Title: I'm Feeling Lucky – Chapter Six
Characters: Kurt Hummel, Blaine Anderson
Disclaimer: Still not mine.
Premise: Happily ever after? Does such a thing really exist?
Blaine's handwriting was smooth. No hesitation marks, no space unnecessarily wasted, and all letters slanted optimistically to the right.
Dear Kurt,
I've started and stopped this letter probably five hundred times. I keep trying to make it perfect – and isn't that something I've always done? Put myself through any kind of configuration and stress, no matter how sick or unrealistic, just to see smiles on other people's faces. I like to think that I'm very good at that.
I would do it for my mom when I was a kid. I learned how cute I had to be on any given day and she would smile and hug me.
I tried to do the same thing for my dad. Even rebuilding that old Chevy was just another way to try to make him happy, since me being happy wasn't such a priority. I tried, and he tried, and I can truthfully say that it failed spectacularly but we were oddly content with the failure as a whole.
And now I have to admit that I tried the same thing with you.
At first, I thought you needed a friend. A guide. Maybe I shouldn't have put myself in the role of mentor – it was rather presumptuous of me – but there was no one else to fill the need that you had and I was so thankful to do it for you.
When the blinders fell off my eyes and I finally understood everything you had had in your heart from the very beginning, I thought 'this is what I'm supposed to be doing. This is someone I know how to make happy.'
Last year wasn't that magical – and I tried my hardest there too. I put you on a pedestal and Chandler quickly knocked it down. I looked at my magical little songbird and saw for the first time how beautifully human you are.
Well.
I guess that's the only excuse I can truly give for my betrayal of our trust and our relationship. I've learned in these weeks of silence that I am human too.
I'm not going to continue calling you. I'm not going to keep sending correspondence after this letter. You want your space and I will respect that.
I'm not going to keep kicking myself over this either because I've also learned that it was never truly about you nor was it truly about me.
It was about us. We knew how to thrive together but never really figured out how to do the same when we were apart.
I never missed one of your calls, Kurt.
Now I've given myself permission to be pissed that you found it acceptable to miss mine. Not an occasional thing either – we talked twice in the entire two months you were in New York before I finally had enough of you being the only person doing the talking.
You see, my parents put me in second place. They taught me it was acceptable and I should be grateful for whatever scraps of affection they could show me.
I never dreamed I would repeat the same pattern with the love of my life.
I have to wonder if that label was given too soon. Did you love me or was it the fact I was the first boy willing to hold your hand? I never dreamed I would be asking that question, but there it is.
I wish I could stop loving you but I can't. I always will love you.
It's just time for me to love myself too.
Give New York your brand of hell and shine, Kurt. I wish you nothing but the best. I'm wishing myself the same thing.
Love always,
Blaine
Teardrops dampened the bottom of the page, but Blaine's hands were steady as he folded the paper, slipped it into a pre-addressed envelope, and put it out with the mail.
He heard nothing for weeks.
Weeks turned into months.
Kurt was standing on his doorstep just before those months turned into a full year.
His eyes were still so beautiful, so open, and so yearning.
The yearning matched the expression Blaine saw on his own face each time he looked in the mirror.
"I got your letter." Kurt's voice was rough. "I read it. I screamed. I threw things against the wall. I smashed your picture to hell. And I tried to forget you."
His hand met Blaine's. He looked at their joined hands as though the action had occurred without his permission.
"I couldn't forget you."
"I couldn't forget you either," Blaine admitted. "I'm not apologizing for what I wrote."
"I'm not asking you to."
They weren't what they had been before. They couldn't ever be that again. The old despair welled up once more within Blaine. "So what are you asking me?"
"Is it all right if I honestly don't know?" Blaine's other hand reached up at Kurt's words and wiped away tears from his face.
One word would have sent Kurt from him forever.
"Of course it is," he replied instead, feeling the old pain begin to disappear. "Of course it is."
/end/