“Ugh, I feel like I was run over by a bulldozer.”

Kurt blinked wearily at the light pouring through his hotel room shades, with hardly any memory of the night before. He remembered getting the (New, New) New Directions checked into the Palms hotel, shouting at them over the cacophony of the casino floor that there would be no drinking, gambling, or any other funny business (who the hell thought Las Vegas would be an appropriate venue for a high school show choir competition?). He remembered the rehearsal in Conference Room B right after dinner at the all-you-can-eat buffet, in retrospect a terrible idea; the kids were sluggish and one threw up as a result of crab legs of questionable origin. He remembered going down to the casino bar after the curfew bed-check, where he ran into...Blaine.

Oh, fuck.

The New Directions and the Dalton Academy Warblers had both participated in the same Invitational, but the Show Choir board had placed them in different regions. Now they were competing against each other at Nationals for show choir supremacy. Sure, they were on friendly terms now; Kurt had accepted Blaine’s new relationship with Dave, and while things didn’t work out romantically with Walter, it had given Kurt a much-needed confidence boost. So yes, he and Blaine were back to being good, platonic friends.

Which didn’t explain why he could hear a very hungover Blaine mumbling about bulldozers while Kurt was in bed…

Naked.

“Shit!” Kurt’s eyes burst wide open, a move he immediately regretted when the bright sun hit his pupils and slammed them into pinpoints. He squeezed them shut, only to open one back up just to check and be sure that what he thought was happening was in fact happening. Yep; there Blaine was, laying on his stomach, naked as a jaybird. “Shit, shit, shit!”

“Ow, stop yelling,” Blaine groaned, pulling a pillow over his head and against his ears.

Kurt looked around the room, which looked like something out of The Hangover (which he only watched for Bradley Cooper); he caught his reflection in the mirror over the dresser and was thankful he didn’t have a face tattoo or missing teeth...he only hoped that there wasn’t a live tiger in the bathroom. He quickly located his briefs tangled up in the bedspread and pulled them on. “Blaine, wake up,” he said. When he got no response he called out louder; “Blaine!”

“What?” Blaine shot upright like a rocket, immediately raising his left arm to block the light like a vampire exposed to a crucifix. 

Kurt huffed out a breath in frustration. “What the hell happened last night? Last I remember…” he drifted off when he noticed a rather prominent bandage on Blaine’s left hand. “Wait, what’s wrong with your hand?”

“My hand? What…” Blaine looked down at the bandage. “Huh, I must have hurt it last night. But...how would I have hurt it? Oh God I didn’t punch anyone, did I?”

“I don’t know, Blaine… I remember checking in on the kids, then seeing you at the bar, and then...” Kurt shrugged, struggling to recall. 

“Um, Kurt? Did you happen to notice you have a bandage too?”
 
“I what?” Kurt looked down, couldn’t believe he hadn’t noticed it. A piece of gauze and surgical tape wrapped around his left…ring…finger…
 
“Oh my God,” he said as he started to undo the wrapping, hoping against hope it wasn’t what he thought it was. “Oh my God oh my God oh my God no no no no…”
 
When the gauze was gone, all that was left was a tattoo in simple black script - right where a wedding band would be: Blaine.
 
He looked up; Blaine had taken off his own bandage and was staring at his hand. Sure enough, there it was; Kurt, in the same black script, permanently inked on Blaine’s left ring finger.
 
“Oh God,” Blaine murmured. “What did we do?”
 
Kurt started to ransack the room, rambling to Blaine, to himself, to a god he didn’t believe in. “It...it doesn’t mean anything! They’re just tattoos, I have one and they screwed it up, and I got it fixed, what they are and where they are doesn’t mean anything! Where the hell are my pants?”
 
“Um, I found them,” he heard Blaine say, but his voice sounded off, like he was in another headspace. Kurt turned around and saw Blaine with his pants in one hand, and in the other, a couple of pieces of paper that Blaine was staring at intently.
 
Kurt walked to Blaine gently, as if he were a fawn that would run off at the slightest movement. Getting closer, he saw what Blaine had apparently found in one of Kurt’s pants pockets. One was a photograph of the two of them, Blaine’s arms around Kurt planting a kiss on his cheek as an Elvis impersonator in a spangled jumpsuit and Hawaiian lei looked on. The other very clearly said across the top, “Clark County Nevada Certified Abstract of Marriage.”

Oh what had they done indeed.

~~~~~

“I have a tattoo, Kurt. A tattoo! You know me, I would never get a tattoo!” By now Blaine and Kurt were both dressed, pacing a bare spot in the carpet. 

“Gee, Blaine, I’m not as concerned with that right now as I am the fact that we are married!” Kurt yelled. “How am I going to tell my dad? And I still have to get my students together for competition tonight, and so do you!” Kurt’s voice kept rising.  “Oh God Rachel will have a field day…”

Blaine stopped his pacing. “God, Dave.” His face fell. “How am I going to tell Dave?” 

Kurt turned around with a steely look of resolve. “We won’t. We’ll get an annulment. We got married at the drop of a hat, we can get it annulled just as quickly.”

“No...Kurt, you don’t get it.” Blaine sat on the bed, looking like someone had just kicked his puppy. “I just...cheated on my boyfriend. Again.” 

Kurt frowned. “Oh…” He saw the look on Blaine’s face and suddenly had an idea of just how guilt-ridden and depressed he must have felt when Eli happened. “Blaine...he’ll understand. I mean we were black-out drunk, we don’t even remember it, I’m pretty sure we can make a case that the marriage is invalid, it’ll be fine.”

“No it won’t,” Blaine cried into his hands. “It won’t because Dave doesn’t deserve this, neither of us does, it wasn’t supposed to be like this.”

Kurt sat next to Blaine, rubbing his back to comfort him. “What wasn’t supposed to be like this?”

“This,” Blaine looked up, motioning between them. “This marriage, these ring tattoos. We were supposed to get married in Central Park, with star lilies and a string quartet and doves that pooped glitter and actual rings and all of our family and friends, not in Vegas by a fat Elvis, both of us so drunk we don’t even remember it.” Kurt blinked up at Blaine. “Kurt, I never stopped loving you, wanting to be with you. And the stuff Sue pulled made me realize that, but...but you had moved on, you were going on that date with that online guy,” Blaine shrugged, “and I figured, why mess up a good thing with Dave when you were moving on?”

Kurt bristled at that. “Blaine, I was moving on because I thought you had moved on. You know the whole reason I came back to Lima in the first place was because of you. But then Rachel offered me this chance to bring back the glee club, and I thought great, I can help McKinley, I can earn credit at NYADA, and I can get you back...and then I saw you and Dave and I figured...well, that was that. I could barely think of going back to New York without you and I just...got stuck, I guess.”

Blaine laughed humorlessly. “Yeah, I think we both did. But I think I needed it, you know? I needed to...not need someone.”

“What do you mean?” said Kurt.

Blaine turned to face him. “Kurt...I never should have transferred to McKinley-- no, let me finish,” he said as Kurt tried to interrupt. “I know you wanted your senior year to be special, but Kurt, I made my whole life about you. And I lost myself along the way, and I think that’s one of the reasons we had so many problems. And then you left, and I didn’t know what to do. You know I came this close to going back to Dalton senior year?”

Kurt smiled wistfully. “Actually, yeah...Finn. He, um, he told me.”

Blaine sighed as they shared a moment of sadness. “I figured he would. But you know it was Sam that made me see that I had a family at McKinley, and you know I was doing great for a while...until we hooked up at the wedding. And then it was like all the progress I made had been undone. All I could think about was being with you, marrying you, and I was right back where we started. I can’t help but think...maybe if we had stayed at separate schools, the long distance wouldn’t have felt as lonely. The Warblers wouldn’t have gone rogue; I totally would have been head of the council. I’d still have you, but I’d still have myself, too.”

Kurt frowned. “But we can’t undo any of that now. Come to think of it, we can’t really undo this,” he said as he held Blaine’s left hand in his, rolling his eyes at their matching tattoos. 

Blaine sighed wistfully at their joined hands and their tattoos. “Kurt, I think they have lasers for that…”

“No, not just these, the marriage,” Kurt said. “Even if we get an annulment, in the eyes of the law we will never have been married, but we’ll know.”

“So what do you want to do?”

Kurt stood up, and pulled Blaine up with him. “We are going to table this. We have time, I think 30 days? Maybe more? And in the meantime, we are going to go back to our rooms and get our glee clubs together for final dress. And then my show choir is going to blow your Warblers out of the water.”

Blaine laughed. “Oh really?”

“Yeah. Because I know what it does to you when I win,” Kurt winked.

“Ah, you say when as if it’s a lock, Hummel, I wouldn’t be too sure.” Blaine paused. “And then? After the championship, what do we do about this?”

Kurt sighed. “You talk to David. You be honest with him, but kind. And then...we’ll talk. We have a lot to discuss. And it probably wouldn’t be a bad idea for us to find someone to talk to as well. Like a therapist.”

Blaine nodded. As much as he loved Kurt, they still had a lot of issues that love alone wouldn’t solve. “But a real one, right, not our guidance counselor?” 

“As much as I love Ms. Pillsbury and appreciated her efforts at the time, yes, a real one.”

“Good,” Blaine said. “Well, those teenagers won’t wake themselves up. I’d...better go.” He walked to the door and stepped out, with Kurt right behind him.

Kurt stopped him in the hallway. “Oh, one more thing?”

“What’s that?” Blaine turned just in time for Kurt to lean into him and kiss him softly on the mouth. He gasped slightly, then closed his eyes to savor the moment and the feel of Kurt’s lips on his for the first time since they had broken up (at least that he could remember soberly).

Kurt pulled away and whispered, “My glee club is so going to kick your glee club’s ass.”

The door closed, and Blaine stood in the hallway. He smiled, and as he walked down to wake up his Warblers for breakfast, he knew that one way or another he would come out of Vegas a winner.