the orchestration to help tell the story just as much as the words was really groundbreaking. I think we're going to see a lot more of that in the next few years."

"But singing is what makes the musical," Rachel stated firmly. "Otherwise it would be ballet, and while I've taken ballet since I was four and am incredibly talented, I still believe that the best vehicle to telling a story through song is the song."

"Songs aren't just about the lyrics." Blaine shook his head. "The emotion, the movement - the dancing's incredible."

"How do you know?"

"I saw it on tour in Chicago, it was- you have to see it. Seeing it will change your mind, I'd bet you," he stated. "Besides, as much as I love a good old-fashioned love story set to music, I think West Side Story is more timeless. I mean, it's Romeo and Juliet for a new generation. The Music Man is so...dated. Traveling salesmen skipping town, and a woman being inherently untrustworthy because she's not married?"

Rachel pursed her lips, stared him down a moment, and allowed, "Okay, fine. As the proud daughter of a strong single mother who has no interest in dating anyone because she is devoted to her career, I don't love that the entire town thinks there's inherently something wrong with Marian. But the scene on the footbridge..."

"Is great, but isn't something we haven't seen before," Blaine pointed out.

"But still incredibly romantic," Kurt stated without realizing he'd spoken. He guessed that was why the happy little sigh escaped, too.

He didn't mean to. It was just that-...well, there was something so moving about that scene. Sneaking off to hidden places to confront one another, reveal that she knew he wasn't who he said he was but still he brought such a change into her life that she couldn't help but love him...he knew how she felt, too. Like suddenly the world that had been dull exploded with life around him because he met one person. Going from silence to being surrounded by music.

From black and white to vibrant, rich rainbows of colour.

He glanced nervously at Blaine, then reached over to take a breadstick to give himself something to do with his hands and eyes to avoid staring any more. Someone was bound to notice at some point, he knew, and that...that wouldn't be good. He didn't know what would happen, but he knew it wouldn't be good.

The moment passed as Blaine and Rachel moved on to discussing relative-newcomer Julie Andrews and how fantastic she had been in My Fair Lady, and Kurt busied himself staring at the table and chewing on his stale bread.

A group of six or seven Asian kids came in - around their age, joking and laughing as they were escorted to the other group table. Mostly Kurt noticed one of the girls was wearing a fantastic neo-Edwardian jacket. He wanted to stop her and ask where she had gotten it; finding that style had proved impossible in Lima - or in Columbus, for that matter - and he was left with one obscure mail-order catalog out of London via somewhere in New Jersey. They definitely didn't have the jacket she was wearing (a black velvet frock coat with an incredible black silk taffeta collar that seemed halfway between a stood-up shawl collar and a tapered mandarin), and wherever this jacket came from, he wanted to see what other jackets there were to be found there.

Just because he didn't have the opportunity to wear things like that often didn't mean he didn't need any more of them. There was always the opportunity for fashion.

"Looks like this is the place to be," Sam commented.

"They come in here a lot after rehearsal," Rachel stated.

"It's 8:30 on a Saturday," Sam chuckled.

Rachel nodded seriously. "Evening rehearsal ends at 8. My mom tried to move it back to 10 on weeknights and midnight on Saturday, but their parents complained about making sure they got time for homework, so she added a morning rehearsal to make up the difference."

Rachel's mother, Kurt guessed, was where she had inherited her intensity from. He'd never met her, but considering how often Rachel brought her up during the course of any conversation, he knew a little about her. She coached the glee club at the Asian school in town; he had often wondered why she didn't even try to get a job somewhere she could coach Rachel since - judging by the stories he'd heard - she was a completely insane stage mother. A modern Mama Rose with a decidedly more willing act to manage and far less nudity. But apparently McKinley was sexist as well as being racist, and the Asian parents were more willing to let her be intense in her coaching. No way would the parents at McKinley have stood for the idea of six hours of practice every day for a single extracurricular; even football didn't practice that long. The parents of Asian students, however... Intensity and single-minded devotion to an artistic pursuit in search of technical perfection was apparently a common ethos, and it seemed to jibe well with whatever it was Rachel's mother did to torture those kids.

"They're excellent," Rachel added. "Because they spend so much time, their dancing is mind-blowing and their vocals are perfect. And with my mom's arrangements...While I don't know who they're competing against at Sectionals-"

"Against us, I think," Blaine stated. "Lima Independent High School?" When Rachel nodded in confirmation, he replied, "Yeah. It's us, them, and Crawford Country Day. The letter came this week."

Rachel's eyes lit up. "Well, then as much as I wish you luck, I have to say that I think there's no way they won't win the competition. They're extraordinary."

If Kurt were being honest, he was kind of surprised Rachel hadn't found a way to convince the administrators at the newly-coined Lima Independent High School to admit her on the basis of some fictional relatives from somewhere in the general vicinity of Asia. It was the kind of thing she would do, and Kurt knew she had to be losing her mind without any creative outlet. She was so completely obsessive when it came to performance, a few thousand times worse than he was and he was pretty bad sometimes. But she had all the community groups, he supposed, the local musical theater group, there were choirs...somewhere, Dayton maybe? He remembered her mentioning them sometime. What could she do, anyway? Not like she could convince the school she was Asian just by saying so, and even if no one knew what happened to her dad there were enough people in town who remembered seeing him around that there were a few hundred witnesses who would attest to her not meeting the lone entry criteria.

"What I don't get is why they still get a school," Mercedes stated. "I mean, your school gets closed, my school gets closed, but they still get to be every other year?" It was a perfectly fair question, Kurt thought. While the local Asian community wasn't too bad off - you know, if a person ignored the whole 'you're considered half as good as us but still better than them' attitude and their questionable legal status under any given statute - but Kurt hadn't thought they had enough resources to just start a school like that. Create one out of nowhere, charter it as a private academy subject to fewer state restrictions, and just have a school all of a sudden.

Well, not all of a sudden, he supposed. After all, they'd had a school before the entire mess with integration started; they'd had their own school for as long as Kurt could remember, and probably before the war too. But after the debate all summer about whether or not they should have been subject to a separate school in the first place, whether they should have been allowed at McKinley all along, he was under the impression that they wanted to just go blend in with the white part of town and ignore everything else.

Apparently the idea of a year off school wasn't something they could accept. So they had gotten together and next thing Kurt knew, the Lima Independent High School just kind of...appeared, operating out of the long-underused Community Center over in one of the more heavily-Asian neighbourhoods. So really the question was how they had the resources to afford an intense and slightly psychotic glee club director.

"You're kidding, right?" Puck snorted. "This is like the best thing ever. No school? Nothing a person has to do all day?"

"Speak for yourself," Mercedes replied. "My dad's sending me to the library every morning and won't let me come home until five because he's convinced I need to keep studying on my own if I'm going to go to college like my brother. Do you know how much easier it is to just go to school? Why can't I just go back to sitting in class, paying attention exactly half the time, getting my B+, and going home at 3?"

"Sounds like my father during breaks," Blaine replied ruefully. Dalton, even as rigorous as it was, would still be preferable to his father directing his academic career.

"Easy for you to say, white boy," Mercedes joked, and it took everything in Blaine not to react. Luckily he was extremely well-practiced - years of cold family dinners and even colder conversations had trained him well. "You don't have your father saying you have the responsibility of reflecting well on the entire race and changing every person's perception of black people everywhere. School's fine and everything, but why can't I like what I want? I'd rather sing than do anything else, but that's not respectable enough to make people think we're not all criminals or something. Like anyone dumb enough to believe that is gonna have their mind changed if I get a degree instead of moving to Detroit to be the finest singer since Billie Holiday."

Blaine wanted to tell her she was wrong - he did have that. Only his position was far more precarious because his father sent the message with every step that he needed to be smarter, faster, better than any white person without ever revealing his reasons let he be uncovered as some kind of cultural double-agent. He had to single-handedly be the best part-Pinoy ever, the most successful, the best-qualified, without ever telling anyone.

But he didn't want that kind of visibility. The kind of harassment she had to get- just for existing like that? The kind he'd seen a few of his cousins get? No. No way. That was what made things harder for Mercedes; not her father, but the fact that everyone else around her knew and she couldn't just...

...Couldn't do what he was doing, which was sitting quietly without comment.

That knowledge made his situation seem so much easier all of a sudden, even as much as he was dreading having to go home at some point in the next day, to deal with everything he couldn't stand about his family for another 24 hours.

It was Sandy who responded. "Why do you have to make everything about race all the time?" she asked snottily. "I've met you, like, three times, and okay fine - so one of those times it was because I was trying to put spiders in your hair to see if they'd spin a web out of the plastic on your head-"

"Oh you did not just say that-" Mercedes looked ready to lunge across the table.

"-but every time I hear you talking, it's all about colored this, colored that. Whatever, okay? Nobody cares."

"Oh please," Quinn said, rolling her eyes. "Come on, Santana, we all know what game you're trying to play here."

"Nobody asked you," Santana replied dismissively, raising a well-manicured finger in Quinn's general direction.

"You think because your dad does something-"

"Um, excuse me? He's a doctor," Santana stated with a snooty tilt of the head.

"What does that have to do with anything? My dad's a dentist," Mercedes interjected, irritated.

"A real doctor - not a tooth doctor."

"Can teeth wear stethoscopes?" Brittany asked idly, and Sam tore his eyes away from the three warring girls to stare at the vacant-eyed blonde beside him. "Because I saw it once, on a sign telling me to go to the dentist, and I think my teeth have eyes but I can't see them. But I don't think they have ears."

"I..." Sam sent Blaine a 'help? What do I do now?' look, having no idea what the appropriate response was when a girl asked if her teeth had ears - okay, seriously? - but Blaine was busy watching the drama on the main stage, face an unreadable mask as he tried very hard not to react.

Because what was he going to do? It wasn't even like any of it was blatant- Well, it was, but not specifically against a particular group enough that he could jump in and point out all the ways it was wrong. It clearly was wrong, but it wasn't- Even if he wanted to speak up, what could he say? And if he did speak up, and every eye on the table suddenly went to him...then what?

But mostly...how precisely was he meant to interject anything here? Even if he knew them - which he didn't - and even if he wanted to - which he didn't really...what exactly was the appropriate response when it wasn't outright 'You're less white than me but pretend you're not so I'm calling you out'? When it wasn't 'Black hair's ridiculous, white hair is better' but everything about the conversation screamed that?

He had avoided these conversations in the past. Not been part of any real groups at his old school, walked away when comments were made. But now, stuck at the table with a bunch of people he didn't actually know - save Sam who just looked uncomfortable and Kurt who looked like he wanted to get on a magic carpet and fly immediately back to Dalton but had his hand on Mercedes' arm under the table - he realized just how long he'd been in a place that wasn't like this.

He missed his bubble.

He also missed precisely what it was that sent Mercedes storming off from the table, Kurt following her as she left the restaurant - head held high, looking like she was about to start yelling at people up one side and down the other but knew her mother would kill her for making such a scene.

He leaned over to whisper to Sam, "Wait, what just happened?"

"Sandy said-" Sam started to relay, but was interrupted.

"You think being a jumping bean gets you to the top of the pyramid?" Quinn asked.

"I don't know, is standing up there why your legs are so far apart?"

Quinn's eyes widened, then her gaze hardened as she glared at Santana, eyes darting nervously to Finn, then Puck, then Finn again, then across the table- then she burst into tears. With as defiant a look as she could muster, she stood and stormed away from the table - definitely not fleeing. Not at all. Finn raced after her, catching up easily with his long strides. Outside the restaurant, she appeared to forget about the large storefront windows and flung herself suddenly into his arms as the rest of the table looked on.

Sandy rolled her eyes and slipped out of the booth, dark ponytail bobbing as she stood. She 'smoothed' her skirt in such a way as to just accentuate her hips as she strode in the direction of the bathroom. Puck watched her go with moderate interest, but it was Brittany who followed her.

"What was that?" Sam asked, eyes wide. He glanced out the front window of the restaurant where he could see Quinn sobbing against Finn's chest while he held her and looked like he had no idea what was wrong or why his shirt was getting wet.

"They do that," Puck shrugged.

"Wait, really?" He glanced over at Blaine, as if to ask 'do girls really act like this and we've been missing it?'; Blaine just shrugged.

"They can't have drag races, and they can't have fist fights, what else are they gonna do? Just 'cause they're chicks doesn't mean they don't have big man on campus and status and shit."

"Okay," Kurt said breathlessly as he returned to the table. "Mercedes is okay but said if she came back in here she and Sandy would end up in a...let's just say physical altercation." He wasn't going to repeat in public what Mercedes had actually said. "So I'm going to walk her home-" wherein he would let her rant for exactly six blocks before distracting her by getting her into their go-to argument: the unacceptability of leopard print. They had it frequently, neither of them ever won (even though Kurt was most definitely right), but it was a safe enough way of diffusing anger into something that didn't matter to keep the two of them from nearly exploding with rage over something fundamentally important.

He did that a lot, he realized. Distract himself to pour all his energy into something more superficial and pleasant than the horrible, mean-spirited, downright ignorant things people said. His mom had done it first - distracting him with picking flowers or restyling the curtains when he would come home crying because the boys were so mean to him in first grade. It kind of continued from there, he supposed; he'd spent an awful lot of time planning beautiful rooms with amazing furniture and daydreaming about elaborate weddings while trying to let the sting of the insults ebb away.

He could only imagine how many homes' worth of well-coordinated rooms he would design if anyone ever found out about the whole new pool of insults available now with his...well. Condition, such as it was.

It wouldn't matter when he was out of here, he reminded himself. He and Mercedes would get out of here, run away to New York - and she would be a famous singer with that gorgeous powerful voice of hers, and he would be a famous...something. Music was his first passion, but until or unless there were songs on Broadway suitable for his unique-yet-beautiful range, he might have to 'settle' for his secondary dream of running one of the big fashion houses.

They could be safe there, and Mercedes could wear all the horrible leopard she wanted because they wouldn't need to fight about it as their go-to distraction (even though he would still be right about it being horrible). And their apartment would look amazing because he wanted it to, but he wouldn't need to plan remodels every few days the way he did now.

Two more years he reminded himself.

"Blaine, you can walk along if you want, or hang out with Sam, or...I don't know, go grab milkshakes across the street-"

"We can hang out around here," Blaine assured him. "Go worry about Mercedes."

"Okay. I'll come find you, it shouldn't be too long - then we'll head back home. I have no idea what Finn's plans are, so he's not exactly a reliable fallback, though sometimes-." He stopped himself as he felt his planning start to go faster and faster, drew in a deep breath, and nodded. "I'll see you in a little while then," he added before exiting the restaurant.

He missed Dalton.

Two more years.

He wondered if Man #16 had to redecorate his apartment as often as Kurt contemplated redoing his bedroom.

* * * * *

After watching Kurt and his family all morning, and Kurt and his friends all evening, Blaine had never felt more solitary.

It wasn't that he didn't have friends at Dalton - he did. He had buddies, good guys he could hang out with and joke around with at lunch, boys he could study with and that he enjoyed going to town with to drink cheap milkshakes and monopolize the jukebox until other patrons wanted to strangle them all, but there was something-

He wasn't sure how to explain it. That was part of the problem.

Kurt had people he talked to. Actually, seriously, talked to. His best friend, that really intense Rachel girl who was kind of halfway not bad...he got the impression that, if something was really bothering Kurt, he could even talk to his father - he didn't even call the man 'sir', that had to mean there was a better relationship than any he'd seen, right?

He couldn't imagine ever having a conversation with his father about anything important. Anything that was bothering him. Anything at all, really, except being chastised for not sending in his applications yet and not spending enough time networking and spending too much time singing.

And talking - seriously talking? - with Jeff or Nick or Wes or anyone was just-...they didn't do that. None of them did. A few of them might break the mold a little and have deep conversations about being torn over colleges when letters started coming in later in the year, but that was it. That was the closest any of them would come.

And normally he didn't care. Normally it didn't bother him, but everything inside him just kept building and he couldn't make any of it make sense. He needed someone to help him put order to everything, but who the hell could he go to about things like this? About things like being different? About-

About spending all night staring across the table at a boy and wanting to kiss him? Who in the world could he tell about that part?

Because no one was safe unless they were like him, and he didn't know who that might be. Absent somehow sneaking one of his father's records, getting access to one of the patients, someone who could help him, who could help him not feel so goddamned separate all the time-

He didn't want to be apart. He wanted to blend in, to just be like everyone else.

No one was safe unless they were like him. But if he was so far out there, there wasn't anyone like him to look to.

Except maybe-...and he couldn't be entirely sure, but he thought...maybe the boy whose fault this was.

While he had only met a few of his father's patients, certainly not enough to be certain about the symptoms of homosexuality, from the few he had met...

Kurt was one. Kurt was sick like he was, he would be willing to bet on it.

He wondered if Kurt knew he was sick. If Kurt had guessed his secret. If Kurt knew about either of them, really.

Lying on the bed, staring up at the ceiling, he whispered, "Kurt?" He wasn't sure if the guy was already asleep, it had been quiet in there for quite awhile.

"Yeah?" Kurt whispered back. He was trying very hard not to think about the fact that Blaine was so close, just- right freaking there, and it was taking all his self control not to do something stupid.

"Do you ever feel like..." Blaine hesitated, not sure what exactly to say now that they were here. There were so many things he couldn't put words to, so many feelings he couldn't quite-

"Like what?" Kurt murmured. It felt like his heart was beating out of his chest, and he wondered if Blaine could hear it, could feel the way his breathing sped up at the unfinished question.

"Like there's this...wall between you and everyone else because you're so...different?" Blaine swore he stopped breathing as he finished the question, shifting nervously on the bed.

Kurt's heart sank. It wasn't about them. It wasn't about being like him, it was about not being like him. It was about dinner and not fitting in anywhere, about Santana being a bitch to Mercedes and Quinn being an even bigger bitch to Santana. It was about Blaine hiding his heritage, not hiding his...feelings.

He felt like an idiot.

Blaine didn't like him, he wasn't...he wasn't like him, he wasn't capable of-...they were friends and that was all.

He wanted to cry.

Instead he simply drew in a slow, deep breath; it echoed in the darkness, the quivering sound amplified a thousand times in his own mind. Blaine didn't comment - Kurt wasn't sure if that meant he didn't notice it. "Sometimes," he admitted quietly. "Especially here." Because it was true; at Dalton, things felt less black and white, less right and wrong, less like if he didn't want to date ever pretty girl he saw then he was disgusting. At Dalton, people could be people and have a variety of priorities and things in their lives without anyone making assumptions.

Anyone except him, at least. He had assumed-

"But not everywhere's like this, you know," he added quickly. "School's better, and - I'm told - there's a giant world out there with all different kinds of people. Places we can all...find our place to fit in."

He hoped it was true. It was the only hope he had left - escaping Lima, escaping Ohio, escaping to somewhere lovely with other people, other homosexuals, other boys who wore fabulous clothes and liked musicals and liked boys. There had to be a place out there like that for him, because otherwise...otherwise he didn't know what he was going to do, because he'd known what made him this way for less than a month and already felt like he was ready to crawl out of his own skin.

"Besides. Santana's just...Santana, and she and Quinn have been rivals for at least the last four years," Kurt added dismissively, trying to be reassuring by downplaying.

Blaine swallowed hard. If Kurt thought he was talking about that - which he kind of was, but not really, not as the main thing, not as what mattered...then that meant Kurt didn't know what else there was to mean. He didn't know. He didn't get it. He wasn't-

...He wasn't sick like Blaine.

Oh god, even Kurt was normal. The boy who knew every reference that his father considered a hallmark of the homosexual, every album he hid from his parents...the boy who made Blaine feel less alone and more vile at the same time-

He got to be normal. Kurt got to have people to talk to, got to have understanding and community and- and not feel like this.

And Blaine was left alone in the dark, feeling separate from everyone else in the world.