One Year Ago

He's looking through some old pictures when he sees it. Blaine had come to him that morning and shown him his scrapbook and pointed out a picture of him and Kurt from their first Christmas together, well the space where it was. He'd asked for Kurt's copy because he'd ‘lost' his. Kurt had just smiled fondly, pressed a kiss to his fiancé's full lips and gone to look where his pictures were safely under their bed. It wasn't lost, Kurt knew that. He'd seen it, worn, stained and ripped tucked under one of Blaine's singing trophies at his house after they got engaged and had assumed he'd been sleeping with it for a while. He couldn't blame him. He had one of Blaine's pictures, as worn and lost as that one to keep him company until the warm, wriggly, snoring version had turned up to fulfil what a picture never could.

His breath hitches and he pulls out the rectangle of card, as shiny and bright as it was when his dad had taken it. It's of himself and Finn after their Nationals win. They're still in their black and red outfits and Finn's holding the trophy across them while they both cheer into the camera. Blaine and Rachel are in the background nearly out of view of the camera. Rachel's crying and Blaine's doing his cute little clap, his head turned to Rachel but it's Finn Kurt can't drag his eyes from. His brother, so happy, so alive and a tear rolls down his face.

He sniffs and crosses his legs, settling in to look at the photo and sighs. His mind going back to the moments after their win.

“Finn slow down!”

“We won! We won! Where's mom and Burt? Oops, sorry Blaine. Burt! Look!”

Kurt shakes his head as Finn bulldozes through the corridor like the quarterback he is, almost flattening poor Blaine in the process. He wields the trophy and Burt laughs at him, pushing the trophy out of his face.

“Okay, okay Finn. Congratulations guys. Come here Kurt; let me get my two boys. Kurt you just won.”

The two teenagers look at each other and turn, cheering and Kurt can hear Rachel happy-crying and Blaine giggling in the background while their dad cheers with them. After their picture there was many more with all four of them, Blaine and Kurt, Finn and Rachel, Kurt, Finn and Burt, Blaine and Burt and Rachel and Burt. It's an incredibly happy moment, one of the many that year.

He looks up at the calendar on their bedside table and it hits him like a truck. One year. One year ago he was sitting, probably right here; the memory of that day is slightly hazy still. The phone rang and through his father's deep voice, made deeper by the tears it was laden with, came the words that made his world tilt and fracture. Your brother's dead.

He sniffs and wipes the tears off of the shiny surface quickly. The year has made the pain easier, what was once a gaping hole with tattered edges, nerve-endings flaring to life every time something scraped against it; is now still a hole, there always will be but it's smoothed around. He can remember Finn without crying hysterically or wanting to eat a cheesecake shop's worth of produce and he can talk about his brother with his friends and family, especially Blaine. He can talk to Finn, and that makes him smile.

“Oh Finn,” He starts and it's so different than how he started a year ago with anger and screams and why's. “Everything's so different now. Blaine and I are living together, though we did have a little separation because he got clingy and annoying and I turned into the anti-fiancé. Don't worry; we didn't break up, though you probably know that. Rachel got Funny Girl, and then ran off to Los Angeles to star in a show about herself. She's enjoying it, well she should be, it's about her. Mercedes is on tour and Brit is her backup dancer. Sam's back in Ohio. No-one knows what he's doing, not even him. Quinn, Mike, Artie and Tina are all doing well in their colleges. Oh, Tina got into Brown.  Puck's doing well.  He's in the air force, making a difference like you wanted to. You did though, didn't you? You changed everyone around you. You changed me. I miss you so much.”

“Hey,” Blaine's quiet voice breaks into his tears and he feels warm, strong arms wrap around him from behind and Blaine pulling him back until he's sitting in his fiancé's lap. “What's this? Oh Kurt.” He says soothingly, taking the picture from him and Kurt chokes on a sob.

“One year.” He rasps and as he turns to cuddle into Blaine's chest he sees hazel eyes landing on the calendar and tearing up themselves.

“One year ago I was lying in my bed, thinking about you, going over how you said yes, that you couldn't just say it once and then someone hammered on the door at the same time my phone rang. I opened the door as I answered the phone. Do you remember?” He asks and Kurt nods against his shoulder. “Your dad was there and you were crying down the phone and all he said was Finn. I bought plane tickets and I had you in my arms by that evening.”

“All I could think about was you. If I lost you…” He trails off and Blaine's fingers lift his chin up and he's hooked by those beautiful hazel eyes, just like every time, like the first time and just like that he's reminded of every time they were there for each other, and the once they weren't. Blaine doesn't say it, he doesn't need to. He can feel the ‘you never will' as plainly as he heard the tenor of his fiancé singing Not While I'm Around and the warmth of his love wrapping himself around him like right now. They kiss briefly and Kurt rests his head back on Blaine's chest after they climb onto the bed and his mind drifts to the others spread over the US whose eyes landed on a calendar and head filled with a voice from a year ago.

Tears fall on pictures in Ohio, New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Chicago. In Los Angeles Rachel sinks to the ground, her face screwed up in pain as tears flow down her face, for the man she loved, for the man she lost, the future she'll never know and one year ago when she walked into the loft and looked into Kurt's blue eyes, saw the tears on his face, the broken heart in his chest, and her world came apart.

In a quiet voice she sings.

And she wishes today

was one year ago

when you cared so much for her

and loved her so

not a doubt in her mind that it would still be you

because the love that you shared

it was true