"Ugh," Blaine groaned, resting his head on Kurt's shoulder and looking at the paper he was hunched over at the kitchen table. "You're already perfect, and now you can draw too? Where did this come from?"

"You'd be amazed," Kurt said quietly, not looking away from the methodical movement of his pencil. "At the skills you pick up when you spend every recess and lunch period for 10 years hiding in empty classrooms." He felt Blaine tense behind him and turned, placing a quick kiss to his temple. "That wasn't supposed to be angsty."

"I just…I remember," Blaine shrugged, moving to sit in the chair opposite Kurt. "I did the same thing, once I got outed. Never picked up any skills though. I can draw a mean daisy. Maybe a fluffy tree. But I always preferred coloring…" he trailed off, looking down at his hands. "I'm not so good at creating things on my own, but at least I can maybe help make them beautiful. It's silly."

"It's not silly," Kurt smiled, setting his pencil down and covering one of Blaine's hands with his own. He thought of Blaine concentrating on a picture in front of him, tongue poking out of the side of his mouth as he carefully added the colors that brought life to what was once only a series of cold black lines.

—

Blaine walked into his first class, history, his least favorite. It was only by the grace of coffee that he had any hope of staying awake at all, and he missed the distraction Kurt had always provided from the neighboring desk. An eyeroll, a smirk, even just the steady sound of his breathing as he, too, tried to avoid falling asleep.

He grabbed the notebook from his bag with a sigh, looking in confusion at the unfamiliar stack of papers poking out from the edge. Pulling them out, he found a stapled book with "BLAINE" written in blocky, shadowed letters across the cover, "An Adventure Series" underneath it and his boyfriend's familiar looping signature in the bottom corner. He opened the cover to find a note:

Without you, I'd just be these lines. Never stop coloring. - K

(Look in the front pocket of your bag)

Blaine reached absently down, closing his fingers around a flat box and pulling it up to find a pack of colored pencils. Leafing through the book he found a cartoon likeness of himself, all big smiles and exaggerated eyebrows. He fought dragons and flew spaceships and lived underwater with the fish. On the last page, he ran through a hallway with a wide-eyed boy.

He would color that one first.