Later that night after Kurt had escorted Blaine back to the Hufflepuff common rooms with a hug that lasted for several minutes and a kiss they could’ve been fine with never ending, he returned to the Slytherin ones with one thing in mind; sleep. He was completely drained and he knew his functionality as a person was very low bordering nonexistent.

Still when he saw Santana sitting there on the sofa burritoed in a blanket, looking very distressed, he chose to postpone finding his bed for maybe twenty more minutes. He could take that.

Once Santana noticed Kurt she inhaled sharply and gestured for her best friend to come sit with her.

"I’m so sorry, Kurt. I shouldn’t have said anything. I mean, of course you are handed 99 problems you don't deserve instantly after I tell you that you have none just to get you to listen to mine," Santana shook her head, so visibly upset with herself and her words earlier that day it was almost too endearing. "Shit..."

"99 of those problems have to do with Sebastian, 'Tana. You have nothing to do with any of them" Kurt assured sternly, sitting down next to her on the couch. It was a few minutes past midnight and they were definitely supposed to be in bed, but neither of them could really sleep now.

"Yeah, I know that" She nodded, turning to look at her best friend. "But I still feel horrible. And I want to help you. I can punch Sebastian in the face. Screw magic, let me just do that” The Latina was practically pleading for Kurt’s approval to punch their fellow Slytherin, but Kurt wasn’t going to give her that. Of course not. That didn’t stop him from being touched by the gesture though.

"I do really love you, you know that right?" Kurt tilted his head to the right, looking at her with a tiny smile.

"I do know" Santana sighed, leaning on Kurt's shoulder and pulling the blanket she was under to cover him as well although it was more than warm enough without. "And I love you, too. Really. You're the most tolerable person in this joint."

Kurt furrowed his brows at this. "And Brittany?"

"Oh" Santana exhaled. "She doesn't count. She's not on the chart."

"What? I thought you got your crap together and-" Kurt exclaimed a little too outraged and suddenly a lot too invested in the welfare of his best friend’s relationship.

Santana snorted, putting her hand over his mouth. "Hush, you dumb. Duh I did. She's not on the chart because I love her - in a different way. She has her own chart."

Kurt rolled his eyes with a smile, removing her hand from in front of his mouth. "She gets her own chart and I share one with all of Hogwarts? Not cool" His attempt to sound offended failed massively and he just sounded very amused. He still learned new things every day with Santana it seemed.

"Oh, please. You're such a hypocrite. I'm sure you have a chart for Blaine and ONLY Blaine, too."

Kurt laughed. "I do not have a chart for Blaine! Or for anyone for that matter. I don't understand what it is about you and these charts."

"Leave me and my charts alone, Hummel."

“Gladly” He chuckled, leaning his head on Santana’s shoulder. “And hey, Satan?”

Santana snorted, wrapping her arms around Kurt. “Yeah?”

“I’m not going to let you physically assault the Cheshire cat.”

“I will find a way.”

-

On Monday morning at 9am Kurt and Blaine were in their shared charms class, sitting at the very back and holding hands under the table - and paying very little attention to the actual lesson.

What their teacher was endlessly preaching them about was surely something about how important and hard the upcoming N.E.W.Ts next year were going to be. She was also talking about it like it wasn’t something they had heard more than a hundred times just in the last six months. They seriously might as well already have been let out of school two weeks ago because ever sine June maybe one fourth of all teachers still had classes that required an attention span of some sort.

Therefore there were much more important things to be focused on.

“You’ve actually slept, right?” Blaine whispered to Kurt whilst simultaneously nodding and pretending to follow the happenings of the class unlike Kurt who openly wasn’t.

The Slytherin chuckled very quietly and nodded. “Yeah. I have. I wanted to ask you the same, actually.”

The boy turned to look at him then. “I have, don’t worry” Blaine twirled his wand in his hands and worried his bottom lip between his lips.

Kurt furrowed his brows at him in concern, reading his body language very differently than his words. “Everything okay?”

“Yeah, yeah” He promised, a sudden unsure expression on his face. “I just couldn’t stop wondering if you had been up, not being able to sleep, thinking you’d made a mistake with deciding to keep going and not caring about Sebastian or, really anyone like him.”

Kurt sighed, glancing at the front of the classroom where their professor was scribbling what looked suspiciously like the last notes of the class on the board. He turned to look back at Blaine, lifting their hands on top of the table and squeezing them. “No, absolutely not” He shook his head. “We went through this. I am one hundred and two percent sure about you. I love you, you know that. You’re just being irrational. ”

The Hufflepuff scoffed humorlessly. “Well, that’s what I’m best at.”

The class ended then, sending the students up from their chairs to sprint out of the room struggling with their arms full of papers and books. Blaine stood up too and was going to turn to leave, but Kurt kept his right hand in his and didn’t let go.

“Hey” Kurt spoke softly. “Wait.”

He gathered his stuff up and walked out of the classroom with Blaine, turning him fully towards himself when the hallway had cleared. “That is not true.”

“Kurt, it’s fine. I honestly sometimes really feel like it is. That the only talent I have is being a dysfunctional ball of anxiety and irrational thoughts.”

The Slytherin frowned at him, feeling a painful tinge in his chest. He grabbed Blaine’s shoulders and looked him in the eyes, willing to convince him otherwise. “No. That’s nonsense” He said persistently, squeezing the boy’s shoulders when an idea came to him. “Actually, you know what… I’ll prove it to you.”

The Hufflepuff’s eyebrows rose. “Prove it to me?”

Kurt smiled. “Yeah. I’ll deliver you a list of ten things I know for a rock-solid fact you can do better than breed anxious thoughts.”

Blaine smiled, as well, just plain staring at Kurt as his heart performed some sort of acrobatic routine in his chest. “Well, good luck then."

-

“What’s that?” Santana peered at the piece of paper in front of Kurt from behind his back. She squinted her eyes, seeing ten numbers scribbled on the left side of the paper. Nothing else.

“Nothing that has something to do with you, my dearest” Kurt quipped at her, twirling the quill in between his index and middle finger.

“Oh!” The girl exclaimed, skillfully ignoring Kurt’s words. “You’re finally creating your own damn chart, aren’t you? Taking it to the next level! I’m so glad to have inspired you-“

The boy scoffed and threw a piece of paper kind of in her direction, barely hitting her on the shoulder. “Don’t flatter yourself.”

Santana sat down next to him, tilting her head at what she firmly believed was going to be a next level chart of people he tolerated.

“Okay” Kurt exhaled, knowing that he would need to tell Santana what she wanted to hear or he’d never get her off of his back. Their friendship was most definitely one of a kind. “Blaine freaked out a bit today and when I told him that he was being irrational he told me he felt like it was the only thing he’s good at. That is obviously not true. So I promised to make him a list of ten things I know he’s better at.”

“Okay, that’s sweet and all but you told him he was being irrational? Not cool.”

“No, Santana. That’s not what it is. He gets really bad anxiety and irrational thoughts are the very thing that leads to all that. So this time I’m not a jerk. It is an actual problem he has.”

“Oh.” Santana said, voice considerably quieter. “I’m sorry about that.”

“Me, too.” Kurt sighed.

Blaine hadn’t had it easy with his mental health. The things that he’d went through were things that Kurt knew have made people bitter and angry and mean before. But not Blaine. He hadn’t permanently become none of those things. Of course, bitterness and anger are basic human emotions and because Blaine was a human he felt those things too, but not because of struggles he’s faced. Blaine was so kind and so considerate and sometimes it left Kurt completely in awe of him. It was like he was superhuman.

But he wasn't. In Kurt's eyes, yes - but not really. He was just those things from his very heart. They were traits that were so deep within him they couldn’t be touched or taken away, not by anything or anyone. That was why he was a Hufflepuff. Not because he chose to be kind but because it came to him naturally – it was the only way he knew how to be and how to treat people.

What broke Kurt’s heart was how Blaine was so gentle with everyone but often failed to treat himself the same way.

“So that’s why I’m helping him. He can be really hard on himself and I don’t like to see that, not when it only brings him down.”

Santana was quiet for a moment and Kurt went back to pondering what exactly he was going to write down, but then she said; “Okay. Wow. You really are in love with the boy. I’ve never seen you care about anyone like this.”

Kurt was stuck between agreeing and ignoring the girl when she chuckled, somehow aware of his inner debate. “You don’t need to say anything. Just know that I’m very happy to know that for sure now. And he’s very lucky, too.”

It was Kurt’s time to have a quiet moment. He turned to look at Santana, a smile slowly breaking on his face. When he cooed at her she knew that she’d made a grand mistake.

“Where is this coming from, best friend?” He asked, talking to the girl like she was a small, adorable child while she covered her ears with her hands.

“God, Hummel” She grimaced, shaking her head. “I take back what I said.”

The boy snorted at her. “My question to you is what in the hell made you that way?”

“Feelings?” She asked, hands still covering her ears.

Kurt gasped, trying very hard not to laugh. “What? You have those?”

“I hate you.”

-

It wasn’t long until dinner when Kurt finally finished the list and sprinted out of the Slytherin common rooms to go find Blaine. Lucky for him the boy was already heading to dinner and he caught him right outside the Great Hall.

“Hey, Blaine,” He came up from behind the Hufflepuff and grabbed his arm.

“Hi” Blaine turned around and smiled at him. “Will you come eat with us?”

“Actually I was wondering if I could just borrow you for a second?” Kurt asked with a soft chuckle.

“Sure” He said without hesitation, walking a little further from the masses into the Hufflepuff corridors right by the kitchen.

“So” The Slytherin pulled the small piece of paper from the pocket of his robes and straightened it out, looking up at Blaine with a smile. “I got this done.”

He handed the paper to Blaine whose eyes scanned the paper thoroughly, his smile growing by every sentence he read further.

“Quidditch was too much of an obvious one” Kurt said and Blaine looked up from the paper questioningly. “Which is why it’s not on there. I tried to be a little more creative. But you should know that you’re better at that than anyone at this school.”

The Hufflepuff bit his lower lip to contain his smile and focused back on the list titled with much thought; The ten things Blaine Anderson is enviably great at by Kurt Hummel.

Number one and two were ‘Being kind’ and ‘being compassionate’ which were both personality traits that he did pride in having, so he read on – now much more confident that the list wasn’t going to be anything too crazy.

Only he got a little ahead of himself.

3. Being incredibly brave 
4. Making professors feel like their knowledge and devotion to teaching are actually being appreciated 
5. Putting people in their place so gracefully they have no idea they’re being told off

“Kurt” Blaine laughed. “This-“ He couldn’t quite find the right words to say. The whole list to begin with was such an utterly Kurt thing to do, in such a Kurt way and he considered himself just that much luckier there and then. Kurt had certainly proven his point already halfway through his attempt, but before Blaine could tell him that Kurt spoke up.

“Number ten’s kind of the most important one, so at least read that before feedback.”

Blaine did as suggested, looking back down at the very bottom of the paper to read point number ten.

10. Giving a Slytherin a chance to love him despite other slightly more idiotic Slytherins’ idiocy being triggered to the max by it

His heart started beating wildly, matching up to the way Kurt’s had been ever since he’d handed the paper to his boyfriend. He looked back up at Kurt, watching the boy’s eyes impatiently waiting for him to say something, the realization of just how much he loved him filling up his entire mind, heart and soul.

Instead of unsuccessfully trying to stutter out words this time, Blaine took a step towards Kurt and grabbed the sides of his face with the paper still in his hands, pressing their lips together in a kiss that could’ve just been the most passionate one they’d yet shared. Yet it somehow managed to be very tender and sweet at the very same time.

“So can you accept the list?” Kurt asked with a wide smile once they parted, sounding breathless enough to make Blaine’s toes curl. “Did I make my point?”

The Hufflepuff laughed a breathy laugh and shook his head ever so slightly. “Not all of it. But I guess I will, if you really do think so.”

“I do” Kurt answered instantly. “I really do.”

“And I might not know what it’s like to live with anxiety like that, but what I do know is that I don’t mind, not one percent, being here for you and helping you in any way that I can.”

Blaine breathed out a quivering breath, biting the inside of his cheek. He really didn’t know what to say or how to be around Kurt sometimes and what blew his mind was that it was all for good things.

“Yeah, point made” Blaine finally said, answering Kurt’s other question. “And for the record, you are much less of an idiot than you think you are.”

“Okay-” The Slytherin tried to sound mock offended, but all of that was gone the second Blaine leaned on his shoulder and hugged him tightly, the rest of his planned sentence coming out as more of a whisper than anything. “Here I was thinking you loved me.”

“I do. So much.”