'Why on earth is that woman wearing a dress made of meat?' Blaine frowned as he flicked through the channels, pausing his search as he came across the spectacle.

Kurt laughed as he walked back into the room from the kitchen, setting down the large glasses of Coke on the table, the ice cubes tinkling against the glass as he did so.

'That's Lady Gaga, she can be a bit eccentric but her music is amazing!' He said, sitting back down next to Blaine on the small couch.

Blaine studied Kurt's face for a moment, taking in the expression on his face and the way his eyes lit up as they always seemed to when he began to talk about something he loved.

Kurt had spent the last half an hour explaining the different gadgets in the living room. Unlike the kitchen everything in here seemed to have changed. The record player was now a tiny little thing that Kurt slotted in to a set of small speakers. The sound came through crisp and clear, supposedly an improvement, but Blaine missed the scratching of the needle on vinyl.

The television was huge compared to the boxy one his parents had. The screen was flat and the picture on it was almost perfect, something that Kurt had called 'high definition'. And there were so many channels to look through.

'Have you found anything you like yet?'

'No yet, there are a lot of channels.' Blaine smiled, pressing the remote again just as another image of the eccentric singer flashed on to the screen, making him wonder for the sanity of someone who wore a telephone on their head.

'Well this is only basic cable. You could get a lot more.' Kurt said.

'There's more?' Blaine exclaimed. 'Seriously? Why on earth do you need this many channels? There are hundreds!'

'And yet there's never anything good on.' Kurt sighed, Blaine couldn't tell if he was joking or not. 'At least you've got the hang of the remote now.'

Blaine laughed, he had managed to get the TV stuck in a different language almost as soon as Kurt had handed him the remote. And as soon as Kurt had fixed it Blaine then managed to somehow turn the whole screen grey.

'I think you need a degree in electronics to work this out.' Blaine said, waving the remote in front of him. There were so many buttons on the thing, each one capable of doing almost anything to the picture on the screen.

'Honestly, you should just be happy with having so many channels, why do you need to worry if the picture is a few inches wider or how clear the image is?'

'People are never satisfied. They're working towards making TV 3D now.' Kurt shrugged.

Blaine's eyebrows shot to his forehead and he was about to respond when he landed on another music channel, this time with a group of men dancing in their underpants with large smiley faces over their crotches.

'Uh...'

'Oh I like this song.' Kurt said, his face lighting up once more as he paid attention to the screen.

Blaine watched for a few moments, trying to decipher what was going on.

'Wiggle wiggle wiggle? Is this music?'

'I didn't say it was a great master piece of our time.' Kurt laughed. 'I just think it's catchy!'

'If you say so.' Blaine changed the channel once more. 'Who's this?'

A woman with short blonde hair was singing on stage to a large crowd.

'Oh that's Pink. She's very good.'

Blaine set the remote beside him for a moment to watch the singer perform.

So raise your glass if you are wrong, in all the right ways-

'This seems pretty hip.'

Kurt raised one eyebrow at him. 'Sure, it's 'hip'.' He smiled. 'You can really 'get down' to Pink.'

Blaine smiled at the gentle teasing.

'What, people don't say hip anymore?' He said, making Kurt laugh.

They watched a few more of Pink's live performances before Blaine changed the channel again, eager to discover more new music.

He discovered he quite liked a singer called Katy Perry who liked to kiss girls and found out that Kurt was right about Lady Gaga, her dress sense may be crazy but she had some amazing songs. They watched the music videos of groups called The Black Eyed Peas, Florence and the Machine, Maroon Five and a woman called Britney.

'Wow, music has changed a lot.' Blaine said, turning the TV off and bringing his knees up to his chest and wrapping his arms around them, as if somehow he could protect himself from this strange new world. All of a sudden he was feeling overwhelmed again, his joy of finding new music taken over once more by the fact that everything had changed.

Kurt bit his lip, sensing the sudden change in mood. 'Uh huh. But we can listen to some music from your time if you want.'

Blaine nodded; he needed to feel a little bit of home right now.

'Do you have any records then?'

Kurt laughed. 'No silly! We'll YouTube it.' He pulled the black square thing he had called the iPad out of his bag and began to press icons and letters on the screen.

'Ok, how about this? It's a 1970's playlist some guy made.'

Blaine nodded, leaning over towards Kurt to see the screen and doing his best to ignore the inviting warmth radiating off of him.

The crushing feeling left him as suddenly as it had arrived as he recognized what was playing.

'Hey, I went to that performance.' He said, unwrapping his arms from his legs and shifting so he was sitting right next to Kurt, their sides pressed up against each other.

'Brain Ferry, Cleveland Ohio, 1975.' Kurt read.

'Yeah, my friends and I met him by the stage door afterwards, I high fived him, it was amazing!'

Blaine stared at the screen, transfixed by the video of something he had experienced less than a year ago. He didn't even notice Kurt was watching him.

The performance ended and the playlist moved on to the next song.

'Elvis!' Blaine bounced on the sofa with excitement. 'He's my favourite; I really wish I had seen him perform live.' He began to sing along to 'You don't have to say you love me' swaying a little and bumping shoulders with Kurt.

'I wouldn't have put you down for an Elvis fan.' Kurt smiled at Blaine's enthusiasm. 'I guess I always thought Elvis was more sixties.'

'But I grew up in the sixties; I grew up with the King. When I got my guitar his songs were the first ones I wanted to learn.'

'You play the guitar?'

'Yeah, my friends and I used to camp out over the weekend, we'd sit around the campfire, I'd get out my guitar and play some songs for them; Elvis, Bryan Ferry, I even took some Blondie songs and made them more acoustic.'

Kurt watched Blaine's face light up as he spoke. He hadn't seen Blaine look this happy since he met him and the way excitement filled his eyes and a smile spread across his lips made Kurt want to smile too.

'It was during those nights I knew I wanted to become a musician.' Blaine said, his eyes still following The King across the stage. 'I knew I couldn't be happy working in my dad's company, I just wanted to play the guitar and sing.'

'You were a musician then? Back in your time?' Kurt asked, his eyes never leaving Blaine's face, wanting to take in the flurry of emotions that was playing over it.

'I was trying to be.' Blaine said. 'I left Ohio and came to the city to try and make it. I had a large selection of songs that I could play and few I had written myself.'

'You wrote your own songs?' Kurt said excitedly. 'That's amazing; you'll have to play them for me sometime.'

Blaine blushed a little at the attention. His parents had never approved or appreciated his song writing abilities but his friends all thought they were good. It was his friends who had encouraged him to try in the first place.

'I don't have a guitar.' He shrugged.

'Did you ever get anywhere with your songs?'

Blaine shook his head. 'No, I had only just come to the city really. My parents wouldn't give me any money to try and make it work, they let me go so I could get the idea of it out of my head but they said I had to do it all on my own. That's why I volunteered to take part in the trial, I needed the money.'

'Oh.' Kurt said, not knowing what else to say to that. Blaine had made a daring move to leave his family and try and make it in the city. He had hopes and dreams and was doing his best to achieve them. It made what happened to him all the more tragic.

'Kurt, can I ask you a question?' Blaine said quietly, looking down at his hands.

'Sure.'

'Do they, the people at the lab, do they know why I was left frozen? I mean I know everyone keeps saying that I, and all the other people, were just found and no one knows why, but there must be some theories.' He was thinking about the two girls in the corridor discussing the fate of the frozen people.

Kurt paused for a second before answering.

'They really don't know Blaine. Everyone is coming up with their own theories of course but they're just rumours. The pharmaceutical company that own it now, The Pharm, took it over a year ago. They wanted to expand the fields they were researching in and the company working in that building, Meditech, had all the labs and everything for it already, so the Pharm bought them out. It wasn't too much of a challenge for them, Meditech had lost a lot of money and were about to close down.

I came to work in the lab shortly after it was renamed. They needed assistants in the lab and I needed some money. It wasn't until about a month ago when they wanted to knock the wall between the cryogenics lab and the empty offices next to it that they even found the room you were all in. It had been bricked up and the room wasn't on any of the official plans of the building or anything. The power source to the room doesn't show up anywhere either. It's all a mystery!'

'So what are the theories?' Blaine asked.

'Well there are a few people thinking it was all an accident, somehow you were bricked in and your records removed by accident. There are some who think that it was a secret experiment by *****, who wanted to test an illegal kind of cryogenics and were bought out too quickly for them to unfreeze you and remove all evidence. And then there are some who are saying it's a conspiracy. They think you were locked away to keep you out of the way of something. But no one knows what so it's not a very solid theory.'

'Oh.' Blaine sighed. It was hard enough to have been frozen and left for thirty six year and have to adjust to a completely different time, but to not have a reason for it was even worse. He had nothing and no one that he could blame.

'What about the scientists that were working in the lab at the time, don't they remember me?'

Kurt shook his head. 'I overheard Wes, uh Doctor Montgomery, talking to another doctor. Apparently he disappeared a few years ago, his body was found in the Easy River a few days later.'

Blaine didn't know what to say to that.

'What about my parents? Has anyone contacted them?'

'Oh, didn't they say?'

Blaine shook his head; no one had said anything to him about his parents.

Kurt huffed. 'That's great, that'll be Mary, she's in charge of contacting relatives and things like that. No doubt she decided to go home early instead of telling you. She's so lazy.' He grumbled.

'But she found them?

'Kind of. Your parents are alive still, your dad retired a few years ago and they moved abroad. We're just having trouble finding a contact number for them.'

'And my brother?'

'Living in New York!' Kurt smiled. 'He's an actor but he took the week off to go up state for a short vacation, he's unreachable too. But he'll be back in a few days.'

Blaine paused for a moment before asking his next question. He knew what the answer was going to be and knew it would be painful.

'Do they think I'm dead?'

Kurt put his hand on Blaine's knee, but he was too numb to feel it.

'Yes. They declared you missing, but after a few years there was no trace of you, no sightings or anything. So they declared you dead.'

'It's better that way.' Blaine said, taking a deep breath to try and hold back the tears. He knew he wasn't on the best terms with his parents but they all loved each other. He knew they must have gone through hell when he went missing and he felt an overwhelming guilt at putting them through that.

'Hey, can we listen to Suspicious Minds? I love that song.' Blaine asked, wanting to change the subject.

'Sure. Here why don't you do it?' Kurt grinned, handing the iPad over to Blaine who held it as if it were a bomb about to go off.

'Are you sure? I might break it or make it all Spanish again?'

'You'll be fine.' Kurt said. 'Press your finger against the search bar up there.'

Blaine did so, gingerly pressing his finger against the screen and pulling it back quickly as a bar with letters on it jumped on to the screen.

'Wow, that's really cool.' He laughed, the weight of their last conversation lifting a little.

'Ok, now just press on the letters you want and press the search button down there.'

Blaine frowned in concentration, carefully pressing each little letter and then pressing the blue search button.

'It worked!' He exclaimed.

'Uh huh.' Kurt grinned. 'We'll have you mastering this technology in no time!'

XxXxXxX

Blaine woke early the next morning, the red lights on the bedside table declaring that it was six thirty. He and Kurt weren't due back at the lab until nine thirty.

He looked around the room, a little disorientated until he remembered he had his own apartment now.

He got up from the bed and padded softly to the living room where Kurt was sleeping on the couch. They had talked about music until the early hours, going through all of Blaine's favourite music from his time, apparently there was far too much disco in there for Kurt's liking, and on to the eighties. They hadn't finished until the early hours and Kurt had opted to crash on Blaine's couch rather than go home just to come back again a few hours later.

Blaine had to admit there was a lot of good music he had missed. Queen had quickly become one of his favourites and Kurt had become very excited when he showed Blaine Madonna.

He had learned that Michael Jackson had become an amazing performer and even changed his skin colour and he had been absolutely devastated when he learned Elvis had died.

They had then gone over more modern music, covering boy bands and girl bands who took over nineties. They even listened to some rap artists even though Kurt didn't like rappers; he said Blaine needed the education.

He stood in the doorway watching Kurt sleep peacefully. He looked younger somehow, his face completely relaxed and peaceful.

He felt his stomach clench at the sight of him, but not in a bad way. He knew he was becoming attracted to the young man but he was trying to hold back. He still didn't know what the attitude towards homosexuality was and he didn't want to upset Kurt in any way.

Now he couldn't be caught staring Blaine took the opportunity to really look at Kurt. He was beautiful, he had noticed that straight away, but now Blaine could take it all in. The smooth, unblemished skin, the soft curve of his lips and his long neck. He just wished he could look into those deep blue eyes again.

As if hearing his wish Kurt's eyes blinked open, peering around the room for a moment as if trying to remember where he was.

'Good morning.' Blaine said, stepping into Kurt's view.

'Morning.' Kurt said sleepily, slumping back down on the pillows.

'Can I get you anything?' Blaine asked. Kurt had been taking such good care of him he wanted to try and return the favour.

'Can you remember how to work the coffee machine?' Kurt asked his voice thick with sleep.

'Yeah, I think I can manage it.'

'Then coffee please, lots and lots of coffee.'

XxXxXxX

Blaine had thought the lab had run every test on him they could, but it turns out he was wrong. They were still finding places to stick needles in to, samples to extract and intrusive questions to ask him.

Thankfully at lunch time Kurt came to his rescue.

'Dr. Montgomery, are you finished with Blaine yet?' He asked, poking his head through the door of the office they were sitting in.

The Doctor flashed Kurt a smile. 'Yes Mr. Hummel, we're all done, he's all yours again.'

'Great, ready for some lunch Blaine?'

XxXxXxX

Kurt had given free rein to Blaine over where they had lunch, but the choice was a little overwhelming to Blaine. He hadn't known much of the city in the first place and now everywhere had changed he didn't know where they could go.

'There's a MacDonald's on the corner if you want to go there.' Kurt suggested.

Blaine nodded. He could handle that, that was familiar enough for him.

'At least we still eat food and it's not all in pill form.' Kurt joked as they sat down with their trays.

Blaine smiled and took a bite of his burger, setting it back down on his tray with a frown.

'Everything ok?'

'It tastes different.' Blaine answered once he had swallowed.

'Does it taste bad?'

Blaine shook his head. 'No, just different.'

'I have some news.' Kurt said excitedly, practically bouncing in his seat.

'What is it?' Blaine smiled, catching Kurt's enthusiasm.

'I found you a job!'

Blaine faltered. A job? How was he supposed to hold down a job? He had only been unfrozen two days ago.

'I know what you're thinking.' Kurt waved his hand as if to wave Blaine's concerns away. 'But it's ok. My friend Jeff and his partner Nick work in a record shop a few blocks from where I live. They specialise in all the old stuff, mostly from the sixties and seventies. It's all vinyl in there, you'll love it.'

'That... that actually sounds like something I could do.' Blaine said. If there was one area he knew well it was music. 'But what about... you know, everything else.'

'Well, I thought about that. They're both decent people, I think you could tell them the truth if you wanted to. Or if not I thought up a story that might work. Basically you were raised on a hippy commune that didn't develop much past nineteen seventy five.'

Blaine laughed. 'You think that would work?'

Kurt shrugged. 'It's worth a try.'

Blaine picked at his burger, thinking over something Kurt had said.

'You said Jeff and Nick were partners. Did you mean business partners?'

'No they're gay.' Kurt said.

'As in, homosexual?'

'Yes.' He paused for a second, looking at Blaine. 'I'm sorry, I didn't even think, that's not a problem for you is it? I know attitudes were a lot different towards gays in your time.'

'No, it's no problem for me.' Blaine said. 'I just... a couple of my friends were homosexuals. They told people in their small group of friends but you couldn't really let just anyone know.'

'That's too bad.' Kurt said sadly.

'I know one guy who was a homosexual. He got caught with another man and that man's brothers took him out one night and beat him. He was in hospital for weeks. A few months after he got out they did it again, this time he was killed. And the authorities didn't really do anything.'

Kurt looked horrified. 'That's awful!' He said, putting down the fries he was about to eat, his appetite suddenly gone. 'I mean, I knew things were bad back then and that kind of stuff happened, but-'

'I know.' They sat in silence for a few moments. 'So, is that kind of thing more acceptable now?'

Kurt's face lifted a little.

'Yeah, I mean, it's more socially acceptable. There are still people who will beat you up for it or call you names but society as a whole is more accepting of it. Some states are even allowing gays to marry. It's brilliant.'

'That does sound good.' Blaine smiled. 'And by gay you mean homosexual right? They're not just happy people?'

'Well they're happy they're being allowed to marry.' Kurt laughed. 'But yeah; gay means homosexual.'

'Right.'

'So homosexuality isn't a problem for you then?' Kurt asked once more, as if to clarify that Blaine would be ok with his friends.

'No not at all, like my Grandma said; love is love, there's too much hate in the world for people to scorn love when it comes around, whatever form it comes in.'

'Your Grandma sounds pretty awesome.'

Blaine smiled at the memory of her, she had died a few months before he had left to follow his dreams, she had been the one who had convinced him to follow them in the first place.

'She was, she never quite left the hippy phase you know?'

'Wearing a lot of tie dye and spouting flower power?' Kurt asked.

Blaine chuckled. 'Pretty much.'

They finished their meal in a comfortable silence as Blaine mulled over the information he had just received. Homosexuality was a lot more acceptable in this time, even if there were still some people who opposed it. Blaine understood that, he remembered his father telling him that after their local swimming pool stopped segregating there were still some people who refused to swim with the coloured people. You would never be able to make everyone accept people who were 'different'.

But he was filled with a new sense of hope. Maybe now that he was in this time he might be able to admit what he was, to tell the world he was homosexual and maybe even be brave enough to find someone to date.

Like the man sitting opposite him.

He shook his head, he didn't know enough about Kurt to warrant that thought. He had made the assumption that Kurt was gay based on his mannerisms, something that he had always refused to do, and even if he was he didn't know if Kurt already had a boyfriend. Or if he would even want to date someone who was out of their own time.

'Are you ready to go?' Kurt broke him out of his thoughts and he smiled up at the young man.

'Yeah, let's go.'

XxXxXxX

Kurt hummed to himself as he made his way back to his office, taking out his key to unlock the door. Blaine had seemed to settle in well in the record shop and Nick and Jeff promised to take good care of him until Kurt came to take him home.

He knew Blaine was an adult, he knew that he would be more than capable to get himself home but he wanted to be there for him.

He hadn't minded passing up free tickets to a show the night before, spending the night in with Blaine had been fun.

Kurt liked Blaine, he was very interesting to talk to and seemed to be adapting quite well to the situation. His enthusiasm towards the music they had listened to had been infectious and Kurt had found himself enjoying disco music for once.

But there was something else there too, something else making him want to spend more time with Blaine. The way he caught Blaine looking at him from time to time made him wonder...

He shook his head. Blaine was scared and vulnerable right now and Kurt was helping him. He should confuse gratitude with attraction.

Kurt sighed as he opened the door to his small little office. It was barely big enough for a desk a file cabinet but it was his, even though he was only part time for most of the year.

He brushed aside a few of the papers on the desk, looking for Blaine's parents contact information. Mary still hadn't done anything and Kurt was sure it would be another week until she bothered. He might as well do it himself.

But the contact information wasn't there.

Kurt frowned. He was certain it had been there before he left. He had stuck a little yellow post-it on it saying 'Blaine' with a little heart underneath, to signify it was information about Blaine's loved ones, obviously, and left it next to the phone.

But now that space was empty.

He glanced over his desk, frowning as he noticed one of his desk drawers was open slightly. He was sure they were all closed when he left.

Someone had been in his office.

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