For a long time, I've been aware of the lack of good, lengthy, completed crossovers between Glee and White Collar, so I decided to collaborate with my own. Of course, maybe I'm not that good at searching, so if any of you know any fic that fits the previous criteria, please please pointed it out to me so I can read it.

Anyway, I hope this prologue will explain enough how I'm planning to merge both universes (there are more explanations to come, of course) but if you have any question please ask (I'll most likely try to include the answer in the fic). Also, I'm hoping to manage weekly updates, but we'll see how that goes. I guess it depends on how real life treats me, and how interested people seem in this thing.

Finally, I don't have a beta, so any and all mistakes are mine. Sorry.

DISCLAIMER (for all chapters): Neither Glee nor White Collar are mine. I just play with them.

Prologue

When Cooper prepared his grand escape, he just didn't think about Blaine.

He would later realize how bad that spoke about him, but he honestly didn't. I wasn't like at some point his mind wondered "what would happen with the squirt?" and he ignored it. It honest-to-god didn't even occurred him that Blaine was part of the deal, on way or another. He just wanted to get out, leave that backwards town in the middle of nowhere with its backwards people and his backwards parents.

In the future, he would always wonder how he just forgot to think about him. But he was young and stupid, a cocky and daring teenager, and in his mind the only thing that mattered was to get out. Leave that awful place and move to a grand city, with interesting people who would match his skills, and situations that would actually be challenging. He didn't have that in Westerville, Ohio, where people were proud to be average and mediocre, and even for teenagers the idea of excitement was either a day in the country club or a night of beers with the boys, and how provincial was that?

No, Cooper wanted adventure, adrenaline. He wanted to get high on doing the impossible.

So he started planning early. He always knew that he'd leave young, but the small part of him that still wanted to play it safe decided to wait until high school graduation. He didn't want to look like he was on his own while being too young anyway. Until then, though, he worked on sharpening the skills he would need in the future.

He took every art class they offered in school, even though most of the time he already knew the content. He signed on workshop no learn to build things, mechanics to understand cars and later other machinery, and almost every language the school offered. He became fluent in French, but also managed to gain a good understanding on Spanish and German, even though he couldn't speak them.

He was passionate about everything in the arts. Painting and sculpture where his forte, but he was also knowledgeable in literature and poetry. He took on everything in with eagerness, spending full afternoons perfecting his paintings and drawings, going over and over his sketching and color-mixing. What he didn't understand though, was how he could miss the tiny tag-along that remained at his side all the time.

It didn't really bother him. Even though Blaine was ten years younger and had a bit too much energy, he never interfered in Cooper's business. He found everything so interesting and fun, and he'd constantly be asking what is this or that and how does it work? Cooper found out early on that Blaine's endless questioning helped him go over his knowledge, and once or twice he had managed to ask for things that even Cooper hadn't thought of finding out, so overall it was a good excuse to revise.

It was a constant, doing something and having Blaine at his side. Always jumping around him, playing, or asking questions. Sometimes he'd be on the floor doing his homework or reading the random book Cooper had given him to make him shut up so he could concentrate. It was a bit like background noise, the kind you learn to tune out as time goes, like it's part of the ambient. Maybe that was the reason why he didn't realize that by leaving Westerville and his old life, he would also be leaving Blaine.

The first real con in his life was done to his parents. He didn't feel the least bit guilty about it, because it wasn't like he was leaving them homeless or anything. And the way he saw it, they owed it to him for doing such a crappy job in actually caring about him. Cooper had learned to manage everything by himself, mostly because there wasn't anybody else he could count on, except for the few nannies he'd had when he was younger. Later, he'd actually preferred it that way, because it gave him a lot more freedom to do whatever he wanted, and in his mind that was the reason why he insisted to his parents that he could take care of Blaine every day after school without hired help. Another part of him knew that it was mostly so Blaine didn't have to grow up with strangers like he did.

His father was a successful businessman and his mother worked with him some days, and spent time with the ladies of her different clubs the others. They used to take long vacations in Europe almost every year, to which they never took their sons because "they were too young to appreciate it". Cooper knew they had enough money to spare, but he also knew his dad would never support him in doing any of the things he wanted to do. To be fair, he had never even considered college –he could learn anything he needed by himself. But he did need funds, if only to support himself for a few months until he could start getting some income. Or maybe he'd travel for a bit. There were so many possibilities.

It was almost too easy. He pretended to apply for the Economics program at Yale (and seriously, it showed how much his parents didn't know him if they actually believed he'd study economics) and faked the correspondence he "exchanged" with them. The money they asked for his first year of tuition and board was enough to maintain him for a while, and his father gladly wired it to a preset bank account because "it shows that you finally got some sense knocked into your head".

The whole charade was a rush. The detailed planning, the forged letters, his faked enthusiasm over his new school, even the admission essay he had asked his dad to correct. All the backup plans in case his dad checked the information on his own, in case he tried to contact Yale by himself, which he never did. But even if not all his planning was put to use, it felt to him like he was making up for all the boring years he'd had to endure with them. It all worked out perfectly. Too perfectly.

"Aren't you going to take any shoes? I think you'll need shoes more than all those paint brushes," Blaine said from the door. It was the day before his departure, and he was trying to finish packing.

"Yeah, they'll go on the next suitcase, squirt, don't worry," Cooper answered. Maybe he should shut the door, because if his parents saw he was taking all his art supplies with him they'd have a lot more questions than his 9-year-old brother.

"Mom said you can only take two suitcases on the plane, and that's the second one already," Blaine pointed at the already closed one at the other side of the room. "You didn't put any shoes there either."

Cooper cursed a little bit, because he really didn't have space for the damned shoes. He wondered for a bit how long Blaine had been watching without him even realizing. Is not that Blaine sneaked on him, because Cooper could see him if he wanted. He was just so used to the squirt that, well, yeah. Tune out.

"I'll make some room. But you know how much I love my brushes, I can't just leave them." There was a small silence, while Cooper wondered what was less important than his brushes that could make some space.

"Dad says you're going to live on your own because you're a man now." Blaine's voice was small and wavering, which finally snapped Cooper out of his head because he had rarely heard that tone on his brother before. "He says I can't go with you. I asked, but he says I'm too little and I have to stay here."

Blaine was sitting at the side of his door, his arms around his knees making him look impossibly small, his big amber eyes trained on him. And that's when it actually hit him. He was leaving, just like he'd always wanted, but Blaine was staying. He had planned it all to run away and never look back, but Blaine was staying.

The realization knocked the air out of him, and for a full minute he couldn't speak. The dread that he felt running through his body was something he'd never experienced before.

"Can I really not go with you?" Blaine asked after a while without an answer from Cooper. "I'm sure there are schools near Yale for me, and I wouldn't bother you or anything. I'd just do my homework and wait for you to get back, and then it'd be same as always."

"I… no, squirt, it doesn't work like that…" Cooper said, although he wasn't sure how to respond. Conning his baby brother felt like the lowest thing he'd ever done.

"Are you sure? Because I think mom and dad would be glad if they don't have to take care of me. They are always busy with work."

Cooper had to fight hard to get out the words to tell Blaine that no, he couldn't go. He would be living in a dorm room where they didn't accept kids, and he was, in fact, too young to leave mom and dad's house. Knowingly telling lies was already a second nature to him, but he'd never had to say one as difficult as telling his brother that it would be ok, that with school starting soon time would just fly by, and he'd have mom and dad at home to keep him company. That lie was the most bitter of them all, because he knew by experience how unlikely that was, and he remembered how big and empty the house had felt, ironically, until Blaine's birth.

He realized it was thanks to his brother that his teenage years hadn't been lonely and rather sad like the previous ones, and for an irrational moment, he thought about calling everything off and staying. How could he leave Blaine to an empty life with parents that didn't care about either of them? But sense came back soon after and he knew he couldn't. There was no way of explaining to his parents that he'd never even applied to Yale and that he had planned to disappear with their money. He could try to keep in contact and pretend he was going to classes in order to keep in touch with Blaine, but he knew that would blow off too soon, and for the life he intended to have, he really shouldn't keep connections. He already had a fake ID with the name Neal Caffrey on it, and he had decided that the moment his plane departed, Cooper Anderson would be no more.

He couldn't sleep that night, but it wasn't excitement what kept him awake. Next day his parents decided it was fitting that they'd all go to the airport to say good bye, and Cooper never felt like more of an asshole than the moment he had to calm down his crying brother by saying he'd keep in touch, and they would be seeing each other on Christmas.