July 2013

“– inform you that we will be arriving at the terminal in roughly ten minutes. Thank you for choosing to travel with –”

Kurt thought that he might be sick.

A million thoughts ran through his mind as he stared down at his phone, fingers tightening reflexively around the bright-green case. What if this was a mistake? What if they didn’t get along in person as well as they did online? What if he wasn’t there to pick him up? What if Kurt had just traveled thousands of miles for absolutely nothing?

He took a deep breath and tried to clear his mind.

It was far, far too late for what-ifs and regrets, Kurt reasoned. Not now, not after he had traveled nearly three-thousand miles to meet the boy that he considered to be his best friend. His boyfriend. His other half.

A boy he had never before met.

Well, at least, not in person. They spoke every night on Skype. They used Facetime. They chatted over the phone when they were away from their computers. They joked online over Twitter. They texted one another. They sent constant e-mails.

For two people who had never actually met, they sure did spend a ridiculous amount of their time together.

The bus came to a sudden stop, and Kurt tried not to panic from an overload of nerves and excitement. He glanced down at his phone again, briefly debating whether or not to text his father that he had arrived safely in Los Angeles now, or to wait until he was actually with his boyfriend and his older brother before doing so.

He decided to wait.

It took a good twenty minutes or so for everyone to get off the bus and grab their things. Once he finally had all of his belongings, Kurt slung his duffle bag over his shoulder and grabbed hold of his two suitcases, dragging them along behind him as he headed for the building. Each step he took made his heart race faster and faster.

Blaine was waiting inside that building for him.

He came to a halt at the entrance, took one last deep breath, and pulled the door open.

May 2012

“That was the most amazing movie I have ever seen,” Sam said excitedly, waving his arms around as though it would help to further make his point.

“It was pretty good,” Tina agreed, pushing a strand of her long hair back behind her ear. “I can’t decide which character I liked the most, though.”

Mike made an insulted noise in the back of his throat. “You’re joking, right? Thor is the best character in the entire movie, woman.”

Tina smacked him, hard.

Mike screeched, loudly, and quickly inched away from his irate girlfriend. “I was just joking, Tina. It was a joke!”

“I disagree,” Kurt interjected, lips curling slightly in amusement as he watched Tina chase after her boyfriend. “Although insanely attractive, Thor is clearly inferior to Tony Stark.”

“Iron Man is pretty cool,” Sam agreed. “I like Bruce Banner the best, though.”

The four teenagers had just left the midnight opening of The Avengers, and were quickly making their way to Kurt’s navigator; despite being early May, it was a rather chilly night in Lima, and only Kurt had bothered to bring a coat.

“It’s too bad that Santana, Brittany, and Sugar couldn’t come,” Sam said. “Then the whole group would have been here. We’ll have to go again later this weekend, so that all The Troubletones are able to watch the movie together.”

Kurt smiled slightly at the mention of the last three members of their little group. That smile quickly faded, though, when he remembered the circumstances that had led to the development of their small, dysfunctional family.

Much to Kurt's unhappiness, his issues with Karofsky had not been resolved until the end of his junior year. In fact, if anything, they had only gotten worse before they got better.

Karofsky, much to Kurt’s immense surprise, was not as stupid as he would have originally guessed. With the joint threat of both the glee kids and Sue Sylvester monitoring his every move looming dangerously over his head, Karofsky had quickly mastered the art of being crafty. He never did anything when other people were around – no more locker checks, no more slushies, no more anything that could be used as visual evidence of his harassment – and instead took to bothering Kurt when they were alone.

At first, it had been the usual taunts, shoves, and name-calling that Karofsky had always used against him. Although he was more than used to dealing with that sort of harassment, Kurt had tried to tell his friends what was going on anyway, hoping that perhaps they would once again strengthen their watch over him.

To their credit, they did try to keep an eye out for Kurt the first few times. However, with Karofsky keeping his harassment on the down low, nothing ever seemed to happen when they were actually with him. Eventually, days turned into weeks and Kurt could slowly began to see the majority of his friends grow annoyed with they considered to be his “cry wolf” attitude.

Eventually, they stopped responding at all.

It was then that Karofsky had taken things to the next level. One fateful afternoon, he had upset Kurt enough that the smaller boy had chased him into the locker room.

Where Karofsky had kissed him.

The details were something that Kurt tried very hard to forget. However, what he did remember, very vividly, was the cold-hearted threat that had been delivered the next morning.

“If you tell anyone that you kissed me,” Karofsky had said, “I’ll kill you.”

Kurt never told.

After all, what was the point, when no one seemed to believe him anymore?

He had, however, decided to take certain matters into his own hands.

Kurt quit glee club first thing the following morning. When Rachel had confronted him about it later that same day, Mercedes and Quinn flanking her in what he assumed was supposed to be some sort of intimidation method, he had calmly replied that he couldn’t stand to be around people who believed him to be nothing more than an attention-seeking liar.

The next thing Kurt had done was to quit his other extracurricular activities. In his mind, the less time that he spent at McKinley meant fewer opportunities for Karofsky to bother him.

That same night, he had logged on his computer and searched the internet for LGBTQA support websites, hoping that he might be able to find a safe-haven of some sort of talk about everything. At some point that evening, he had found an interesting photo on Google images and had clicked on it for a closer look.

And that was how he had stumbled across Tumblr.

In his defense, Kurt hadn’t actually meant to get addicted. He had simply thought that the website had looked interesting and had made an account. He then went one full week without using it.

Until the following Saturday when he decided, on a whim, to watch all of Sherlock in one sitting after finishing the first two Iron Man films.

That same night – or rather, morning, as it was nearly 5AM by the time he had finished series two – he changed his url to reflect his new fandoms and promptly followed every blog regarding the two that he could find.

It had all gone downhill from there.

With Brittany being the only person in the glee club who would still speak to him at that point, therefore automatically making her Kurt’s only friend, he had a lot of free time. As such, spending an hour or two on Tumblr per night quickly morphed into four or five hours; eventually, it had reached the point where Kurt would suddenly realize it was 3AM and where the hell had his evening gone?

Things continued in this matter until early one morning in April when Karofsky finally slipped up.

He cornered Kurt more than halfway down the east stairwell, gripping the smaller boy’s designer shirt tightly between his fingers, and was in the middle of delivering his daily-death threat when Sam, Mike, and Santana rounded the corner.

Karofsky, reacting much like a startled animal, extended his hands forward and let go of Kurt.

By the time that the football player realized just what he had done, Kurt was already falling backwards.

For obvious reasons, Kurt remembered very little of what happened next. What he could recall, later, was screaming and shouting, a searing pain racing along his left arm, and then blacking out as his head hit the floor with a resounding crack.

He woke several hours later with a concussion, a broken arm, and a broken shoulder. Dr. Lopez, a man just as blunt as his daughter, later told Kurt that if he had been further up the stairwell when he fell, he probably would have died.

About ten minutes after Dr. Lopez left, there was a tentative knock on the door to his hospital room. Burt and Carole exchanged looks – and Kurt briefly wondered where the hell his step-brother was – before turning to Kurt.

“Do you want us to let them in?” his father had asked. “It’s up to you, bud.”

Kurt shrugged, not entirely sure who would bother to come and visit him at this point, before finally nodding.

His parents stepped out and a moment later Santana, Brittany, Sam, Mike, and Tina quietly filed into the room. It was obvious that Tina and Brittany had been crying. Mike, Santana, and Sam, however, just looked deeply disturbed.

“Why didn’t you tell us how bad it was?” Santana had demanded, not bothering to say hello.

“I did,” he had answered softly. “In fact, I told you guys multiple times. None of you believed me after awhile, so I just stopped trying.”

From that point on, things had changed drastically. With three witnesses and visible injuries, Karofsky was immediately suspended. Principal Figgins, under threat of having the school sued for negligence, was forced to implement stricter anti-bullying policies. Although it wasn’t a perfect system, and bullying still occurred, the policies still helped to drastically cut back on the number, and severity, of bullying incidents at McKinley.

Although the five who had visited him were truly sorry and wanted to make amends, the rest of the club did not seem to share their view. They seemed to hold the opinion that it was mostly Kurt’s fault, as he “should have tried harder” to convince them of what Karofsky was doing, and they were still irritated that he had quit glee club in the first place.

Needless to say, Kurt did not rejoin.

He knew that they weren’t purposefully being cruel or mean. The fatal flaw of New Directions was that many of the members were rather self-centered, and always believed that their viewpoint and opinion were the correct one. In their minds, it was Kurt’s fault because he should have tried harder, and not the other way around.

Kurt hadn’t had the energy to argue with them.

Santana, Mike, Sam, Brittany, and Tina, however, appeared to have taken the polar opposite viewpoint. In their minds, it was entirely their fault. Kurt had tried to reason with them – although, to be entirely honest, he couldn’t completely argue against their point of view – but it made no difference.

It took nearly four months, but by the time his senior year rolled around, he had found himself once again close to the other five. Kurt would never again trust any of them - bar Brittany, who had still stuck by him when the others hadn’t - one-hundred percent completely, but he had managed to put things behind him and rebuild his friendships with them as much as he possibly could.

That September, the failed audition of Sugar Motta brought even more change, giving his five friends – none of whom had felt entirely comfortable in New Directions since everything that had happened in April – the out that they had been looking for. When Sugar was rejected and started her own glee club, they followed.

Eventually, they managed to get Kurt to join.

Although The Troubletones had lost at sectionals, thus ending their competition season ridiculously early, the seven had continued to refer to themselves as such and spent as much time as they could together.

***

Much to Kurt’s relief, the changes in his offline life had not interfered with his online one. He still spent just as much time online as he had before, except that now he had mastered the many ways of socializing and reblogging at the same time.

As such, the fact that it was nearing three in the morning did not deter Kurt from opening his dash the moment that he got back from the theater.

His url was sherlarked, a mash up of the names Sherlock and Stark that Kurt had thought particularly clever at the time, and a blatant nod to his first two fandoms. His blog had roughly three-hundred and twenty-six followers; it tended to fluctuate, though, because Kurt had an unfortunate tendency of posting angry rants that alternately lost or gained him followers, depending on the subject matter.

That particular night, he logged in to find that he had gained three new followers. Kurt did not automatically follow back, mostly because if he did his dash would be entirely unmanageable, but he always made a point of checking out each blog that followed him; if they had enough in common, he would usually go ahead and follow.

The first two blogs only shared one fandom with him, Sherlock, and as he already followed about twenty Sherlock-only blogs, he opted not to follow back. The third one, didyouparkthetardisonameter, shared at least seven or eight fandoms with him. Or, at least, that’s what it appeared like to Kurt as he browsed the first few pages of their blog. Deciding that they had more than enough in common with one another, he scrolled back to the top of the page and clicked the follow button.

Once that was done, he clicked on his inbox, which had two messages.

gerbertheunitard asked sherlarked:
2012-05-04 00:46
SERIOUSLY. WHERE ARE YOU?!?!! YOU’RE ALWAYS ON HERE AND WHEN I *ACTUALLY* NEED TO TALK TO YOU ABOUT SOMETHING IMPORTANT, YOU AREN’T. JFC. GET ON.

gerbertheunitard asked sherlarked:
2012-05-04 00:24
Message me as SOON as you get this. I need to talk to you about NYADA!

He sighed. Both messages were from Harmony.

Harmony Peters was, much to Kurt’s continuous horror and bafflement, perhaps the closest thing to a best friend that he had these days. The two has started mutually following one another the previous July, right around the time that the second part of Deathly Hallows had been released. Kurt liked Harry Potter a lot, yes, but it was more one of his secondary fandoms than a primary one.

Harmony, on the other hand, was absolutely obsessed with the series. She was constantly making references to it in everyday conversation, sorting people that she met based on their characteristics and personalities (“You’d be such a Slytherin, Kurt. I mean, don’t get me wrong, you’re intelligent and loyal, but you’re far too ambitious to be anything else!”), and she had gone exactly forty-nine hours without sleep in order to sign up for Pottermore.

The two had been nothing more than casual followers for the first few months. However, in September, Santana had decided to drag Kurt along to a meeting for the New York Academy of the Dramatic Arts.

It was there that a borderline-crazy girl ranting at Santana and Kurt about her days as a Gerber baby had gotten annoyed with him ignoring her in favor of his phone. She had snatched it out of his hands to look at the screen, and then had promptly let out what had to be the loudest screeching-noise known to mankind.

“Oh my god,” she said, staring at him with wide eyes.

Kurt, for his part, was absolutely terrified at the idea of an actual in-the-flesh person seeing his blog while he was there.

It was the sort of things that nightmares were made of.

Before he had a chance to formulate any sort of reply or defense about his blog, the girl had grabbed him by the arm and dragged him away from a baffled Santana.

“It’s so cool to meet someone from Tumblr in person!” she whispered hurriedly as they moved across the room, her nails digging painfully into the skin of Kurt’s arm. “Your blog is one of my absolute favorites! I mean, I wish you’d blog more HP – everyone should blog more of that, you know, because it’s absolutely amazing – but I do like your Sherlock posts a lot!”

“Thanks?” Kurt replied, confused. “Do I, uh, know you?”

The girl rolled her eyes at him. “I’m gerbertheunitard. We follow each other. I recognized your url when I saw it.”

“Oh,” he said. “Oh!”

That had been the start of a pretty close friendship. Although Kurt had eventually decided against applying to NYADA, the two had exchanged numbers and constantly talked both online and off. As much as it pained him to admit it, Kurt trusted Harmony more than pretty much anyone else.

Once the messages to Harmony were out of the way, he clicked back to his dashboard and scrolled for a bit, reblogging some posts immediately and sticking others in his queue. It was about a half-hour later that he saw that he had a new message in his inbox.

didyouparkthetardisonameter asked sherlarked:
2012-05-04 03:49
hey there! thanks for following back. i would have sent you a message earlier, but i literally just got home from seeing the avengers. WHICH WAS AWESOME. err, not that you care about how awesome i thought it was, i’m sure. oh, wow, i’m really awkward so i’m just going to stop talking now. anyway, thanks again!

Kurt bit his lip in an attempt to keep from laughing. It was an awkward message, but it was an endearing sort of awkward, and not the creepy awkward that he sometimes got from people.

He clicked ‘reply’ and quickly typed out a message.

sherlarked asked didyouparkthetardisonameter:
2012-05-04 03:51
No problem! Don’t worry about being awkward, because I’m pretty awkward, too. And, actually, I DO care about The Avengers. I actually just got back from seeing it, too! And by “seeing it” I mostly mean “staring in awe at how amazing Iron Man is” :)

Kurt hit “answer privately” and then glanced at the clock. It was nearly four in the morning. It was probably a good thing that his father had given him permission to skip the next day, Kurt thought to himself as he stood to find the TV remote. He doubted there was anything good on right now, but luckily he had taped some of his favorite shows on the DVR.

A second later he sat back down at his desk and idly clicked the refresh button, wondering if he’d have gotten a reply yet.

He had.

didyouparkthetardisonameter asked sherlarked:
2012-05-04 03:58
i’m pretty that sure you meant to say “staring in awe at how awesome captain america is,” but don’t worry, i fixed it for you! :D

Kurt raised an eyebrow at that.

sherlarked asked didyouparkthetardisonameter:
2012-05-04 04:01
Uh, no. You, sir/madam/whatever, are incorrect. Tony Stark is the best Avenger. There is no argument whatsoever.

didyouparkthetardisonameter asked sherlarked:
2012-05-04 04:04
what? no! captain america is totally the coolest. he has a shield. A SHIELD. you can’t argue with that level of awesome. also, it’s sir. or, you could, you know, just call me by my name. which is blaine. my name, i mean. is blaine.

sherlarked asked didyouparkthetardisonameter:
2012-05-04 04:06
Yes, I see what you meant when you said you were awkward, Blaine. Also, Iron Man has a badass suit. No arguments.

didyouparkthetardisonameter asked sherlarked:
2012-05-04 04:08
:( :( :( i’m not that awkward!

sherlarked asked didyouparkthetardisonameter:
2012-05-04 04:11
I think that might be debatable. So what’s up with your url?

didyouparkthetardisonameter asked sherlarked:
2012-05-04 04:12
what do you mean, what’s up with it?

sherlarked asked didyouparkthetardisonameter:
2012-05-04 04:16
I mean, I don’t get the reference.

With that final message sent, Kurt closed his laptop and yawned. It was getting late – early? – and he was starting to feel pretty tired. While he would much rather be trolling Tumblr for a bit longer, he knew that he really had to go to sleep at some point.

Besides, Tumblr would still be there in the morning.