The first time someone had mentioned how beautiful Kurt looked when he cried, Blaine had –-
He doesn't even remember, really.
Blaine knows he choked, sort of, his coffee caught solid and tight in the column of his throat in a parody of a memory that meant everything (he totally gets what Kurt meant now, about a burnt oesophagus not being conducive to coherent thought, let alone actual genuine did he just say what I thought he said romance), but he hadn't been surprised, not really. Rachel Berry was a fabulous roommate, in many ways –- she was a good cook, knew better than to leave dirty towels all over the bathroom floor, and spent enough Friday nights at rehearsals for her summer show that Blaine and Kurt could have sex without so much as the thought of being interrupted. Unfortunately, she also continued to be as socially obtuse as she was talented.
It wasn't even that he couldn't objectively see it -– completely and utterly unobjectively, Blaine thought Kurt was gorgeous in everything he wore, everything he said, everything he did. Had thought so, that first day when Kurt turned up on the stairs like something out of every gay fantasy he'd ever dreamed of, so obviously enamoured that this had to be a dream; boys didn't flirt back with Blaine, not boys in bondage pants like that, this couldn't be reality.
Come to think of it, Blaine thinks it might have clicked that day at McKinley, Kurt sobbing into his shoulder in the car afterwards, leaving Blaine's blazer sloppy and sticking to his skin. It had been - shocking and appalling, honestly, and his entire body had gone slack jawed with the knowledge that someone could do this to a person like Kurt, that Kurt could experience something so dreadful and still be the boy whose acerbic wit and heartfelt honest left Blaine feeling a little too tightly wound but also unstrung. He was an out of tune violin and Kurt was the virtuoso, even if he sometimes needed Blaine to transcribe the music for him.
Mostly, though, he had just been overwhelmed by the fact that Kurt, a boy, trusted him enough to cry in his presence, and it was that which made him want to do anything in his power to make sure that Kurt rarely needed someone to wipe away his tears. That was what shocked him the most about it, even now; Kurt himself may have been beautiful when he cried; but the situation preceding it generally wasn't. Blaine's boyfriend didn't deserve that; no one did.
For the most part, there were fewer of them, these days. Kurt still got upset, sometimes, but it was over failed projects for his fashion class and stories he saw on the news, now, and even then New York acted like a hand rubbing circles into the small of his back, like the murmured reassurance he needed; things weren't going to get better, maybe-possibly going to be okay depending on the ability of Kurt's outfit to act like a beacon for homophobia and the mood of McKinley's jock population that day. To some extent, things already had improved, just by virtue of them being there.
Blaine gets it, too; he can feel the city thrumming beneath his skin during the late spring heatwave, leaving him hot and sticky as he presses tight through crowds in the still blanket of heat and yet refreshed with the breath of fresh air he hadn't known how desperately he needed until Kurt had turned him one day during junior year and said I hope you like Broadway, because I'm thinking about moving to New York and I really don't want to have to ask someone else to be my date. He'd maybe mentioned to Kurt that he was considering Colombia and NYU, once or twice before that, but this time, he'd stopped, blinked at Kurt's impossibly wide smile and imagined him wearing that same grin standing in front of the Gershwin Theatre until suddenly it was all he could see.
But sometimes, Kurt needs more than that, and Blaine is all too happy to be a constant in a way that the city can't be sometimes; he holds all the pieces of Kurt that were broken in Ohio, by Ohio firm beneath his hands, feeling his boyfriend's heartbeat under his splayed fingertips and remembers that both of them started to heal there, together. Thinks of prom and Pavarotti's death before that, of the healing power of phoenix tears and how he and Kurt haven't been reborn but, through heartbreak, have grown into the people they're meant to be. His boyfriend sighs; the bird metaphor is every bit as ridiculous as it sounded in Blaine's head, and in apology, he kisses Kurt long and sloppy and thinks that if anyone finds his boyfriend gorgeous when he cries, they're going to be blown away when he smiles.