Chapter 6

The greatest gift of all

(Out in the storm)

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Part one

'Finally,' Blaine breathed out when the door closed behind them and they were alone in Kurt's bedroom at last. 'I thought it was never going to end.'

'God, me too,' Kurt said as he hooked his arms around Blaine's neck and his eyes drifted to Blaine's mouth. 'Is it bad that, while we were singing for those homeless people, all I could think about was getting it over with so we could come here and be alone?'

'Emphasis on come?' Blaine asked with a smirk, which was quickly swallowed by Kurt's mouth on his, kissing him so fiercely that Blaine stumbled backwards a little. The back of Blaine's knees hit the bed, and then they were tumbling clumsily onto the bed, Kurt falling on top of Blaine.

'I like how you think,' Kurt said in a low voice when he had pulled himself into a more dignified position above Blaine, straddling his thighs. He leaned over Blaine, his hands finding and intertwining themselves with Blaine's on either side of his head. At the look on Kurt's face – such a perfect mixture of lust, playfulness and love – a wonderful sense of warmth spread through Blaine's entire body, and he felt suddenly much more comfortable than he should be in this position, like he could keep lying here forever. After a week of exploring and experimenting whenever they could (Blaine had a newfound love for his mother's crazy work schedule), Kurt's weight on him was warm and reassuring, and his face was so close that Blaine could see nothing but him, as if they were each other's worlds.

When Kurt let go of his hands and raised himself a little to work on the buttons of his shirt, Blaine let out a strangled sound, finding himself caught somewhere betweenNo, don't go away, you're too far away already and Yes, good idea, more skin, please, but before he could comment either way Kurt's shirt was gone and Kurt was kissing him again, hungry and open-mouthed, their tongues meeting and fighting for dominance.

Somewhere along the way – he barely remembered how – Blaine lost his shirt too, and Kurt maneuvered them to lie properly on the bed. Kurt stretched out on top of him, his entire body covering Blaine's now, and Blaine was sure that there was no better place in the world to be than right here. As they kept kissing, Blaine forgot all about Christmas songs and homeless shelters and ugh, "holiday roommates", and there was just Kurt and his mouth and the way he began to rock his hips against Blaine with increasing desperation until oh. Blaine let out a short gasp as a particular well angled thrust sent shivers through his body and alerted him to his own growing arousal.

Kurt removed his lips from where they had been working on Blaine's neck and moved his head to look at Blaine with a satisfied smile. 'Good?' he asked.

'I...yeah...' Blaine managed. His breathing had turned uneven, which rendered words somewhat difficult. 'Hold on.'

Kurt looked confusedly on as Blaine reached a hand in between them and into his own pants, where he fumbled for a second, not used to doing this while he was still wearing pants, but then he pulled out the packer and threw it towards the chair in the corner, where it landed with a soft thump.

'Better access this way,' Blaine explained, bucking his hips against Kurt's demonstrating what he meant, and they both groaned at the friction.

They continued like this with Kurt rocking against Blaine over and over, both of them moaning and panting, their voices seeming to melt together into one until Blaine could no longer confidently distinguish Kurt's noises from his own. Blaine's groin area – he never really knew what to call it – was throbbing and aching from the constant stimulation, and it was all so new and overwhelming. The sensations themselves weren't new obviously (Blaine masturbated often enough) but the fact that it wasn't his own hand bringing them about very much was.

Above him Kurt was completely lost in his own arousal, his eyes heavy-lidded and dazed with lust, and he planted open-mouthed kisses everywhere on Blaine that he could reach. His movements grew steadily more erratic until all at once he stopped, explaining between heavy breaths that he didn't want to finish just yet. Instead he reached his hand between Blaine's legs, resuming his work with his hand and fingers now. In response to the new way of being touched, Blaine's eyes flew shut and his hips jerked wildly.

'God, Blaine.' He felt Kurt's breath against his mouth and his lips pressing softly against it. 'You look amazing like this. I'm so glad I get to do this with you. See, this is what I was talking about. Me and you. That's all that matters. I love you so much.'

Kurt kept talking, his words coming fast and breathlessly, but Blaine heard him as if from a mile away. Everything he was hearing and feeling was so immediate and yet so distant at the same time, as though his body wasn't really him anymore. He could feel his mind beginning to shut off, removing all context and sense of self from the situation and focusing on the touch so perfect that it sent shivers through his whole body. When hands began tugging on his pants, he was aware of raising his hips helpfully, but he felt separate from it somehow, and when he was finally naked except for the binder that still covered his chest, it felt like it was someone else's body on display.

'Okay if I touch you?' he heard a voice ask, and he only dimly registered that the question was directed at him and that he should answer. 'I'd like to... blow you. I've- I've been researching.'

He opened his eyes, blinking a little against the light. He hadn't even realized that they had been closed for this long. The person who had spoken – Kurt – was sitting at the foot of the bed and was eyeing his body with so much love and want. He closed his eyes again, before nodding his head. Yes, please. Make it feel good.

He felt the bed shift as the other person moved to position himself between his legs. A hand came to rest warmly on his stomach and another trailed fingers up the inside of his thigh before brushing over his already so sensitive area, and a whimper escaped his throat. Soft kisses pressed against his belly, further and further down until he felt warm breath ghosting over him.

'Wait. No.'

Blaine's eyes flew open. This wasn't right. This wasn't how it was supposed to be. He looked down at Kurt who was lying between Blaine's legs, his mouth inches from Blaine's crotch, but at the sound of Blaine's voice, he looked up, concern on his face.

'What's wrong?' Kurt asked softly, a hand reaching to touch Blaine's leg in what was undoubtedly meant to be a calming manner, but Blaine was already scrambling to get up and away. He swung his legs over and sat on the edge of the bed, taking deep calming breaths and bracing himself with his hands against the mattress. This was all wrong. All wrong. 'Blaine?'

'I'm sorry, I just couldn't.' Blaine's voice shook a little. 'Not like this. I'm sorry.'

'It's okay.' Blaine heard Kurt's voice from behind, and he felt the bed shift as Kurt moved closer to him. His hand touched Blaine's shoulder lightly. 'Don't be sorry. Just tell me what the problem is, so I know what to do differently next time.'

'It's not you,' Blaine said quietly and shook his head sadly. In a way it would have been much easier if it had been Kurt – if all he needed to do was to give Kurt a few pointers on technique and then they would be good to go again. 'You were perfect. You are. Believe me, just knowing that you've seen my... everything, and yet you're still here? That's priceless to me.'

'Then what is it? Can you explain it to me?'

Blaine let out a long breath and thought for a moment, searching for a way to phrase it. 'When I do this by myself – touch myself – it's kind of like... like Blaine has to disappear for a while and I become someone else. Because the idea of getting pleasure from this part of my body that I don't want... It freaks me out. So that's where I went just now. I shut out everything – who, where, when – until there was just the purely physical aspect left.' Behind him Kurt had stilled, and Blaine shifted around to look at him. He took Kurt's hand in his own and squeezed gently, trying a smile. 'But I don't want it to be like that when I'm with you. I want to be able to look at you and think That's my boyfriend and he's blowing me and he loves it. But I'm just not there yet.'

'So you don't want me to touch you there at all?' Kurt asked and, though he tried to disguise it with concern, Blaine didn't miss the hurt in his voice.

'No, not "at all",' Blaine corrected quickly. 'Just not so... directly? I mean, I want to, eventually. God, Kurt, I wanna do everything with you. I want to let you touch me and make me feel good. I want you to-' Blaine hesitated, blushing a little, the word on his tongue so outside his normal vocabulary. 'to fuck me, to- to feel you inside me. That's what I want when I think about us. But right now I just can't. Not without either disappearing into my head or- or feeling sick with dysphoria.' Blaine swallowed thickly before continuing. 'But this – everything we're doing – it's forcing me to deal with it, and it's hard and it hurts, but it's good. I can feel myself getting better, more comfortable, each time. But it's just- it's just gonna take time, Kurt.'

'But for now?' Kurt asked tentatively.

'What we did first – with- with the frottage? I liked that. I think maybe because it was the both of us getting off at the same time? But we can do that more. If you want. And I want to keep finding ways to make you feel good,' Blaine added, desperate to not have everything revolve around him. He smiled but thought it came out more like a grimace than anything. 'I like blowing you.'

'I like it too,' Kurt said with a smile that was somehow both fond and suggestive. 'And thank you. For explaining it to me. I know I'll probably never really understand what it's like, but the more I do, the better we can make this work.'

Kurt reached out a hand to cup the side of Blaine's face, smiling when Blaine leaned into the touch and then forward until their lips touched. It felt familiar. Safe. They fell back onto the bed and ended up in an embrace, Kurt resting his head on Blaine's shoulder and his arm slung across Blaine's stomach. As they lay there, simply enjoying each other's quiet company until Blaine had to go home, Blaine absentmindedly ran his fingers through Kurt's hair and let his mind drift.

Coming out to Kurt was in many ways a very different experience from the one Blaine had had nearly four years ago, when he came out to his parents. In the case of the latter Blaine had asked them to disregard the perception they had had of him for fourteen years as a girl and a daughter and try to view him as a boy and a son instead. Kurt, on the other hand, had been told about Blaine's past and was asked tonot let it alter his perception of Blaine. Where Blaine's parents had been encouraged to tell everyone they knew that they now had a two sons instead of a son and a daughter, Kurt was asked to keep quiet about his boyfriend's biological sex. And there was of course the fact that Kurt was in a romantic relationship with Blaine, which raised questions about sex and intimacy, something Blaine's parents were less immediately concerned with.

However, one thing was very much the same now as it had been four years ago. Coming out put Blaine's transness on the radar – specifically Blaine's own – in a big way, which he wasn't altogether comfortable with. It wasn't that Blaine wanted to deny that it was part of him. Rather he just preferred it not to take up so much space in his life. He hated that he and Kurt had to focus so much energy on trying to make him comfortable. Kurt was amazingly patient and understanding about everything, and it wasn't as if it was the only thing they talked about, but because Blaine's issues were still so unresolved, he could feel it lingering on the edge of every conversation they had. He hadn't blamed his parents four years ago, and he certainly didn't blame Kurt now, but when all Blaine wanted was to be a normal boy, it was beyond frustrating to spend so much time talking about the ways in which he wasn't.

It was a period of adjustment, he knew that. Things with his family had eventually settled into a sense of normalcy and routine, where "he" and "Blaine" came naturally and talking about getting his prescriptions filled and who was driving him to therapy didn't mean that Blaine wasn't a real boy, but simply that he happened to have been born into different circumstances than other boys and that was all right. He was confident that he would get there with Kurt as well. In time he would be able to engage in sexual activity with his boyfriend without feeling so hindered by his body. He would be able to enjoy his body for what it was rather than despite what it wasn't.

As much as Blaine wanted it to be, though, that time wasn't now.

'I'm sorry I'm such a mess,' he said quietly.

With the arm that was slung across Blaine's stomach, Kurt squeezed a little tighter as if to say Don't be, and he turned his head to place a soft kiss on Blaine's neck. 'Beautiful mess.'

The Saturday following the shooting of the Christmas special and the failed blow job got off to a bad start. Blaine felt cranky and irritable from the moment he got out of bed, and he let out a long frustrated groan when he had to spend a good minute wrestling with his binder, because it got all bunched up in the back as he was putting it on. Then he picked up his phone only to discover that it was dead, because he had forgotten to put it in the charger the previous night, and he had to resist the urge to throw it across the room. A moment later he groaned again when he remembered that the History paper he had barely gotten started on was due this Monday.

Blaine closed his eyes and took a deep breath to center himself. Apparently it was just one of those days. Those "off" days he sometimes had, not because he was trans but because he was human, and human beings had bad days. He was just a little bit out of sorts; nothing that a strong cup of coffee, a little determination and some cute text message banter with Kurt wouldn't be able to fix.

Hopefully.

Blaine put his phone in the charger and went downstairs to the kitchen. His mother, dressed in a morning gown and slippers, was in the process of making coffee when he entered and she called a cheery 'Morning,' over her shoulder when she heard him.

'Can you get one for me as well?' Blaine asked, stifling a yawn. 'Morning,' he added unenthusiastically, remembering his manners despite his bad mood. He sat down heavily at the table and tipped his head into his arms resting on the table.

'Tired, sweetie?' his mother asked as she put down the coffee in front of him a few moments later, and Blaine straightened up.

'Yeah, tired. Late night.' Blaine took a sip of his coffee and smiled gratefully at her. 'Thanks.'

They sat in silence for a while, both sipping their coffees. Blaine's mother was going through the mail, a large chunk of which seemed to be Christmas cards from friends and family, and she scanned each one before putting it down and making a note on her phone. Meanwhile Blaine's mind wandered to the previous night's escapades – or lack thereof – with Kurt and he debated with himself about asking his mother for advice on how to get more comfortable. He was not particularly thrilled at the prospect of discussing his sex life with his mother, but she was a grownup and she had told him that he could ask if he needed to. Maybe she would be able to offer some insight? And it was so rare that Blaine even had the opportunity to have a serious conversation with her; usually if she wasn't busy with work, she was tired from it or about to head to it.

'Mom?' he began and she hummed in response but her eyes were trained on the card she held in her hand. 'Remember when you said I could come to you? If I had any questions about se-'

Blaine frowned when he noticed the look on his mother's face. The card she had been holding had been put down away from all the rest, and her phone lay forgotten on the table. As she finished reading another, her lips pursed and her eyes narrowed before she discarded it on top of the other. The same thing happened with the next few cards, and she looked more and more displeased with each one.

'What's wrong?' Blaine asked but got no response. 'Mom?'

'Hm?' His mother finally looked up. She shook her head, forcing a smile. 'Nothing.' She made to reach for the pile of offending cards, but Blaine – not believing her for a second – was too quick for her. 'Don't,' she said sharply even as Blaine was already opening one.

'Oh,' he said when he saw the first line of text. Merry Christmas John, Grace, Cooper and Amber! It was from Blaine's uncle Peter and his family. Of course. Another card was addressed just to his parents but asked at the end to Give our love to Cooper and Amber. There were at least five more cards like this, most of them from people whose names Blaine remembered from his father's side of the family tree. His grandmother had actually included a pretty long section in her letter about how she hoped John and Grace were getting "Amber" the help that "she" needed.

'Don't read them, sweetie,' his mother begged him. 'You know they're wrong.'

Blaine swallowed thickly. 'I know.' He couldn't stop reading though, and he was strangely curious to find out whether the rejection – which was what it was, no matter how nicely wrapped in We want to help you it was – would hurt more or less as he went on. It wasn't less. 'Who's Parker? I don't recognize that name.'

'My cousin,' Blaine's mother told him stiffly. 'Don't worry. I will be calling him and giving him a piece of my mind. As for the rest...' She stood up and deposited her coffee cup by the sink before walking back to the kitchen table. 'I'll make sure your father sees them. Give them here,' she demanded in an uncharacteristically shaky voice, and she practically ripped the cards out of Blaine's hands. It reminded Blaine of the way she had shouted at his father following the Thanksgiving debacle, except today her rage was suppressed because there was no one present to take her anger out on.

As Blaine heard his mother thunder up the stairs, presumably to leave the cards in the master bedroom for Blaine's father to see when he came home tonight, he shook his head and sighed. She could yell at her husband and tell him to stand up to his family all she wanted, but it was not as if it was going to change anything. It never changed.

He got up from his seat to leave his half empty coffee cup next to his mother's and busied himself with making breakfast. He didn't feel angry. He didn't feel hurt. He didn't feel sad. All he felt was numb and tired. So, so tired.

He was in the middle of making French toast, when he heard his mother come back down a few minutes later, and he turned around to see her fully dressed, her bag over one shoulder.

'You're going to work?' Blaine asked, finding his voice flat and emotionless.

'Yes. Just a short day,' she said quickly. 'Things are extra crazy now right before Christmas. Which I will be home for, I promise. It won't be like Thanksgiving.'

'Right,' Blaine said, vaguely realizing that he hadn't taken in a word his mother had said. She stepped closer to him, giving him a long searching look, and Blaine averted his eyes.

'You'll be okay by yourself, right?' Blaine shrugged first, still looking past her rather than at her, but realizing this might not be altogether reassuring, he forced himself to look at her and nod in response. She smiled softly, before deciding this wasn't enough and pulling him in for a brief one-armed hug. 'Just don't let them get to you.'

'I know.' Blaine nodded stiffly before turning away. 'My toast is burning,' he said, not because it was – he wasn't hungry and he really didn't care – but because his mother's worries only served to drive the message of those cards home. It was easier if he could just be numb.

With his mother safely out the door, Blaine finished making his breakfast, before sitting at the table to eat. He had little appetite, however, and after twenty minutes of picking at it, he had still only eaten half of it. In the end he gave up and threw the leftovers in the trash. When he had finished cleaning up in the kitchen, he went upstairs intending to get started on his History essay, but found that he couldn't concentrate. For long minutes he stared blankly at the blinking cursor on his screen, unable to make his mind cooperate, and when he pulled out his textbook hoping for some inspiration there, he kept reading the same passage over and over without taking in any meaning at all. Finally admitting defeat, he snapped his laptop shut and put aside the book. He would just have to do the essay later.

Five minutes of pacing later Blaine went downstairs to the living room and spent a few moments searching the bookshelves before he found what he was looking for. Photo albums – two of them. Dusty and untouched for years. One was labeled with the years 1994-1999, the other with 2000-2006 and both of them bearing the nameAmber crossed over and replaced years later with Blaine. He took both of them upstairs to his bedroom, where he threw himself on the bed and started flicking through the oldest one.

It looked as though he had been a happy enough child, always eager to pose for his father's camera. Blaine ran his fingers over one that showed him riding piggyback on Cooper's shoulders in the back garden of their old house in Columbus. Long, dark pigtails were bouncing in the air, and a delighted smile lit up the small child's face, as though riding around on your brother's shoulders was all one could ever want in life. The short handwritten descriptions that accompanied most of the photos had not been edited since the name change, so this one still read Amber and Cooper. Back garden, summer 1997. Blaine would have been a little over three years old. Why couldn't he have just remained that happy child? Where and how had things gone so horribly wrong that this was what he was now?

Blaine kept flicking through the album, the photos filling him with a mixture of nostalgia and painful remembrance. He lingered for a while at one whose caption readAmber and Jamie, Amber's birthday party 1999. In the photo he was posing next to his then best friend – the one who would later claim that Blaine (well, Amber as he had been known then) was too much of a girl to be friends with. Blaine remembered that day. His parents had thrown him a huge party and his mother had insisted that he wear a dress for the occasion. Blaine had screamed and cried in protest, but his mother wouldn't budge. In the end he had given in, and his mother had looked at him with fondness, cooing how pretty her little girl was.

When Blaine reached the end of the first photo album, he switched to the newer one, continuing to study photo after photo of a pigtailed little girl in sundresses and a matching bright smile. Some of the photos Blaine inspected closely, as though some greater meaning or truth was suddenly going to reveal itself to him, and it was suddenly inexplicably important that he ascertain whether all those smiles were genuine or not. There was no deep meaning of course – they were just photos – and Blaine's face had always just automatically lit up in smile whenever he saw a camera pointed at him.

This was useless.

He threw the photo album on the floor in frustration and moved to stand in front of the mirror over his dresser. It was too small, however, so without really stopping to think about what he was doing, he picked the mirror from the wall and placed it on the floor against the dresser at an angle so it worked more like a full body mirror. There, that was better.

Except... Blaine frowned a little at the image he saw. Slowly he began removing his clothes, studying each new exposed body part before moving on to the next piece of clothing until finally there was only his underwear – his briefs and his binder – left.

It had been more than two and a half years since Blaine had begun transitioning medically, and a lot had changed. His muscles were bigger. He had more body hair. He had to shave regularly. Fat had redistributed to different parts of his body. Even the shape of his face had changed somewhat.

So why did it feel like nothing had changed at all? Why did it feel like he was still that girl with the pigtails and the yellow sundress? Even though he never had been.

Resisting the urge to smash the mirror in front of him, Blaine went instead to the bathroom where he shed the last two pieces of clothing and stepped into the shower. He spent long minutes under the hot water, and he turned the heat up a little higher than he was used to, dimly hoping that it would distract his mind. When that didn't work, he turned the water extremely cold instead, but all that did was make him coldand miserable. He kept standing there, however, minute after minute staring at his warped reflection in the plumbing in the wall.

Finally he stepped out and went through the motions of drying himself off. It wasn't until he raised his hand to run a comb through his hair, that he realized that his body was shivering with cold.

Back in his room he got dressed in a worn pair of sweats and an old t-shirt of Cooper's that had been left behind in the wash. He didn't bother with the binder. It seemed rather pointless. Finally Blaine sat down on the edge of the bed and heaved a deep sigh, before letting himself fall to lie flat on his back, staring up at the ceiling.

He knew what this was. Everyone had bad days; days where little things irritated them disproportionately, and Blaine didn't think his were much worse than normal people's. Sometimes, though, a simple bad day would turn into this.

Sometimes all it took was one stupid comment when he wasn't expecting it to make it feel like his whole world was crashing down on him and all he was left with was crushing despair and hopelessness. Like everything he had worked for and achieved in the last four years disappeared, and he was still that scared kid staring into the mirror, wondering when things were going to get better.

Blaine sighed and closed his eyes for a long moment. As tempting as it was to keep lying here all limb and apathetic, he knew he mustn't. It would just make it worse. Years of dealing with this on a semi-regular basis had taught him that much. There were only really two options for getting past these moments. The first was to simply charge forward and live through it – fake it till you make it – or, if that didn't work, the other was to find a way to work the pain out of his system, which usually translated to either pounding furiously on a punching bag or to putting on sad music and allowing himself to just cry. He had already failed at the first option, and he was all out of punching bags, so in the end Blaine reached for his phone. He spent a minute scrolling through his playlists until he found a suitable one and put it on shuffle.

The first sound he heard was a melancholic sort of whistling, and Blaine's immediate reaction as he sank to the floor, leaning his back against the bed, was a peculiar sense of calm. However, it only lasted fifteen seconds until the singing started.

I'm burned out and wasted
I'm tired of pacing
I'm busy erasing voices of the dead
Everything changes
And everyone's faceless
I wanna replace this darkness in my head

Blaine blinked once and the first tear rolled thickly down his cheek, because that was it exactly. He felt tired to the bone. He was sick of dealing with dysphoria, sick of looking at a body that betrayed his past as the person he had never been able to be. He was sick of ignorant relatives and sick of being confronted with the world's hatred of people like him. He was just done with it. It was a scary feeling that felt an awful lot like giving up, and Blaine wanted rid of it. He liked to think of himself as an optimistic person under normal circumstances, and he always did his best to not give into despair. Giving up was not going to accomplish anything.

Even fools, they say, can find a way out of the dark

There was no logical reason that Blaine should be feeling like this right now. It was not as if he had anything new to be depressed about. In fact, with Kurt turning out to be so supportive and patient, things were arguably better now than they had ever been. Admittedly his school situation was not what it had been a year ago – at McKinley the classes were duller and the kids were meaner, but Blaine was hardly failing his classes and being stared at for being gay did not really touch him.

Logically Blaine should have been able to talk himself out of feeling this way by telling himself all the ways in which his situation did not in fact suck. Kurt was wonderful and supportive. Cooper was quite possibly the best brother anyone could hope for. His parents were... not everything he wanted them to be, but they had supported him from the moment he came out, and that was a lot more than a lot of kids in his situation got. And Blaine had plenty of friends. He was finally starting to find his place at McKinley, and he still kept in touch with a number of his old Warbler friends. Not to mention there was a whole online community always within his reach, ready to offer support and advice whenever he needed it. All in all there were a lot of kids out there who had it worse than him.

Knowing that, however, did nothing at all to make Blaine feel better.

Help me out of the dark

All it did was make him feel even more stupid and helpless.

When something dripped onto Blaine's phone, it was a second before he realized that it was his own tears; that he was crying properly now, even shaking with the force of it.

Have I been a sinner?
A lover, a killer?
'Cause the world, I've discovered
It feels nothing like my home

Blaine remembered the conversation the day after he had inadvertently outed himself to Kurt, in which Kurt had made Blaine promise to tell him next time he had a bad day. This was exactly what they had been talking about – in fact it was ten times what they had been talking about – but Blaine just couldn't bring himself to call Kurt.

I wanna escape it
Or try to embrace it
I keep re-arranging everything I know

He couldn't. What would he tell him? My father's mean family sent some rude letters and now I'm really depressed sounded silly and childish even in his head, and the thought that that was what had sent him over the edge this time made him feel pathetic and ashamed that he couldn't handle himself better.

In a strange strange place
I'm lying on the edge of a star
In these violent days
I only wanna be where you are

Blaine almost wished that his pain had some kind of physical manifestation. He wasn't afraid of physical pain. When the assault had happened nearly three years ago now, the worst part hadn't been the pain itself. What got to him was the helplessness, knowing he could do nothing to stop it, and it was the constant fear and the nightmares in the months after.

Even fools, they say, can find a way out of the dark
Of the dark
Help me out of the dark

Bruises and broken ribs he could at least show to someone and say Look! This is why I'm hurting. Physical pain seemed manageable. He would know what to do with that, but this – there was no easy fix to this. All he could do was to sit here and let the tears come, hoping that they would eventually run out.

He waited for the moment when the music turned inspiring and his usual sense of fiery determination overtook him. Determination to not let himself be a depressed mess and to make the best of his situation because being bitter hurt no one but himself. Today, however, it wouldn't happen. As song after song went by, the tears just kept rolling down his cheeks.

As one song faded out and gave way to slow piano music, Blaine considered turning it off and putting on some happy music instead, because this clearly wasn't helping. For long moments he stared at the phone in his hand, vaguely noting that his vision was blurred by tears, and the music just kept playing.

Something is said, it sits in my head
It's been there too long, it's killing me slow
It's rolling around, it's pushing me down
It's keeping the good part of me closed

He should turn it off. Except the mere thought of happy music made Blaine want to vomit. Right now wasn't fun, but it didn't require anything from him and there was safety in that. Happiness meant making an effort, having to stay strong, and it was exhausting.

Can't you see that when I find you, I'll find me

Kurt. He had become Blaine's rock. Something to hold on to when he felt himself slipping. Blaine felt himself inexplicably tied to Kurt in a way that went far beyond mere high school sweethearts. He wondered if that was what people meant by "soulmates".

I need you to know today, I'll wait for you always

Kurt. If only he were here now. Blaine wouldn't ask him to come though. Not for this. Not when there wasn't really a problem, and Blaine was just being weak and oversensitive. It was the weekend before Christmas. Kurt would have better things to do than to babysit Blaine.

My only weakness, is knowing your secrets
And holding them close, and hold them tight

Kurt. He knew Blaine's secret and accepted it, but up until now he had only seen Blaine have a few minor freakouts. What if he took one look at Blaine like this and ran away? This wasn't the Blaine Kurt had met and fallen for. That Blaine was strong and composed, charming with an easy smile. That Blaine still existed – this mess wasn't who Blaine was, and it wasn't indicative of who he wanted them to be either. He wanted them to be boyfriends – equals – not a patient and his caregiver. If only he could explain that to Kurt.

I know the way to silently make you
Smile with my eyes, when you're trying to fight

Then again, if they really were soulmates the way Blaine's heart told him, then wasn't Kurt just as tied to Blaine as Blaine was to him? Maybe that meant that Blaine wouldn't have to explain.

I'll wait for you always
Cause when I find you, I'll find me

Maybe that was the point.