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It's not that Blaine is a man out of time so much as he's a man without one. Depending on who you ask, he was born either a long time ago or at a point in the distant future, and he exists in both places equally distinctly.
Blaine slips into time as a 16 year old boy at a private school. The calendar says it’s 2010. It’s been a long time since it was 2010, but it’s an impossible distant utopia from where he’d been before. He sits across a table from a boy with clear skin and troubled eyes who asks, his voice shaking and breathless, if everyone here is gay. Blaine ducks his head and studies his hands. It’s 2010, he reminds himself. He can say that he is in this place, at this time. So he does. He says he is, but his friends are not, and it’s worth it for the way the boy’s face lights up.
(2010 doesn’t last long for Blaine. It flashes away with Kurt’s decision to transfer. It feels important to Blaine all the same.)
He flashes through history, bumping and tumbling and occasionally bruised. He sees a lot of the inside of hospitals, becomes familiar with the various shades of washed out grey and off-white white and the meaningless condolences of strangers scribbled hastily inside insipid cards. Lilies smell like death and funerals, and the aching in his bones makes him wonder if he’s dead. (Probably not, he reasons. Death probably doesn’t hurt, but he’s not sure. He hasn’t tried that one yet, pinwheeling through time as he is.)
His body is 19, maybe 20, when it marries the boy from 2010. His name is Kurt, and Blaine can feel how much he loves him hammering through his body, the rush of blood and affection and want blazing through him until he feels he can barely contain it. It comes out of his mouth and his eyes like sunshine.
The official says they can kiss, and Blaine doesn’t have to tiptoe to kiss Kurt, but he can feel himself bouncing on the balls of his feet all the same. The ring on his finger feels like an anchor, and he wonders if he can cram his whole being inside of Kurt, if there’s any way to feel closer than he does with just their mouths touching here, in this very public space. He settles for burying his face in his neck and letting Kurt hold him.
They dance, here, in public, surrounded by all of their friends. There are faces Blaine knows, and faces he doesn’t, and his mom dances and cries -
And it fades to black in the passenger seat of a newish rental, his eyes flicking open again in the back of a riot van, surrounded by other men, and that fades just as quickly (he breathes out in the void; he’s seen enough of the back of riot vans) and that quickly he’s standing knee deep in a lukewarm ocean, the sun warm on his shoulders and the year indeterminate. He’s still young, but then, he often is, and a pregnant woman calls his name and waves to him.
Which is - unusual, even if it’s not new. There’ve been women a few times.
She splashes towards him carefully, and he holds out his hand when she gets close. She grips it tight and steps out of the surf, shields her eyes and smiles at him. Her eyes are dark brown and the sun warms her skin to a dark tan. He can see he’s been here long enough for it to have started to do the same to his own.
“We thought we’d lost you,” she says, and he blinks in confusion. She sighs and squeezes his hand again.
“It’s obviously been longer for you,” she says. “Let me find - we’ll get someone to adjust your meds again. You were only gone a moment. Are you okay?”
“I-” he pauses and swallows and runs a hand through his hair. Actually through his hair. He blinks and pulls it away again, and bumps down hard in the sand. The woman looks worried, shields her eyes again as she stares up and down the beach.
“Blaine,” she says, crouching slowly and clumsily in front of him. “Do you remember me?”
He wants to say he does. A girl that looked like her was there, wherever he was, sometimes. Only her hair was black and her mouth was sharper, and she’d been a lesbian. His mouth forms the word without his input. “Santana?” he says, and she smiles. “We got married on the same day,” he says, to fill the sadness that her silence creates.
“What?”
Blaine doesn’t say anything else. She pushes herself back to her feet, grunting at the effort, and then holds out a hand to help him up.
“This is getting scary,” she says. “Last time you drifted, you came back with a broken nose and a broken wrist.”
“Dalton,” he says, and her mouth flattens into a line.
“Is that where you’ve been?”
“No,” he says. He can’t control where he ends up. But he remembers the year Dalton burned. It doesn’t mean he can never go back, but the fact that it burned seems significant somehow. He touches the bump in his nose, and flexes his fingers, and wonders idly if the break affected his piano playing.
“It didn’t,” she says, and he glances at her. “Stop you playing. You ask every time.”
He nods, and wishes his memories caught up to his body faster. He’s not even sure if this woman, with the blonde in her hair and the baby in her belly is Santana. But maybe. She feels the right kind of familiar, and he’s learned to rely a lot on the feel of people.
They pass under the arch of a heavy iron gate. It seems incongruous to Blaine, juxtaposed against the beach. ‘William McKinley Holographic Simulator’ is emblazoned on a plaque beside it. There’s a buzz and a click behind him as he passes through the gateway, and something tells him not to look back. He keeps looking ahead, and he focuses on Santana’s hand in his own. WMHS, though. Those letters follow him through time. A message, he thinks now, and says it softly.
“Pardon?” Santana asks, and he shakes his head.
“Were you a cheerleader?” he asks, and her smile is sad.
Probably not then.
But time flashes around him quickly, and he sees her again, her skirt short and red and pleated and her hair pulled back in a severe high pony, and he’s not attracted to her, not sexually anyway. But he sees her and he knows that so many people don’t. Anger is a mask for pain. He’d know. He wants to tell her but she’s disappearing in the fog, replaced by the blonde beside him again, and his confusion punches his breath out of him.
“Slip?” she says, and he nods. His brain whirls. “Happening too often,” she sighs. “Hold on to my hand.”
He doesn’t think he’s let her go, but when he looks down, his hand hangs uselessly at his side. Tears well in his eyes, and Santana takes his hand in her own.
“Let’s get you to the lab,” she says, and Blaine nods his head.
He wakes up again in a hospital bed. His right arm is in a cast, and he can feel the ache in his jaw and down his side. A doctor stands outside of his room and talks quietly with his parents. His whole body hurts, and he knows where he is, comes back here a lot. This period is obviously important to him. He remembers wanting to dance, being proud of who he is and the decade in which he lives and he remembers the experience of curling into the ground as feet and fists taught him otherwise. He remembers the time he spent in this room, healing and drifting, and how it changed everything. He coughs and his ribs pull, and the handle of the door depresses and his mom slips inside.
“Hey, Blainey,” she says, and he turns the corners of his mouth up. She’s pretty, his mom. Her eyes are warm like honeyed gold and he wants to tell her he loves her. Maybe he does, sometimes.
But this time he wakes up with his wrists bound to the bars of the bed, with a strap across his chest. His ankles are cuffed as well, and he turns his head desperately, until a petite brunette steps into his line of vision.
“Shush,” she says, and checks his IV line. “We’re trying to stabilise you again, Blaine. Please relax.”
He tries to say he can’t, but his muscles are pudding and his tongue is too big and he slips away again, wakes up in a vast New York loft. There’s a presence behind him, and an arm firm around his waist, and he sighs into his pillow as a damp breath ghosts over his neck.
He’s not sure when is real anymore.
But he hopes it’s not the past where they lock him away for who he is.
(He celebrates marriage equality at the Stonewall Inn. There’s tears and laughter and joy, and he thinks with a sudden clarity that he doesn’t really know a time when he couldn’t have this, and it’s like ice down his spine before the sun catches him full blast again. ‘Love Wins’ scream the signs, and another pair of arms crush him against a solid chest. Love wins. Yeah, he thinks. Maybe.)
When they let him out of the hospital bed, two men appear. One of them looks like Kurt. He wears a gold band around his finger, and Blaine touches his own hand. Yes, there it is. A band of gold. Do they do that in the future?
Kurt’s hands are gentle with him. The corridors they walk through are carpeted and softly lit, and Kurt’s skin reflects the light until he looks almost blue, and then, in the harder light of the room he leads Blaine to, Blaine assesses that maybe Kurt’s skin is blue, and it’s not the light at all.
He sits in silence and then says, “Or grey.”
Kurt looks at him, and his irises are startling in their clarity. Those are definitely blue. Or maybe also grey. Kurt’s mouth curls up in smile and he leans in to press a kiss to Blaine’s receptive mouth.
So that is the same. That’s nice.
“Grey,” he says. “It’s always grey.”
Blaine nods his head and accepts that as truth. He doesn’t remember always, but that’s not unusual either. Kurt hands him a cup filled with water and two tablets, and Blaine puts them in his mouth and swallows them without protest. He’s been poked full of holes, injected with stabilisers; Rachel had explained, needle in hand, ‘We’re doing everything we can to keep you with us, Blaine.’ He’d nodded, and drifted, and opened his eyes in a different hospital room, still full of the scent of lilies.
“Who’s dying?” he laughed, or tries to, and his mom (she looks older, is she older?) and Kurt (definitely older, holding a toddler on his hip) had turned to look at him. Is he dying?
Rachel said, “Back in the room.” He blinked, and everything tilted a little, but he stayed present. (Or in the future, or never, he’s lost. He’s so lost.)
Kurt strokes his hair and kisses his forehead once. “I think they regret that experiment a little,” he says, and Blaine blinks and nods.
“Experiment?” he asks, and Kurt inclines his head.
“To ‘Experience real living history’,” he says, and makes air quotes with his fingers. “They don’t know how to make it stop, and your body seems to keep regenerating the antigen.”
Blaine swallows. “I’m scared so much,” he says, and Kurt sits down gently beside him.
“We all are,” he murmurs. “Santana won’t admit it, but she’s scared you’ll be gone when the baby comes. And I’m scared you’re not going to come back at all. And it’s not like I can chase you.” He gestures to himself, and Blaine leans into him, soaking in his warmth. He wonders how often they’ve had this conversation, and maybe it shows on his face, because-
“This is the thirty-fifth variation,” Kurt says, and Blaine laughs.
“Fifty first dates,” he says, and it’s worth it for the laughter in Kurt’s eyes.