Six months later on the dot and Luca and I are back at the hospital.

The boys had turned four back in April, when Luca had only been home for a couple of months and still couldn't be around other people. He'd cried a little, but ultimately wasn't too upset when I let Wes and his daughter, Lily, come over for the afternoon. Cooper tried to make it out, but he was on a very tight filming schedule, and just the flights here and back would have eaten up the majority of whatever time he would've managed to get off.

My book had come out soon after, and I'd wheedled my manager into not booking me anymore writing gigs until everything with Luca cleared up. With my bargain-hunting tendencies, inherited trust fund from my grandparents, and semi-steady, often exorbitant salary, I have so much more than enough to keep my little family going for the next while without working. Very technically, the trust fund would be enough to see me through the nursing home and the funeral, and have some left over for the grandkids, but I refuse to rely on it. Instead, twenty-five percent of it sits in an account with the twins' names on it, collecting interest and waiting to be used for college and life after. Another twenty-five percent stay in my savings account and doesn't get touched, and the plan is to give it, plus whatever money I have left when I die, to my boys' families.

"Do you have your blanket?" I ask Luca, turning from the front door. He shakes his head in a panic and runs back down the hall to his and Micah's room.

Our apartment is considered large by most standards. It's very open, well-lit, and in a wonderful neighborhood. It's the only thing I've really splurged on in my life, and even though I could have easily bought a house for us, we just don't need the room. I make a point of keeping it clean: with an at-home job and two kids who aren't in school just yet, there's really no excuse for mess. Plus, I may not have had the best habits in high school and college, and want to leave my kids with better ones.

"Got it!" Luca exclaims, running back out through the living room.

Wes sits on the couch with Micah, 'Finding Nemo' on the T.V., but the boy keeps looking over at me and his brother. He doesn't want Luca to leave. He'd cried most of the night before; it took hours to explain that we'd be back in two days.

"Alright, kid," I lean down and make sure he's got everything he needs in his backpack. Then I turn to wave goodbye to Wes and Micah. "Be good, Micah, listen to Mr. Hughes."

"I will, Daddy," he says, waving softly back.

Wes shoots me a reassuring smile. "We'll be fine, Blaine, this is hardly anything new."

I roll my eyes at that- since when is leaving your kid with the neighbor for days at a time an acceptable habit? I open the door and start ushering Luca through, untangling him when the trailing end of his blanket catches in the door.

"Thank you, Wes, we'll be back tomorrow night," and we're gone.

"Hey, Champ!" comes a voice through the door and in pops Doctor Hummel, wearing pink scrubs today with his lab coat over top.

"Doctor Kurt!" Luca exclaims with a beaming smile, raising up his little arms for a hug. Kurt obliges, leaning down to the bed to give him a squeeze before sitting at the end. I rise from my chair next to the bed and scooch onto it next to Luca. He crawls into my lap and we both look at Doctor Hummel expectantly.

"So, how's it been?" he asks genially. I give him a rundown of the months spent at home, and it's brief- nothing's happened, Luca's been fine.

"That's amazing," Kurt breathes. "We're just going to spend the next couple of days running some tests to make sure that the transplant has engrafted and is starting to build a new immune system, okay?"

Luca looks worried. "Will I get sick again?" he asks, sucking a thumb into his mouth and I don't have the heart to reprimand the habit.

Kurt shakes his head. "We're just going to take some blood from you," he explains. "You know your port?"

The boy nods and tugs down the neck of his shirt to tap at the little raised lump on the right side of his chest.

"We'll use that to take some blood, just like before," Kurt says. "And if the tests come back okay, you'll get to go straight home."

"Will he get the port taken out?" I ask, glancing between the two.

"Not just yet," Kurt says. "He's going to need regular blood work for a while, and the port will make it much less painful for him. In about a year, if there are no complications and his immune system has rebuilt, then we'll take it out."

I nod and he sets about wheeling in a small cart with some lines and syringes on top, and he starts hooking Luca up to draw blood. It's over soon, and after the needle is removed from Luca's chest and Kurt's swept off with the samples, we settle in for some good old-fashioned Disney movies, Disney coloring books, and Disney stickers.

Cooper once blamed the twins' attraction to Disney on my own mild obsession, and I agreed with him whole-heartedly. I've always adored the films, nearly every one, but the classics have remained my favorites through my whole life. Much of the joy I felt after bringing the boys home after their birth was from the new justification I had for owning every animated film.

Luca sings along quietly along with Simba during I Just Can't Wait to be King, and even growls playfully at me when Simba growls at Zazu. Laughing, I place another Mulan sticker next to the picture of Mushu he's coloring, all fierce red lines and jagged oranges. He hasn't quite mastered staying inside the lines, but he at least chooses colors appropriate to the characters and tries to keep it neat. Micah takes a much more...interpretative approach to his drawings; his colors tend to blend and mix all over the page, and he uses as many colors on one drawing as he can.

Artistic differences aside, some of my favorite afternoons are the ones I spend sprawled out on my stomach on the floor of our living room, one boy on either side of me and endless pads of paper and coloring books spread out before us. We set a large bin of crayons and colored pencils down right in the middle, and don't resurface for hours.

Now, helping Luca find just the right blue for Cinderella's dress, I yearn for this all to be over, to be able to go home and not have to worry about hospital visits or getting a cold that could kill my kid. Still, I hand the proper crayon to my son and decide to be grateful that he's gotten the treatment he needed and will be back home soon.

Kurt comes back that evening, papers in hand and smile on his face.

"Good news?" I inquire hopefully, wiping the corner of Luca's mouth where he's smeared some of his vanilla pudding.

He nods happily. "So far, so good," he says, adding the papers to the clipboard hanging from the foot of the bed. "He's really doing wonderfully, and it looks like the marrow engrafted with no problems."

I feel like I'd been holding my breath for the last six months and am just now able to exhale and inhale properly.

"Oh, thank God," I moan, instinctively squeezing Luca to me, probably a little harder than needed if his indignant squawk is any indication.

Doctor Hummel laughs. "Yes, well there are some more tests that are running right now, and he'll still need to be monitored for a while, but it's looking really great," he says, glancing between us both before settling his eyes on Luca. "You've done a really good job, Luca. You keep it up, okay?"

Luca grins ecstatically and nods. "I promise!"

With some last smiles and reassurances, Kurt leaves once more.

"Done with your pudding, kid?" I ask, and when he nods I take up his trash and dump it in the bin by the door, then start getting him ready for bed.

The next morning, a couple of hours before Luca will probably wake up, I make my way down to the hospital cafeteria and head for the coffee machine at the back. Cup in hand, I stake out a table along a wall and settle in for some quiet alone time. The room is nearly empty; it's only 7:30 in the morning, and visiting hours don't start until nine. There's no beeping here, no machines whirring or timers going off to remind you that it's time for medicine, or a bath, or to eat. I sip my coffee, just as black as I've always taken it, and watch a few trees wave about in a light breeze out one of the large cafeteria windows.

"Is this seat taken?" a voice asks behind me.

I turn to see Doctor Hummel gesturing at the chair across from me, and I shake my head, giving him an encouraging little smile when he hesitates.

"You looked a little...thoughtful," he remarks, settling in with his own cup of coffee and a plastic bowl of fruit salad. "I'm sorry if I interrupted you."

He's got a couple of crease lines in his cheek, and his scrubs, the same color as yesterday's, look a little wrinkled.

"You didn't interrupt anything," I assure him, accepting a grape when he nudges his bowl into the center of the table. "Did you sleep in your office or something?"

His mouth quirks up in a sheepish smile, and a blush creeps up his neck to settle in his cheeks. "I may have, perhaps, put a rush on Luca's tests and ended up finishing them myself and then I, hypothetically, could have fallen asleep on the sofa in my office."

I shake my head at him, equal parts amused and concerned. "You really didn't need to do that, Kurt," I state, but he waves it off.

"No, I wanted to," he says, chewing slowly on a piece of melon. "That kid's sick of this place, he needs to be home where he's comfortable."

There's a tug in my chest and I reach over to cover one of his hands with my own.

"Thank you."

He flips his hand over to give mine a quick squeeze. "No problem."

Just after noon Kurt comes up to tell us that Luca's cleared all of his tests, his immune system is building up nicely, and that he's free to go home for another few months. The little boy wastes no time in shoving all of his things haphazardly into his backpack, forcing the zipper closed, and jumping off the bed. He stands next to the door, tapping his foot impatiently while I sign some more release forms and take his new prescriptions.

"Thanks again, Kurt, for everything," I tell him, and before I can talk myself out of it I lean forward to give him a quick, round-the-neck hug. He returns it gently patting my shoulder as we let go.

"You still have my number?" the doctor asks, and I nod. I'd entered it into my phone the very first moment I could get to myself the day Cooper and I brought Luca home the first time. Thankfully I hadn't needed to use it, as Luca never once got ill or had any problems.

"He's not entirely out of the woods yet," Kurt reminds me as I sling my messenger bag over a shoulder. "If he gets so much as a sniffle, I want you to call me. There's still plenty that could go wrong."

I laugh. "And on that uplifting note," I tease, following him to the door where he pats Luca's growing curls with fondness.

Kurt rolls his eyes, opening the door to let us through and walking with us down the hall. "You know what I mean. And, you know," he fiddles with the pen from his breast pocket, "if you have any questions or anything, too, or if you just need someone to talk to or some-"

I stop him with a hand on his arm. "I'll call," I promise. And I will.

Three Weeks Later...

The café is moderately filled; there's chatter, and it makes me feel less isolated, but it's far from stifling. My little table sits covered in notebooks, some flipped open to certain pages, others closed and waiting. Some of the pens I brought roll dangerously close to the edge, and I scoot them back with an absentminded hand, still scribbling away down a page in the notebook before me.

"Are you busy?" Someone asks, definitely a man but that's all I can tell, and I can see their shadow fall over the table, feel their presence next to me, but I can't stop just yet. I hold up a finger, a 'one moment, please' and scrawl double-time.

"I can come back, if-" There's a lull in the general noise of the café when he speaks, and my head jerks up almost without my conscious knowledge. My hand finishes the sentence without me looking at the paper, and it skews on the lines a bit- the last few words droop down onto the line below.

"Kurt!" I exclaim, note the coffee and plate of cookies in his hands, then begin hastily clearing the mounds of paper from the table so he has room to set his things down.

"I don't want to intrude," he says, but I've already stacked up the journals on my side of the surface and wave him down into the opposite seat before he can protest further.

He gently places the plate and cup down before taking a seat, adjusting his satchel on his lap. With two long fingers, he nudges the cookies towards the center.

"So...is this work?" Kurt gestures to my pile of journals and I nod. "You're a writer?"

"Yep," I begin to explain, breaking off a piece of chocolate cookie to nibble. "Mostly biographies. Some novels. A few articles or journals."

Kurt frowns in confusion. "I thought most writers just sort of stuck to one thing."

I grin at him, hand him the other half of the chocolate cookie. "Ah, well, most writers do. I, however, am a ghostwriter. I get paid to write the things that people can't be bothered to write themselves, yet want all the credit for."

"That doesn't sound so very fulfilling," the doctor contemplates. "You don't get any credit? None?"

I shake my head. "Not legally. I have a reputation, though, through my clients. And my manager is a genius; somehow she's gotten so many people vying for my services she's built a waiting list."

Kurt's eyebrows shoot up. "That's incredible!"

"It can be," I say, then take a breath. "But, and this is totally a secret," I lean forward and drop my voice as Kurt mirrors me, "I may have published some of my own works."

He laughs and leans back. "Anything I might have read?"

I take a moment. I've never shown anyone, not Wes or my brother, the books I've written. The only people in the world who know me as both Blaine Anderson and Dalton A. are my manager, and the twins. With a deep inhale, I decide that maybe I need more people in my life that I can trust. And maybe Kurt can be one of those people.

"Do you like poetry?" I ask him, reaching into the stack of journals for one near the bottom as Kurt nods vigorously.

"Yes, actually," he says, grabbing at his satchel. "I'm actually kind of picky about it, but there's this one author, he's only written like the one volume and only a few years ago, but I just love his writing." With a triumphant noise he draws out a tattered, taped-together, dog-eared, sticky-noted, slim little book.

My mouth drops a bit, and I turn immediately to the journal in my hand, flipping back through the dated pages for somewhere in the middle. I stop at a particularly messy page, where nearly every other line has been crossed out and then replaced; some of the lines had been revised upwards of four times, my writing getting more and more cramped as the space ran out. On the facing page, the second-to last draft of the poem, with just a few revisions to suggest the final version.

Heart in my throat, I hand Kurt the notebook.

He looks confused at first, glancing over the nearly illegible writing, but the more he reads the more his face clears, and he opens up his well-loved book to the proper page and compares the two. Then he notices the date at the top of the page, written in ink from a pen that ran out soon after, and checks the publication date at the front of his book.

"Are you seriously telling me that this is you?" he asks, mouth agape at me from across the table, eyes wider than I'd seen them yet.

Hesitantly, I nod. He gasps and promptly drops both book and journal to the floor, hastily scrambling to gather them up again. When he pops back up from under the table, he reverently closes the journal again and hands it back. I take it with a small, encouraging smile. I've never encountered a fan before, not ever even seen someone holding my book. These waters are untested; I'm a little worried to dip my toes in.

Kurt, however, decides to dive right in. He grabs his tattered book and snatches up one of my pens from the table, thrusting them both at me.

"Sign. This. Please," he begs, desperation in his eyes but there's a playfulness, too.

I laugh. "Don't you have enough of my signature?" I ask, but I take the items anyway. "All those consent and release forms from the hospital."

He scoffs. "I feel obligated to tell you that were it not illegal, I would hoard every document you've ever signed."

I raise an eyebrow and glance down at the front page of his book. "Uhm...do you want me to sign as Blaine or as Dalton?"

His smile is radiant. "As Blaine, of course."

Biting my lip, I quickly scrawl out my name and give him back his book. He immediately opens it to check, staring reverently at the pen marks.

"Kurt," I start, and it takes him a moment to tear his eyes away from my signature. When he does, I give him a level look. "I really wasn't kidding when I said that it's a secret," I gesture at the book in his hands.

He agrees frantically. "Of course! I won't tell a soul, are you kidding me? Besides, Mercedes would kill me if I told her I got your signature, and then steal it. So, no. Your secret's perfectly safe."

The breath whooshes out of me. "Thank you."

"It's no trouble," he assures me, and for a moment we sit in the quiet of the café, the clocks tick over into the afternoon, and I feel the peace I used to think I could only feel when around my sons. That strange, familial peace that says, 'This is your family, and this is where you belong'.

Kurt breaks the quiet, gently stowing away his freshly signed book back into his satchel.

"So," he says, "how is Luca doing?"

And the afternoon soars on.

Two Months Later...

Kurt had asked me out officially nearly five weeks ago, after we'd run into each other three more times at the café and spent each of those afternoons together. Two weeks after that, we had declared ourselves official 'partners', after I adamantly declared 'boyfriends' too juvenile a term, and Kurt agreed.

Our second date, at his apartment for a home-cooked meal and then onto his balcony with a bottle of wine, he'd asked who the twins' mother is. It took the entire bottle for the story, and a shared bowl of ice cream after, for me to choke it out. I'm not particularly proud of knocking my best friend up in a fit of desperation, a last-ditch attempt to find out if I could be straight at all and finally get my father to stop looking at me like that. Of course, not only did I need to have been excruciatingly drunk in order to bed her, I managed to get her pregnant as well. And some months later, at twenty years old, I found myself quite suddenly responsible for two entire people who were utterly dependent on me for everything, and my friend moved away and hasn't contacted me since.

In return, he tells me about his father, his rock, who died of a second heart attack during his first year at Medical School. He says he moved here from Ohio because Ohio hurt too much; with his mother deceased since childhood, and considering his father never remarried, Kurt has very little family left.

"An Aunt, I think," he says one day over coffee in a park, the late summer breeze just this side of chilly. "Maybe in Michigan. Or Montana. Or nowhere." He's never met her. He has no grandparents, his mother was an only child. He's twenty-eight years old and may very well be the last of the Hummels.

Family, he explains, is something he's been trying to find for a very long time.

Today's the first day that Kurt will be spending at my apartment with the twins. I'd explained to them as best I could about homo- and heterosexuality, and how either was absolutely fine, but that I happen to be the former. This lead to a discussion about the nature of making a babies and an explanation as to the absence of their mother that I hadn't been entirely prepared to have with my four-year-olds, but they deserve to know. Hopefully the both of them grow up feeling comfortable talking to me about these things so that they don't act out the way I had to try and figure myself out. But they're only four at the moment, so I don't bother myself too much with it outside of making sure they are as happy and healthy as they can be.

Kurt buzzes in precisely at eleven- it's freezing outside, winter in Maine sets in fast, so I let him in as soon as I hear and moments later there's a knock at the door.

"Hi!" he greets when I usher him inside. I help him out of his coat and hang it up, earning myself a quick kiss.

"Hey," I reply, take his hand, and bring him straight through to the living room where the boys sit watching Cars and munching on Goldfish.

Luca looks up immediately and squeals happily, leaping off the couch and running over to Kurt, clamping little arms around his legs before Kurt bends down to sling him up and into his arms.

"Luca!" he exclaims, tickling the boy a bit. "How are you feeling? All better?"

His ten-month engraftment check-up was just a week ago, and his results had come back strong. By the one-year mark, he should have a fully functioning, highly operational immune system and be able to go to preschool with his brother.

"All better!" Luca confirms happily.

Micah walks over carefully and stands just behind me. He's only met Kurt a few times, and for very brief periods, unlike Luca who's worked quite closely with the doctor for the last ten months. With an encouraging hand I nudge him over to where Kurt has set Luca down and crouched in front of him to chat. He walks over tentatively, but calms when Luca takes both his hand and Kurt's and drags them back to the couch, immediately offering Kurt his bowl of Goldfish.

I smile and lean over the back of the couch to press a kiss into Kurt's temple as he juggles some of the drawings the boys have pressed into his hands to show him.

"I'm making lunch, sweetheart, do you want anything special?" I ask him, low in his ear.

The boys are still chatting away to Kurt, but not actually paying him much attention while they talk about their crayons and finger paints.

Kurt shakes his head. "Whatever you're making is fine."

"Will you be alright out here?" I reach down to tug Micah's shirt straight where it's ridden up, and to smooth down Luca's corkscrew curls.

"I think we'll be just fine," he states, letting Luca crawl across his lap to get to Micah, where they begin to argue a bit over who drew the best Belle in their coloring books. Kurt quickly distracts them, flipping open a book of blank paper and complaining that he can't draw at all, and that both drawings of Belle are entirely wonderful. He gets them to color with him, all together on the blank paper, creating a splotchy, colorful mess of wax and pencil lead while I, with another kiss to the top of Kurt's head, wander into the kitchen to start lunch.

After a round of grilled cheese sandwiches and grapes, the boys start to nod off against us on the couch, the entire living room littered with debris from hours of creative expression. I ask Kurt if he'd like to help put them down for a nap and he agrees, quietly disentangling Micah from sheets of paper and colored pencils.

They go down with no fuss, a miracle some days, and they'll sleep until about three in the afternoon. Kurt starts picking up in the living room, shuffling papers into a stack before stopping at one, and when I ask him why he's grinning he just shakes his head, drops the piece of paper he's holding, and kisses me hard on the mouth. He turns to collect crayons back into their bin and I sneak a peek at the paper he'd been holding- a shaky crayon, stick-figure masterpiece of four distinct figures, two quite a lot smaller than the others, all standing together and holding circle-stick-hands in one house.