Chapter Text
Blaine has precisely three minutes and twenty-four seconds to get to the Dalton common room, and with everything timed down to the last second, he knows he’s in no rush. His goal is to be the last one in the room, letting the Warblers start their backup vocals as he steps casually through the doorway to take his place at the front of the group. He knows how to make an entrance, and he’s practiced this one for the past several days in a row to make sure it’s perfect even in the crowd of students, which is why he can walk so calmly down the spiral staircase today, at three minutes and twenty-four seconds to showtime.
“Excuse me,” a voice calls from behind him, and Blaine turns around before he realizes that this will throw off his schedule entirely. He slides his watch into his pocket. There will still be time to catch up, he’s sure.
The boy glows with an internal light that everyone else around them seems somehow completely unaware of. He’s the most beautiful boy Blaine has ever seen, with pale skin and piercing blue-green eyes, his hair swept up in a styled coif. He looks familiar, but he can’t be. Blaine would definitely have remembered if they’d met before. He’s absolutely unforgettable.
“Um, hi. Can I ask you a question? I’m new here.”
“My name’s Blaine.” He holds out his hand to shake, a trained politeness that he always forgets is completely weird to other kids his age. He feels stupid, all of a sudden. Why hadn’t he been able to think of something better to say? This boy surely doesn’t care what his name is. Why couldn’t he have come up with a normal answer like ‘sure’ or ‘of course’?
The boy looks stunned for a moment, his mouth snapping open and closed a few times before he can give his own name. “Kurt,” he finally answers, taking Blaine’s hand, and a thrill runs through Blaine’s body because the most gorgeous boy in the universe is touching him.
Kurt’s face turns confused, and he drops Blaine’s hand much more quickly than Blaine would have liked. “So, what exactly is going on?” Kurt asks.
“The Warblers!” Blaine’s tone is too enthusiastic, trying to make up for the weirdness of this conversation and the inappropriate tingly feelings he’s having. “Every now and then they throw an impromptu performance in the senior commons. Tends to shut the school down for a while.”
“So wait, the glee club here is kind of cool?”
“The Warblers are like rock stars!” That’s overstating it a bit, Blaine knows, but he can’t help trying to make himself seem as exciting as possible in this boy’s eyes. Half of his brain doesn’t know why he cares so much, but the other half can’t stop himself from grabbing Kurt’s hand again, because he wants to always hold Kurt’s hand.
“Come on,” he says, covering for his own eagerness. “I know a shortcut.”
That’s when he remembers that he’s lost quite a bit of time here on the stairway—he’s not certain exactly how much and he can’t very well get his watch back out now—so he takes off down the hallway at a run, pulling Kurt awkwardly by the hand in front of him. They reach the common room precisely on time through some absolute miracle.
Kurt is breathless and bewildered. “I stick out like a sore thumb.”
Blaine is as thrown off as he has ever been in his life, so he puts on his best performance face and adjusts the lapel of Kurt’s black blazer. “Next time don’t forget your jacket, new kid.”
He steps into his place, pivots, and sings Teenage Dream directly to Kurt.
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He takes Kurt for coffee afterwards, with Wes and Dave. Blaine’s heart aches when he hears about the bullying Kurt is going through at school, and he gives the best advice he can, even though he knows that it’s untested and that he couldn’t follow it himself. He worries about what will happen, and so he makes sure they exchange phone numbers and full names. Kurt Hummel has a nice ring to it, he thinks. It’s a good name.
Kurt looks oddly bewildered as he types ‘Blaine Anderson’ into his phone. “Are you a Senior?” he asks.
“Sophomore,” Blaine laughs. Despite his short stature, he’s used to being mistaken for older. Something about the way he carries himself, his father tells him.
This seems to remove the source of Kurt’s confusion, and he visibly relaxes, though Blaine can’t imagine why. Perhaps he feels more comfortable around someone younger than himself. Though, revealing that he’s only fifteen makes Blaine wonder if Kurt will take him seriously at all.
But Kurt does take him seriously, and the advice Blaine gave turns out to be fairly awful. They somehow manage to become the best of friends anyway. The two of them just seem to always understand each other in a way that Blaine has never understood anyone or been understood before. Within weeks, Blaine feels as if they’ve known each other all their lives.
Their dynamic is flirtatious and fun, and occasionally the idea of asking Kurt out teases the back of Blaine’s mind. But the way they’ve slipped into each other’s lives so easily and so deeply makes the idea of dating feel too intense. He can’t imagine just going on a couple of dates with Kurt. Something tells him that it would get too serious too quickly, so he opts to keep things on a friendship level and avoid the danger entirely.
Until one day when Kurt is standing in front of the Warblers, singing about a dead bird with tears rolling down his cheeks, and Blaine suddenly feels that he cannot possibly live unless Kurt is his. The feeling is so overwhelming and out-of-nowhere that it terrifies him, and he leaves rehearsal as fast as he politely can. Lying on his bed, staring at the ceiling of his room, he tries to think through it. But suddenly nothing about their friendship makes sense to him anymore.
It’s not until that evening in the shower, as Blaine is washing the gel out of his hair, that something on his left arm catches his peripheral vision. He freezes, then moves his arm to take a closer look.
His soulmate marks have appeared.
One of the names on his arm is Kurt Hummel.
Oh.
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“Why didn’t you tell me?” Blaine has been thinking about it all night, but he can’t figure out the answer. If their ages had been reversed, and he’d known all along that they were soulmates but Kurt hadn’t, he’s sure he would have told.
Kurt looks up from the table where he is gluing rhinestones to a small box. “Tell you what?”
“That we’re soulmates.”
Kurt puts his glue gun down on the table, and Blaine drops into the chair beside him, feeling defeated. His thoughts were consumed by the contradiction. Kurt had known the whole time, since the moment they’d met on that staircase. But he’d never said a word, never subtly rolled up the sleeves on his uniform to where Blaine could read his soulmate marks, never made the first move. If he disliked Blaine, why were they best friends? If he wasn’t attracted to him, why was he so flirtatious?
“I didn’t want to take away your choice,” Kurt said.
“What do you mean? What choice?”
“If we had started dating before you even had a chance to see who your other soulmates are, it wouldn’t have been fair to you. If you knew more than one of them … like my friend Rachel, she knew two of her soulmates already. If you have me and … someone else, I don’t know, someone younger than you who wouldn’t know about you yet, or someone you know from outside of school, or even just someone else who’s waiting … and I got to you first just because I was the one to tell you first … it wouldn’t have been fair. It wouldn’t have been really your choice. I wanted … I guess I wanted to make sure you were going into this with your eyes open. If we do go into this at all. Which we don’t have to.”
“Kurt…”
“We could wait. If you want. We both have other options, even if we don’t know who they are yet. There’s no reason we need to—”
Blaine can’t spend another second listening to Kurt cover his nervousness and pre-emptively prepare for a rejection that isn’t coming. He moves toward Kurt exactly the way he had always wanted to and always been afraid to, because now there was nothing to fear any longer. His hand lands on the side of Kurt’s neck, in the curve near his shoulder, as their lips meet in a kiss that sweeps both of them away to another plane of existence. Kurt reaches for Blaine’s face, and it feels like he is enveloped in a state of complete perfection, like this is exactly the thing he was born to do, the place he was born to be.
Their lips part, and Blaine falls back to his chair with a surprised thud. He doesn’t quite know how to go on. He feels as if he’s suddenly awoken in a new world that he never knew existed. He looks at Kurt and sees the same awe and surprise on his face.
“There you are,” Blaine says softly, not quite understanding what he means by it. “I’ve been looking for you forever.”
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Blaine blinks awake and is greeted with the sight of his gorgeous husband asleep beside him, many years older than in the dream. His brain had done quite an excellent job of placing Kurt in surroundings that never existed, perhaps bringing to life the old McKinley yearbook pictures Blaine had seen a couple of times and mixing them with the Dalton uniforms that were such a familiar presence in his whoops-I-forgot-I-was-taking-this-class nightmares. The vivid reality of the dream lingers, and for a moment Blaine entertains the fanciful idea that it wasn’t an imaginary story at all, but a window into an alternate universe in which his life had gone in directions both entirely different and exactly the same as his real life.
A cabinet door in the kitchen closes with a thud, and Blaine smiles, knowing that Roo is trying to get his own breakfast without waking them. He hopes it’s something more nutritious than goldfish crackers this time.
Kurt stretches and yawns, then smiles at him. “Good morning, husband,” he says, just as he does every morning.
“I had the most amazing dream,” Blaine tells him.