Cloud Surfing

Laws are set in place to protect the citizens and outsiders to the cloud banks. Our society is not much different than the human society we live not so far above. We have jobs and families, and we go out on dates with the people we care for; just like the humans.

There are also those who feel the need to bend and/or break the rules of our society… just like the humans. The most well known delinquents of our society are the cloud surfers, and it's my job to find cloud surfers and arrest them.

-Blaine

A/N: I wrote a large part of this on an airplane to Colorado. The idea just kind of popped into my head when I was staring out the window on a really long car ride.

Anything recognizable isn't mine.

Good morning Lietus, and what a good morning it is. It's once again, a perfect 32 degrees this lovely summer day, so break out your shorts, kids! It's going to only get warm—

The radio was static-free as usual as the sun shone in through my poor excuse for curtains: standard issue golden polyester with crimson red stitching. My hand flies up to my clock on instinct—just like it does every morning, the contact of hard plastic and smooth flesh produce the familiar slap that pulls me completely from dreamland. Mr. Sandman releases his relentless hold on me and I roll from the comfort of my silken sheets, instantly wishing I could return to their warmth. It's like this every morning: I wake up, I roll to the floor, I eat breakfast, I leave for my job at Sky Patrol HQ.

Sky Patrol is the only job that impresses my dad, and I landed it. It wasn't the fact that I got the job a year ago, on my eighteenth birthday that impressed him. It wasn't the fact that I was—am—the youngest member of Sky Patrol on record. I guess what impressed him is that his disappointing, gay son could get the job that he couldn't.

My life is far from glorious; it's far from spontaneous.

It's always been.

Cloud surfers are sneaky. They're extremley well at concealing themselves, but there is always that one surfer who is new. They don't know how to hit the clouds like the other's do, and that proves to be their weakness. Those are the surfers most Sky Patrol catches, but me? I know their secrets. I've figured out the "perfect cloud" for them.

It rises for a mile into the sky, and billows out more at the bottom than the top. I have yet to figure out why this is considered the prefect cloud, but then again I don't exactly make a point of striking up a conversation with fugitives.

I spot my first rookie of the day, whisping out just barely from a fluffy cotton ball of a cloud. His bronze skin stands contrast to the milky color of the clouds.

That is their one downfall. Every cloud surfer has a deep bronze skin tone from their over-exposure to the sun. All Clouden residence are tan, but cloud surfers particularly so.

It's not a extremely cloudy day, only a handful of clouds out in the area to block the sun, so the fact I spot one so early in my shift is kind of interesting. In less than a minute I'm up on him, his dark dreads spreading over the cloud as his board becomes trapped between his body and the soft, almost intangible fluff of the cloud.

"Name?"

The boy underneath me laughes. "Hart. Joe Hart."

"Well Joe, it seems as if your luck with the clouds just ran out." the clear floating tray, a hover-plate, I approached the cloud on, expands to a accommodate the two of us as I push him onto it towards the Patrol car.

"Do your parents know you cloud surf?"

He laughs again, pushing a portion of his hair back. "My parents are—"

A swirling pattern appears in the cloud right next to me, Joe's eyes go wide and I immediately move the hover-plate to the patrol car, rather unceremoniously throwing the rookie in. I know those patterns anywhere; they're the patterns of an expert—the special mark they leave in the clouds they surf in.

The adrenaline is rushing through my body like the wind on an autumn day. An expert! My first expert in three months! I could sing. The invisibility shield is still humming around the car as I topple out into the cloud, completely forgetting to lock the patrol car.

The cloud is perfect, stretching farther up than I care to address. I'm so mesmerized by its grandeur that the click of a door and hum of a hoverboard completely blow over me. It doesn't matter that much to me. Another patrol officer will catch him soon enough.

Approaching the cloud is easy. It's like running under a swinging pendulum; you wait for it to rise completely up before bolting. With surfers, you wait for them to reach the bottom of the cloud, and then progress. By the time they move up and come back down, I'm there waiting for them.

The underneath of his board is transparent—invisible to all those below them—the only clue I have of the surfer is the small movements inside the different parts of the cloud. It's almost ten minutes before he emerges, and in seconds I've tackled him onto the cloud, my hover-plate mere inches behind me the whole time.

His hover board is knocked from my sight, but I'm not looking at it anyways. The boy beneath me is unlike anyone I've ever seen. He isn't bronze at all. The smallest hint of color is nowhere to be found. He's as pale as a human. I try to push the thought that he might be a human from my head, because that's not possible. No human could survive in the cloud banks.

The surfer has the same arrogant look that they all have on his face as I pull him up and onto my hover-plate. I can't pull out my information pad with experts; I learned that the first day I caught one. In the two seconds I looked down to pull it out of my uniform, the surfer vanished.

Instead I memorize their faces; I soak up their every feature and file them away. If I can't remember the name, I always remember the face.

"What is your name?"

"None of your damn business." he snaps back and boy, does that throw me off. His snarky remark isn't what shocks me, it's the sweet, angelic voice that produces the remark. I wasn't expecting such a sweet voice to come from his lips. Most cloud surfers have a low or raspy voice, but this boy's wasn't anything like that. It was higher than the average male's, but not forced at all. For a moment I just stare out of sheer awe before snapping back.

"You broke the law, I have to take you to Sky Patrol HQ. I need your name."

His sky-blue eyes darken slightly, arrogance gone and slight anger replacing it. "I do not wish to go to HQ. I simply want to return to my daily activities."

He goes to jump from the hover-plate—onto what, I have no idea—and into the sky, but I grab his insanely pale wrist. For some reason I feel the need to pull him close and tell him I don't want to arrest him. I've never wanted to let anyone go, but something about the surfer makes me want to just set him back on the cloud and pretend I never met him. Even if I do, I know I will never forget him, and it's not just because I never forget a face. It's because I don't think I could ever forget him. "It's dangerous."

He scoffs. "Please, the humans love it. Their children sit on the grass gazing up at us, guessing what animals they can find in our clouds. It's a game, Officer, and I simply aid them."

I look back to his cloud, staring at it to try and determine what he was trying to create. It looks like a great big nothing to me, but I'm not exactly in the position the humans would be looking at it from. I turn back to the surfer, and not only is he still there, he's observing me with a look I haven't quiet seen before. It's slightly sympathetic.

"A rabbit." His wrist falls from my hand, but he doesn't make to move. He simply looks at me for longer. "It's a rabbit."

I turn back to it, trying to see it in a way that would make sense, but I still see nothing but white fluff. A sigh escapes me. "I don't see it."

Something of a snort comes from him. "That's because you aren't looking at it right, Fancy Pants."

Before I can even blink, his arm is around my waist and we are falling through the sky. There is no time to scream. Almost immediately after the fall the pair of us are floating on a clear hoverboard. The moment we land, it dawns on me that I wasn't actually scared when we were falling. It was thrilling. I almost immediately want to do it again, but we're slowly drifting down farther and farther. He's looking at me as I strain my neck looking up. The closer we get to the southern border, the more I can make out the rabbit the surfer was making.

"It's not done. You tackled me before I could finish."

He sounds annoyed, but I almost don't blame him. I would be mad if someone stopped me in the middle of my work. Then I ask something I wasn't even expecting. "Can you still finish?"

That catches him off guard. He stares at me, his face a mix of confusion and shock.

"Is that a trick question?" He asks slowly, clearly unsure of what else to say.

"No. I want to watch you finish."

He's still staring at me with that unreadable expression. "You would have to stay on the board with me."

"Is that a problem?"

He shrugs. "I've had guys on my board before. Granted none of them have been cops, but there's a first for everything."

When he mentions the fact he's had other men on the board with him, something turns in the pit of my stomach. It's strange and I touch my abdomen when it happens. The surfer raises an eyebrow at me. "Since I'm giving you a ride, I should know your name, Mr. Anderson."

"I'll tell you mine if you tell me yours."

He smirks. "Fair enough, I'm Kurt."

Kurt. It's a nice name; it's a beautiful name for a beautiful boy. The longer I look at him, the more I just want to KEEP looking at him. Everything about this guy is gorgeous, the soft curve of his jaw, the wind blown peak of his hair, the way his perfect pink lips curve into themselves, and his unworldly blue eyes. It almost hurts he's so beautiful.

"Blaine." I say with little volume to my voice.

"Blaine." He scrunches his lips together as if to taste my name. "Blaaaaaaaaine."

He chuckles.

"I like it. It's not as good as Fancy Pants in my opinion…"

Before I can retort, we zip up into the cloud at what feels like light speed. My arms fly instinctively to grab around his chest, the rumbling of his laughter shaking me slightly.

"Hold on."

We continue up, up, up, farther into the cloud, and I can't even begin to describe the feeling of being inside a cloud, we're moving so fast. Then, just as suddenly as we entered, we fly out the top and stop.

"Is that it?" I find myself asking.

He laughs. "No. I just prefer to work from the top down.

"Why?" I ask. The top of the cloud looks much smoother than the bottom, almost like the peak of a dollop of sour cream.

Kurt looks at me, really looks at me as I examine the cloud beneath us, and slowly pulls out of the hold I still have on him. "Are you sure you're not a wannabe surfer?"

I shrug, my eyes coming back to meet his. "I guess I've spent so long chasing you people, I want to know what exactly you are doing in the clouds." I shrug again, never really thinking about it before.

"Mmmm." Kurt taps on the front of his board, a sudden lurch propelling us forward. "Well, I guess you're lucky you found me. Most pros would have whacked you with their board and left you in your little Patrol Car. I'll probably just drop you in the cloud." He shrugs.

"Well that's comforting."

"I'm a surfer, I kind of grew up disliking cops. Nothing against you."

"Right."

"Actually," he begins, cocking his head slightly to the side, "you're kinda cute."

Wait. What?

As we reach the inside of the cloud again, I realize it's much cooler in here. Kurt smirks at me, but it's almost a smile. "Hold on, Fancy Pants."

He grounds himself and that's the only warning I have before we whizz sideways. My body flies off the board, lights popping in my vision as my life flashes before my eyes.

But I'm not scared.

Looking back, my life is nothing but nineteen years of a boring routine filled with waking up, going through the motions, and then just going back to sleep. I'm disappointed.

I keep my eyes closed and wait for the southern border to catch me and zap my body into a pile of ash, but the imminent death doesn't come. I'm snatched back onto the board by a group of strong, slender fingers followed by a short reprimand. I don't even think as I grab Kurt around the waist and press my face into his back.

I feel like I'm flying.

The cloud whips around us, the wind slapping our faces with what should be bruising force, but it feels amazing and I just let out a careless laugh. If this is what birds feel like all the time, I pray that I am a bird in my next life.

As we take a sharp turn, my fingers ease their vice-like grip from Kurt's shirt and slide to gently rest on his sides. My feet have found a position to hold my weight, and when I pull my head back, reality finally sinks in.

I'm cloud surfing, and I've never felt more alive. I laugh and yell at the top of my lungs, unable to see the boy in front of me breaking his face with a smile.

My arms fly out on their own accord, and it's decided. I'm going to be a bird in my next life. I don't care what I have to do. I'm going to be a bird.

It feels like we've only been in the cloud for a minute when we exit, the sudden stop making my knees buckle, but Kurt catches me. He surges forward and catches my limp body before I can roll off the board.

It's a strange position: my legs bent, unable to hold my own weight, and Kurt's arms holding me tightly to him. Our eyes lock and everything comes to a standstill. There is no cloud, there is no Sky Patrol, there is only Kurt and his amazing eyes.

"You didn't drop me." I whisper.

"I guess…" he laughs softly. "you're laughter is contagious, Blaine."

We're both shaking with adrenaline. I'm afraid I'm about to fall off the board at any second, but Kurt's grip on my waist doesn't loosen. The feeling of flying is still heavy on my bones, and I want to go again. I long for the feeling of the cloud parting and congeal around me, the wind on my face, the flying.

"I want to go again."

Kurt stops laughing, his grip on my waist loosening impossibly, and pulls me to a standing position.

"Blaine?"

"Yes?"

For a second, it looks like he isn't going to say anything, but then he grabs one of my hands and taps on a button that sends us slowly back down into the cloud.

"I want to show you something."

We sail slowly down beneath his rabbit, still several yards above the southern border.

"Hold on." he says before pulling a small bag of what I recognize as cloud dust from an invisible compartment.

"I feel like every time you tell me that, I almost plunge to my death."

"But I always catch you."

A laugh escapes me, because it's true. Every time I start falling through the sky, Kurt catches me. It's as if he can sense my clumsiness coming to a peak or something.

"Thanks for that." I turn my head to smile at him and suddenly become hyper-aware of his proximity. It's like the moment after the cloud surfing, where I almost fell off but he caught me. We just stare at each other, not sure what we're really looking for, but knowing it's in one another. It's like Kurt is that missing piece in my life. Where I was never spontaneous or inclined to take risks, Kurt is a complete daredevil, pushing me from my comfort zone. And man, did I need that push.

He pushes a loose strand of my hair back into its gel prison. "I'll always catch you."

His eyes flicker to my lips.

My breath goes shallow. "I hope so."

It literally feels like a spark zaps when our lips connect. Kurt's lips are too soft for someone who spends their days in high winded situation. It's like kissing a cloud really, only I'm pretty sure I'd rather kiss Kurt.

All too soon we have to come up for air, and Kurt puts the bag of cloud dust in my hand. I pull the string and let a small amount of dust escape, smiling as it blends with the sky.

It reminds me of putting a drop of milk into a glass of water. It's white for a short moment before slowly blending with the rest of the glass. I let more of it go an watch again.

"It's beautiful."

"Yeah," Kurt says, only I can't see he isn't taking about the clouds we just made. He's talking about me.

We spend the rest of the afternoon seated on his hoverboard, kissing lazily inside the rabbit-shaped cloud, and I feel life I'm finally doing something with my life that makes me happy.

If I'm going to be a bird in another life, I want Kurt to be a bird with me.

It's one of those days when you can see the moon and the sun at the same time, and I sigh when Kurt smiles at me as I watch the moon begin to reflect in his eyes.

"Come with me." he says.

I want to say anywhere. I want to say that I'll follow him to the edge of the borders; I want to say that I'll freeze for him. But I don't. Instead I smile at him from my perch on his board.

"Where?"

He smiles at me, his crystal eyes twinkling in the last peel of sunlight, and tosses a thick mound of cloth at me from the small compartment underneath the board. "Put on this ice suit."

"Wha—" I begin to protest, but he's already slipping his own heavy, black suit over his porcelain skin. I oblige, my mind immediately assuming he IS taking me to the north border as the foreign material clings to my body structure and the invisible insulation covers my face.

"Hold on, Fancy Pants." he laughs. He pulls my body down to a crouching position and covers me with his own body, slender fingers curling over my own around the smooth board. The suit expands my nerve endings to wear I feel naked, my flesh now the suit.

The board shoots up into the banks, past tall billows of white fluff and streaks of creamy white fuzz. I can faintly feel the temperature dipping below zero, the suit completely protecting me up to under eighty. There is no laughter from Kurt. He's ridged above me, the wind seeming to slap any emotion from him. He is nothing but a mold of concentration.

Suddenly, the clouds end. We are just yards from the border, but the board doesn't slow. He isn't taking me to the border… he's taking me ABOVE the border. I immediately want to yell turn back, that this is suicide. The guards have a flawless detection device; anyone who makes it past here is executed on the spot.

"Press the blue button when I say, Blaine."

I faintly register Kurt letting one of my hands go and sliding a piece of board over to reveal dozens of different buttons. There is a cerulean one off to the far left that's blinking in a pattern of two quick bursts and one long. I hover over it, uncertain of anything at this point.

For the fifth time today, he tells me to hold on, and we shoot even faster into the now navy sky.

"Now!"

I jab my thumb into the smooth button.

There is a small pulse and we go still in a few short seconds. My knuckles are more than likely white from the vise-like grip I've been administering to the board with them. Kurt is sliding off me and onto the side of the board, his legs dangling off the side, but I am frozen, some part of me waiting for Sky Patrol to come and kill me.

"Come on, Blaine. Sky Patrol won't find us for at least an hour." He puts his hand on my back in a gesture of trust, but I'm still frozen.

"Look at it. It's beautiful."

It must have been the way he said it—the words like velvet sliding from his throat—but I did; I looked.

The image literally took my breath away.

The clouds are impossibly thin up here, almost like a wide-spread fog across the earth. The human's trillions of lights are like another constellation right below us. Some clusters of light denser than other, and for a moment I want to play the game the human children do with our clouds. I want to pick out shapes and animals from the strange groupings.

Off in the distance I can make out a mountain peaking above the sheet.

It is beautiful.

"This is my favorite place to come. I can't often because of Sky Patrol. That little button sends out an electromagnetic pulse so the fancy pants like you can't pinpoint me for a while. I never thought that I'd bring someone up here, but I don't know what it is about you, Blaine. You do something to me I can't explain. It's not like you make me want to be a better person and stop doing all these things, it's just… you make me feel… whole."

Sitting there, towering above the border, the night on my fingertips, one wrong move possibly sending me to my death; I fell in love with Kurt Hummel.

It's the hum of a human airplane that brings us down to the cloud banks. We find a dense cloud off the edge of the patrol area I'm meant to be scoping at the time to lounge on. The lounging eventually turns into kissing, and the kissing turns into something else entirely.

"Have you ever had sex on a cloud?"

For some reason, the question makes me laugh. It's not exactly a strange question, but I let out a sharp laugh anyway. Something tells me that Kurt has had sex on a cloud, and the thought gives me a strange twisting feeling in the base of my stomach. This boy is barely an adult, teetering on the edge of eighteen, and yet he's had more experience than I've had, tripled.

"I can't say I have."

He smiles at me, sky-blue eyes sparkling. "We should fix that."

I guess I should be scared of getting caught and losing my job on sky patrol, but I am beyond caring. For the first time in my life I'm happy. Sure I had just participated in about a half a dozen illegal activities, and I probably will never be able to pull over another cloud surfer without feeling guilty and having the intense urge to join them, but it doesn't matter. I have felt freedom, and I am not inclined to return to my old life.

Lying here, with nothing but the night and a sleeping boy resting on my chest, to cover me, I watch as Sky Patrol and shooting stars zoom around above me and the wind pushes our cloud through the sky. Maybe I just won't show up for work at all tomorrow (my dad would love that); maybe I'll join Kurt and become a cloud surfer, testing the limits and risking exposure to the humans.

A spotlight scans the cloud next to us, and I pull Kurt closer to my body, willing the cloud to come around us and conceal our bodies. The wind gives a particularly strong gust, and we sail away from the beam of light, far off towards the west.

I start to doze off, the cloud pulling its wisps around our naked bodies. My last conscious thought only that of wonder. I don't stress over trials and trying to make my father proud. I don't worry about waking up late or running out of polish for the patrol vehicles. I only wonder.

I wonder where we'll wake up and what Kurt will show me next.

END

A/N: Reviews are appreciated.