There’s a photo on the wall, a polaroid of the sort that you normally find tucked away in family albums, dusty reminders of a time long past; the kind of photo that is shelved or stuck in a cupboard, taken out occasionally and smiled at fondly before it is put away again. This particular photo is different though, hanging proudly alongside awards and certificates, and Blaine is the only one who really knows why.

It’s not the best photo – in fact it’s pretty awful. It shows two hands, linked loosely and dangling gently over crumbled earth; one of them is tan and calloused, the other pale and slender. There’s a blur of orange, yellow and red in the background that can be identified as a fire, the edge of a high heel that only a well-trained eye could describe as Santana’s, and half of a bottle of beer on the other side. The photo is tilted at an angle, skewed so that the fire appears to be levitating; it’s dark and only the joined hands are lit up by the dull flash of a camera that Blaine remembers buying at the beginning of that summer (so he could memorise everything about it, about you, he’d said, smiling brilliantly when Kurt had blushed). It’s a terribly photo, really, but still it stays there on the wall, in all its hazy glory.

He’s often been asked why he keeps it, what it’s done to earn it’s place on the wall, but he’ll usually just shrug the question off with a quick ‘good old days, you know?’.

In reality, though, it’s so much more than that; it’s a reminder of all those New Directions summer parties, of singing and drunken-ness and a bit of nostalgic crying towards the end; it’s a reminder of whispered confessions over shared bottles of something (finally opening up about his parents to Kurt), of watching the sky tinge pink, purple and blue and the sun create a blazing trail on the horizon before slumping against each other in exhaustion. Most of all, though, it’s a reminder of sitting on the faded white picket fence at the edge of the Berrys’ yard, just sitting there holding hands and listening to crickets chirp contentedly; of realising oh, I want to spend forever with you and isn’t that just wonderful? under the glow of Rachel’s Chinese lanterns.

Kurt’s tried to get him to take the photo down, arguing that it’s ‘ugly and messy’ and ‘my hand looks like it belongs to a vampire, Blaine, honestly!’, but Blaine just laughs and kisses him to get him to shut up, because he thinks it’s flawless and he has a feeling it won’t be coming down any time soon.