Cooper comes home from work midweek to find Blaine huddled on the sofa in the living room, red plaid blanket draped across his shoulders. His feet are planted on the cushion; arms wrapped his legs, chin resting on one knee. He’s staring moodily at something – his uncovered eye dark and narrowed.

There is a beautiful bouquet of two-dozen deep red roses in a glass vase on the coffee table.

“Oh, wow. Kurt’s gonna love those!” Cooper exclaims. He knows what kind of a sap his brother can be when it comes to Kurt. He’ll never forget that ridiculous gum-wrapper ring, or his brother’s gratitude over the Christmas present.

“How did you go out and get them? You’re not supposed to drive with that eye patch. Or the pain meds.”

Blaine just grunts noncommittally and rubs his chin against his knee. It’s a move Cooper has seen from Blaine before, when he was little and upset about something, but didn’t want to talk about it.

Cooper sits down on the coffee table in front of Blaine. He can smell the sweet, delicate fragrance of the roses. He remembers the bouquets of flowers that were always on the sill of their grandmother’s kitchen window.

“All right, what’s going on?”

Blaine ducks his head and hides his face between his knees, careful not to put any pressure on his eye. The surgery had gone perfectly, but he’s supposed to wear the patch until the end of the week. He’s sick of it. It gets hot against his cheek and the strap rubs at this scalp and tugs his hair.

“Kurt’s got a secret admirer,” Blaine mutters into his knees, not much louder than a whisper.

“What?”

“Don’t make me say it again.”

“I heard you I just, I don’t understand.” Cooper was at Dalton for the entirety of high school and doesn’t really know what public school is like. But he’s having a hard time imagining a boy publicly sending another boy romantic gifts - especially at a school where slushie facials and locker-slams are apparently the accepted norm.

“Someone is sending Kurt Valentine’s gifts. At school. Leaving shit in his locker. Candy. Flowers. Cards. A goddamn Gorilla Gram.” Blaine practically snarls the last bit and the hurt and the anger in his voice startles Cooper. Blaine’s hands curl into tight fists, and a few small scars stand out white against the tanned skin of his knuckles.

“And he thinks it’s me. He thinks I’m doing it. And I’m not. I’m his boyfriend and it’s not me.” Blaine presses his lips together, and this close Cooper can see the tears welling in his good eye before he blinks them away. He can see the flex of muscle as Blaine clenches and unclenches his jaw.

“It should be me.”

Cooper knows that if Blaine were feeling better he would be pacing back and forth, hands flailing wildly with the emotion he feels but can’t verbalize. His brother is often a study in contrasts. He tries so hard to be this font of courage and steady calm, but inside, beneath the bowties and the hair and the dapper, he is just a boy who feels too much and doesn’t always know how to show it.

They are Andersons. Fear and doubt and anxiety are not for them.

Cooper moves off the coffee table and slides onto the sofa next to Blaine. Blaine is tense and thrumming with nervous energy next to him. He adjusts the blanket so it falls over his shoulders too, cocooning them both in its warmth and well-worn softness. He remembers when Blaine had gotten the blanket.

It had been their grandfather’s, and it sat on the back of the armchair in the living room of their grandparents’ home for years. Whenever they stayed over Blaine would fall asleep in that chair, curled up in the soft blanket, until after one visit, when they were getting packed up and into the car, grandfather had tucked the blanket snug around Blaine and told him to keep it.

For a long time it had smelled of grandfather’s shaving cream and pipe tobacco. Now it smells of Blaine’s cologne and Kurt’s shampoo.

It takes a moment, where Blaine is stiff and unmoving next to him, but Blaine finally relaxes and slumps against Cooper, curling into his side.

“I had a plan, you know? All these plans because it’s our first Valentine’s together and if I thought I fucked up Christmas last year, I really fucked up Valentine’s Day.”

Cooper bites his lip to stop his smile. Blaine had been so damn excited about the Warblers' performance at the GAP. Cooper hadn’t had the heart to tell him what a god-awful idea it was. Some things a boy needs to learn on his own.

“I was going to bring him little gifts all week at school. I had a list.” Blaine tips his head onto Cooper’s shoulder. “And then on Friday I had this big number all planned out and Tina and Mercedes were going to back me up and it was going to be great and then this – this fucking eye happened and I couldn’t do any of it.”

Blaine stops then, and Cooper hears him sniffle a bit. The hurt of the Warblers’ betrayal isn’t going to soothe over easily.

“And he just – he’s so happy about it. So happy. School was so awful for him for so long and here he’s getting these gifts. In public. And it’s ok. He was over this afternoon and he had the balloons from that fucking Gorilla Gram and just kept looking at them and grinning and then looking back at me with his big stupid perfect eyes and fuck. Fuck.”

Cooper leans his cheek against the top of Blaine’s head. The curls are soft and ungelled for once.

“Do you have any idea who it could be?” He asks.

“NO! There’s no one else out at McKinley. And I can’t think of anyone who might be. It’s not like Dalton, it’s – it’s dangerous there.”

“Apparently it’s dangerous at Dalton too.” Cooper doesn’t even try to hide the venom in his voice. He still can’t believe that the Headmaster did nothing to Sebastian over this. His storming into the office and demanding the kid get expelled, or at least suspended, had been a useless gesture. Throwing open those doors had felt damn good though.

“Don’t, Coop. Just don’t. Not right now.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“There’s going to be a party, a dance, at Breadstix. For Valentine’s.” Blaine sighs from deep in his chest and burrows in closer to Cooper’s side. Blaine has a complicated relationship with dances, even after junior prom, and Cooper knows it can’t be easier for him to want to go to one.

“Well you know what you need to do? Go to this hootenanny and claim your boy.” Cooper squeezes Blaine’s shoulder. “You didn’t get to sing him some disgustingly, sickeningly romantic song at school, but you can do it there. Show this secret admirer what’s what.”

“Coop,”

“Oh come on, you know you want to. I know what you’re like. I’ll help you plan it!”

Blaine groans, but a smile creeps onto his face. “Like that’ll go well. I know what you’re like.”

“Hey! It’s Not Unusual went well, didn’t it?” Cooper has fond memories of finding videos of the Carlton dance and teaching it to Blaine. It was the perfect way to raise his spirits the first week after getting kicked out.

“Until Quinn lit the piano on fire. Poor defenseless piano.”

“Well Kurt loved it. He told me so.”

Blaine just grunts again, but Cooper can tell, Cooper knows that Blaine’s thinking about it. His brother has always been one for the big scene, the grand gesture, and he’s so very desperate to make his and Kurt’s Valentine’s Day memorable.

“Oh man, you know what we should do?”

“I can’t imagine.”

“We should make you a Valentine’s eye patch! Heart-shaped with rhinestones and glitter and the works.”

Blaine’s bark of laughter is just the reaction Cooper was looking for.

***

Blaine is getting ready for the big dance Cooper’s bedroom, testing different bow ties against his shirt, when his phone rings. Cooper knows it’s Kurt by the ringtone, and by the way Blaine’s face lights up as he grabs for the phone.

“Hey you!”

Cooper doesn’t know what Kurt says just then, but he knows it can’t be good, not with the way Blaine’s face falls in an instant.

Blaine turns his back, wrapping an arm around his chest as he does, but Cooper catches the confusion and the hurt on his face.

Cooper tries not to listen, he does, to give Blaine a little privacy, but his tone of voice, soft and aching, but growing angry with each passing second, and the lowering slump of his shoulders is all Cooper needs - something has gone wrong.

Blaine ends the call with a quiet, curt ok bye and slams his phone down on the dresser. He stands there, chest moving with barely contained anger, and Cooper knows his brother is wishing there were a punching bag anywhere near by. He keeps meaning to set one up in the basement - he’ll do it this weekend.

“Everything ok, B?” Cooper asks, taking a cautious step towards Blaine. He wants nothing more than to wrap Blaine up in his arms, but Blaine’s too tightly wound for that at the moment.

“It was him,” Blaine spits out. “The secret admirer. It was Karofsky.”

Cooper’s brow furrows. “The kid who bullied Kurt?”

“Bullied and attacked and assaulted and threatened to kill? Yeah. That kid.” Blaine clenches his fists tight and feels his nails dig deep into his palms.

“This whole fucking week it’s been him. All of it. The candy and the cards and fucking flowers. And he told Kurt to meet him before the dance and Kurt did thinking it was me. And it wasn’t. It hasn’t been me at all. He told Kurt he loves him! That he fucking loves him.” Blaine presses the heels of his hands to his forehead, as if he could force whatever he’s thinking, whatever he’s imaging, out of his head.

Cooper adds one Karofsky to the growing list of people he will never be all right with.

“I can’t. I just. Why is everything always so...why does it always-” Blaine stops, takes a deep breath, and closes his eyes for a long moment. Cooper watches a million emotions flicker across his face before Blaine squares his shoulders and turns to face the mirror.

He grabs at the ends of the bow tie he’d selected and struggles to get it to knot correctly, but the ends slip from his fingers over and over.

Cooper sighs and moves to stand in front of Blaine, batting his hands out of the way and grasping the ends of the tie in his own fingers.

“I don’t know if this is a good idea,” Blaine mutters, licking his dry lips. He lets his brother help him with his bowtie since his hands are suddenly a little too shaky to do a decent job of it. The anger is bleeding out of him, leaving behind hurt and doubt and a ache in his gut that’s threatening to crawl it’s up and out his throat.

“What? No, you can’t back out now. You’re supposed to be there in half an hour.” Cooper gives Blaine’s deep red bowtie one final tug, making sure it’s perfect.

“Yeah but, now, after - after this,” Blaine stops himself from saying anything else. He shoves his hands into his pockets and scruffs the floor with his shoe.

He doesn’t think he’ll ever like Karofsky, not after everything he’s done to Kurt, and almost certainly not after this. Blaine can’t imagine becoming friendly with the person who sent his boyfriend gifts for Valentine’s Day, and declared his love for him, knowing full well Kurt is spoken for.

“Do not let that Karofsky kid ruin this for you, for either of you.” Cooper places both hands on Blaine’s shoulders and forces his brother to look at him. “This is about you and Kurt and no one else. Do you understand me?”

Blaine nods. Sometimes he loves his brother; the rest of the time he doesn’t know what he’d do without him.

Cooper grins and pulls Blaine into a quick hug, kissing his forehead.

“All right then,” he reaches over and grabs the newly made eye patch off the dresser. “I can’t believe you didn’t let me bedazzle this. It would have looked great.”

Blaine’s rolls his eyes, both them (and damn does that feel good), before sliding the eye patch on for the last time. “As if I’d let you anywhere near a hot glue gun. Not again. Not after last time.”

Cooper helps him adjust the heart-shaped patch that just about matches the bowtie, then he smooths down Blaine’s lapels. “Hey, the glitter finally came out, didn’t it?”

“Uh-huh, sure.”

“Hold on,” Cooper goes to his closet and stretches up on his toes to grab something from the top shelf.

“Here,” he plops a hat down on top of Blaine’s head. It’s a little small, but it works. “Go get your boy.”

***

Hours later Cooper’s phone buzzes with a text:

Kurt’s coming over. Be gone.

Cooper laughs and thumbs back a quick response:

Atta boy.