Disclaimer: These characters, while they belong fiercely to my heart, primarily belong to Glee and Fox.
Kurt wakes up with a lurching feeling in his stomach from what must have been his twentieth New York dream since graduation. In the soft, unsure slant of morning the details have already begun to fade, but he's pretty sure he spent the whole thing trying to hail a cab on Madison Avenue, and even the empty ones sped right past him.
He closes his eyes, feeling the familiar ache like someone is squeezing limes in his chest, and takes a deep, silent breath. Blaine is asleep beside him, on his stomach and snoring a little, one warm ankle draped over Kurt's shins. He's wearing a white undershirt that seems to glow in the curtained darkness of Kurt's bedroom.
Kurt usually wakes up first, if only by a few minutes, and he's glad for it, because awake Blaine is never still, and sometimes this feels like the only way that Kurt gets to look and look and look at him.
He puts a hand over his heart and presses, the pads of his fingers probing an ancient sadness that sometimes feels as inextricable a part of him as his voice and his terrible dancing. He is so tired, and Blaine's left arm is flung across the bed, and part of him wants to edge underneath it so Blaine will wake up and rub his back until he drifts back to sleep. Usually, when Blaine rubs his back, he doesn't remember his dreams.
Instead Kurt slips out of bed and heads for the bathroom, where he washes his face and brushes his teeth for an assiduous three minutes and avoids meeting his own eye. When he hangs the washcloth up and goes back into his room, Blaine is stirring.
"Morning," Kurt says softly, half-wanting to get back into bed so Blaine can kiss the toothpaste sting out of his mouth, but instead going to his dresser for a fresh t-shirt. The dream has left a hateful film of sweat over his ribs and back and shoulders.
"Morning," Blaine mumbles back. "Come here."
Kurt doesn't answer. He peels off his shirt and throws it into the hamper.
"Here," Blaine says, and Kurt turns to see him half sitting up and wriggling out of his undershirt. "Wear mine." It's Blaine's version of horse whispering; he's done it a dozen times this summer but manages never to act like it's coddling or romantic, even though Kurt knows it's both.
Blaine scooches to the edge of the bed, shirt balled up in one hand, his bare chest like the morning sun itself. Kurt is standing close enough to the bed that Blaine can reach out and put his free hand on Kurt's hip, which he does, and Kurt sinks into the touch ever so slightly. Blaine stands up, hand on his boyfriend's hipbone like an anchor, and moves behind him with his forehead pressed between Kurt's shoulder blades, his chest aligned with the pale expanse of Kurt's back. Kurt feels Blaine's weight against him and thinks it might be the only thing that reminds him he's solid, made of matter, that he matters.
Blaine has wrapped his arms around Kurt's waist. "You feel so thin," Blaine blurts out. Kurt knows he's lost weight since June; he can feel it in the angles of his fingers, and under his cheekbones when he tries to smile. He's a little surprised that Blaine, who has been intimate for so long with every inch of Kurt's body, either hasn't noticed or has managed not to mention it until now.
Even though he's been avoiding mirrors for months, Kurt glances up at the floor-length one affixed to his closet door. It's a strange sight, a study in opposites: his own dark grey cotton pajama pants against Blaine's bright blue briefs, his fair torso entangled in Blaine's golden arms, his own ranginess somehow less than Blaine's muscled compactness. For a wild second Kurt feels like he doesn't have bones, and he still doesn't look at his own face.
"Back to bed?" Blaine suggests quietly. He's still holding his undershirt, and Kurt takes it and nods. Blaine unhooks himself from Kurt and clambers back onto the blankets as Kurt pulls the white cotton over his head. Blaine likes his sleeping shirts loose, but it still comes up a little short on Kurt, baring an inch of soft stomach.
Kurt crawls into bed and lies on his side facing Blaine. Blaine matches him, tugging at Kurt's foot with his own until their ankles are laced together again. Kurt closes his eyes and nuzzles his cheek into the worn collar of the t-shirt. It smells like clean summertime things, suntan lotion and chlorine and shampoo, tempered by sleep and warm skin and all the softness of Blaine.
Eyes still closed, he reaches out and finds Blaine's hand, guides it over his heart where it quivers like a constellation. Kurt presses his palm flat to spread Blaine's hand out, feeling his fingertips through the thin cotton, electric as the static in the air after a storm. He breathes deeply again. Blaine's touch has the singular, constant power to bring him back from bad dreams and shadows, to guide him quietly into the land of the living.