I apologize.  I totally thought I would be able to write on my trip and post from my iPad… but… Disneyland.  It is an all consuming force of magical awesomeness that demands your full attention.  I am totally not sorry.

It took a special person to get tangled up in sheets such that they had to fight to free themselves, but Blaine was one of those people, and as much as he wanted to linger in bed and sleep in, he knew he had to get out and catch the train to school.  School wasn't going to stop on account of him desiring more snuggle time, nor would his cats forgive him if he was late in feeding them before classes started.  He could have just brought them back to Kurt's apartment, but he had already been struggling with having Kurt let him in and didn't want to have to fight to have the cats there as well.

After Thanksgiving break, Blaine had left Kurt's apartment in order to ensure his feline pets were still alive and attend classes, only to find that when he came back that night that Kurt had locked him out, yelling at him from inside the door that he needed to forget about him, that it wasn't safe for Blaine to be there, and that he couldn't risk Blaine getting hurt.

It took Blaine sitting outside Kurt's door for an hour to convince Kurt that Blaine wasn't going anywhere and that if the bad guys were coming, they'd have to deal with Blaine before they ever got to Kurt anyhow.

Kurt had gone so far as to tell the doorman not to allow Blaine in, but Blaine had smooth talked his way in, and Kurt had finally acquiesced that Blaine was as stubborn as he was, and, perhaps, just as stupid.

It wasn't that Blaine had a death wish though that kept him coming to Kurt's each night, it was that he felt drawn to Kurt in a way he couldn't explain, nor did he want to.  He finally accepted what his heart already knew, and that was that he, more than anything, wanted to be with this man that all sense and logic dictated he shouldn't want to be with.  Blaine was okay with fighting for whatever it was they had, and made sure Kurt knew it.  

It wasn't like Kurt was as tough as he had made out either, because each time Blaine made his way into the apartment, regardless of how Kurt had tried to keep him out, it was Kurt who melted into Blaine's arms.  The power dynamic between them had changed.  It was Blaine who held Kurt, who took care of him, and who left the apartment during the day now.  He was sure that Kurt didn't even leave to go up to his office, and while that was good on account of Kurt not having any more cigarettes around to smoke, Blaine knew how trapped he felt in that place and worried that Kurt felt the same.  What was more was that Kurt had trapped himself in this situation, out of fear, and Blaine didn't know how to remedy that.

“If they were going to come after you… don't you think they would have already?” Blaine asked of Kurt one evening after they laid in their shared sweat, Kurt's head pressed against Blaine's chest.

“It's not like the movies… they wait to see if what you've done has had a purpose.  For all they know I might have gone out of country to do some kind of business that might explain my change in interest - and that change might benefit them somehow.  They might also assume that I caught wind of the authorities looking into my business and had to cool it for awhile.  These are things that are completely forgivable and understandable.  It's when they realize that I'm trying to pull out of the game that they'll get angry….”

“You've handled all their cash… surely you've got something to hold over them…”

Kurt peered up at Blaine then, through his almost blonde lashes that sometimes disappeared in the right light.  “I do… I have plenty… but there's a fine line between leverage and liability…”

The way Kurt spoke made Blaine worried that what they had was temporary.  A waiting game, like terminal cancer that would sneak up and take away all the love they had and replace it with pain and anguish.  But it wasn't an incurable disease, and Kurt's fatalism just frustrated Blaine.  There needed to be a way out of the mess he was in, and he needed to want to fight for it.

Which was why Blaine kept coming, kept taking care of Kurt - even when his depression was maddening.  At one point Kurt put a glass in the microwave and it exploded in there, leaving little shards everywhere that Kurt, absent of self-preservation, tried to pick up with his fingers until he was riddled with cuts that Blaine had to bandage.

“It said right on it - not microwave safe.  You'd think with all the work you've done that you would be a little more literate and mindful…”  Blaine scolded as he washed and wrapped each finger, stopping to gawk at Kurt when the other man started laughing.  “What on earth is so funny?”

“It's just…”  Kurt started, giggling again and needing to take a deep breath to stop his laughter in order to explain himself.  “... my dad put a metal dish in the microwave and it caught fire once…. and I gave him trouble for it too… I always wanted to be like my dad….”

The chuckles gave way to a solemn frown, and Kurt looked away.  Blaine was sure he was hiding a tear or two in doing so, and when he finished bandaging Kurt's fingers made sure to kiss his hands over tenderly.  “Your dad would be proud of what you're doing…”

“You never knew my dad…”  Kurt whispered softly, head still turned.

“I know you though, and I know that if you wanted to be like him, then he would be the kind of man that would think that doing the right thing isn't always doing the easy thing.”

It was the first of many difficult discussions.  Kurt talked about his parents, and the heartbreak of losing them one after the other.  Blaine talked about how indifferent his parents had been towards him, first with coming out of the closet and then pursuing a career in the arts.  They mused about what they wanted out of life when they were young, and how it compared now.  At least Blaine did anyhow.  Kurt never spoke about the future in the present.

There was talk of the bullying they had both experienced, and notes compared about how Blaine's bullying had resolved itself after he had been beaten and transferred to Dalton and how Kurt's abuse continued until he had come to New York and toughened up such that no one dared to mess with a boy that had mafia connections.

Kurt had asked him about Cooper, and why his parents had been okay with Cooper running off to pursue an acting degree, to which Blaine had to painfully admit that “It was one thing to have a kid in the arts, it was another to have one that was gay and in the arts…”

Through it all, no one knocked on their door, and Blaine never saw anything suspicious when he came to Kurt's or left there each day.  It was enough to build up his sense of security if Kurt hadn't been there to remind him to watch his back.

At one point, Kurt had even tried to hand a gun to Blaine, insisting that he might need it.

“Not only am I not comfortable with having one of those, I don't know how to shoot them.”  Blaine had admitted, refusing the firearm.

“I can teach you.”

“I won't be taught.”

It was the end of that conversation, although Blaine knew that Kurt kept a gun tucked in between the mattress and boxspring on his side of the bed.  

Weekends were the best.  It was when Blaine got to sleep in, cuddled against Kurt.  He had bribed his resident advisor to look in on his cats and feed them over the weekends so he wouldn't have to leave the apartment aside from play practices and any tutoring he couldn't schedule during the weekdays.  Weekends were the best opportunities to build Kurt up, to show him how much he mattered to Blaine, and they were when Blaine saw the glimmer of hope in Kurt's eyes for something more than the present.

Weekends were when Blaine proposed ideas like:

“We could go visit the gravesites of your parents together.”
“It would be nice to see a show together.”
“Maybe we could go on a vacation over Christmas.”
and
“I read about a cruise that does a different Broadway play each evening onboard.”

Each suggestion was responded to with silence, but the more Blaine spoke about future plans and ideas, the more he saw the life grow in Kurt's eyes.  So he kept it up, dreaming up future plans for both aloud until, at last, he earned a little nod from Kurt about how it would be fun to go to Disneyland together.

The nod was worth all the effort.

Their sexual roles had also switched since they met, and now Kurt was consistently the bottom, letting Blaine take care of him and lead them both through, and while Blaine was alright with the development, he inwardly did a cartwheel when Kurt, after a month of passive lovemaking, rolled them over so that he was bouncing on top of Blaine - taking care of himself and Blaine at once.

Mornings were also a struggle.  Blaine often had to untangle himself not only from the sheets, but from Kurt's needy arms, in order to leave in a timely manner, and while Blaine couldn't be sure of it, he was convinced that Kurt didn't leave the bed until the afternoon.  So the first time Blaine woke up without Kurt in bed, he first panicked, and then he grinned in absolute joy as he realized it was Kurt who was up before him and in the shower.

Those were the little things that let Blaine knew that Kurt was getting better, or at least developing, in his own way and despite Kurt's assurance that there would be retaliation, Blaine never saw any suggestion that there would be any.  If anything, the more time went on, the more he was sure that Kurt was overdramatizing things and that everything would be alright.

Until, that morning when he worked on untangling himself from the sheets, that the door banged open and a barrage of men with guns stormed into the apartment just as Kurt was getting out of the shower.  

“It's time for answers Hummel.”