Her life, she thought as fetched a cigarette from the pack hidden in one of the many cubby holes under the dashboard of her car and carried it back into the house, hadn't quite turned out the way she'd planned. Not that she wasn’t happy. Of course she was. Bill was still as much of a joy to her as the day they’d met. And her boys...well, they were independent and making their own ways in the world. No one’s life was perfect, of course, but she was definitely happy.

In the kitchen she gathered up her paraphernalia - little Pyrex prep bowl full of water, yellow lighter, cigarette, her phones, both cell and house (because someone invariably called just as she was starting to lose herself in the nicotine buzz) - and made her way out to the sunny table on her back patio. In a ritual worthy of any heroin addict, she laid everything out carefully in predetermined places. But that didn’t mean anything. She was a sub. She craved routine and created it for herself wherever she could. Besides it was one a day. She was pretty sure she'd die of old age before the cigarettes would have time to kill her.

She took her time, as she always did, settling into her chair, lifting the cigarette to her lips and pressing into the solidity of the filter, breathing in the fragrance of the tobacco. Then she flicked the lighter, pulled the soft, warm smoke of that first drag into her lungs and held it like a lover inside her body.

Who the hell was she kidding? She was a smoker. A one cigarette a day smoker, yes, but she needed that one cigarette as much as she needed to breathe. Her mother would be so disappointed.

Margaret had grown up on stories of her parents' grand passion. How her father had crossed continents and fought a war to find his soulmate. How her mother had braved danger and censure. But they had both been willing to risk everything, even their own lives, because they both had believed that true love was the most important thing in the world and Margaret grew up believing it too. As long as she could remember she had imagined her own grand adventures in finding her soulmate, late at night tucked up in her Cinderella sheets, and the day she’d had a name to put into the stories she made up - William Anderson traced on the delicate skin inside her right wrist - had been one of the happiest days of her life.

As it happened, she didn't have to face down any obstacles at all to find Bill. They'd met after a concert in Chicago - the Rolling Stones - it had been raining and she'd slipped on a stray pamphlet someone had dropped in the parking lot and Bill had caught her as she fell. Very romantic by most normal standards, but Margaret Monaghan hadn't grown up with normal standards.

Still, if the finding had been bordering on ordinary, being with her soulmate and dom had been everything Margaret had ever imagined and she threw herself into it with all her strength. She and Bill had refused to wait - she was wearing a black cuff within a week and an engagement ring shortly after.

Cooper was born right away, Blaine much later, and as Bill's career took off and took him away from her so much of the time, Margaret threw herself into her boys with the same attitude of determined perfection that she'd had for her marriage. She loved them fiercely and guided them as best she could in the directions she thought were most likely to lead to their happiness.

But children grow up and leave you and no one tells you how impossible it will be to let go of them when you finally realize that they're the only mark you're ever going to leave on the world.

She tapped ash into the little bowl of water and watched it dissolve as she took another drag.

She had forgotten, somewhere along the way, that when her sons moved on into lives of their own she would still be fairly young, with a busy husband years away from retiring, and left in this big, quiet house, to try to occupy herself. Something she'd never really learned how to do. She’d been busy all her life, first as oldest sister to three brothers and later as mother and wife. There had never really been time for her to find out who she was, when she wasn’t being defined by the people around her. And it seemed a little late to start working it out now.

So she meddled, she knew, in the boys' lives. Sometime she felt like an artist, sneaking into her patrons' houses in the dead of night to put still more finishing touches on her paintings. Because Cooper and Blaine were her masterpieces, the only things she would ever create from scratch, and if they weren't perfectly happy then she'd failed in the one and only job life had given her.

She knew Cooper was fine. She tinkered and advised and yes, she knew, criticized, but her efforts were more for her than for him. Cooper encountered life on his own terms and even (she sighed and sucked in another lungful of smoke) even with his tattooed ex-stripper soulmate he seemed to succeed at whatever he touched.

But Blaine. She'd made so many mistakes with Blaine. Not the least of which was figuring out that finding your soulmate shouldn't be the ultimate goal of your life much too late to stop herself from making him believe that it should.

Another drag and the buzz was starting, muffling unpleasant thoughts, at least for the few minutes it lasted. She leaned back in the chair and closed her eyes. It was almost like that first slide into subspace, a little moment of chemically-induced silence. She turned herself over to the drug with the same sense of contentment that she turned herself over to Bill, when they had time to really play.

And, of course, the phone rang.

She dragged herself back to the surface with a petulant groan and leaned down to carefully stub the cigarette out on the concrete under her chair. She only got one cigarette; she always smoked it all. She set it next to the bowl of now cloudy water and reached for the phone.

Blaine Anderson, the block letters on the ID screen announced.

Blaine hadn't been a planned child.

Margaret had always wanted a large family, like her own, and Bill had hated being an only child, but their best laid plans were completely subverted as soon as Cooper made his appearance. Cooper was a force of nature - it took all of Margaret's energy just to try to keep up with him. And by the time he was older and in school and another baby was something Margaret could contemplate without feeling like it would put the labors of Hercules to shame, it was clear that Cooper wasn't in any way brother material. They had a good life, the three of them, and she and Bill reluctantly decided that the three of them was how it should stay.

But fate had other plans.

Margaret had cried when the little red dot had appeared in the window of the pregnancy test, silent tears of joy right there in the bathroom, caressing her flat belly where a tiny new life was hidden. Bill had been thrilled too, but Cooper, who had just turned eight, hated the baby even before Margaret’s belly started to swell.

She dreamed of a girl. A sweet child with long, dark hair who could share all of her own romantic notions. They’d read fairy stories together, and sew princess dresses, and someday they’d shop together for a wedding dress and then baby clothes...much, much later she had to reassure herself that her longing for a girl couldn’t have impacted tiny Blaine nestled inside her. All evidence said that children were born as they were, she told herself.

And Blaine was born perfect. Her first thought, when they handed him to her, red and wet and wriggling, and she stared down through the haze of exhaustion and pain - she always wondered how dominant women managed to survive childbirth, without a submissive’s experience in surrendering to pain and the overwhelming efforts of the body, although her mother had certainly done it over and over again - her first thought had been he looks like me. Even as a newborn he had his father’s riotous curls, plastered wet to his head, but below them she could see the shadow of her mother’s face in his, even as she saw it in her own, and she offered her finger to his tiny, grasping fist and pressed him close to her heart.

Parents are supposed to love their children equally, and Margaret did - she would have thrown herself in the path of a bus for Cooper as quickly as she would have for Blaine - but there was no doubt that she and Blaine were kindred souls. He loved to watch her in the kitchen, sitting in his little high chair and staring with his huge, golden eyes that seemed to take in and understand everything. And as he grew he shared her love for romance, for music, and for his heritage. Cooper never had time for the past - his eyes were fixed so firmly on his own future - but Blaine loved to hear stories about his grandparents and Margaret never tired of telling them.

She’d tuck him up in his bed, and offer “Jack and the Beanstalk” or some other storybook but more often than not he’d beg her instead to tell him again how Omoeni wrapped her left wrist in a bracelet woven from sea grasses and walked out of her village toward a war to find her soulmate.

And so she would recite for him the story she’d heard from her own mother’s lips so often: how Kyung Yu, at 15, cried the day her soulmate mark appeared on her left wrist, because after waiting so long to know the name of her destined love she found that she couldn’t even read the strange, western letters imprinted on her skin. How she hid her secret so carefully from everyone in her family. How she despaired, knowing there was no way a girl in a tiny Korean fishing village would ever even meet a man from America or England or France. And then the guilt she felt when the war that so completely ravaged her country also planted a seed of hope in her heart that perhaps she might find her soulmate after all.

Blaine’s favorite part was when Kyung Yu decided to take fortune into her own hands and leave her tiny village for the city of Busan, bustling with soldiers and refugees. He’d listen so raptly, eyes wide as saucers, to his grandmother’s adventures in the city, and those beautiful eyes would sometimes brim with tears at the climactic moment when she found him, almost by accident, in an army machine shop, and he fell to his knees right there on the oil-stained floor and showed her her own name, in perfect Korean characters, on his wrist.

How could Cinderella’s poor little glass slipper ever compare to that?

For years it went on, long past the age when most boys started pushing their mothers away, she’d sit on his bed and answer the questions that got more and more elaborate the older he got. They talked about Korea; planned fantasy visits to the places her parents had traveled, and for Blaine’s thirteenth birthday, just weeks before his mark appeared and everything changed, she’d given him the slim red leather volume of translated Korean poems that his grandmother had given his grandfather on their first anniversary.

If there were parent/child soulmates, Margaret often thought, then Blaine was definitely hers.

But then his mark appeared.

He’d been so terribly young, that had been part of it. Barely thirteen, a time when most children were just beginning to flirt with ideas of who and how they’d love some day. But that name, on Blaine’s right wrist, was such a sudden thrust into a grown-up world that none of them were ready for him to experience. Margaret often wondered if they’d ever had even a tiny chance of actually getting it right.

“Mom, can I talk to you?”

It was the second night after Blaine’s mark had appeared and Margaret was surprised when he called her into his room just as he was climbing into bed. Much as he loved his mom, Blaine was in full teenage privacy mode and she was rarely invited into the inner sanctum.

“Of course.” She settled on his bed, enjoying the feeling of being there again with her baby.

And he was still her baby, despite the deep timbre of his voice or the brown leather cuff around his wrist.

Blaine didn’t smile, and his eyes were troubled. He seemed hesitant, which was strange. He’d never had trouble talking to her about anything before.

“Can I tell you something? About my mark?” He waved his arm a little to make sure she understood what mark he was referring to.

“Well, you shouldn’t tell me the name,” she said, still smiling, still so oblivious. “The name is your special secret, until you meet her.”

But this only made Blaine’s eyes seem cloudier, and he looked away, watching his own fingers as they played with the fabric of his comforter.

“That’s the thing.” He took a deep breath and looked up at her and she was shocked to see fear in his eyes. He’d never been afraid to tell her anything and her brain was so busy groping for what could possibly be so terrible that she was not in any way prepared for his next words. Not that she ever would have been anyhow.

“It’s not a girl’s name. It’s a boy.”

His voice was so low that she barely heard him over the noise in her own head and at first it didn’t really register - it was the last thing she would have expected, something that she’d never even considered before. She opened her mouth and said the first thing that came into her head.

“Oh honey, are you sure?”

And just like that, so obviously and quickly that panic pressed frantically in her chest, a wall went up; she saw him build it in an instant behind his eyes. She watched helplessly as, for the very first time, her baby judged her and found her inadequate.

“No, Blaine, I just meant, some names are...you can’t always tell. If it really is a boy then -”

“I don’t want to talk about it any more.” And he lay down, pulled up his navy comforter, and turned his face to the wall.

“Honey, you just surprised me. I wasn’t expecting it, that’s all. Please talk to me. If it really is a boy’s name we can figure it out together.” She placed a hand on his shoulder and tugged just a little to try to get him to turn toward her, but he stiffened and refused to be budged.

“There’s nothing to talk about. I just want to go to sleep.”

And it wasn’t until then that it hit her that when Blaine said ‘It’s a boy’ he wasn’t as surprised as she was, he wasn’t asking for her to help him understand why he didn’t have a girl’s name on his wrist. He wasn’t surprised at all.

He was coming out. He’d known already. He’d know and he’d been afraid to tell her - her - until the name on his wrist made it all concrete and inescapable. Twenty minutes ago she would have sworn she knew all there was to know about Blaine. She could barely comprehend how wrong she’d been.

The thought was so huge and overwhelming and Blaine was so resolute in his rejection at that moment that Margaret stood up with a sigh and made for the door. He wasn’t ready to hear her tonight. Anything she said would only make the chasm between them wider. Tomorrow, when everyone was calmer, she’d explain herself and he’d understand. He had to. It was Blaine. They always understood each other.

“Mom?” She was just switching off the light when he called her name again.

“Yes?” was all she dared say.

“Don’t tell Dad, okay?”

She didn’t know what she should say. She wished desperately for her mother, long dead by then, to appear and tell her what was right. She was so afraid of hurting him even more than she already had. “Okay,” she said, turning off the light and pulling the door closed behind her.

She’d raged at fate so many times over the years. That she’d been so unprepared. That she’d been expected to pass a test she’d had no idea she was even taking. That she’d heard Blaine asking her to help him understand why his soulmate was a boy instead of understanding that he was telling her about himself, that he was gay. That she’d made herself complicit in his hiding, validating his desire instead of insisting that they sit down with Bill together and tell him because it wasn’t anything that needed to be hidden. And that, after that, she’d let their lives be ruled by fear for so long.

Because they didn’t talk. The next morning Blaine had appeared at the breakfast table with a smile on his face but a warning in his eyes, and with Bill there between them making morning small talk, the secret sat like a leaden centerpiece and was resolutely ignored. And by the time Blaine came home from school that day Margaret had managed to convince herself that it was okay, Blaine was okay. He would come to her if he needed to and meanwhile she would show him through her actions that nothing had changed. Nothing was different. And when he decided it was time to come out to Bill, well, then she’d be prepared and say all the things she should have said the moment he told her his soulmate was a boy.

But he came out to Bill unexpectedly, in the middle of an argument, the kind teenage boys have with their fathers on a regular basis as they drag through the difficult task of learning to define themselves as separate entities. Margaret couldn’t even remember what the argument had been about - she always tried to keep out of the way during their battles - but Bill must have said something about Cooper because even from the kitchen she heard Blaine shout, “But I’m never going to be Cooper, Dad! Because I’m a sub. And I’m gay! I’m a gay sub, Dad, so just be grateful that you have one real son and leave me alone!”

Then the front door had slammed and quiet reigned and Margaret was surprised to find herself on her knees on the floor. It had taken superhuman effort pull herself up and go into the living room to face her husband.

If Margaret had been doing a good job of pretending everything was normal, Bill raised it to an art form. They both ignored the fact that this made it easier for them, meant that they never had to say certain words out loud or face certain truths. Bill clung so strongly to the belief that the way to show Blaine that it didn’t matter to them that he was gay was to never bring it up, never make it an issue, and treat Blaine exactly the way he’d treated Cooper when he was fourteen. Up to and including box seats at baseball games and building yet another car in the driveway. And Blaine played along, participated, smiled and acted the perfect son. And he never stopped. Even after the nightmare of the school dance where he’d been attacked. They all just pretended even harder, aggressively, that everything was fine, and Blaine transferred to Dalton and buttoned his shirts all the way to the top, kept his ties tight and straight, gelled his wild curls into perfectly controlled submission.

It was a perfect semblance of the perfect family but it was hollow and empty and nobody was happy but nobody seemed to know what to do about it. And every day Margaret longed for the beautiful, carefree boy with the manic energy who used to run into her arms and tell her he loved her with eyes that matched his smile. But every day she moved closer to accepting that that boy was never coming back again.

She answered the phone on the third ring, as she always did, with a cheerful “Hello?” that she knew was an affectation in these days of caller ID. But she passionately hated when people answered her calls with “Oh, hey” or some other opening that telegraphed the fact that they already knew who was calling. It made her feel somehow at a disadvantage, and was something she refused to participate it.

“Hi Mom, it’s Blaine.” He took after her so much more than he knew. Because “Hi Mom” would certainly have been enough.

“Hey honey,” she made a concerted effort to keep all tension out of her voice. So many of Blaine’s recent calls had been bad news: he was leaving school, he wanted to live alone in Lima instead of in his own home with them. “What’s up?”

There was a bit of a silence and when Blaine spoke again his voice was just a little trembly. Which made Margaret’s heart sink because nothing that made her son sound that way could be good.

“Um...I’ve got something to tell you. Something pretty big.”

The afternoon air seemed to chill even as he spoke and Margaret got up, forgetting all about her smoking paraphernalia, and made her way back into the warmth of the house. “Okay. Something good, I hope?”

Blaine made a breathy sound that might have been an attempt at a laugh. “Well I think so. And I hope you will too.” There was a long pause, she could hear him take several short breaths, then, “I found him, Mom. I found my soulmate.”

Margaret had always thought “bursting into tears” was just a literary concept; not something that ever happened to anyone in the real world. But in less than an instant her throat closed impossibly tight, unbearable pressure filled her chest, and tears spilled from her eyes as if someone had turned on a faucet. She was choking on emotion that had slammed into her with no warning. She couldn’t breathe; speech was out of the question.

“Mom?” Blaine asked after a moment’s silence.

She struggled to say something, scrubbing at her face with her free hand, but she was so overwhelmed, and so desperate that he not know that she was crying, that nothing would come out, even as she screamed at herself to speak.

There was a stuttering sigh in her ear. “Oh, God, I knew this was a bad idea -”

“No!” she managed to choke. “Don’t go, honey, please. I’m happy. I’m so happy for you, Blaine.”

The dam in her chest broke with the words, but that meant that the sobs flowed more freely.

“Mom?” It was quiet this time. Wondering. Which only made her want to cry harder. He’d been so alone for so long, more alone than he ever should have been, thanks to her cowardice. She’d failed him in so many ways but now, now he had his soulmate. He’d never be alone. He’d finally, finally feel as loved as he deserved to be.

Breathe. Slow and deep she sucked air into her lungs. “Tell me about him, honey. Is he everything you’ve ever dreamed of?”

“He’s perfect, Mom.” She could hear the astonishment in his voice as he spoke, but she didn’t care. Her baby was happy. “His name’s Kurt - Kurt Hummel. He’s beautiful and...well...there’s something else I need to tell you, though.”

Her throat spasmed again but she forced air through it. “Okay.”

“It’s just that he’s...he’s young, Mom. He’s a lot younger than me.”

“What does that mean?”

“He’s almost...he’s not quite seventeen.”

Margaret’s fingers closed around the edge of her granite countertop with crushing force and she viciously stifled the hysterical giggle that bubbled in her chest. Sixteen. Her twenty-seven-year-old son’s soulmate, his dom, was sixteen.

God, when fate decided to slap you silly it certainly did it with style. Because for once in her life she could say anything she wanted. Any criticism would be justified. Blaine couldn’t have blamed her or told her she was meddling. He certainly expected it. And there wasn’t a therapist in the world who would have denied her right to ask Blaine what the hell he was thinking. He wouldn’t be able to argue with a single point she might make.

But she knew if she did it she’d really lose him. Forever.

She forced her hand to relax against the cool stone and took a slow deep breath. “That must have -” She stopped herself. No. She wasn’t going to put words in his mouth. She wasn’t going to assume again. “I mean, how did you feel about that?”

“It...it was hard at first. I was really angry.” His stammering betrayed his surprise, but he kept talking, and Margaret realized how very long it had been since he’d revealed any genuine feelings to her. “And I was scared and couldn’t understand why I didn’t deserve...something better, you know? But, Mom, he’s everything. He really is. I’m so in love with him.” He was still trying to convince her. Still expecting her to tell him it was wrong.

Slow, deep breaths. Margaret thought carefully. She weighed every word. She wasn’t going to let herself fail this test. No matter how much it hurt. Losing Blaine wasn’t an option. “Well that’s...that’s what matters, isn’t it? Everything else can...everything else is just details.” Slow. Deep.

She heard a little manic giggle from his end of the line and wondered if he might be feeling as close to hysteria as she did. They were so alike, after all. And that thought, after years of feeling so far from him, made her giggle as well, a tiny, identical sound.

He said something while she was laughing. “What did you say, honey?”

“Oh, no, I was just talking to Kurt. He wanted to make sure I was okay.”

She knew immediately what she had to do, and her heart beat faster at the thought. “He’s there?”

“He wanted to be with me when I called you. For moral support.”

The roller coaster of her emotions plunged down again at the thought that Blaine felt that he needed moral support to talk to his own mother, but she forged ahead, ignoring her racing heart and twisting stomach.

“Can I speak to him? Would that be okay?”

There was another long, probably stunned silence on the line and then Blaine said, very precisely, “I’ll ask him.”

She could hear muffled voices, and a thump, and then, sooner than she expected, “Hello?”

Her hand clutched spasmodically at the edge of the counter again, and tears filled her eyes. It was a girl’s voice. A little boy’s voice. A voice that stabbed her with the reality that this was a child. A child into whose hands she was expected to entrust her own child’s happiness and welfare without a single word of warning or even concern. But how could he possibly be able to live up to the task?

Like you’ve been doing such a good job? a tiny voice in her head demanded.

“Hello Kurt. It’s good to talk to you.” She had to force herself not to speak as she would to a ten-year-old. Kurt was almost seventeen, despite his voice, and she wracked her brain to conjure up an image of Cooper at seventeen, filling out, muscled, not a little boy any more.

“It’s good to talk to you too, Mrs. Anderson.”

She could hear it then - high and boyish as his voice might be, she could hear confidence in its tone. More confidence, if she was being honest, than she’d heard in Blaine’s. Which was right, she told herself, because Kurt was dominant. She focused on the visual reference of teenaged Cooper again.

“I just wanted to tell you myself how happy I am that Blaine found you. He was alone for a long time and it was so hard for him. He...he’s so special. He deserves so much. But I’m sure you already know that.”

“I do,” Kurt said simply.

“And you’ll take care of him, won’t you? And...love him.”

“I promise I will.” Kurt’s voice strong and definite. “We’ll take care of each other.”

“Thank you, Kurt,” was all she could get out before her throat started to close again.

“Well, I’ll let you talk to him again,” Kurt said after a moment’s silence.

She managed a second “Thank you,” then almost immediately Blaine was back.

“Mom?”

“He sounds lovely honey. He also sounds ten. You’d better send me a picture of him so I don’t get too panicky.”

Blaine, thank God, understood and laughed, a bright and happy sound that she hadn’t heard in years. “You really want a picture?”

“Of course I do. I want a picture of both of you. And you have to promise me you’ll bring him home soon so we can meet him.”

“Mom, I...thank you.” His voice broke over the words, and her heart broke at the same time, because she’d taught him to expect so little from her.

“Honey, I know you had to learn that your parents weren’t perfect in about the worst way possible -”

“It’s okay -”

“No, please, let me finish.” She took yet another deep breath, but she was starting to feel stronger, the extremes of emotion were settling, so she knew this must be right. “I failed you in so many ways, Blaine. I don’t think I even know all the ways I failed you. But I promise you, your dad and I never stopped loving you or wanting you to be happy.”

“He makes me happy, Mom. I never even dreamed that I could be this happy.”

When had she taught her romantic boy to be so careful with his expectations? She swallowed hard past the lump in her throat. “Well that’s all that matters. It’s your life, and you have to live it for you, Blaine. Not for anybody else.”

“You know, you should probably tell Cooper that sometime too.”

She smiled at that. “I’ll take that under advisement.”

He laughed again, bright and honest, and she felt like it had been years since she’d heard him sound so free.

She heard Kurt’s voice in the background again, then Blaine said, “Kurt can’t stay for much longer, so...”

“No, it’s fine honey. Just promise me you’ll call soon, okay?”

“I promise. And Mom...? Would you tell Dad for me?”

Margaret’s breath caught in her throat, but she forced it out. This wasn’t a test, not any more. Blaine knew who he was now. There weren’t any more trick questions.

“Are you sure that’s what you want?” she asked. “We can call you back when he gets home and you can tell him yourself. I know he’ll be happy for you.”

“It’s okay. I don’t get much time with Kurt during the week, so I’m really fine with you telling him. And I promise I’ll call this weekend.”

Of course he didn’t get much time with Kurt. She pushed thoughts of homework and sports team practices and curfews out of her head; there would be time for questions about Kurt’s parents’ reaction and how they were managing to be together at all, and what their plans were. Right now she needed to let it be. She needed to leave him with nothing but her support.

So with mutual I love you’s that sounded truly sincere for the first time in almost as long as she could remember, they said their goodbyes.

And then she fell into a chair and cried, freely, unsure really if her tears were from sadness or joy or relief, or some combination of the three. And pretty sure it didn’t really matter.

The last time Margaret saw her mother - at least, the last time while she still was her mother, with all of her faculties intact - was when her parents came to celebrate Cooper’s 16th birthday and his marking, which had happened only weeks before. Kyung Yu knew she was sick, but she hadn’t told anyone and she’d forbidden her husband to say anything either. She’d wanted, he told Margaret later, to have a last happy visit with her only daughter.

The moment that was burned in Margaret’s memory forever was when she came upstairs the night of the party to put seven-year-old Blaine to bed, only to hear her mother’s voice coming from his room. She’d stopped short of the door, hidden there listening to their conversation.

“Is it better to be a dom than a sub, Omoeni?” Blaine had asked, pronouncing the Korean word perfectly just as he’d been taught.

“Why would you say that, jagiya?” Her mother’s voice was always soft but the foundation of strength was undeniable.

“Mom always says you were lucky that you were marked as a dom,” Blaine said in his small, quiet voice. Margaret slid silently down the wall until she was sitting on the floor.

“Oh, but that’s only because of the way things were in my country at that time. In Korea then, submissive children had to show their marks to their parents. And then their parents would seek out their dominant and decide if it was a good match. If I’d been submissive my parents would have known that my soulmate wasn’t Korean, and maybe they’d have tried to keep me from him. But since I was dominant I was safe.” There was a short pause before she spoke again. “The person I love most in the world is submissive. So no, I don’t think it’s better to be one or the other. If we didn’t have both, what kind of world would this be?”

“Were you sad when your mark appeared?” Blaine persisted.

“Well, I was very surprised. And also afraid, because I couldn’t imagine how I’d ever manage to find him. And I suppose I was a little sad. It was hard not to be able to read the words and know his name.”

Blaine gave a tiny sigh, and Margaret imagined her mother must be stroking his hair. He always loved that.

“I used to sit in my window at night,” her mother continued, “and look at the letters in the moonlight and make up stories about them. I thought that maybe they were pictures, so I tried to guess things about my soulmate from the shapes they made. One was the shape of the veins on the back of a leaf-”

“V?” Blaine guessed.

“Yes. I imagined that meant that my soulmate would be tender and gentle like leaves blowing in the breeze. And another was tall and jagged like mountains-”

“M!”

“And that meant he would be strong and faithful. Or that I’d have to cross mountains to find him, which I very much hoped wasn’t the case. And then there was one that was like a big fat man.”

“That was D,” Blaine said confidently.

“Yes, and I was a young, romantic girl so I hoped very much that the fat man was my soulmate’s father or uncle. But I also knew that if it was him, then I would find him perfect even if he was as round as letter D.”

“Because your soulmate is always perfect for you in every way.” It was a foregone conclusion for Blaine, even at the age of seven.

“That’s right. Completely perfect. So I fell in love with the completely perfect shape of his name, but I didn’t know what that name sounded like until I went to Busan and met a missionary’s daughter - your Auntie Nessie.”

“And she told you!”

“Yes. And eventually I found him, when I was delivering papers for her father to one of the officers in the motor shop.”

“What did you do when you saw him?” Blaine’s voice was breathless and Margaret knew that anticipation so well. This really was the best part of the story.

“Well, I had just given the papers to the officer, and I turned around and there behind me was the tallest man I’d ever seen. He looked up just as I turned, and he stood so still, staring at my necklace.”

Margaret knew that her mother was now touching the necklace she always wore, the one she’d had made when she first arrived in Busan, with her name painted on a pale wooden plaque in ink that was once stark black, but had long since faded gray.

“I knew in an instant that it was him. And he recognized my name as easily as I recognized part of his on the patch on his shirt. He looked so shocked and surprised and I’m sure I looked just the same to him! Then he said my name - Ha Kyung Yu - in perfect Korean. And I said his - Devon Monaghan - in much less perfect English. But I was happy and proud to think that he’d worked so hard to learn to say my name exactly.”

“Then he knelt, right?” Blaine asked breathlessly. Margaret smiled at how caught up he could get even after endless retellings.

“Yes, and he was so tall that even on his knees we were almost face-to-face. And people were staring at us but we didn’t care at all. He was all I could see. Then I gave him my very first command - eul boyeo - which is like ‘show me.’ It’s what a dominant says to command a submissive to show his mark. Of course, it was a terrible mistake to tell him to show me his mark in front of everyone like that, but he did it anyhow, and the other soldiers were kind enough to look away.”

“And then you showed him your mark and you lived happily ever after,” Blaine finished for her, and Margaret could hear the rustle of his sheets as he wriggled in that happy way he had.

“Well, it wasn’t quite so simple, back then,” her mother chuckled, “but yes. Here we are. Happy ever after. And now you must go to sleep jagiya. It’s been a long and exciting day.”

The bed creaked as Kyung Yu stood up and there was more rustling of bedcovers.

“I love you, Omoeni,” Blaine said, his voice soft and sleepy.

“I love you too, beautiful Blaine,” Kyung Yu said quietly.

When her mother appeared in the doorway she smiled to see Margaret sitting there on the floor listening. “He looks at me exactly as you did when I used to tell you that story,” she said, coming to sit beside her daughter.

Margaret leaned her head against her mother’s shoulder. “I worry about him, Oma,” she said quietly, making sure Blaine couldn’t hear them from inside his room.

“Why do you worry? He’s a perfect child.”

Margaret sighed and fished for the right words to explain. “He’s just so...he needs so much. I knew Cooper would be a dom, but even if he’d been marked sub, I never would have worried about him. He’s never going to accept less than everything from his life.”

Kyung Yu chuckled and her shoulder shook under Margaret’s cheek.

“But if Blaine’s a sub - and he will be, I know he will - he’s so open and giving. What if he can’t protect himself, his heart, out there in the world? Or what if he’s disappointed and builds up defenses that his soulmate can’t break through? There are so many ways that he could be hurt, Oma.”

Kyung Yu moved a little to wrap an arm around her daughter. “It’s a little early to worry about those things, don’t you think?”

“He’s my baby,” Margaret said, as if that explained everything.

“Well, if his needs are deep, then his soulmate will be deep as well. The more he needs protecting, the stronger she’ll be. And if there are walls, she’ll know exactly how to break them down. That’s how it works, Maggie.”

“You really believe that?”

“Do you have to ask?” She turned and pushed Margaret back a little so she could look into her eyes. “When your father’s name appeared on my wrist I thought that any dream I’d ever had of being with my soulmate had been crushed forever. But here we are.” She smiled and lifted her chin in the direction of Blaine’s room. “His soulmate will be just exactly what he needs to get through this life in perfect happiness. Just as your father is for me and as Bill is for you. As Cooper’s soulmate will be for him. Fate is never wrong.”

Fate is never wrong. Margaret’s phone chimed, pulling her out of the memory. She opened the text to find Blaine’s face looking up at her, and while she certainly noticed the other person in the picture, the achingly young man with elfin features that seemed almost at odds with his confident gaze, it was Blaine’s eyes that riveted her. He was about to cry - she could tell he was holding back just long enough to snap the picture - but he was open and present and there in a way that she hadn’t seen since before he’d been marked. They were the eyes she’d seen when he’d run to her after a fall or a broken toy or some other great childhood disappointment. Eyes that said that even as he despaired, he trusted that you could make it better.

She knew those eyes were not for her. They were for Kurt now, for the boy who had his cheek pressed to Blaine’s temple in the photo. But that was, as her mother would say, as it should be.

She texted back quickly - he’s beautiful - then made her way back out onto the porch to finish her one cigarette.

Kurt held Blaine as he cried, laid out on the bed, his shirt pushed up around his chest so that Blaine could press his face to the soft skin of Kurt’s stomach and let it soak up his mostly silent tears. He stroked Blaine’s hair and down his back and waited, patiently, for the storm of emotion to pass.

“They don’t hate me,” Blaine said finally, as the tears began to subside.

“Of course they don’t. They’re your parents. How could they hate you?”

Blaine looked up then, eyes still damp, and pushed himself further up the bed until they were lying face-to-face on the pillows. He slid his hand into Kurt’s and squeezed tight. “When I was fourteen, there was this dance at my school.”

“Dance?” Kurt asked. The shift in topic confused him, but Blaine looked so serious that he just stroked his thumb along the back of Blaine’s hand and waited for him to go on.

“I was out then. Barely. So I asked a friend of mine to go with me. He was gay too.”

Kurt held his breath. He had enough experience to know that stories like this never had happy endings.

Blaine shifted a little to pillow his head on Kurt’s chest, smoothing his shirt back down into place.

“After the dance, we were waiting for his dad, and some guys started harassing us. Just verbally, at first, but then...not.” The hand that was clasped in Kurt’s tightened even more. “I just remember being really scared, and lots of noise, loud voices. Streetlights too bright in my eyes when I was on the ground. And pain. Somebody called the police and an ambulance came and took us to the hospital. I was okay. Wyatt - that was my friend - his arm was broken. But I just had a lot of bruises and a cracked rib.”

Kurt gasped a little, surprised by how much a story from long ago could tug at his need to protect Blaine. “A cracked rib isn’t ‘okay,’ Blaine. I’m so sorry that happened to you.”

“But, I mean, the point,” Blaine rushed on, “is that after they taped me up I went out to find my parents. They were in a waiting room. They didn’t see me in the door at first. My dad was crying - I’d never seen him cry in my life. And I...God, Kurt, I was happy. Happy that I’d gotten beaten up. Because if my dad was crying about me being hurt, then that must mean he really did love me, right?”

Kurt just waited, silently.

“But then he said to my mom, ‘This wouldn’t have happened if he wasn’t gay.’ And I realized that he wasn’t crying because I was hurt. It was because I was gay. And as far as he was concerned, me getting beaten up was my own fault, I guess. Because I was gay.”

Blaine nuzzled his face into Kurt’s neck, still clutching at his hand, and Kurt gave him a moment before he pulled away a little.

“Look at me, Blaine.”

Blaine raised his head obediently.

“It wouldn’t have happened if you weren’t gay.”

Blaine’s eyes widened.

“But saying that,” Kurt said, “isn’t the same as saying that it was your fault that it happened. Did you ever call him out on it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Did you ever ask him what he meant? Or tell him how much it hurt you when he said that?”

Blaine stared at Kurt as if he’d said something particularly sacrilegious.

“After I came out,” Kurt said, “sometimes my dad would say the wrong thing, or I would, but we’d always call each other on it, you know? I guess, with just the two of us, we couldn’t really afford to misunderstand each other.”

“But weren’t you scared?”

“Of what?”

Blaine shrugged, and tried to hide in Kurt’s neck again, but Kurt pulled him back up and held his face close, forcing him to make eye contact. “What were you afraid of, Blaine?”

“I...I guess that if I talked about it too much or rocked the boat, that they’d just come out and say it. That they were disappointed. That they wished I was different.” Blaine’s cheeks flushed pink, but still Kurt held his head up. “It was hard enough to know they thought it. I couldn’t have taken hearing them say it.”

Kurt let go then; let Blaine settle back against his chest with his arm wrapped around Kurt’s waist. He hated so much that Blaine’s parents had somehow made him feel like their love was conditional and finite. He stroked gentle fingers up and down Blaine’s spine.

“I wasn’t afraid,” he said, “because I knew there was nothing I could do or say that would ever make my dad stop loving me. And he knew it to, about me. I don’t know why you and your parents didn’t have that, Blaine. I know there are true idiots out there, but I think most parents love their kids and they just want them to be happy. Somehow your family got itself all tied up in knots. But your mom’s trying to fix it, right?”

Blaine’s head nodded against Kurt’s chest.

“Well then don’t make the same mistakes again. Tell her if she screws up and let her know you love her anyway. And maybe she’ll do the same thing for you.”

The hand on Kurt’s waist slid slowly up his body, over his chest, along the length of his neck, until it reached his jaw and Blaine picked his head up to watch it.

“She said you were beautiful.”

“What?” Kurt asked, distracted by the fingers caressing his skin.

“When I sent my mom our picture she texted back that you were beautiful. And she has no idea how right she was.” Blaine stretched up and pressed tiny kisses along Kurt’s jaw, then sucked gently at the point of his chin before tilting his head higher, begging silently to be kissed.

Kurt teased him just a little with barely-there brushes against his lips, but then kissed him in earnest, falling into his mouth in that perfect way that he never got tired of. Soon Blaine was gasping and moaning and making those little jerks with his legs that Kurt had only recently figured out meant he was struggling not to grind his erection against Kurt’s body.

Kurt loved how easy it was to work Blaine up after only a few days of denial. He pushed off the bed and rolled them over so that he was on top, still kissing, and pressed his pelvis against Blaine’s with wicked little rolls that pulled glorious whimpers from Blaine’s throat.

“You get that I love you more than anybody has ever loved anybody in the history of the world, right?” Blaine asked between kisses.

Kurt pulled back a little and frowned down at him. “I think Romeo and Juliet might argue with that.”

Blaine shook his head. “Fictional couples don’t count.”

“Anthony and Cleopatra?”

“An epic love, but nope. We still win.”

“The Obamas?”

Blaine laughed. “Not even close.” He slid one hand down and over Kurt’s ass while the other came up to stroke his face again. “You’re just going to have to accept that you’re one half of the greatest love story of all time.”

Kurt giggled and rolled his hips a few more times, until Blaine was properly speechless again. Then he leaned down and whispered against Blaine’s ear.

“I can live with that.”