"What's your middle name?"

Blaine's eyes froze mid-sentence somewhere in the fourth chapter of Virginia Woolf's Orlando. He was sitting on the bed next to Kurt, who was sprawled out on his stomach doing his math homework. Blaine should have known to expect this eventually. He and Kurt had known each other for five months and had been dating for one of them. It was only a matter of time before this question came up, but he was still less than prepared to deal with it.

"I, uh, I don't have one?" He didn't sound nearly as convincing as he'd hoped for.

"Nice try, Anderson."

Blaine felt a small blush blooming in his cheeks. He tried to return to his reading, but his eyes just kept roving over the words without absorbing them. "I don't know, I don't want to say."

"Is it some awful old man name, like Clarence or Walter or Winston?"

"I would have gladly taken any one of those names instead," he mumbled. Kurt positively squealed with delight, his feet flying up behind him to kick in the air above his shoulder blades.

"Ooh, it must be salaciously horrific if you'd rather be Blaine Winston."

"See, this is why I don't want to tell you, if you're just going to make fun of me."

"Oh, come on, it can't be that bad," Kurt argued, smacking the back of his hand against Blaine's knee playfully. "What's in a name?"

"You must understand." Blaine drew the ribbon of his bookmark between the pages of the book and closed it. "I mean, I'm sure you've been teased your whole life for your middle name."

"Not especially," Kurt dismissed, pressing one finger against his notepad and punching the keys on his calculator with his pencil's eraser with the other hand. "I mean, I'm not the world's biggest fan of Alexander—a pretty ordinary name, if you ask me—but at least it protected me from adolescent ridicule."

"Alexander?" Blaine's eyebrows sloped up—a feat considering the natural shape of them. "I thought your middle name was Elizabeth?"

Kurt laughed uproariously, smacking his palm against the bed with mirth, causing his notebook to jump a little. "Oh, no, my parents weren't that cruel."

Blaine leaned over and pointed to the top of Kurt's assignment. "But you always write your name, Kurt Elizabeth Hummel."

"Well, yes." He paused. Sometimes he had to remind himself that he and Blaine were still only getting to know each other. He liked that about them, liked sharing old parts of himself that were new to Blaine. It was like watching a favorite movie over and over again and still finding new things you never noticed before. "But that's not my given name. Legally I'm Kurt Alexander Hummel."

"Then, why—"

"When my mom died," Kurt cut in, and Blaine drew quiet, "I wanted to do something to pay tribute to her memory. So I adopted her first name as my honorary middle name. My dad wouldn't let me legally change it, since his father was an Alexander, but he agreed to let me have it as a sort of stage name."

"Oh." Blaine didn't know what else to say. His stomach felt heavy. It would have been easier to tell his own middle name when he thought that Kurt's was just as embarrassing. Maybe if they'd had that in common, they could have commiserated over the raw deal their parents had bestowed upon them. Now Blaine just felt alone.

Blaine didn't even notice that Kurt had drawn up to a sitting position and leaned back to swipe Blaine's wallet from the pocket of his blazer, folded neatly across the pillows behind them, until he spied Kurt holding Blaine's driver's license up to the light and looking quizzically at it. Blaine dove desperately across the bed, his arms flailing wildly to grab at the card, but Kurt was quick to snap his wrist just beyond Blaine's reach.

"What are you—"

"Ryan?"

Blaine sighed and, utterly defeated, dropped still, landing him sprawled across Kurt's crossed legs. He lay there briefly, too deflated to move, his head draped over the side of Kurt's leg. He saw Kurt's hand drop into his eyesight, his thumbnail underscoring the name on the card. "You're embarrassed about Ryan?" Blaine nodded, his chin tapping the side of Kurt's thigh. "Why?"

"I don't know," Blaine lied, thinking quickly to come up with a reasonable explanation. "I guess because the first kid who really bullied me in kindergarten—his name was Ryan. It stuck with me or something, I don't know."

"Oh," Kurt said, sounding almost disappointed at a very anticlimactic story after so much fuss. "Well, you didn't have to hide that from me," he pointed out, sticking the license back into Blaine's wallet.

"Yeah, I guess you're right." Blaine held his breath. Maybe he didn't notice?

Kurt took advantage of having Blaine's head still resting lethargically across his lap and pulled his fingers gently through his hair. Blaine hummed happily, the tension and stress of the moment dissipating the longer Kurt stroked his head. That is, until Kurt shrieked suddenly.

"Oh my god! Your initials!"

Blaine groaned and buried his face in Kurt's leg. He noticed.

"No, no, no," Blaine mumbled, his lips buried in the fabric of Kurt's pant leg. Kurt laughed, patting the top of Blaine's head.

"Oh, sweetie." He clicked his tongue affectionately. "You didn't stand a chance."

"You have no idea," came Blaine's muffled reply. He turned over halfway in Kurt's lap to look up at him. "You know how long it takes a third-grade bully to pick up on that?"

Kurt cooed, petting Blaine's face with sympathetic touches. "Aw, my poor baby."

"I would have changed it, but my mom promised her grandfather on his deathbed that his name would live on in her firstborn." He sighed heavily. "Sometimes I wish my last name really was Warbler..."

Kurt pushed the curls off Blaine's forehead with the back of his hand. "How about this? From now on, it is."