Disclaimer: I do not own Glee or any of its characters; Ryan Murphy and Co. hold that honor. I'm simply writing this for fun, not profit.
Kurt awoke in the Infirmary Wing.
Blinking dazedly at his surroundings, he sat up on the cot, squinting at the sunshine streaming in through the tall windows along the wall.
"Ah, Mr. Hummel," Madam Astor exclaimed, evidently pleased to see him. "Good to have you back with us. How are you feeling?"
It took Kurt a moment to take stock of himself amid his surroundings – he could only recall a vague sense of panic and then nothing, his mind cool and calm and orderly – before he was able to respond, "I feel fine. What happened?"
"Mr. Gilbert brought you in – quite the adventuresome sort, aren't you? It's not often that I see students for mermaid-related injuries –"
All at once the memories flooded him: the raw terror at the first chilling crackle of the werewolf's howl, the absurdly cold smack of the lake's frigid water against his extremities, the swoop and glide of Blaine's body underneath his as he swam from shore and their return journey, his own fading consciousness then reducing the world to grays as Elliot snapped at Blaine and Blaine snapped at Elliot and then there was screaming and an overwhelming sense of powerlessness as Blaine vanished and Elliot scooped him into his arms and the world faded away.
"I have to find Blaine," he said immediately, cutting Madam Astor off as she ran her wand over his upper arms. He pushed himself to a more upright position and had almost managed to slide out of the bed when Elliot appeared, helping Madam Astor hold him back.
"You can find Blaine later," Elliot said, voice infuriatingly calm. Kurt wanted to strangle him. "Right now you need to stay here and rest until Madam Astor says you're all right. Mermaid venom can be pretty potent; I don't want you to get hurt."
"Not like how you hurt him, right?" Kurt spat. He didn't care about the wounded look on Elliot's face or the confused one on Madam Astor's; he needed to find Blaine. "I'll explain everything later, I promise, but right now I have to find him. Please."
Madam Astor gave him a cursory once-over before nodding, evidently satisfied. "Very well. You know where to find me if the cuts worsen."
"Thank you," Kurt said, already scrambling off the cot as Elliot offered him an arm. He hissed, his own frustration poring over as he snapped, "I'm fine." Elliot retreated a step, firming his shoulders after a moment and letting him go.
For that, at least, Kurt was grateful.
As soon as his feet touched the floor, he took off at a run for the lake. It was close to sunrise, the sky already turning pink at the edges, and Kurt knew that Elliot's spell was meant to last for the better part of an hour. Dashing over the grass and flying down the hill, he came to an abrupt halt at the lake's edge, unsure how to proceed.
"Blaine!" he called – hoping, miraculously, to attract him. Cupping his hands around his mouth, he shouted, "Blaine!" and felt his spirits lift fractionally when the water rippled.
The giant squid appeared, lolling happily under the surface as Kurt groaned and buried a hand despairingly in his hair.
Drawing in a deep breath, he stripped off his robes and splashed into the water, casting a Bubble-Head charm over his own head before ducking below.
The silence was eerie as he swam farther out into the lake, kicking hard to keep his temperature from dropping too quickly. It was hard – even without the initial unexpected shock and surge of fear racing through him, the water was bitingly cold – but he kicked and kicked and kicked, desperate for any sign of Blaine.
His bubble had grown claustrophobically small and he felt despair creeping in as he surveyed the lake in vain for any sign of Blaine, pushing onward and freezing when he saw Blaine curled up in a tangle of seaweed, trembling weakly.
The fear that he felt descending to the same depth as Blaine paled utterly in the face of his alarm, Kurt's arms already reaching to push the seaweed aside as he reached the bottom. He noticed with vague surprise that the seaweed was warm to the touch, soft and comfortable – the lake was noticeably warmer down here, drawing some of the coolness out of his own limbs.
Blaine's skin was ice-cold to the touch.
Kurt hissed, retracting his hand before sliding his arms around Blaine's torso, trying to lift him. He didn't budge, and even in the relative lightness of the water he was heavy, his muscular tail curled on the ground as Kurt tried to haul him upwards. He wasn't getting warmer down here and Kurt was worried that if he didn't bring his temperature up soon that his heart would stop; temperature spells were notoriously ill-tempered, and Elliot hadn't been aiming for gentle when he cast it.
Growling with frustration, he heaved him upright and persuaded Blaine to wrap his arms around his waist, locking into place vice-like once they were there. Shivering at the contrast, Kurt drew in a deep breath – one of his last, if the bubble around his head was any indication – and reached for his wand, pointing it skyward and commanding, "Wingardium leviosa."
Blaine was heavy enough that the usually swift journey took longer than Kurt expected, their heads breaching the surface just as Kurt's bubble disappeared. He towed Blaine towards the closest shore without letting the cold catch up to him, paddling as Blaine flapped his tail weakly, face even more pale in the full light.
As soon as they hit the ground, Blaine flopped heavily onto the grass, clawing his way weakly onto the ground and shivering hard. Kurt helped tug him away from the water until he was propped up against a tree, waving his wand again with an Accio cloak! He caught the material and draped it over Blaine's shivering form, heedless of the claws shredding portions of it as Blaine curled them against it, clutching it to his torso.
It wasn't enough, he knew at once, as Blaine's shivering intensified. Flicking his wand and summoning his own Invisibility Cloak, he draped it across his shoulders and flicked the hood over his head, effectively vanishing from behind. Blaine could still see him, though, his face unshrouded as he knelt down, one hand holding the cloak shut and the other reaching for Blaine's half-frozen cheek, holding it so their eyes met.
"Don't move," he said, waiting until Blaine nodded in understanding before straightening from his crouch.
He hated to leave him, but he didn't have a choice – there was no way that he could transport Blaine without help. He couldn't ride a broom, either, negating that option, and Kurt didn't dare waste time on his alternatives.
Bee-lining for the Slytherin dormitory, he slipped off his Invisibility Cloak and made his way past the portrait into the quiet interior, well-lit and comfortably warm but empty. Taking the steps to the boys' dorms two steps at a time, he threw back the door for his fellow Sixth years and barked, "Puck!"
There was a muffled grunt from the bed closest to the window, a misshapen lump buried under the covers stirring at his voice. Not wasting time, Kurt yanked the blankets off him and said, "Get dressed. I need your help."
Thankfully, once he got past the initial hungover-like phases of waking up, Puck was quick and compliant: he leveled a flat look at Kurt that said so help me God I will charm the hell out of your bedding if this is a joke before shrugging on his cloak, ready to go. "Where are we going?"
Kurt didn't respond, leading the way back down the staircase and expecting – praying, hoping, needing – Puck to follow.
Thankfully, he did.
By the time they reached the lake Puck was more awake, questioning Kurt's motives and finally shutting up when Kurt snapped, "You owe me one, remember?"
They had an ongoing exchange of debts that both shamelessly exploited. It was a unique friendship, but at least Kurt could say that it had its rewards and Puck was honorable enough to follow through without question.
Which was why it caught Kurt momentarily off guard when Puck halted mid-step and stared at Blaine curled up against the tree, deathly still; he'd forgotten that mermaids were something of a rarity for most people. Kurt didn't wait for him to catch up mentally, taking off down the hill with a shouted, "Blaine!"
Blaine barely stirred, twitching his head in Kurt's direction with glazed over eyes, tilting his head to look up at him and extending a clawed hand in silent supplication. Kurt wrapped his arms under Blaine's instead, carefully hauling him upright and ignoring the shiver that coursed through him as he did so.
Puck cottoned on quickly enough: with only a single emphatic grunt at the effort, he lifted Blaine's tail, helping Kurt to carry him away from the lake.
It was slow-going up the hill. To his credit, Puck didn't ask questions or do more than curse whenever Blaine's tail slid in his grip, threatening to flop heavily to the ground at any moment. Somehow, miraculously, they tumbled back into the Slytherin dormitory after an exhausting trek around the lake, Kurt guiding them up to the Prefect baths as Puck followed carefully.
At last, they reached the door and Kurt let Puck work his magic to get them inside, grateful that he was clearly too spellbound by their current situation to refuse. He trusted Kurt's instincts – and Kurt had to trust his own – as they waddled inside and deposited Blaine on the tiled floor.
His face was ashen, and Kurt worried for a moment that he had made a mistake, that he needed to go to Madam Astor, after all (regardless of how she might have looked upon a mermaid, a creature that was supposedly self-sufficient and utterly unshakeable at best and cruel and aggressively defensive at worst). Then Blaine's eyes flickered up to his and he rasped, "K-Kurt."
Puck said, "Holy shit, Hummel."
Kurt didn't deign to reply, crouching down next to Blaine and letting his head rest against his knee. "Fill the bath with warm water. Not too hot," he warned Puck.
Blaine reached up a shaky hand towards him, and Kurt wordlessly intertwined their fingers, careful of the claws as they listened to the tub fill, Blaine's eyes half-lidded as he watched the water pour into the pool, his tail a lighter shade of blue than Kurt had ever seen it.
Once he'd gotten the bathwater to a reasonable temperature – twice he'd had Puck add in cold water to drop it, not wanting to shock Blaine's system – he helped Puck guide Blaine into the bath, letting him reach out sluggishly with an arm before dipping his tail into it.
The shift was sudden – one moment Blaine was on the tile and the next splashing into the water, Kurt's heart pounding until he reappeared, resting his arms on the side of the bath as he relaxed into the heat. Even tepid though it was, it was still noticeably warmer than the lake had been – even the strangely warm bottom – and Kurt was relieved to see color returning slowly to his cheeks.
Mermaids were hardy, he mused, feeling the tension seeping out of his own shoulders at Blaine's repose.
"Should I ask?" Puck ventured, seeming neither disquieted nor particularly concerned. "They're serving waffles at the Great Hall and I'm not missing out on that."
"I can take it from here," Kurt assured, surprised at how calm he sounded. "Thank you. And please don't – tell anyone?"
"Lips are sealed," Puck promised, halfway out the door when he added, "Oh, and Hummel? You owe me."
The door slid shut behind him and Kurt couldn't even bring himself to be annoyed at the prospect – he was just relieved that Blaine was okay, his tail slowly waving in the water behind him, feeling and color returning to it.
"How are you feeling?" Kurt asked.
Blaine rested his chin on his arms, oddly human, and said nothing.
"That well, huh?" Kurt asked, slipping off his shoes and dipping his own toes in the water. Blaine stiffened, looking over at him with those bright golden eyes as though he expected Kurt to lunge at him before relaxing again, unperturbed.
"This is all against the rules, I'll have you know," Kurt said, swishing his feet through the water as Blaine swished his tail to the same rhythm, slow and methodical.
Blaine stared at him in silence, tail flapping gently in the water.
"I'm sorry that Elliot – did that to you," Kurt said quietly, unable to remain silent on the issue any longer. "I never – ever – wanted you to get hurt."
Blaine's brow furrowed for a moment before his jaw tensed at the memory. "Elliot – bad. Very bad."
"Very bad," Kurt agreed. "I won't let him hurt you again. I promise."
Sinking a little deeper in the water, his back lowering until just his head and shoulders were above the water, Blaine said, "No hurt is good hurt."
"I'm glad you're not hurting," Kurt said, relieved to hear that Blaine wasn't in any discomfort – or, at the very least, only marginal discomfort. "I really am sorry about what happened."
Blaine shrugged, slipping into the water fully after a moment, reemerging in front of Kurt and making his breath halt in his chest as he rested his elbows on Kurt's knees.
"No more sorry," he said.
This close, his golden eyes were dazzling. Holding his breath – because three months ago he would have run from a mermaid five feet away, would never have let one get so close – he reached up and very, very gently touched Blaine's curls.
They were softer than he was expecting.
Almost at once, Blaine tilted his head towards Kurt's hand, letting him stroke through his curls.
"I don't understand you," he admitted, because the books were so inadequate and words even more so to describe what he felt about Blaine. Subhuman, he thought. Looking into those hazel eyes, though, he couldn't justify it; the words from Blaine's journal were still burned into his mind, the language barrier broken down and leaving no other immediate options at Kurt's disposal.
Take away the sharpened teeth and the claws and the tail and he was human, somewhere. Perhaps even closer to the surface than anyone had given Kurt reason to believe.
He carded his hand through Blaine's curls until he fell asleep, cheek resting on Kurt's knee as he dozed in the water.
God, he was human.
. o .
Inevitably, word got around about the incident. Kurt eventually started speaking to Elliot again, although he let the silence hang unbroken between them for two weeks before doing so. He addressed the concerns of Headmaster Waters by reassuring that Blaine was back in the Great Lake where he belonged. And he'd fenced the rumors that had come his way about his relationship with Blaine, maintaining an aloof but firm stance that he was intrigued by Blaine but in no way formally dating him.
The Elliot incident kept Rachel and Mercedes from pestering him too fiercely about it, even though he wasn't able to escape some prying. He simply sipped his cider and ignored them, focusing on the good things in his life without the need for a boyfriend.
Still, he visited Blaine every day, first with restorative potions that he pressed on him as a sort of apology for the Elliot incident and also to assuage his own fears about Blaine's condition. He seemed healthy, but even Kurt had needed to spend some more time at the Infirmary after his dip in the lake, his system shocked twice in one day. Blaine had courted disaster even more closely, and Kurt wasn't taking chances as a result.
They talked about anything and nothing that came to mind, Blaine answering Kurt's questions to the best of his ability and Kurt recorded the answers and, if Blaine was willing, stroked his hair as they sat at the base of a tree together. Eventually, Blaine would doze off and Kurt would give him a little nudge (after a suitably long period of time had passed in peaceful silence) so that he could return to his dormitory for the night.
Blaine kept him updated on Cooper, as much as it was relevant, and Kurt kept him updated on his life in return.
It wasn't until they were closer to the end of the school year – Kurt's Sixth year, and it ached in his chest to think that he only had one more year before he would leave Hogwarts forever – that he realized the glaring logistical error of their relationship.
Soon he would leave for home, but Blaine would remain at the lake. Three months of separation loomed.
Kurt spent even more time at the lake to compensate. As far as Rachel and Mercedes were concerned, Blaine and he were dating, and they insisted on "meeting" him formally after about three weeks of Kurt's nightly sojourns.
And so Kurt reluctantly brought Mercedes along and waited for Blaine to emerge. It took twice as long as usual for him to even bob out of the water, looking up at Mercedes warily until she extended a hand and he very delicately curled his own clawed hand around it.
They shook, and something about that was enough to convince Blaine to come partially on shore, tail still in the water, ready to flee if need be, but comfortable, otherwise.
Kurt tried not to think about what it would be like to introduce Blaine to his other friends, to his family, to his dad. Blaine was a passing entertainment, a friend from far away that would always be inescapably tied to the land, and Kurt needed to accept that.
Heart heavy, he visited the lake on the last of May and tried to think of something to say. He knew that Blaine knew that he was leaving soon – he'd already broken that particularly unsavory news weeks ago – but to have the moment almost here was very different from looking at it in the abstract.
"Blaine?" he called.
He ducked when a book flew at his head.
"Cooper," Blaine hissed, bobbing out of the water a moment later as a second, slightly larger mermaid bobbed up beside him, hissing slightly. It took Kurt a moment to process the presence of another mermaid before he realized that Cooper was laughing, in the same grating way that mermaids did.
"Quick reflexes. He's a keeper," Cooper informed Blaine, nudging his shoulder and paddling farther out into the lake.
Blaine sighed – another hissing noise, and six months ago Kurt would have backed away fearfully; now he merely drew closer – before coming up onto shore and smacking a wave at Cooper with his tail.
"This is for you," Blaine explained, pronouncing each word carefully as he picked up the same water-logged diary that he had presented Kurt with before and handed it to him. "Now we can – talk. Even when you are gone."
There was a pen tucked inside the book, and Kurt couldn't help but feel his throat tighten at the thought that Blaine would give him his book just so Kurt could keep in touch.
"With Cooper home, we can talk," Blaine explained. "Not – the same. But good?"
Kurt didn't respond aloud; he just reached forward and scooped Blaine up in a hug, feeling him stiffen in surprise before his own clawed hands came to rest against Kurt's back gently.
"Stay safe. Okay?" Kurt demanded.
"Very safe," Blaine promised.
At that moment, Cooper chose to splash them, letting out another one of his hissing laughs as Kurt yelped in surprise and Blaine growled against Kurt's shoulder.
Letting him go after a long moment, Kurt stepped back, unconcerned that his clothes were soaking wet and his hair doubtless askew. He wouldn't see Blaine again for months.
"I'm coming back," he said, holding up the book and adding, "This isn't goodbye."
"Miss you," Blaine admitted, slipping back into the water and looking up at him. "Talk – soon?"
"Very soon," Kurt said.
They weren't in love – Kurt wasn't even sure that he could fall in love with a mermaid – but Blaine was special and Kurt was determined to keep his promise.
Three months would be long, but they would survive. They had managed worse before.
. o .
Six Months Later
Blaine never gave up his tail.
Even after almost a year of not-dating and two and a half months of dating – they'd finally sealed the deal two weeks after Kurt's return with a careful kiss; as long as they were no teeth involved, then they were fine, good at it – Kurt had never wanted him to lose his tail. He knew how happy Blaine was in the water, how much more natural Blaine was underwater and how every part of him was attuned to aquatic life. Asking him to give that up for the sake of free movement on land was a cruel request at best and criminal at worst.
So they worked around it. With Artie's assistance – and Kurt knew that he was finally becoming the person that he wanted to be when he cheerfully requested a Hufflepuff's help – Kurt was able to devise a wheelchair that Blaine could sit in without breaking (the tail was much heavier than Artie had been prepared for).
They explored the castle together for hours at a time. To Kurt's surprise, Blaine seemed to know the grounds even better than he did (he later showed Kurt a map of the grounds tucked in his book, one of Cooper's positions). He embraced the challenges and marveled at the novelties, thrilling at all the new opportunities presented to him (even though some areas were inherently off-limits in the wheelchair; thankfully, Hogwarts always had a way, and the House Elves were more than willing to find it).
Blaine loved the House Elves, frequently chattering with them in his own tongue and then struggling over words like "cheesecake" and "marmalade." He liked to bring Kurt gifts, and so he would summon an Elf and make a request for "toast" and then beam with delight when the Elf returned seconds later with a slice of plain toast.
To him, toast was a novelty. Kurt loved him for it.
He loved many things about Blaine. He loved how accommodating and honest he was, how sincere and curious he was, how aggressively Blaine he was, even to the point of embarrassment. He loved that he could trust Blaine with secrets without needing to offer lengthy explanations. He loved that Blaine could read his emotions without needing to ask. He loved that even when more complicated plans fell apart, Blaine was more than happy to spend entire afternoons curled up against Kurt in a bathtub with Kurt in swim trunks and Blaine's tail hooked over the edge of the tub.
It was challenging, loving a mermaid: a creature that, according to all books, was so inhuman that love did not exist outside the family.
As they sat on the edge of the lake together, Kurt watching Blaine bask in the sun on the shore beside him, Blaine tilted his head back and said, very simply, "I love you."
Kurt froze, thumb pausing against the back of Blaine's hand where it was sweeping circles. Blaine's smile didn't waver as he looked at Kurt directly and raised an eyebrow, almost challenging.
"I love you, too," Kurt said, surprised at how true it was.
There would always be challenges to loving a mermaid, but as long as he had Blaine, then Kurt was willing to take the risks.