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“Papa, I need to look fancy,” Dalton pouts, crossing his arms. “I’m gettin’ married.”
Blaine smiles at his son. “Okay, how about this — you can wear one of my bow ties.”
Dalton beams, clapping his hands together excitedly. “Yes please!”
“Finn?” Blaine calls to his other son, Dalton’s twin. “Do you want a bow tie too?”
Finn screeches to a halt, the baby doll he was wildly pushing around the house at a frantic pace almost flying out of the play stroller. “Uh, no!”
“Okay, buddy. Just be careful with that stroller.”
Finn nods sincerely. “I will! I’m the greatest daddy ever, Papa! My baby likes to go fast.”
Blaine chuckles. “I’m sure it does.”
Leaving Finn to his A-plus parenting practice, Blaine turns back to Dalton. “What color bow tie would you like?”
He considers his options for a second, and then, in no surprise to Blaine, says simply, “Blue.”
“Got it. Now you stay here with Finn; I’ll be right back.”
Dalton nods, and Blaine fast-walks up the stairs to his bedroom, picking out a blue polka-dotted bow tie from his collection. He hurries back downstairs, not wanting to leave the boys unattended, being only four years old and otherwise alone. Kurt’s at the office today, and both of their older girls are at school.
“Thank you for listening to me!” Blaine praises when he finds Dalton waiting patiently on the couch, Finn now putting together a fake meal in the nearby play kitchen, his baby doll abandoned.
“Finn’s making my wedding cake,” Dalton comments, giggling when Finn pretends to mix imaginary batter very exaggeratedly.
“What a nice brother,” Blaine grins, gesturing for Dalton to come closer. “Come here, Dalton. Let me put the bow tie on you.”
Dalton obeys happily, beaming as Blaine ties it around his neck. “Thank you, Papa!”
“You’re welcome! Look, you look so good!” Blaine opens his phone camera, letting Dalton see himself.
“I’m ready to get married now,” Dalton says definitively.
“Who are you getting married to?” Blaine asks, and Dalton runs over to a nearby chair, grabbing his favorite stuffed rabbit off of it.
“Bun Bun!”
“Okay! Should I hold Bun Bun?”
“Yes,” Dalton replies, holding out the stuffed animal. He pauses then, looking visibly contemplative.
“Papa?” He begins, training his big honey-brown eyes on his father’s. “What’s it like being married?”
Blaine laughs slightly. “Well, who’s your best friend, Dalton?”
Dalton smiles toothily, pointing over at his brother. “Finn!”
Blaine smiles. “I should’ve guessed. Now, you guys can’t get married because you’re brothers, but being married is just like getting to spend every day with your best friend.”
“Are you and Daddy best friends?”
Blaine nods. “Yes. Daddy and I were best friends way before we got married.”
“And you love Daddy?”
“I love Daddy very much,” Blaine answers. “And he loves me. That’s what being married is like — spending every day with your best friend that you love.”
Dalton giggles. “And kisses.”
Blaine laughs loudly. “Yes, buddy, you’re right. Lots of kisses.”
******
“I miss our daughter dearly,” Blaine reads, lounging back against the headboard of his bed. “I know it is good for her to go and explore, but I sometimes wish she was a little girl again.”
“I understand, my dear,” Dalton recites. “I fear she’s left the castle for good.”
“Oh, but what a wonderful knight she will be.”
“And now we get to spend all of our time together,” Dalton says. “We may not have our little girl to love, but we still have each other.”
Blaine grins over at his son. “Great job, Dalton! You’ve got these lines down.”
Dalton sighs, looking down at his hands. “I don’t know, Pops. Something feels off... like, I don’t feel a connection to my character.”
“Why do you think that is?”
“I don’t know,” Dalton pauses. “Maybe because I’ve never had to experience my child growing up and becoming independent? Maybe because I’ve never been married? Maybe because I’ve never been a king?”
Blaine laughs. “Well, I’m sorry to say that I can’t help you with the third one, but I have a little experience in the first two elements of your character.”
“Okay, what do I need to do?”
“First of all, you need to remember that this is a middle school play,” Blaine says gently. “They’re not expecting you to know what it’s like to have a child leave the house, to know what it’s like to be married, or to know what it’s like to be a king.”
“True,” Dalton concedes. “But I still feel like I could be doing better... Pops, what’s being married like?”
“Well,” Blaine begins. “It’s a lot of things. It’s amazing, first of all, because it basically means you’ve vowed to do life with another person because you love them and they love you.”
Blaine raises his left hand to gesture to his wedding ring. “Belonging to someone is the best feeling in the world. You feel loved, safe, and acknowledged every second of every day.”
“But that’s not to say it isn’t hard — you have to make sacrifices and compromises for the other person. But in the end, having them for a lifetime is worth any of the concessions you have to make.”
Blaine rests a hand on his son’s shoulder. “Dalton. You’re twelve. You’re not going to know what marriage is like from your own experience. You just have to think about what makes a good marriage, and try to exhibit those qualities in your character.”
“I think I understand,” Dalton says. “My character is sad that his daughter is leaving, but happy because he gets to spend undivided time with the queen, who is his best friend and his love.”
Blaine smiles. “Exactly! It’s a hard thing to wrestle with, but your character is trying to show his wife that their daughter is happy pursuing her dreams, and they can be happy simply because they’re together.”
Dalton grins. “Thanks for the help, Pops. Having actors for parents really works in my favor sometimes.”
Blaine snorts. “I’m glad to hear it.”
******
Teaching your child to drive is nerve-wracking enough, as any parent knows. But teaching your child to drive in New York City is a whole other monster that small-town-raised Kurt and Blaine were not prepared for.
Sure, they’d learned to navigate the busy streets on their own, having lived in the city for over twenty years. But teaching another person how to do so? Yikes.
Granted, this isn’t their first rodeo. Finn and Dalton are the last to learn how to drive, and teaching both Tracy and Audrey to drive ended in no one dying, no one totaling the cars, and both of them getting their licenses on their first tries.
Still, it’s never an entirely stress-free experience.
Kurt and Blaine allowed their children to choose their teachers — Tracy much preferred Blaine’s encouraging, warm teaching and occasional outbursts of terror when they stopped way too close to another car to Kurt’s level-headed, consistent nature. She could never get a read on her dad, and while that teaching style worked for Audrey (despite Audrey cracking Kurt’s collected exterior in a very near miss with a pedestrian), Tracy liked to know what she was doing right or wrong by simply gauging her pops’ every reaction.
Dalton’s the same way, and Finn needs Kurt’s levelheadedness. It just so happened to work out that perfectly.
Today, it’s a pretty casual lesson. Dalton’s been driving for just over five months now, and honestly, Blaine thinks he’s got the hang of it. It’d be a toss-up between him and Tracy for best driver out of the kids.
But still, since he only has his learner’s permit, he has to have an adult in the car with him at all times. Thus, Blaine’s tagging along to pick up Dalton’s boyfriend, Sawyer, a route Dalton knows well.
Despite Dalton still being a little hesitant to talk about his relationship around Blaine (he and Sawyer had only unintentionally revealed their relationship to his parents a month prior), he lets his pops tease him fondly.
“Does Sawyer like that you’re driving?” Blaine asks, wiggling his eyebrows at his son.
“Oh my god, Pops,” Dalton blushes brightly. “Um, he thinks it’s cool, I guess. He’s a month younger than me, you know, so he’s driving too, but he’s not as comfortable as me yet.”
Blaine hums in acknowledgment. “I remember the first time your dad drove me somewhere... it was literally just to get ice cream, but it might’ve been the greatest moment of my life up until that point. Well, besides our first kiss.”
Dalton chuckles. “Well, Dad is a year older than you, so it must’ve felt freeing.”
“God, it was hot,” Blaine groans, and Dalton fake gags. “I had this gorgeous older boyfriend who could drive, and we could go places alone, and it rocked young teenage Blaine’s world.”
“And it still rocks my world,” Blaine comments. “Because you know that even though I’m okay with driving, I don’t love it. But your dad loves to drive. So I just let him drive me everywhere, and it makes me love him even more.”
“Is that what being married’s like?” Dalton asks as they pull up to a red light. “Falling in love with a person over every little thing?”
Blaine chuckles. “Yes and no. Yes, because you do. You fall in love with every little thing they do and you fall in love with them all over again for everything they’ve always done. But it’s also a lot different once you’re married.”
“How so?”
“Well, there’s a sense of security to it. Like if I do something that Dad doesn’t like, such as leaving water glasses all around the house —“ Dalton laughs at that. Their entire family is familiar with Blaine’s habit of absentmindedly forgetting about the glasses he’s drinking from and setting them in random places, inevitably leaving Kurt to find and collect all of them. It drives Kurt nuts, and Blaine tries to remember, but it’s hard sometimes, okay?
“Anyway, being married is like having a safe space to fail. Like, I’m never going to remember to always put my glass on the kitchen counter if I’m drinking from it in our bedroom. But when I forget, even if Dad gets mad, there’s never the question of ‘is this it? Is this a dealbreaker?’ Marriage is a safe space to fail and a safe space to succeed, with each person supporting the other through both.”
“Is that why you and Dad got married so spontaneously? Because you needed that?”
Blaine nods. “In a way, yes. We tried that, to a degree, with an early engagement, but it didn’t always work. But obviously, marriage, a lot of talking and growing, and time have all worked out for us amazingly.”
As Blaine sees them turning onto Sawyer’s street, he notices an empty parking space along the side of the road. “Think you’d be able to parallel park there instead of parking in his building’s parking lot?”
Dalton exhales, steeling himself with his hands planted firmly on the wheel. “I think so.”
“You’ve got this, bud. Go for it.”
A few careful maneuvers and words of encouragement later, Dalton successfully shifts the car into park, immediately accepting the high-five Blaine offers him.
“Great job! You’re a pro at parallel parking!”
Dalton grins. “I feel like a true New Yorker now.”
“Absolutely. Now tell Sawyer we parked out front today, because that’ll totally get you boyfriend points.”
Dalton rolls his eyes despite the color that rises to his cheeks. “I think it’s just you who has a thing for driving, Pops.”
Blaine shrugs. Later that day, when they’re alone (with the door cracked open, as per Kurt’s rules, mind you), Dalton finds out that he was very wrong about that.
******
“Pops, can I talk to you?”
Blaine looks up from the piano, setting down the pencil he was using to tweak his latest composition with. “Sure, Dalton. What’s up?”
Blaine follows his youngest son to the couch, noting how he wipes his hands on his pants nervously when he sits down.
“What’s it like being married?”
Ah. Blaine knew this was coming soon.
“Trust,” Blaine says simply. “It’s trust. Trusting that you’ll wake up the next day next to that person, loving them even more than you did the day before and having them return that feeling. It’s trusting that you’ll be there for each other during the good and the bad. It’s trusting that each of you trusts the other person in everything.”
Blaine meets Dalton’s eyes. “It’s a beautiful thing, Dalton. Your whole world shifts when you get married, because you suddenly realize that part of you was empty, even if you didn’t notice it before. But that emptiness is gone — you’re two halves of a whole. And that whole is an all-consuming love and commitment that is the most rewarding thing you will ever experience.”
Dalton sighs. “Yeah. I’m beginning to realize that.”
Blaine smiles softly. “I don’t think you’re just beginning to.”
“Is it really that obvious?” Dalton laughs. “Yes, Pops. I’m going to ask Sawyer to marry me.”
“I’m so happy for you,” Blaine replies, pulling his son in for a hug as a few tears slip from his ways. “You two are made for each other. It was just a matter of time.”
“I know we’re still young,” Dalton remarks. “But I mean, I figured, we’re twenty-two, we just graduated college, and we both are starting full-time jobs. I think we’re in a good position now.”
“I think you’re right,” Blaine agrees. “And come on, Dad and I were younger than you guys are, and we made it work! Age means nothing as long as you‘re certain that you’re ready.”
“I am. 100 percent.”
“Well, that settles it, then,” Blaine grins. “Do you have a ring picked out?”
Dalton laughs. “No, not yet. I wanted to tell you and Dad together, but when I walked in here and saw you, I couldn’t hold it in any longer. I’m going to tell Dad when he gets home, and then ask for his advice for the ring.”
“A smart decision,” Blaine nods. “He’d probably even design you a custom ring if you’d want it.”
Dalton smiles. “I know. That’s kind of what I was hoping for.”
Blaine sighs, letting out another watery chuckle. “Oh, Dalton. I love you so much.”
Dalton laughs along with his father as he pulls him into a hug. “I love you too, Pops. You know, I wouldn’t have been half as ready to get married if it wasn’t for you and Dad setting a great example.”
“That’s what we tried to do,” Blaine replies. “And I know you’re going to follow in our footsteps.”