AN: Basically, it's an alternative set of events for the "Grilled Cheesus" episode back in season 2, and an alternative meeting for Kurt and Blaine.
You can't go back to the way things were, you only learn to live with loss.
It is a cold crisp November weekend the day that Blaine finds him in the graveyard.
It is his great aunt's funeral. He hardly knew her, only the smell of antiseptic and old roses locked in a musty house. Blaine supposes he should have cried like his mother or sniffed manfully like his father. Instead, he just got a foot cramp.
He's wandering around the old cemetery now, listening to the leaves crunch under his feet and feeling of an unusually philosophical bent today. Something about the graveyard in the cold afternoon Saturday sun speaks to his dramatic sensibilities. He's planning his own funeral; who shows up, who doesn't, who cries, who doesn't, who wears an ugly tie, who doesn't, when he hears an audible sniffle.
"Are you alright there?" he asks out loud before he can stop himself. He immediately slaps his forehead. Of course anyone crying in a graveyard is not going to be okay.
No answer, but the sniffling abruptly stops.
He crosses a row of graves, trampling unkempt browning grass and mentally apologizing to anyone whose body he is walking over to find a boy kneeling in front of a tombstone, his back facing Blaine.
The first thing Blaine notices, strangely enough, is that he can see the curve of the boy's spine and the bones pressing up against the skin at the nape of his neck. It is November and Ohio and it's cold but this boy is wearing only one layer, a fine cotton button down shirt and Blaine can see the way his shoulder blades strain against the cloth.
The second thing he notices is the silky brown hair wisping around that strained neck.
The third thing he notices is pale hands, the boy is hugging himself, whether in self defense or cold he can't tell.
"Hello?" Blaine says tentatively.
The boy whips around at Blaine's arrival, but he turns around to face the gravestone again just as fast and Blaine can hardly remember what his face looked like.
"Were you here for the funeral?" he asks. He's pretty sure not. He would have remembered this boy. But it doesn't hurt to be polite.
"No," says the boy and Blaine is taken aback by how high and sharp his voice is. "I'm just…visiting."
Blaine nods. For some reason he can't quite tell, he sits down on the ground next to the boy and tangles his fingers in the grass.
"I'm Blaine," he says, after a minute. "Blaine Anderson."
"Kurt," says the boy. The edges of his voice have gone a little softer.
Blaine looks at the tombstone. Weather stained granite. Elizabeth Mary Hummel 1972-2002 For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.
"Kurt Hummel?" he guesses.
The boy finally looks at him and Blaine almost stumbles and falls back because the sheer intensity of those blue, blue eyes is like nothing he's encountered in a long time, and the intensity is magnified by deep purple-black rings beneath them.
Blaine has the distinct feeling that he's being weighed and valued to determine if he's worth an answer, but Kurt eventually says "Yes."
The "yes" is accompanied by an involuntary shiver.
"You're cold," Blaine tells him, and it's not a question.
"Yes."
Wordlessly, Blaine pulls off his black coat and drapes it over Kurt's shoulders.
"You don't even know me, you don't have to-"
"I'm wearing two sweaters already with that," Blaine cuts him off. "I'm fine. Besides, you looked really cold."
Kurt nods and his knuckles go white as he gathers fistfuls of Blaine's coat in his hands.
His eyes flicker back to the tombstone.
"It's a bible verse, isn't it?" says Blaine. He is not religious, hasn't been near a church pew in about three years, but his lola carries a white leather bound bible in her purse and goes to Catholic mass three times a week and volunteers for bake sales. He's bound to pick up things, even the small ones.
"Yes, it is," says Kurt. "My mom didn't go to church. But she always had faith in something." His eyes are wistful and he traces the inscription with his index finger.
"But you don't?" Blaine asks.
Kurt looks at him, expression veiled and suspicious and Blaine immediately realizes his mistake.
He raises his palms in the air, a defensive gesture. "I'm not judging. Myself, I don't even know if there's a God or a holy being or anything. I was just wondering."
"Oh." The fight goes out of Kurt's posture. "I see. And answering your question, no, I don't. I wish I did. But I don't."
"I think…I know what you mean," says Blaine.
Kurt turns eyes on him that are again veiled, holding back. "Do you?"
"I think I do." Blaine watches as he exhales puffs of white in the autumn air. "Faith would mean something to hold onto. It would mean that you're the same as everyone else, and sometimes there's nothing better than to feel the same as everyone else. But you can't force yourself to believe things." Blaine would know. He tried for years; first, to believe that he was just white, then to believe that he believed, and later to believe that he was straight. None of these ever worked.
Kurt blinks. "You do get it." His voice goes all tremble-y, like a harp string, and Blaine senses a fresh wound.
"I'm guessing no one else around you does."
"No," Kurt agrees. "They don't."
Somewhere in the distance, a blackbird warbles.
"Do you want to tell me about it?" he offers.
Kurt takes a deep shuddering breath and Blaine is sure that the fall air must be searing his lungs. His eyes are following the whirling clouds, the shattering sun, the silent graves, anything but Blaine's eyes, until suddenly the dam bursts.
"It's my friends, all of them. I love them, I swear on my life I really do but I can't even look at their faces right now. My mom is dead and I turned out gay and my Dad's in a coma and I don't know if he'll ever wake up and honestly I think I might be universe's chew toy sometimes and they just don't get it." His voice is slowly climbing in volume and a pair of birds takes flight from the bare bones of the tree nearby, but he ignores the rush of wings. "They keep patting me on the back and telling me 'have faith in God, God will take care of all things.' It's all they can tell me! And they just don't get that's it's even worse that way because then all I can think is that if the only thing that could make it better is God and there is no God then it's never going to get better."
His shoulders are shaking now in silent dry sobs. Blaine's never been this forward with a stranger before, but then, he's never met a stranger in this way before. He wraps an arm around Kurt and Kurt doesn't fight it.
"It's just so…goddamn…lonely," says Kurt into his shoulder.
"I know," says Blaine. It's pathetic really, that's all he knows how to say, but he says it anyway and pulls Kurt closer.
"I want my dad," says Kurt, and Blaine's heart twinges a bit; partly because it aches for this strange boy hiding in the gravestones and partly because he wishes that he could want his own dad that much.
"They kicked me out of the hospital," says Kurt. Blaine flinches involuntary. He hates hospitals; hates the white walls and hates how the last memory of going to one is all shattered bones and morphine and haze of bitterness that he couldn't even enjoy a simple dance.
"Visiting hours were over," continues Kurt. "They wouldn't let me stay with my dad. I didn't know where else to go. So I came here. God, I don't want this to be the place where I have to come visit him. I don't want to come back here."
Blaine wraps his arms around Kurt more securely. Both know that this is deeply strange, that two people who met scarcely half an hour ago shouldn't be having a cuddle and a heart to heart, but desperate times call for desperate measures. And besides, Blaine feels like this is the right place to be, somehow.
"Why is your dad in the hospital?"
"He had a heart attack, now he's in a coma. They told me at school last week."
Kurt looks like a mess. A beautiful mess, but a mess all the same. "Who's been taking care of you?"
Blaine has been talking to Kurt just long enough to know that the stare that Kurt turns on Blaine means that he thinks he's dense. "Me."
"Seriously? No stepmom or grandfather or something? Haven't you at least stayed a friend's house?"
"No." Kurt looks surprised
"But…how…" Blaine is lost for words. This boy is near losing his father and his only company up until now has been himself and a gravestone?
Blaine makes a decision on the spot then that is definitely hasty and possibly unwise but he doesn't regret it in the slightest. He pulls out his phone, sends a quick text to his mother, then snaps it shut without waiting to see the reply.
"Come on, get up," he says, tugging on Kurt's elbow.
"Why?" Kurt is wearing a mulish expression.
"You're giving me directions to your house and I'm taking you home," says Blaine.
There are tear tracks across Kurt's cheeks but he still has the dignity to raise a skeptical eyebrow. "Really?"
"Yes. I'm taking you to your house and I'm going to wrap you up in a blanket and make you soup and then dial every number in your phone book until somebody promises me that they're going to look after you when I can't be there, and I am going to stay by your side until your dad wakes up and even after he wakes up."
Kurt's eyes have gone wide. "I don't even know you."
"And I don't know you. But I think I'll have failed as a human being if I just leave you here today." Blaine offers a hand and Kurt can only stare, as if he's never seen such an alien thing.
Slowly, reluctantly, Kurt reaches out his own hand and allows himself to be pulled to his feet, and he casts one last look at the tombstone, the silent sentinel.
And with that, they depart down the hill together, wending through the gravestones in the growing fall dusk.
For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.
Kurt places a cluster of forget-me-nots on his mother's grave.
He knows they aren't the most elegant flower. He remembers people throwing long stemmed white roses onto her casket, but somehow, the forget-me-nots seem better.
The same way that forget-me-nots aren't for graves, they aren't for button holes, but he tucks one into his impeccable black tuxedo anyway and takes a moment to breath.
The fall air is clean, so clean. In all these years he has tasted salty ocean air and heavy dirty city air but something about the cemetery and the clean air, he never forgets.
He's never forgotten that day that he came here all those years ago because he had nowhere else to hide. He never wanted to come back. He vowed to never come back. But here he is, standing at that same spot.
"Thank you," he tells the silent stone. He knows his mother isn't there to here it and the trees and the grass could care less about what he has to say, but Kurt thinks that it's his duty to say thank you anyway. Particularly on this day.
A strong, warm arm wraps around his shoulders.
"They're waiting."
He turns his head to look at Blaine Anderson; seven years wiser and seven years more beautiful.
"Then we had better go, then, shouldn't we?" says Kurt.
"It'd be bad luck to delay a marriage," says Blaine playfully.
Blaine gives a respectful nod to the grave before Kurt drops a kiss on his nose. They wind their fingers together and leave.
Somewhere in the distance, a blackbird warbles.