A/N: I know I said no update for a while, okay, yeah, I lied. This one is a special one though. This chapter is to celebrate it being two years to the day that I started this story. I am curious to know who of you have been here with me from the get go. Drop me a line? I'd really love that. Or let me know when and how you came to join this ride. That would be equally fascinating to me. Anyways, happy second birthday to all of us. That's how story birthdays work, right?

And thank you so much, without you this story would not exist.


Getting Away

Chapter 43: Not A Sound On The Pavement


It is a memory, the best memory Blaine has of his entire life if you ask him.

It might be because it is a more recent one, it might be because it involves Kurt ... and a safe home.

It is a thing so simple to most that they do not even note it in more than passing whenever it occurs.

It is just a hug, after all.

To Blaine it is ... it is so much more.

That day when Kurt and he, just friends back then, had gone to the movies in Lima, one early afternoon, together, for the first time, and later Blaine had driven him home, and they had had a hot chocolate on Kurt's living room couch and kept talking for hours, Kurt's Vogue collection strewn all around them – that had been a great day to Blaine, maybe even the day he fell for Kurt, not because he had felt ready but because he had not been able to help it. Or maybe he just gave up lying to himself ... that day.

Saying goodbye in the driveway of Kurt's home hours and hours later, midnight closing in on them, slowly but persistent, Kurt had shyly taken a step, then two, closer and put his arms around him. Slowly, Kurt had pulled himself closer to Blaine, Blaine closer to his own body, after a moment more, and just held him.

Really, it had just been a hug.

Kurt had shared many of those, long or short but always friendly, with Mercedes, Brittany, Tina, Rachel and even some with Finn at this point in his life. And there had been his mom, there are Carole and Burt, never short of hugs.

But Blaine ..., to Blaine who had to that day had no memory of anyone being gentle with him like that, no memory of being held with such care, ... for him, to him it had been so much ... more, and too much in ways.

Kurt had held on, had pulled back only lightly at Blaine's sharp intake of air right beside his ear. And then with another deep breath sucked sharply into Blaine's lungs, the shock audible, Blaine's arms had been around him, shaking but strong. And Blaine had not let go again as the tears had started coming, Kurt only realizing as Blaine had begun to openly sob in his arms.

It had been the one and only time back then in the first weeks of knowing each other that Blaine had ever shown Kurt that side of him, torn in ways neither of the boys had understood then. Torn in ways Blaine had done everything to keep under the tightest of wraps, back then.

But with Kurt's arms around him, that night, everything had slipped for a moment.

And Burt had stood in the doorway to their house that day, unease in his chest.

All evening he had witnessed, stunned, the relaxed interaction between Kurt and Blaine, the happiness.

He had tried to give them space, but the house is only so big, so he had bumped into them a couple of times, on the stairs, in the kitchen. And every time Blaine had flinched at the mere sight of him.

The first time he had thought he must have imagined it, but then it had happened again ... and again. He had not said anything that day, had not meant to walk in on the boys like that outside, had had no intention to spy. All he had wanted to do and eventually done that night was walk outside and offer Blaine to stay the night, it had been late already after all – the late autumn weather cold and unpredictable no reassurance to Burt that Blaine would make it safely home.

Little had Burt known back then, thinking of past bullying maybe making '...the kid jumpy, if his life has been anythin' like Kurt's.' And Burt had felt so sure it must have been with the way Blaine and Kurt got along as if they had gone through most of their lives together.

But so little had he known back then.

And certainly not that it should not have been Blaine's way home that he should have been concerned about being safe.

Blaine had waved the offer off, and - now that Burt thinks about it - flinched, too, at the suggestion of Burt calling his parents to let them know he would stay.

So Burt had not called.

And Blaine had not stayed.

Blaine had not stayed in Lima at all that night, had driven past his own, his father's home, as fast as the speed-limit had allowed him.

He had made his way back to Westerville, Dalton. It was not exactly happiness awaiting, but at least he had his peace there most weekends, space to live through his nightmares, inevitable, as Blaine had believed to have learned them to be ... a long time ago.

But all he had dreamt about that night, upper body hugged tight against a pillow, had been Kurt's warm body touching his, and how safe it had made him feel, confused too, that there is someone in his life who wants to hold him '... like this.'

He had that night not been able to figure it out. That is, which he had felt more, being held. Safety, or confusion?

It had taken time, quite some of it after that, for the confusion part to really find its place in a tiny corner at the back of his mind, and for love to settle in.

But with every hug from Kurt - who had been more hesitant about them the rest of that weekend and the next week, and the next, but persistent as well - the sense of safety associated with Kurt, not just beside him but closer than that, had finally settled in.

That first night, though, Blaine had found himself so overwhelmed. And only the way he had already felt, with such certainty, about Kurt as a friend, trusting that boy without doubt, only that ... had made it okay.

The problem ..., the problem tonight, shaken from his nightmare in a safe home in Lima, Ohio, is - Blaine minutes later still trying to disappear in Kurt's hold - that Blaine, still, deep down does not know how he feels about Burt, not much more than he does know how to feel about Cooper in a way.

He knows ..., no, his head has stored away somewhere that positive association that feeling he knows he should have attached to the labels brother, ... father.

But the truth is, the truth in his life right now is, no matter how much he longs to grow the same love for Burt as Kurt has for Burt, there are things burned into his thoughts, causing reflexes that have kept him if not safe than alive for all this time.

They are things so hard to see, to feel anything past, especially when sleep pushes them to the forefront of his mind. A sleep addled brain leaving Blaine feeling most defenceless. It is not for no reason that exhaustion, not just physical either, had always played into Blaine's need to get away. And Blaine when asked would be pressed hard to think of many times in his life in the last ... years, in which he had not felt exhausted.

All that is part of why he cannot let anyone look at those pictures, many of them having been drawn or painted when the real, the deep pain hits.

Blaine does not want the people he cares about, is trying to think off in only positive ways, to ever think they are in any way about them.

And Blaine would not have the words to explain any of what they would see, he feels too certain.

He feels sure that in a show and tell he would fail spectacularly at the tell part.

But with no words ... can there be a moving forward?

After Blaine has calmed down again in Kurt's arms, Burt long gone, he thinks about it for an even longer time, how that would work '... finding words.'

He knows he needs them. And reading all those books and articles with Kurt, and Carole, has given him some. And he uses them to talk a little more about his family, and school, and how he feels about ... others.

He has no idea how to talk about himself.

And he is growing increasingly aware now that that is what makes him feel so trapped, still locked away inside himself.

He needs to talk.

And he is beginning to know it.