By the time Kurt was a senior in high school, he was almost certain that he was never going to meet Blaine. That maybe the universe had played a cruel joke on him and Blaine Anderson didn’t really exist.

“You’ll meet him, don’t worry,” Mercedes said one day when they were at the Lima Bean, reaching across the table to put her hand over Kurt’s. He’d gotten into the habit of tracing Blaine’s name whenever he felt especially lonely, which was happening more and more often these days. Sometimes, it would feel like Blaine was so close, but then Kurt would remember that that wasn’t possible and the empty feeling in his stomach would come back stronger than ever.

“Easy for you to say. You have Sam.” Mercedes, like Kurt, had yet to meet her soul mate – a boy named Andre Marcus – but she’d fallen in love with Sam Evans (who had also not met his “Emily” yet). Sometimes falling in love with someone who wasn’t your soul mate was risky because you ran the chance of getting your heart broken (especially if you didn’t fall in love with your soul mate – ouch) but Kurt thought that it must be nice to be loved like that. Not that he’d know since his dating options were limited to… well, no one.

“Well, we’re graduating this year and then you’ll be off to New York.  Maybe Blaine’s there, just waiting to meet you. And if not…” she continued with a sly grin, “sweetie, you’re hot. I’m sure guys will be lining up for miles to take you out. You’ll have to beat them off with a stick.” Kurt laughed and ducked his head, blushing furiously.

“I guess you’re right,” he conceded.

“Aren’t I always?” Kurt laughed again and the pair stood, depositing their empty coffee cups in the trash before heading for the door.

“Oh, sorry,” a boy said, almost walking right into Kurt as they both tried to walk through the same door.

“No problem,” Kurt replied, stepping aside to let the boy and his two friends pass. Once they were gone, Kurt and Mercedes continued to the parking lot, bidding one another goodbye before getting into their respective cars.

As he drove home Kurt tried to ignore the tingling in his right arm, which was usually easy to do, but had started becoming increasingly harder.  Usually (according the websites Kurt had visited) the tingling meant that your soul mate was close, but there was no way Blaine Anderson was in Lima, Ohio. Maybe, Kurt thought, Blaine had been on his mind so much that he’d actually tricked himself into thinking he was close.

“Rumor has it that Sebastian asked you out,” Wes commented as they waited for their coffee. “And you turned him down.”

“Yep,” Blaine confirmed. Sebastian was a nice enough guy (albeit a little forward) but something about him didn’t feel right to Blaine.

“Blaine, come on, man. You can’t keep doing this.”

“Doing what, David?” Blaine asked, starting to get annoyed. He suddenly realized where this conversation was headed and why his friends had randomly decided that they needed to hang out away from Dalton.

“Denying yourself the chance to be happy because you have this insane notion of waiting for your soul mate.”

“I don’t see what the big deal is,” Blaine said, grabbing his coffee and heading for a table. “Plenty of people wait for their soul mates.”

“Yeah, like twenty years ago,” Wes countered. “It’s old-fashioned, Blaine. It’s like asking a girl to go steady… or your hair.” He smirked when Blaine glared at him.

“But in all seriousness,” David interjected. “No one waits anymore. Besides, there’s no rule saying that you have to fall in love with your soul mate. Maybe you and Kurt are destined to be just friends.”Blaine looked down at his arm. It was covered by his sleeve, but he had looked at it enough times to have the brand memorized. “It’s not like that for us. I know that sounds strange because I’ve never met him, but it’s like I can feel it?” He shook his head and chuckled once. “Maybe I’m just crazy. Am I crazy?”

“Maybe a little bit,” Wes admitted. “Or maybe you’re just lonely. All this waiting around isn’t healthy and…”

“Can we please talk about something else?” Blaine asked hotly. He knew that he was probably being pathetic and that Kurt (wherever he was) most likely wasn’t waiting because like Wes said, that practice was old-fashioned. But something in the back of his brain was telling him that this would all be worth it in the end and he knew there was no way Wes and David could understand that, so he thought it best to stop trying to make them.

“We’re just worried about you.”

“Well, don’t be. I’m seventeen years old… I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself.”

Wes and David looked at each other, silently conversing, before David shrugged in a “what can you do?” kind of way. Wes sighed and said, “Fine. So, I was thinking that for Sectionals we should…” Blaine settled in to listen to his friends argue about harmonies and what song would sound best with Blaine’s voice and other things that he should probably pay attention to. Instead, he pushed up the sleeve of his blazer and stared at the ten little letters stamped into his skin. The tingle he’d been feeling since he walked into the Lima Bean had started to fade and he pressed his forefinger into the ‘K’, but it remained as dark and black as ever.

Where are you? he silently asked the name that had come to define his life.

Senior year continued to pass, the lonely monotony broken by the momentary celebration of New Directions’ Sectionals win, and the empty feeling in Kurt’s stomach only intensified as Christmas and then Valentine’s Day passed (seriously, why did there have to be so many holidays with traditions designed to remind him of how much his life sucked?). The only thing he was looking forward to was Regionals and even that was only barely because he knew that they were going to win.

“Are you okay, Kurt?” Finn asked one night as the two of them sat in the living room with Rachel cuddled into Finn’s side. “You’ve been acting really depressed lately. I mean, I know you’re always kinda bummed about the whole “not having a soul mate” thing, but you haven’t smiled in weeks. So what’s going on?”

“I just…” he hesitated, not sure what to say. Sure, he and Finn were brothers and they talked, but they had never been the “bare your feelings”, Brady Bunch kind of siblings. In the end, he decided Finn and Rachel wouldn’t hold anything against him, so he continued. “It’s like, everyone but me is happy. And it’s not just people with soul mates because half the glee club hasn’t met theirs yet and they’re still happy. Because they can be with other people. I don’t have that. And it just… sucks, you know?” he finished lamely.

“Yeah… well, actually, no,” Finn amended and Kurt smiled a little at the look on his face because he could tell that Finn was trying to understand what Kurt was going through and that he felt bad because he couldn’t. “But you’re going to New York in a few months, right? There’s a lot more gay guys there than there are here and one of them is bound to like you.” He smirked and Kurt rolled his eyes. “So just… just hang in there, okay?”

“Yeah, everything will work itself out in the end, Kurt,” Rachel said in that chipper voice that sometimes made Kurt want to kill either her or himself (depending on the day and his mood).

Kurt nodded and agreed with them like he was supposed to and they turned their attention back to the TV.

What Kurt didn’t tell them, however, was how much he wanted to be loved by someone – anyone – or to scrub the words “Blaine Anderson” off of his skin.

Anything to make that empty feeling go away.

As Regionals neared, Blaine was doing one of three things: practicing his solo, rehearsing his duet with Sebastian (real subtle there, Wes), or dodging Sebastian’s continued advances.

Oh, and thinking about Kurt, though that went without saying.

“I don’t get it,” Sebastian said abruptly one day in the middle of their song.

“It’s a pop song, Sebastian, there’s nothing to get. Just sing the words and you’ll be just fine.” Blaine groaned and ran a hand over his hair. He wasn’t having the greatest of days to start with and having to spend multiple hours alone with Sebastian Smythe wasn’t exactly doing anything to turn it around.

“No, not that,” Sebastian snapped, causing Blaine to raise a curious eyebrow. “You. I don’t get why you won’t go out with me. I’m hot, you’re hot. I don’t see what the problem is.” Blaine didn’t say anything because if his best friends couldn’t understand the connection he already felt with Kurt, then how could he expect a guy he’d only known for a few months to? Unconsciously, his hand came up to hold his left forearm and Sebastian groaned. “Oh, don’t tell me you’re one of those people.”

“What people?” Blaine asked, knowing the answer before Sebastian opened his mouth.

“One of those hopelessly naïve people who thinks their soul mate is the be all and end all. News flash, Anderson, they’re not. Do you think Andrew cares that I have successfully fucked my way through… most of the gay guys in Allen county? No, he doesn’t. Probably because he’s done the same thing, but whatever.” Sebastian waved it off and continued in a softer tone that Blaine didn’t know Sebastian was capable of. “The point is, if you keep living this way, when you finally do meet whatever his name is, you’re going to be disappointed. Life isn’t a fairytale, Blaine, no matter how much you want it to be.”

For whatever reason, that set Blaine off and before he could stop himself, he was yelling. “You don’t think I know that? You don’t think I haven’t had people telling me that for years? I don’t want to feel like this about someone I’ve never met but I can’t help it. I know everyone thinks I’m crazy, and maybe I am, but it’s how I feel and how do you tell a person to stop feeling? It’s impossible. So, yes, thank you for your input, but it was both unnecessary and unwanted.” Gathering his stuff, he quickly left the room because there was no way in hell he was going to let himself cry in front of Sebastian Smythe.

As soon as he turned the corner, his phone vibrated in his pocket, letting him know he had a text message. He pulled it out and wiped away the tears clouding his vision before reading Cooper’s message, a smile spreading over his face.

Hey, did you find him yet? I better get a picture when you do!! Ok, that’s all!! Have a great day, B!! xoxo Coop

Leave it to his brother to make everything better without even knowing anything was wrong.

Kurt sat in New Directions greenroom at Regionals, tuning out Rachel’s incessant cries that everything was wrong and they were going to lose and they were all going to ruin her future while concentrating on his arm, which had not stopped tingling since they’d arrived an hour earlier.

“Stop rubbing it,” Mercedes ordered, slapping his hand away. “You’re gonna rub yourself raw and then Rachel will yell at you.” Kurt tried to laugh, but the tingling started again and he went right back to rubbing it. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

“I... don’t… know,” he said through gritted teeth. “It just keeps tingling and it’s kinda starting to hurt.”

“Ooh,” Tina interjected, sitting down next to Kurt on the couch. “Maybe that means he’s here.” 

“Right,” Kurt scoffed. “I’ve only been looking for him for five years and he just happens to show up at my show choir competition? What are the odds of that happening?” He looked down at his arm, which was red and inflamed, making the black letters stand out even more than they already did against his pale skin.

“Stranger things have happened,” Tina said with a shrug. “Don’t give up Kurt – today might be your lucky day.” She kissed his cheek and stood to go talk to Mike.

“Yeah, well, I’ve never been very lucky, now have I?” he muttered to no one in particular, attacking his arm again.

“Is it supposed to hurt?” Blaine complained, looking at Wes and David. They looked at each other, huffed, and looked back to Blaine. Wes held out his hand and Blaine stuck out his arm to let his friend examine it.

“Well, no wonder it hurts, you idiot. You’re bleeding.”

“And it looks like your arm was mauled by a bear,” David commented.

Blaine snatched his arm back and held it against this chest. “It was itchy! What the hell was I supposed to do?”

“Uh… be a big boy and leave it alone?” Wes suggested. “Blaine, until you actually meet him, your arm is going to tingle whenever you’re near each other. It’s just something you’re going to have to get used to.”

“Wait… you mean he’s here? Now?”

“There’s a high possibility, but you can’t push fate, man. If you’re meant to meet today, then you will. Otherwise, you need to keep waiting.”

Blaine sat down and looked sadly at his scratched up arm, the words still in pristine condition.

He was tired of waiting.

The rest of Kurt’s senior year was uneventful, save for a Nationals win.

As for his arm… well, it tingled a few times after Regionals, but nothing major.

And when he moved to New York at the end of the summer, it stopped tingling all together.

The rest of Blaine’s junior year was uneventful, save for finally snapping and giving Sebastian a piece of his mind.

As for his arm… well, it tingled a few timed after Regionals, but nothing major.

By the time school started back up in September, it had stopped tingling all together.