Forest Fires

Chapter 3

Up the stairs, up up up the stairs.

It feels to Blaine like it takes forever.

But then he is standing hand reaching for the handle to open a door he has gone through more times than he has cared to count. It has been a second home, that space, maybe his first real home, ... being with Kurt.

Their first shirtless make-out.

The first time Kurt had made him come and he Kurt, unintentionally but so not unwelcome.

The first time ... Blaine had held Kurt, crying and shaking with tears, like he had always had to do alone, on yet another anniversary of his mom's death.

Blaine is breathing hard, standing there, hesitating for a moment as he holds his breath and listens for the sound absent from his phone. Maybe his heart is hammering too hard in his own ears to still be perceptive to the strained and subtle sounds. So he clears his throat and quietly asks into the piece "May I come in? ... Kurt?"

The intonation in the sudden sob hitting his eardrum is enough of a yes for Blaine, so intimately acquainted with the man inside those walls.

He is still careful when he pushes the door into the darkened room open, the light falling from the hallway within the room guiding Blaine's eyes. The bed lying somewhat beyond its reach looks ... empty.

"Kurt?" Blaine asks into the open air now, call ended, phone clutched unsurely in the hand hanging by his side. "Kurt, ... where are ..." Then Blaine sees him.

Clad in no more than a long shirt and boxers Kurt is curled up against the wall beyond his bed, a small space, allowing for no sudden, unnoticed approach. Kurt's phone lying on the floor in front of him, screen just turning back to black, the last light from the call just ended by Blaine vanishing into the dark air, surrounding the young man clutching the front of his own shirt with both hands, balled into fists, tearing it away from his throat, as if th soft, thin collar could cut off all air.

Blaine can see Kurt shaking, and only now, with a quick glance to his right, he notices the wide open flung window, carrying a quiet but cold night's air into the room.

Blaine is quick to grab the blanket covering the bed and pushing the phone aside, letting go off his own with it he is kneeling with Kurt, wrapping the blanket around him, knowing better than to try and close the window, deliberately kneeling beside Kurt, so not to block his clear path of sight outside, towards the large backyard of the house.

Kurt is still starring ahead, responds with another violent shiver to the blanket being wrapped around him.

Blaine thinks it is as his presence truly registers with Kurt that breaths begin to quicken again, where everything had been absence before Kurt feels the sudden push to react, but all his mind can do is send him spinning towards a new, another panic.

The tears come when Blaine does what only he can do, what only he knows to do, ... what Kurt has been missing for months and months.

Slipping out of his stiffest pieces of clothing, thankfully limited to jacket and shoes, Blaine scoots in behind Kurt, bracketing the man between his legs, gifting Kurt with a solid but warm place to lean on. After a moment's hesitation Blaine's arms find their way, wind around Kurt's painfully tight wound up form. "KK?"

The whine that meets Blaine's ears in answer is ... broken, hesitant. And Blaine's hold tightens instinctively on Kurt, "I've got you, KK. I've got you." 'I can hold you together for a little while,' Blaine thinks, keeps saying, "Try to let go. You can let it all out. I won't judge. I'd never judge," and Kurt's breaths growing in agitation are choked, Kurt working through it, turning into Blaine's embrace, and beginning to let out the desperate sounds, stuttering them into Blaine's still inside out and back to front jumper, while Blaine says soothingly, "I know, KK. I know. I'm here. I'm right here."

At some point they must drift asleep together because Blaine wakes up with a pain in his neck and a young man curled up against him on that very floor the next morning.

For a moment Blaine thinks Kurt is still asleep, but then he hears, "Bee? ... Don't leave."

"KK."

"Don't leave me."