Blaine would never forget his first time at the Silverlake Home For Orphans in Lima, Ohio. He was only 3 years old and so incredibly scared when he arrived. A sweet, young social worker had dropped him off with the few personal items that had been saved from the flames.

His parents and older brother had died in their house when it burned down around them. The only reason Blaine had survived was because he had a habit of sleeping with his face hidden under the covers and his room was the first the firefighters broke into at the top floor of the house. The doctors said that was the only thing that had kept his lungs from taking in enough smoke to kill him as well.

He was all alone in the world, and after the doctors were done checking him in every thinkable way, and taking all of their tests he had been drained of all energy and he had fallen asleep in a hospital bed. He had stayed there for observation, and he had got covered in gauze for the burn marks on his arm and belly. After a week the social worker drove out to Lima to get him into Silverlake.

Blaine didn't talk to anyone when he first came. He stuck to himself, and clung himself to the Simba plush that was the only thing he had with him from home. It stank of smoke and the workers at the orphanage had tried taking it from him on several occasions, but each time he panicked and broke into hysterics so the psychologists had advised them to let him keep it.

Around a week after he had arrived the orphanage were having their annual summer fest. All the kids were dressed in their finest and the house was open for people to come meet the children with the hope that someone would adopt the poor, lonely kids.

The party was being held in the backyard with a huge bonfire.

Blaine was terrified. The fire reminded him of the heat creeping up his skin, and he still had marks on his body from where he had got burned. After a long time of crying and screaming one of the young women working there had allowed him to sit on the porch and look at the party from a distance. That way he would be away from the fire, but still close enough for them to keep an eye on him.

He sat there alone for a long time, staring at the laughing and dancing kids, the bright colored decorations and the visiting people. His grip on Simba was so strong that his knuckles were white and the dress shirt the staff had put him in was too big so the sleeves were flapping around his wrists but he didn't care.

"You're always crying. I hear you at night," a voice said.

Blaine hadn't even seen the boy come to sit next to him on the loveseat. The boy wasn't judgmental or mean in his words. He actually sounded sad for him. The boy had thick golden hair and mysterious eyes. He was pale even though he had been out in the sun all day.

Blaine had observed him over the week. The boy was a year older than him and they slept in the same dormitory a few beds apart. He never talked to anyone either. He usually kept at the other end of the table when the other kids were drawing or eating or doing something else. Whenever they were outside he walked around to himself and sang quietly while Blaine kept at the porch watching the other children playing.

"You miss your family. I never knew my family. I've always lived here. The others are nice. The grown-ups too," the boy said and smiled at Blaine. His smile was comforting, like he knew that Blaine was alone in the world and could need a friend to make the world less lonely.

"If they're nice, how come you never play with anyone?" Blaine asked, confused as to why the boy wouldn't be with the others if he liked them.

"I don't know. I just like other things than they do," the boy shrugged. He didn't sound like he was bothered by the fact that he always wandered around alone. Like it was his own choice rather than something he didn't have power over. Maybe it really was his own choice. Blaine had seen the girls ask him to play with them and he had always politely declined their offer.

"I like your Simba. Lion King is my favorite movie," the boy suddenly said and reached out his hand to pet the lion, but not touching it as if he was waiting for Blaine's permission. Blaine stared at his hand, weighing whether he trusted the boy enough to let him touch his only possession, his only friend. After a little while Blaine thought the boy would retreat his hand, but he didn't. He didn't push it forward either; he simply waited for Blaine to say yes or no.

Blaine reached out the lion for the boy to take it. He picked it up with soft hands brushing Blaine's gently and scooped it into his arms the way Blaine had seen his older brother do with a kitten they once found in their backyard. Like it was the most precious thing in the world and could break at any second.

The boy started stroking the fluffy mane with careful fingers, but his big, blue eyes still locked on Blaine.

"He's soft. I like him. Do you think he likes me?" The boy asked, taking Blaine off guard. He had been completely absorbed in the way the boy held the lion - so careful not to drop it.

"My name is Kurt. Your name is Blaine, right? I heard the grown-ups talk about it when you came," Kurt said, seeming embarrassed that he had been eavesdropping. Blaine already knew that in this place everyone eavesdropped on the grown-ups' conversations so he didn't think anything of Kurt for doing so, so he nodded and started chewing his lower lip.

Suddenly he felt a soft hand over the bandage covering the burn mark on his arm. His first reaction was to pull his arm away, but Kurt quickly let his hand carefully slide down and hold around Blaine's.

"I think I would want you to be my friend. If you want to be my friend. I like your eyes," Kurt exclaimed. He wasn't squeezing Blaine's hand, but simply holding it still to wait for Blaine to react to the sudden contact.

His hand was soft around Blaine's and a warmth spread from his hand through his arm and filled his entire body. He couldn't stop staring at the way Kurt's hand was carefully wrapped around his, and after a little time he closed his hand around Kurt's as well, feeling Kurt squeeze gently back.

"Your hand is really soft," Blaine mumbled, not knowing what else to say. Did this mean that they were friends now?

It did. After that day Kurt was Blaine's best friend. As Kurt had said himself; it wasn't that they didn't like the other kids, they just liked playing with each other better. They trusted each other blindly and didn't have a problem with holding each other's hands in front of the other kids, even though the boys wrinkled their noses at them at the beginning. After a little while everyone knew that if they looked for one of them they just had to look for the other and they would be found. That was the way things were.

The workers thought that it was a delight to see that Kurt had finally found someone to open up to, and it was just as great to see that Blaine had found trust in someone, but they worried that they were too isolated when they only played with each other. They tried talking them into playing with the other kids, but they just shook their heads and proceeded their own games.

Blaine suffered from terrible nightmares. Always about fire and his family being suffocated in the flames while he was crying and watching them from afar, or himself being sucked up by fire and his brother screaming his name but not being able to help him.

"Shhh, Blaine. You're having a bad dream." Kurt woke up Blaine one night. Snores and heavy breathing from the other boys in their dormitory was all that was heard, but Kurt's blue eyes were shining through the darkness. He was standing next to Blaine's bed, holding his plush penguin and his eyebrows meeting worried in the middle of his forehead.

"I heard you cry, so I would make sure that you were okay. But you are not," Kurt whispered, and sat down on his knees next to Blaine's bed.

"I miss my brother," Blaine cried, the words the only ones to push through his whimpers. The face of his older brother, Cooper, surrounded by flames, and the heat crawling under his skin was still vivid in his imagination and he was shaking.

"Kurt, I'm scared." Blaine sobbed and hugged Simba closer, feeling the mane being soaked under his tearfilled cheek.

"Don't be scared. Move a little," Kurt cooed and crawled into the bed next to Blaine. He pushed his penguin under Blaine's arm next to the lion before he put his arm around him and started to stroke his fingers up and down Blaine's arm where the skin wasn't covered in bandage.

"Now I'm here, so you can sleep again. I like water better than fire, so if I just think of water, all the fire in your head will go out," Kurt assured him, and Blaine felt his heartbeat slow down. It was comforting to lie with Kurt in the dark like that. It was like they were in their own world, and he knew that as long as Kurt was there nothing would be able to hurt him; because Kurt would never let anything do him any harm.

The next morning Miss Pillsbury, Blaine and Kurt's contact-person, told them that they couldn't sleep in the same bed like that. However, Kurt pulled Blaine aside at breakfast and whispered that whenever he had a nightmare again he could come sleep in his bed.

And so it was; whenever Blaine had a bad dream he snuck into Kurt's bed, and if Kurt heard Blaine crying at night he crawled into Blaine's bed. They didn't want to let the grown-ups stop them, because Kurt knew that Blaine needed him, and Blaine knew that Kurt chased the bad dreams away.

It caused a lot of problems from the grown-ups, so they figured out a system on how to wake up before the grown-ups woke them up, so they could hurry back to their own bed without being seen by anyone.

xXx

Now Blaine was 6 years old and Kurt was 7. They knew that it would only be a year before Kurt would be moved to another dormitory and it made Blaine nervous. He didn't want Kurt to completely disappear from his room. He still snuck into his bed at night, only not as often as when they were younger. The nightmares weren't as strong anymore, but sometimes they still came, and Kurt gladly let Blaine slide under his covers. Blaine suspected that Kurt liked it just as much as he did, and it was comforting.

It was a late Sunday afternoon and the rain was pouring down outside so they had been told to play inside. The other boys their age had quickly found out their swords and guns and started a heated war game while the girls played dress-up. Blaine and Kurt disappeared into the dormitory where they built a fort out of blankets and sheets over some chairs and found a stack of books to bring with them.

"Kurt? What happened to your family?" Blaine asked while they were absentmindedly flipping through the pages of a copy of Cinderella that some kids had decorated with crayons.

Kurt gazed at Blaine as if he was surprised by the question, which he probably was. They had never discussed Kurt's family, or how he had ended up at Silverlake. It was just the way things were; Kurt had been there his whole life, so somehow Blaine had always figured he never had a family. However, the other day a boy had been picked up by a family that had adopted him, and he came to think that once Kurt had to have had a mom - because everybody had.

Blaine started chewing on the inside of his cheek. He was afraid that it wasn't okay to ask. That Kurt didn't think it was okay of him to talk about it. Maybe something awful had happened to them, the way something awful had happened to Blaine's family.

Kurt rolled over to lie on his side as herested his head on his arm. He stared into Blaine's eyes, and Blaine realized that he was holding his breath.

"I don't know," Kurt said earnestly.

"How can you not know?" Blaine burst out, but instantly wished that he hadn't. That was stupid. There were probably a lot of the kids who didn't know what had happened to their families.

"Miss Pillsbury told me that I came here when I was 1½ year old. They don't know where I came from; one morning I was just there. There was a paper that told them my name, and my penguin was with me and some of my clothes, and that was all," Kurt mumbled. His eyes had dropped to the blanket they were lying on. His voice had gone weak and insecure.

"I guess nobody wanted me," Kurt shrugged and a tear ran down his nose.

A ball curled up in Blaine's stomach and rushed to his throat. He had never seen Kurt cry before. Kurt was always strong, and the one to take care of him. Sometimes he thought that Kurt didn't know how to cry, that it was something only very weak children did, and strong children like Kurt had never learned how to because they didn't need it.

"I don't think that. Maybe there was so many people that wanted you, that they had to agree that no one could have you, because that way no one would get sad because someone else got you," Blaine suggested awkwardly. He couldn't imagine how anyone would ever not want Kurt.

"That would be stupid," Kurt sniffed, but his cheeks had turned pink, and he was running his fingers up and down the fabric under them.

"I will always want you. You're my best friend, Kurt," Blaine said and folded his hand around Kurt's, stopping it in its way over the blanket.

Kurt looked up with wet eyes and let his hand lock around Blaine's in return. He smiled thickly and let his head disappear into the hollow spot under Blaine's chin.

"You're my best friend too, Blaine. I actually love you," Kurt mumbled into his collarbone while Blaine felt butterflies flying around his belly. Yeah, he definitely loved Kurt too. They had never said that they loved each other, but somehow Blaine had always known that he loved Kurt and that Kurt loved him back it - but it was different to actually hear Kurt say it.

They stayed that way for a long time. Blaine's arm started sleeping, but he didn't want to move, because if he did that Kurt would move as well, and he didn't want to miss the feeling of his body against his. It was like lying next to one of those blankets the grown-ups put in his bed when he was sick, only this blanket was soft in another way, and it had a heart that was beating against his.

xXx

It was hard when they had to go to school because Kurt was a year older than Blaine so they couldn't be together in school. The first thing Blaine did when he came back to the dormitory was to wait for Kurt to come up there so they could discuss their day. However, the kids from Silverlake attended the same school in town, so they still had a chance of meeting up in the lunch break which made it a bit easier.

They didn't get bullied, but often got comments that it was weird that they only played with each other. They knew that the others were talking about them behind their backs, and that the reason the grown-ups always made sure to sit them in the middle of the table during meals were an attempt to make them interact with the other kids.

They talked politely with some of the others, and when they all watched movies in the big room Blaine and Kurt curled up around each other on a beanbag but still made sure to stay close to the others as well. They were terrified that one day the grown-ups would force them apart, so they did everything they could to avoid that.

They had both joined the school's music program so they got to spend time together there as well and refused to sit anywhere but next to each other in the choir room. Over Christmas their singing group did a big concert for charity and Blaine was to sing an entire song by himself, only accompanied by the rest of the group over the chorus. He was deadly scared, and sure that he was going to mess up the words.

Kurt, who was slightly taller than Blaine, was standing right behind him during the performance, so when Blaine's solo came he felt Kurt sneak his hand discretely into his. He relaxed a little and only messed up a few words while boring his nails into the skin on Kurt's hand.

"I actually think it sounded better like that," Kurt grinned at him after the show. That made Blaine's insides bubble, and he couldn't help but grin back at him.