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In the weeks that follow Blaine leaving, Kurt repeats the conversation in his head a lot of times. All of the time. When he rearranges the loft to his own specifications again. When he’s in the kitchen and the smell of fresh coffee doesn’t assault his senses. When he gets his own newspaper, when Blaine’s music isn’t drifting from the couch where he’s left his laptop open and his iTunes playing whilst he uses the bathroom, when he’s late home and there isn’t food waiting in the oven for him to reheat, when it’s cold at night and the bed is vast and empty and there’s no one there to curl into for warmth. When he has an idea that he wants to share, that he thinks would make Blaine laugh that laugh that makes his face crinkle and his eyes disappear. He repeats the conversation a lot, to the box in his top drawer, to the walls, to the drumming of water in the shower when he lets the emotion overwhelm him, choke him of air, and, eventually, to the therapist he goes to to talk to a wall as blank as he needs it to be, where he can vent his frustrations, because Blaine, in his absence, becomes everything Kurt wants and needs and his clinginess, his claustrophobic presence everywhere, becomes mutable and lovable. He repeats the conversation a lot, because he needs to know he was right, needs validation that he made the right decision, and can’t quite convince himself that he did. Because every time he says the words again - Maybe I don’t - he sees Blaine’s face crumple, sees it morph into anger and hurt, and he hears Blaine tell him, one last time, that he will never forgive him.
Maybe he doesn’t deserve forgiveness.
Maybe he’s just incapable of being in love.
Maybe he’s too cold, to many angles, too many sharp parts, too many spikes, too much of everything. (He doesn’t believe that. He loves his dad, and his dad loves him. Rachel loves him. Mercedes. He is loved. He’s -
He goes to the corner. Like Rachel said they should. They’d all come back to the corner. Six months.
And it doesn’t matter that he knows no one is in New York anymore. It still a sharp stab. How loved can he be when he’s standing in the rain on his own? Not even a friendly text message, just him and his umbrella and the rain, reminding him that he’s more of a convenience than a friend.
Or they’re all on Blaine’s side. Probably that. He stares at a puddle and then drifts back to the loft, makes tea and stares blindly at the TV until his eyeballs itch. He’s too much. Almost certainly.)
The thing is, he thinks as he drifts through the NYADA corridors, as he sees less and less of Blaine ghosting away around corners, sees the glimmer of hurt and resignation and actual hatred that flickers and fades from his face until he’s dramatically fails out at the end of the first semester of his sophomore year, is that he wants to take the words back just as much as he meant them. Blaine has done nothing except love him, openly, fully, with his heart bared. Blaine had shared his vulnerabilities, and Kurt had clammed up, and maybe they are too young, maybe they’re a lot of things, but he never wanted to see Blaine look at him like that, never wants to see it again.
If he’s really lucky, he never will.
If he’s unlucky, it’ll be because he’ll never see Blaine again at all.
The nausea comes in waves.
He sees the college counselor first, sits opposite her and can only think how much she is not Miss Pillsbury, with her inappropriate pamphlets and understanding smile. But he does get the words out of his chest, does say a lot of things he’s needed to say, and exhales a slow breath when he’s done. He feels vindicated, somewhat, by her silence.
Then he sees a therapist who tells him that he has a tendency to fight as a means of connection, that he communicates primarily through anger, who leads him gently to his own problems with intimacy, with being open, with being honest about his heart. He hears it as a thing men do, but he still hears it. And he knows that it wasn’t a problem Blaine had.
It’s not the first time he cries, or the first time he says it out loud, but it’s the first time he really acknowledges that their problems were not entirely of Blaine’s making. And that he needs to put his heart on the line and find someone new, let someone behind his walls.
Except that everyone he sees is not Blaine, or reminds him of Blaine, and -
And maybe it’s working. The therapy. Because he’s sitting on his couch with his boyfriend pillow and a pint of ice cream and he’s crying over Moulin Rouge. Or he’s crying over Blaine, his Christian, who lay everything out for him and whom he hurt repeatedly because he couldn’t let himself be that vulnerable.
Kurt enquires with his professors whether he can change his work-study program from Lexington, and packs his bags for Ohio.
Because it’s not too late. Blaine waited for him to realise, last time, for his head and his heart to communicate with one another, and he’s going to get him back.
He has to.
Because Blaine is it for him, and everyone else is a pale imitation, a shadow, a ghost of what he had. If he can’t have Blaine, he really might die alone.