"It will be curious," he said, "to have a creature in the castle whose presence causes Lir to call me 'father' for the first time since he was five years old."
"Six," Lir said. "I was six."
"Five or six," the king said, "it had stopped making me happy long before, and it does not make me happy now."
The Warblers take a week off after exams finish. On one hand, even the free time seems to be a time-honored tradition since the 1940s (when the teachers smoking meant a lot of the Warblers' lung capacities were diminished from the secondhand smoke, as Wes explains). On the other hand, Kurt can change out of his Dalton uniform two hours earlier.
They go to Blaine's house - okay, giant freaking mansion - and getting there is a quick drive in Kurt's Navigator. A few yards away from the gate, he needs to switch places with Blaine because the gate is voice-activated.
Through the iron gate with its imposing patina ("It's looked like that since I was born."); down the driveway that has to be a hundred feet long ("You're so appreciative of the little things," Wes says); and finally to the entrance where Blaine rings the bell. The conversation turns to various school things, but the Warblers are off-limits because as David explains, "I am not talking about that on my week off unless I can get a date off it. I'm not gay, and you're all taken."
Presently they see someone's silhouette through the misted windows. "There's Greg," Blaine muses aloud - but then the door opens, and his father is on the other side. Kurt knows this is Blaine's father because in spite of his height, he has Blaine's sloping shoulders and curly hair - or perhaps it should be reversed. In place of Blaine's jet-black is greying brown, and it seems that the rest of him is greying like driftwood.
"Blaine?" He asks, and his voice rolls out like a young man's.
"Hi, Dad!" Blaine smiles, and he is the only one; Kurt is still unsure what to think, while David and Wes are carefully neutral. "I thought you had a meeting?"
"We had to leave early - Colin's wife went into labor and it's no use going on without him."
"Oh, that sucks." Blaine remarks, the smile on his face dimming in concern.
"Yes, but we knew it was coming. He'll email us as soon as he can." He turns to Wes and David, who wave politely and without feeling. "Hello, you two. Thank god the renovations are done; I have no intention of getting laughed at by paramedics again."
"It won't happen again, sir," Wes tells him. "And it was David's idea," he adds.
Mr. Anderson laughs, and then he catches sight of Kurt. "And you are?"
"Kurt Hummel, Mr. Anderson. Nice to meet you." He smiles and shakes the man's hand more firmly than he usually does. Though he spots pleasant surprise in the fading green eyes, he does not say anything else.
"Oh, Kurt. You're Blaine's friend, right?" He asks with no telltale pauses or almost-grimaces. Again Kurt is confused as to why Wes and David don't like him, because he is being perfectly civil. But those two tend to exaggerate things, and Blaine hasn't mentioned anything like what happened when he first came out; maybe his father just needed to get used to it.
"Boyfriend, Dad," Blaine corrects, and another surprise flickers on the man's face.
"Huh - you didn't say anything."
"I wanted to tell you in person," Blaine says, but underneath the casual tone is a wisp of plaintiveness. "You know, since your hours are getting all weird again," he goes on with carefully calibrated sheepishness. "I didn't want to call you in the middle of a meeting or anything."
"Well, come inside." He ushers them in. Blaine makes a show of letting Kurt go in first, and David rolls his eyes.
"Blaine, pace yourself when you show normal people your house - Kurt was impressed by your driveway. Remember when you brought Martin here and he passed out when he saw your theater?"
Wes scoffs. "I can imagine why - your collection goes all the way back to the nineteen-twenties. Lydia's is better if you don't want to spend an hour looking for something to watch."
"It goes back to when and whose is better?" Kurt demands, but Blaine gives a high-pitched bark of a laugh and shuts the door.
"We're inside now!" He says helpfully. Faced with Blaine's glittering smile and the obviousness of that statement, Kurt is just a little bit more in love with him.
The mansion is gloomy, a far cry from its well-kept exterior. Dalton is dark, but it is a dreamy darkness melted by sconces and cove lights. Here the light shears off corners, turns shadows into sinkholes, and throws everything into relentless detail. The bends are claustrophobic, as if the builders took "tunnel vision" to heart, and for a moment Kurt wonders if this is why Blaine always climbs furniture in Dalton - to avoid the shadows and keep the walls from closing in.
Then he scoffs inside. He jumps on furniture because he's an adorable nerd. Sometimes he wonders if he's too dramatic.
After the fifth turn and nothing else to use as a reference point, Kurt is very confused. More troubling is the fact that Blaine's commentary has died off, leaving only Wes and David's unusually strained small talk. Normally they can talk everyone else to madness, but as hard as they try in this place, the words get swallowed by gaping shadows or charred to nothing by the harsh light.
"Your house is a TARDIS," Wes accuses as a last resort, jolting Blaine back into his usual mood.
"Come on, Wes, it's not that bad."
There is something sad in Wes' face, but it's gone before Kurt can pin it down. "That's because you live in it. You're automatically exempt from realizing what a maze it is."
Blaine shakes his head and turns to Kurt. "My house isn't a maze, is it?"
"Uh..." He has no idea when he's going to see daylight again, and it's gotten about ten times darker now that there are no more windows. "It's a little confusing."
"Trust you to ask your boyfriend for an opinion," David drawls. Blaine's dad opens a door. In the white room are armchairs flanking a couch, a flatscreen TV mounted on the wall, and a coffee table. The light pouring in through the wide-open curtains makes Kurt's eyes hurt, and the bare-bones furniture in such a big room makes it seem as good as empty.
But it is not a bad room; it just needs more details. Like paintings, or random knick-knacks, and little signs of life. "Okay - this room is the size of my house's first floor," he says, to another laugh from Blaine.
"It's my theater," he tells him "You spent five months at Dalton and you're still impressed by my house?"
"Yeah, but it's a school. It's supposed to be huge." He sits down on the couch, which is comfortably worn. Blaine sits down, several inches away, while Wes and David drop their things and sink into the armchairs. "So is this your theater? It's nice, but I don't feel quite like I'm -"
"Right, movies!" Blaine gets up and fishes in his bag. He finds a key, walks up to the TV, and sticks it in the wall to its left. As he turns it, a tiny click echoes in the room. He sets his fingers in a crack and swings the wall aside to reveal several stacks of DVDs.
Kurt's eyes go wide, and he's pretty sure his jaw drops and rolls onto the floor. "Your theater has secret compartments."
"Yeah, some of my movies are hard to find, so we can't have them out in the open." Blaine opens another compartment to reveal speakers.
"Your theater has secret compartments," he repeats numbly, voice ragged with shock, and now the other three are alarmed.
"Kurt, are you all right?" Blaine's father asks.
"Blaine, man - do not say anything else," David warns the tenor. "This is when Martin passed out last time. Remember?"
"Don't worry, I'm starting with the modern movies first," he assures, to the opposite effect. Wes and David facepalm, so Blaine tiptoes over for a closer look at him. "Kurt, you okay?"
He inhales and exhales. Silence stretches taut while Blaine fidgets with his hands, but Kurt answers presently in a shaky voice. "I might need a couple more minutes to relocate my jaw, but I'm good."
With the danger over, Wes and David start an argument for what movie to watch. Blaine waits for them to decide, but he keeps stealing looks at Kurt and twisting his fingers together.
A laugh wells up. They look to see an older Blaine, down to the sheepish half-smile, and he seems the picture of a nostalgic father - but he is just as faded as ever, and the smile drains away too quickly. "You're doing your hand thing again," Blaine's father tells him. "I haven't seen that since you were... twelve, I think."
"Thirteen." Blaine stops, self-conscious, and sits by Kurt. If he were less concerned with decorum, he'd be sitting on his hands. "And I never stopped, Dad; you just don't see it 'cause I'm gone most of the week." Blaine slips into the role of annoyed teenager, though Kurt knows that he's lying because Wes and David are caught off-guard.
"All right," he says lightly, as routine as Blaine's annoyance, but his phone beeps. "And -" he grimaces, "- Colin's putting Rick in charge. Which means unofficially, I'm in charge." He sighs. "I have to go; preemptive damage control."
Blaine lets him leave without bothering to say goodbye, and he leans into Kurt like the whiteness of the room hurts him.
"Boondock Saints!" David's voice startles them, and he waves the DVD case at them.
"Hmm?" Kurt asks, to surprised resignation from the council member.
"Practically everyone's watched The Boondock Saints, Kurt."
"'Practically' being the key word," Kurt answers, slightly affronted. "I tend more towards musicals, period pieces, and... not bloody action movies."
"It has shirtless Irish twins," David tells him.
"Done." He takes on the hormone-addled teen's role while David puts the movie on. "Is your dad always this busy?" He asks.
"Just for this time of year. He works on the city council."
"No wonder," Kurt says, thinking about his own father and how he always tries to put Kurt and Finn first. Blaine eyes him: Most of his expression is surprise, a little bit is hurt, and a tiny thread of it is envy.
"About what?"
"Nobody with your level of dorkiness can have a normal dad. I knew you were rebelling against something." But Kurt curls his arm around Blaine's in apology.
"No, he does not want my thoughts," she said softly. "He wants me, as much as the Red Bull did, and with no more understanding. But he frightens me even more than the Red Bull, because he has a kind heart."
David wakes up at ten in the morning to his phone's ringtone. He groans and fumbles for it, rubbing his eyes. I Fucked Up Again, Please Help. "What happened now, Blaine?" he asks blearily.
"Where the hell were you? I've called like, three times - wait. Were you still asleep?"
"It's Saturday," he points out. "Waking up before eight is against my religion."
"Never mind." Footsteps echo faintly from Blaine's end - he must be pacing. "I kind of screwed up and I think..."
He can't deal with Blaine's latest imaginary fuck-up this early in the morning. Kurt and Blaine are a Lifetime couple, damn it - soul-crushing misery, making everyone go 'Make the fuck out already!', the absurd catastrophe that brings them together, and finally the fairytale happy ending that gives people diabetes. This is supposed to be the happy ending! "You already gave me diabetes, man."
"- not sure why because... what?"
"Forget that, it was a dream." David sighs. "Give me ten minutes. I'll meet you in the courtyard."
So it turns out there was a botched makeout session or something, and at first David shrugs it off as another of Blaine's chivalrous panic attacks. He knows Kurt isn't that big on touching or intimacy, but Blaine's putting so little pressure on him that David feels like jumping Blaine sometimes. He gives the tenor slack and says "You ever think of talking to Kurt about it?" instead of saying so. A couple hours later he gets a text from Horrible Spy (Kurt).
I think I screwed something up - Blaine just talked to me about respecting my boundaries. While reassuring, I have no idea why he did that because we already talked about it. Before David can text him back or finish reading, Kurt sends another one. Actually, I do. Where are you?
Courtyard. Damn it, that boy info-dumps on texts. He really would be a horrible spy.
They head to a cafe close to campus, a hole-in-the-wall with great coffee and open-minded staff, where David spends the wait for their drinks gearing up to get all of Kurt's story in one go. How does Blaine keep up with him? ...Right, love.
"So tell me why talking to Blaine made things worse, because usually it does the opposite." David takes a sip of coffee. Here it comes:
"So we were in the juniors' common room -"
"Practicing?" He can't help but grin.
"I get it, you posted the video on Facebook and I will never live it down. How did you steal a surveillance tape?" Kurt asks, then goes on without missing a beat. "But yes, we were practicing, and then I heard a door slam, or a window... and I just - froze. Naturally that freaked Blaine out -"
Is Kurt saying that something triggered a bad memory? Oh god, why is David right about these things?
"- awkward but heartful talk at lunch about boundaries, meaning he thinks I'm a broken little bird with crippling trauma, and that leads us here." Kurt hides behind his coffee, not that it hides how red his face is.
At least Kurt isn't that much of a Lifetime character. Then again he might be downplaying things, and it's really hard to tell with Kurt. "Why did you freeze?"
"It sounded like a dumpster," Kurt spills out. "The one the football team kept throwing me into. I had this... flashback or something, and I felt like running for some reason. Okay, Blaine was sort of - on me. That might have been why." He sips his drink and conveniently misses the flash of horror on David's face. "But you know, it was a really weird coincidence! It's probably never going to happen again."
"Do you really think that?" No matter what Kurt says, David knows the real answer.
"Are you kidding? No." He shows no fear in his face or body - the hands on the table or on his coffee are neither shaking nor white-knuckled, his shoulders are straight as ever, and there is no quivering nor razor-thin mouth. But his voice and his eyes are terrified, and soon his face crumples miserably. "It's not supposed to be this way."
He knows what Kurt's talking about, but he asks for the sake of appearance. "What's not?"
"I spent months dropping the most blatant hints I could think of and the day I stopped trying, Blaine finally got a clue," he says, to a solemn nod from David. "I like my life now. I don't need a spare change of clothes every day, I'm not getting body-checked into lockers, and I have a boyfriend." There is a brief, raw wonder in his voice that makes him look impossibly young. As adorable as he is, it also makes David's chest hurt. "He's thoughtful and gorgeous and kind of dorky underneath the knight-in-shining-armor attitude, and I can actually talk to him."
David waits for the rest, and shifts his bag under the table as someone squeezes past.
"I shouldn't be scared anymore." He keeps his voice normal, but that can't hide what he isn't saying. "I shouldn't be scared that he'll vanish, or break up with me, or say - 'Hey, I'm sick of taking things slow and if you're not ready, too bad.' I keep telling myself that none of that will happen because honestly, I get really dramatic sometimes, but then this happens and I'm back to square one."
It occurs to David that nobody knows anyone like Kurt and Blaine - not together, not Kurt and Blaine. He knows a lot of perfectionists and a lot of bullying victims because Dalton has a habit of attracting them. Everyone thinks that broken people need someone whole; it sounds logical, because you can't fix something if you don't know how it should work. But emotionally it doesn't, because you can't fix something if you don't know how it was broken.
He swallows his lukewarm coffee and tries to keep his emotions off his face. "Life doesn't work that way, Kurt," he says gently.
"Well, it should," Kurt insists bitterly, before a shadow in the doorway catches both the boys' attention. "Blaine?"
"Hi." Blaine straightens and tries not to twist his fingers together. "I was hoping to just... sit tight and let this blow over, but I know you don't do that. Or you might, but you wouldn't be happy about it. So I looked around, and now I'm here."
"I'm heading off - forgot about a paper," David tells them, and they give cursory nods. He stops to refill his coffee, and steals a glance at them from the counter.
It is written on Kurt's face that he'd rather not be here, and he sits as white as a statue. But he stays because Blaine is equally unwilling, and only doing this because he knows (loves) Kurt. And now David understands why Kurt holds everyone at arm's length, and why he put up with Blaine's obliviousness for months. Why Blaine is so careful when he touches him, or doesn't touch him, and why he is so terrified when Kurt loses control. And he knows that on some level, both of them must know this too.
He wonders if these two know what the other knows about the other.
Kurt leans against Blaine with the expression of someone in pain, and David strains to catch what he says. "... gonna sound stupid, aren't I?"
The barista is also eavesdropping as David hands him a five.
"Don't worry," Blaine says. David sticks the change in his pocket.
"You guys go to Dalton, right?" the barista asks. David nods. "I'm assuming they're the two everyone was talking about for a while?"
"It took four months for Blaine to get the flashing neon hints," David tells him, with a dramatic sigh that is not entirely fake. "We were gonna lock them in a room together if he didn't man up soon."
"'Man up' means 'take a risk,'" he points out. "Did you mean 'wise up'?"
"I meant... both, actually," David admits. He tests his coffee; freshly made and too hot. "As stupid as Blaine gets sometimes, he has a worse problem with being too careful. Kurt just does things. He's like Batman - spoiled little countertenor by day, vengeance-filled mastermind by night."
The man laughs. "You don't see couples like those two much."
"Nope." He looks again. Blaine talks very tentatively, and he waits for Kurt's response like he's awaiting a death sentence. Kurt speaks gently, but it still makes Blaine flinch. Considering Kurt just poured out all his insecurities to David a few minutes ago, Blaine is the one acting vulnerable.
For some reason David remembers his History class is going through medieval times, and the code of chivalry flashes into his head - the part about courage.
Being a knight often means choosing the more difficult path, the personally expensive one. Be prepared to make sacrifices in service of the precepts and people you value.
He was the first to joke that "This is Blaine, it's fucking scary," to resounding agreement (and a warning for swearing in class), but now it makes him sad.
