Later that evening, after Finn, Rachel and Mercedes had left, Blaine had fallen asleep without a sound on Kurt’s shoulder during the last bars of the reprise of Somewhere, leaving Kurt to cry through the final minutes of the film on his own. The room was dark except for the white glow of the laptop screen resting on both their legs as they sat in the too-small bed, and the unflickering lights of the ever present monitors and machines; red and green like Christmas lights. Blaine’s dressing gown was draped over their shoulders and, with wet cheeks, Kurt sank into its warmness. It smelt like Blaine; warm, safe, beautiful. The dark mahogany hair on his shoulder fell against his chin and tickled him. Smiling through his tears as the credits began to roll, darkening the room even further, Kurt reached up and brushed the soft curls with his fingers, revealing the creeping scar. Blaine murmured in his sleep and nestled into Kurt’s shirt with a sigh, shrugging his shoulder and raising his hand so that it fell onto Kurt’s chest. Kurt smiled again.

He glanced at the glowing clock in the corner of the screen. 23:19. He should have been home hours ago. Blaine should have been long asleep. But Finn would make an excuse for him, and there was always a bed or a chair for him here. Somewhere. Somehow. With a tiny chuckle he hummed the next few bars in his light soprano: we’ll find a new way of living…

He took up Blaine’s hand. And we’re halfway there…

A further tear ran down his cheek at the melodrama of it; there, in the almost black and white hospital room, lying side by side.

“But I get to be Maria…”

He mumbled, into the darkness. Closing the laptop lid quietly, with an immense effort not to move and wake Blaine, he slid it off their legs and onto the side table. There was silence apart from Blaine’s low breathing and the echoes of the wonderful music in his head. Slowly, in a deep cocoon of warmth and pleasure and melodies, Kurt’s eyes closed, and he drifted away.

A cool breeze floating across his face made Kurt wake slowly. A hazy dawn light was filtering around him. He could see a window, a box of light, with gauzy curtains floating around it. His back and neck were stiff, but as he tried to move he felt two weights holding him down. He looked to his right, squinting through his eyelashes in the brightness. Blaine lay there, eyes closed, mouth slightly open, hair a mess as it spread across his shoulder. Kurt remembered where he was.

But then the weight on his other shoulder shifted, and he twisted to look. Blaine’s mom stood there, half raised from her seat, her hand hovering just above him, outstretched. Kurt blinked at her in drowsy confusion, but she smiled.

“Shhh, you’ll wake Blaine.”

Her voice was clear and light. Her flowery dress merged with the posies on the table behind her. Kurt blinked once more.

“Don’t worry.”

She spoke again, looking over his head at Blaine’s sleeping face.

“I haven’t been here long. It’s not eight yet, and I don’t think even the nurse has been in.”

Kurt relaxed his back and leaned into the musty dressing gown which still lay behind them. He realised someone had placed a blanket over his legs. Blaine snuffled into his arm. Seeing him relax, Mrs Anderson dropped back into her chair, placing her hands in her lap. Kurt rubbed his hand over his face; he best make his apologies and leave. He didn’t want any more tension.

“I’m…I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to fall asleep. I just…”

She interrupted him, holding her hand up again.

“No, no, don’t worry. You both looked so peaceful; I bet it was one of the best rests you’ve had in a while?”

Kurt had to nod. It was true.

Mrs Anderson gave a slight giggle and looked down at the floor.

“It’s odd, you know. Even in my hotel room I slept well last night. For the first time since…”

She waved her hand in a vague gesture, but Kurt understood. Since all this. She shrugged.

“Maybe it was because I knew at some unconscious level that he wasn’t alone…wasn’t in pain.”

She bit her lip, smearing her lipstick ever so slightly so that a tiny streak of pink remained on the bottom of her teeth.

“I’m sorry for the way I’ve acted, Kurt. You didn’t deserve it.”

Kurt was silent, held between hot and cold by the warmth of Blaine and the breeze. He watched as Mrs Anderson straightened up to look him in the eye, placing a hand on his arm.

“I know you probably have no sympathy with me for saying this, but the last five or six years have been pretty hard for me and my husband.”

Kurt swallowed and stiffened slightly. He didn’t know where this was going.

“I mean, we love Blaine, we do, with all our hearts. He’s such a ray of sunshine; such a brilliant boy.”

Her eyes drifted over Kurt’s face to her son’s.

“But this…”

Once again she gestured, her hand waving over them both. Kurt felt his heart harden for a moment. Oh. So that’s what she was trying to say. Her hand pressed into his arm, as if trying to hold him down.

“You have to understand, Kurt. When you have children…”

Her voice caught on the word and her gaze quivered. Kurt knew that look. She’d obviously spent a million nights agonising over the fear that Blaine would never have children.

“You…you plan things for them. I know it sounds stupid, but it just happens.”

There was a pause. Blaine shifted again and settled.

“You see their lives planned ahead of you…their school, their achievements, maybe even their failures. And you see them in love.”

Kurt wanted to leave so badly. Could he excuse himself on the grounds that he had to get to school? No…Mrs Anderson knew that McKinley had given him special leave, and that he was allowed to be late or to miss a day if he chose. Her eyes blinked away tears. Oh God, she was going to cry. Kurt looked round at Blaine’s sleeping form, willing the nurse to come in and break the awkwardness. But Mrs Anderson went on regardless, chokingly, and Kurt had the feeling she wasn’t going to stop until she’d confessed her entire heart to him.

“But, Kurt, when Blaine came to us all those years ago, and told us…”

Another sentiment she couldn’t express.

“Well…as parents, you go through so much. You wonder if it’s just a phase, whether there’s just one boy that he’s found, and if you wait, whether it’ll pass. Or you think that it might be something to do with the way you’ve raised him…I know his father went out of his way to try and bond with him…”

Kurt recoiled physically. Oh yes, he’d heard all about the car building projects. She didn’t seem to notice. Her eyes were now fixed on her son.

“Lord, we even got the money together to send him to an all boys’ school so that, away from all the bullying and in some kind of macho environment or something, he might be able to rethink himself.”

Kurt blanched at the words. But they also awoke something in his own mind. Had his father gone through this? When he was four and demanding dresses and Broadway tickets for Christmas?

“Then we kept getting these letters home from his tutors and houseparents, saying how brilliantly he was doing, how popular he was, how he’d found a second family in the Warblers. And we though, stupid as we were, that it might have happened, that something might have changed.”

She pressed his arm again, realising the tone of what she was saying.

“Kurt, you have to realise how na�ve we were, how blinded by our prejudices. We had no reference for this kind of thing, no one to ask about our ‘problem’, as we saw it. We couldn’t tell our friends; though we lived in constant fear that they’d find out. We’d go to church and sit at the back, not making eye contact with our neighbours. I think we had some crazy idea that they’d see it on us, as if it was a disease or something. That we’d smell like a showtune and have glitter in our hair. Our obsession with this single part of our son was stopping us from seeing the man he’d grown into, without our help.”

She sniffed and pursed her lips, but pushed on determinedly.

“And then we went up to the end of term concert. It was the Christmas recital. We hadn’t seen him since that first day, since dropping him off and driving away from our issues. He’d spent the midterm break with a friend and his family. I remember how, over the phone, he’d told us how nice this friend’s sisters had been. And we’d latched onto that single sentence as a breakthrough.”

“But then we sat in the auditorium, amongst all those other parents, and he came out on stage and sang and danced, and we could see that nothing had changed. Well, nothing of that had changed…But he seemed older, braver and happier than we’d ever seen him. All the other parents were whispering, smiling and pointing at our little boy as he stole the show. There were girls, girlfriends of the other boys, I guess, in that audience, looking up at him and cheering. And all the boys were rooting for him; on his side. No one was judging him. They were all just in awe of him. And, Kurt, I’ve never felt pride as I felt in that moment. Never saw the error of my ways so clearly.”

Her fingers lifted from his arm and held his hands.

“We took him home that holiday; and I was so desperate to show him how much I had changed. His father was away with work most of the time, and I think to begin with Blaine was uneasy; neither of us really knew where this suddenly epiphany moment had come from.”

She squeezed his hand.

“When he talked, it was only about school, only about the Warblers, only about you.”

Kurt felt his heart glow and his cheeks redden in spite of himself.

“He would tell me everything that had happened to you, that had driven you away from your own school, and it made me realise what he must have been through in those years when we weren’t watching. Kurt, you helped us so much in those weeks that I can't thank you enough. I was useless at talking to him about what had happened, what we had done, but as soon as I mentioned your name he would open up and talk for hours.”

She gave another small giggle and looked down at the floor.

“You know, it’s funny. All that time I just assumed the two of you were dating. It was just the way he spoke about you.”

She lowered her voice slightly to imitate Blaine’s, letting a smile grow over her face until she looked even more like him.

“‘Kurt said this…’ and ‘Oh, mom, it was so funny, we were in the coffee shop, and this happened, and you should have seen the look on Kurt’s face…’”

Kurt gave a small smile too, glad that the mood had lightened.

“But then this whole thing with Jeremiah came up.”

Kurt’s face tightened. Oh. She glanced up at him, the same look reflected in her eyes. Her mouth creased, as did Kurt’s, and they both laughed.

“I guess we understand each other there?”

She giggled, but then her face grew serious.

“See, Kurt, this is why I’m so sorry. Because, you and me,” She pointed her small fingers with the words, “I think we’re quite alike in some ways. In the way we care about him.”

Her hand twitched, as though she longed to reach out and hold her son, to back up her words.

“Apparently I’m a bit of a specialist when it comes to the single-moment-realisation thing, because when I walked in here this morning, I saw that. The two of you, just sleeping there. It was the most natural, most heart warming thing in the world. You both deserve each other so much.”

Tears crept into her eyes again, and this time Kurt kept watching. He was genuinely surprised and moved. She pulled a waiting tissue from the sleeve of her cardigan and dabbed at her eyes with it.

“So, I just wanted to say…because I had to let you know…how sorry I am for the bitch,” She spat the word out of her mouth, “I was to you in that hallway, and at any other time.”

Kurt saw in his mind the image of her retreating back and dagger eyes as she’d abandoned him without answer in the ER, and those same eyes protecting her son in the hours after he had woken up. He flinched.

“Kurt,” She squeezed his hand again, pleadingly.

“I was so jealous. So jealous that someone else might have taken the son I had regained away from me. It brought back all the anger I thought I’d lost, and filled me with it. I’m sorry…”

She pressed her hand to her face; the very image of Blaine. After a second though, she let a hollow laugh escape through her tears.

“You know what makes me feel worse thought?”

Kurt gulped at the rhetorical question. He had nothing to say; what could he say to make the situation better?

“That I was actually angry at him when I found out what had happened. When I was piecing it together from what Finn, and the police, and those other boys…um…” She struggled with the names, not wanting to pass them over as pointless. “Um…Dave, that’s it. Dave and Noah. From what they all told me. I was so angry that he’d flown in there without a thought for me, or for his father, or for the danger he was putting himself into.”

Kurt sniffed. He knew what she really meant was that she’d blamed him, Kurt, for putting Blaine in that situation.
“I was angry at him for having the courage that I wouldn’t have had.” She spoke frankly. “And because I knew that courage had come from you.”

She leaned forwards and Kurt couldn’t read the look in her eyes.

“But then he came back. He woke up. And he wanted to see me, and he hugged me and said he loved me. And, Kurt, I just couldn’t be mad any more, not if he wasn’t, not if it would hurt him or make him sad.”

She stopped. Blaine moved again on Kurt’s shoulder, his eyelid flickering but then resting once more. Kurt felt that somewhere in that final statement he was meant to find a sincere apology.

“’s ok…”

He muttered, embarrassed at the weakness of the gesture. Blaine’s mom relaxed slightly, leaning backward in her chair. She smiled.

“I know I must sound like…like a complete…Well, anyway, I know I haven’t made things easier, let’s just say. But I hope…well, you really are an amazing boy yourself Kurt, and…”

Kurt knew what she needed. He smiled.

“I forgive you.”

Mrs Anderson smiled bashfully.

“Thank you.”

She half stood again and reaching delicately over Kurt took up Blaine’s hand as well. He fidgeted at the touch and his eyes opened wearily. He blinked a few times, taking in their faces watching him and the feeling of Kurt’s body lying alongside his own.

“Wh…what are you two up to?”

He shifted stiffly and stretched, curling back around Kurt instinctively, nestling into his warmth and softness.

“Nothing, honey,” Said his mom, smiling at Kurt. “Just swapping embarrassing stories about you.”

“Oh…good…”

He puckered his lips dryly.
“Can you shut the curtains?”

His mom let go of their hands and rose, obeying him.

“And keep you voices down?”

He let his eyes drift shut again, but not before gazing up at Kurt’s face and brushing his cheek against his soft shirt.

“Don’t let her get out any baby pictures.”