He should be better. He’s supposed to better. He’s at Dalton down. The fading bruises are covered by a shield of navy and red.

Most days, he is.

Today isn’t one of those days.

A panic attack is enough to get him out of his afternoon classes. In the aftermath, he’s left feeling silly. Like he’s overreacting. He’s letting himself be held captive by memories. Kurt would never let himself be controlled by these thoughts. Kurt’s so strong. Why isn’t he as strong as Kurt?

His mind feels like a prison.

Blaine focuses on taking even breaths, and tries to let his mind float to happier things. He’s laying on his bed in his dorm room, thankful for the fact that Jeff’s classes haven’t let out yet. He needs time to collect himself. He hates not feeling put together.

The Dalton structure has been good for that.. Even when he feels like a mess, he can put on that blazer, slick his hair back and put on an Academy Award winning front. Kurt has been lecturing him on the less than conservative amount of product he’s been using on his hair lately, and Blaine can’t find a way to explain to him that having each hair in place helps him pretend that his life may someday follow suit.

He glances at the photo of himself and Kurt he has set as the background on his Blackberry. Blaine is giving the camera a cheesy grin, while Kurt remains composed. His lips hint at a smile, but just barely.

Kurt Hummel is an enigma. One week he’s playing football, the next, he’s wearing corsets and ass-kicker boots. He goes from Mellencamp to selections from Wicked almost seamlessly. And not to mention a couple of months back when there had been that cryptic message about getting on the wrong side of a bottle of chablis.

Blaine is the one off at boarding school without parental supervision. Shouldn’t he be the one getting up to shenanigans?

The fact that he’s calling it ‘shenanigans’ should tell him something.

When the phone rings, Blaine nearly falls off the bed in his haste to take the call. He knows who it will be, but that doesn’t stop him from smiling when he sees Kurt Hummel flash across his screen.

“This is the worst week ever.”

“You said that last week,” Blaine chuckles. He shifts to get more comfortable, because phone calls with Kurt are never a quick occasion. Not that he’s complaining - he loves it.

“I have pear hips.”

“And I’m a space captain.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I thought we were saying impossible, ridiculous things.”

Kurt sighs through the phone.

“You don’t have pear hips,” Blaine tells him. “Your hips are... well, they’re hips. I’m pretty sure they’re supposed to look like that.”

In the past few weeks, he’s learned that it’s easier to focus on Kurt’s dilemmas than his own. He lets himself get lost in the stories from Kurt’s glee club. Sure, he doesn’t always know what to say, but he tries. Offering Kurt guidance, however useless, makes Blaine feel important.

Another sigh. “You try wearing the world’s most unforgiving red polyester pants, then try talking to me.”

If Kurt doesn’t think he looks good, Blaine can’t image what he thinks of him. He’s too skinny and he feels like he’s a bundle of elbows and knees. The growth spurt last year has left him feeling unbalanced. And he hasn’t even ended up particularly tall as a result. In fact, most days he feels a bit like a baby giraffe.

Kurt is gorgeous. It hurts Blaine’s chest to hear that he sees a single thing wrong with himself.

“Last week you were telling me that you rocked that uniform!” Blaine has the self-taken photo of Kurt posing in front of his mirror in the Cheerios uniform to prove it. He loves that picture. Kurt has his head cocked to the side and his hip jutted out. He has been tempted to make it the new background on his phone, but he already gets enough grief from Wes as it is.

“I could look better in it,” Kurt says in a strained voice. “I could always be better.”

“You’re kind of perfect,” Blaine replies almost instantly. Kurt’s huff annoyance makes him cringe. He wants to reach through the phone and take the words back. He doesn’t need more reasons to think that Blaine is silly.

“You’re kind of a sap,” he says after a moment, but his voice sounds lighter.

Kind of how Blaine’s tends to sound after a long, exhausting day that ends with a phone call from Kurt.

“You like me anyway,” Blaine teases, and he hopes that it’s something resembling the truth.

“Some of these days I wonder...” His voice is airy. Blaine wants to curl up in it like a cat on a cloud. “Anyways, that wasn’t even why I was calling you! The synthetic fibers are weaving through my pores and into my brain, I swear...”

Blaine has so much he wants to tell Kurt, but he knows he has enough on his plate. Kurt is out at a public school. He’s balancing glee, cheerleading, and still managing to get a heart healthy dinner on the table every night. He has had to open his home to Finn and Carole Hudson, after a whirlwind PTA romance.

(“Dad proposed a motion to have some of the funding yanked from athletics so they could toss the arts programs a bone. Carole supported him, and those other football mothers are like sheep, Blaine. They’re nothing like Carole. She’s fabulous. Yeah, her penchant for denim leaves a little to be desire, but Blaine... she’s perfect.”)

But for every bit of enthusiasm Kurt shows for his father’s budding romance, he still manages to show hints of disappointment over the bond Finn seems to share with his Dad. Blaine worries for him, sometimes. He wants to make sure Kurt never feels unwanted, however tiny that feeling might seem.

These problems seem so much bigger than the fact that Blaine gets a little nervous when someone knocks a book off their desk.

So he listens.