Blaine is sitting on the beach, has been for hours, all alone, thoughts swirling. He's bunched up, even smaller a figure than normal. The sand is damp, it soaked through his pants hours ago, not that he cares. It takes a few minutes of roaming but he always come back to Kurt, every thought seems rooted in him. It's been this way since he was seventeen. His thoughts, and his heart, can never get far away from the beautiful boy he met one day on his way to Warblers' practice.
The first year had been easy, once he'd realized how much this boy meant to him. He'd danced around it for month, excuses bouncing around his mind. First Kurt was too fragile, then he'd gotten to close. It had finally snapped into place after an uncomfortable dalliance with Rachel Berry. That and a song. Hearing Kurt sing like that, even now, Blaine can't really describe the feeling. But he'd gotten over it, gotten over all of his fears about the other boy. He'd even, after a while, gotten over that feeling of being someone's world or of having someone else as yours. Of course the last had only happened when Kurt was away. It was really more forgetting than anything.
He's surprised, if he takes the time to consider it, that he never really stopped being Kurt's world, even when things got complicated. Even when they broke up they still skyped each other once a week. He isn't the least bit surprised that Kurt was always first in his thoughts. He'd dated a bit, in that year in Ohio alone, a string of first dates with men that were so not Kurt that it hurt him to even think about them.
Kurt was the first person he'd ever talked about his dad with. The only person to whom, he'd ever felt a need to explain the importance of mundane things, like football and cars. The only person who had ever asked, really. He'd asked a lot in return, when they were back together and in New York. He'd poked and prodded and learnt a lot about a woman he would never get to meet. To say that Kurt's mother played a role in her son's life was like saying that fashion was important to him. He took her name and made it his middle name. The clothes he had yet to wear smelt ever-so-slightly of her perfume. He had made her a part of him so totally that an outsider would never recognize her footprints.
But Blaine was not an outsider. He saw every mark she'd left on his soul, both the traces that made their way outside and those he kept completely secret from the world. He'd caught glimpses of the complete terror that Kurt held for hospitals, or the way that his face tensed up unconsciously whenever he got a call from an unknown number, like he expected the worst news in the world.
Kurt was strong, though. He cried at the drop of a hat, a beautiful boy with tears streaming down his face, but he never broke. The memories of another woman had made it ten times harder to deal with Blaine's mother's illness. She had been almost 50 when he was born, the fact that some 25 years later she would be diagnosed with a form of cancer was hardly the shock Kurt's mother's had been. But it had hit the same place, caught him just as hard, and caused all the old pain to come back.
Before that winter, Blaine had never really realized how much there was to Kurt, not emotionally, but how much he was physically made up of. It had taken months and months of him slowly slipping away before he realized how little Kurt was eating. But those missed meals took their toll. They brought the temper that Kurt had tried to lessen around Blaine to the forefront, he snapped at the slightest provocation.
It was even worse when they talked to the doctors. Kurt called every undusted corner of every waiting room in Ohio as proof of their inadequacy, questioning every prescription and every therapy. Even knowing that he was trying to make up for what he couldn't do at age 8, Blaine had to worry. It got to the point where he threw Kurt out until he promised to behave. It had only happened once, but Blaine had apologized for weeks after. He bought silence with roses and forgiveness with quietly accepted lectures, and so they went on.
By this time, ten more cycles of guilt and grief, all centered on a blue-eyed ghost with the voice of an angel, darkness has fallen. The waves crash along the beach, the noise soothing away the anguish. In a funny way Blaine's glad he has Kurt to angst over. After spending years reliving the torture of his freshman year this relationship had represented a twisted sort of freedom. But he hates that way of thinking, so he lets hourglass of his mind swirl again, bringing his thoughts back to the day he had realized Kurt's problem.
It was a week after his mother died, he and Kurt hadn't left their bedroom more that once a day since then. Everything had felt so fucking raw at that moment that they'd sought solace in the power of each others' embrace. It had been the sort of story they made terrible romantic movies about, up until the last day. Blaine had looked over; tears still just second from streaming down his face, and all he had seen were ribs. Ribs, hollowed out so that there was nothing else there but his spine, each vertebrae perfectly visible, filled with crisp shadows on pale flesh.
He remembers the shocked gasp that had escaped his mouth then, because this was not the Kurt he was expecting to see. He didn't want to count the vertebrae and see if it added up, that was terrifying in all its possibility. He'd tried to bring it up, day after day, as he ate the breakfast Kurt made him and watched the coffee he drank black. The mixture of ebony and ivory, coffee and Kurt was mesmerizing. It terrified him to think of what it meant but he couldn't look away. It tore him apart to think about it but it hurt just as much every time he tried to mention it. Eventually it just stopped being a topic of conversation. Kurt didn't eat and Blaine didn't force him.
Blaine had never been strong enough for that. Kurt had been perfect for him because he was perfect. It wasn't that he didn't have issues; it was just that his issues were all laid out, confronted. It had always been Blaine with the steely outside and the dark and twisty interior. Kurt had lightened the decor, but the walls of the maze were still there. This side of Kurt, the side that is not just scared of something, but absolutely petrified to even start confronting it, was torture to Blaine. The ghost that followed is more than he can handle.
So he sits on the beach. They'd come here together, in happier times, talked about the kids they'd bring. But kids require parents, not broken rag doll and a twisted maze. Blaine has made this his beach. He thinks of the future and the past here, sometimes just sitting, sometimes wading out, or dipping his toes from the pier. The eddies of time swirl around him, his thoughts racing away before coming back to the present and the man at home. Because as much as the sea is a good place to think about the future, it is also a good place to remember what you have to deal with to get there.
So Blaine stands up, carefully wiping sand from his otherwise perfect pants. He smoothes his hair, still gelled despite the salt spray and he sets off home. He vows for the hundredth time that he is going to bring up the jutting of Kurt's hips, the way his spine is crawling out of his back. He vows to ignore the way the sea reflects itself in Kurt's eyes, the way that makes all the futures he's imagined here on this beach come to life. He vows that he will do what hurts, do what's hard, and he'll be better for it. He even lets himself believe that he'll do it this time. By the time he's wound his way up the hundreds of steps to their living room, he's convinced himself that today is the day he gets better.
But then that only makes the familiar sight of Kurt's limp body hanging from the rafters harder for him to see. Because he had convinced himself of that the first day he saw this sight. And still, every day in the week since then he comes home, thinking of the futures that they never got to have.
Somehow he makes dinner, chattering away as if the fading frame can understand. If it weren't for the sea coloured eyes that fill his mind he'd find this odd. But somehow, the futures the sea helps him imagine make it seem like the most normal thing in the world for him to play house with his boyfriend's body. In a way he has for months.
Sometimes he thinks he'll join Kurt in hanging from the roof, like some sort of Greek tragedy. But he knows that isn't true, he has to stay here. He has to make dinner for a man who won't eat, has to keep the dust away from all of Kurt's clothes. But most of all he just needs to stay, the future is in his mind now and he intends to keep it alive, even if that means a thousand years of sitting on the beach.
Hrm. So this is pleasantly dark. The inspiration for this thing started off with a Los Campesinos song of the same title. But that song, though dark, has nothing on the craziness of Blaine especially in this. It may also end up channelling Psycho a little bit. This just sort of came out. Drop me a line maybe and let me know what you thought?