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Klaine: Insomnia

Title: Insomnia Artist: overcaustically Author: animeangelriku Rating (art/fic if different): PG Word Count: 8k Warnings (if any): None Fic Summary: Ever since he was a child, Kurt has dreamed with a meadow where a boy named Blaine lives. He befriends and falls for Blaine, even though he knows he's not real. Now that he has grown up and has to move away to college, Kurt's afraid that he will never see his beloved Blaine again. Link to Art: Right here! Link to Fic: You can read it here or on AO3! (A/N: Huge shout-out to Chloe, who was so kind as to beta-read what I had of the fic, as stupid as I found everything I was sending to her. Thank you, lovely, and I hope you're much better now!! And, of course, the biggest of shout-outs to Robert, whose gorgeous fanart inspired this fic. Robert, sweetie, I hope you like this, and I'm sorry that I couldn't send it to you before and that I had to change it. Thank you for being so patient and understanding with me, and I hope we get to work again in future bangs, whether they're Klaine, Kurt/Blaine Reverse, or next year's CrissColfer Bang! Thank you so much for everything, and I hope you're satisfied with this fic!) Art Thumbnail:

“’Night, buddy.”

“Goodnight, Dad.”

After his dad closed the door behind him, Kurt’s room still wasn’t that dark. His father had plugged in a night light next to his bed, so his entire room was better lit than he was used to seeing it when it was time for bed.

Of course, he’d had problems sleeping for a while now, so a lot of people had suggested he get a night-light. If he had a nightmare and woke up in an illuminated space, he would calm down long enough to go back to sleep instead of staying awake, afraid he would have another nightmare. So far, he hadn’t had any nightmares, but he’d also spent nights rolling around in bed for hours, unable to sleep.

This was one of those nights.

There had been many nights like this one since Mom had passed away.

Kurt was staring at the stuffed toys on the middle shelves of the huge bookshelf he had covering one of the walls of his room. On the higher shelves were coloring books and fairytale books that Kurt himself couldn’t reach, but he would be able to when he was older. For now, Dad had to get the books for him. But he could get the stuffed toys. Dad had told him that if the light didn’t help him sleep, maybe he could try having one of those toys with him. Then again, Mom had told him when she was in the hospital that, now that he was eight, he was a grown-up; from what Kurt had seen, grown-ups didn’t sleep with stuffed toys.

Oh, but he’d had so much trouble sleeping lately, maybe he could try it…

Kurt got up from his bed, and he made his way to the bookshelf, to one of the lower shelves so that he could grab a stuffed little boy that Mom had sewn for him before she went to the hospital the first time. The doll had black threads of hair and brown buttons for eyes, and he wore a yellow bowtie around his neck, a white shirt and yellow pants. And black little shoes to go with his hair.

“One of them can protect you for me,” Dad had said, referring to his stuffed toys in general. “As soon as you close your eyes, whatever toy you choose is gonna come alive and help you sleep so that you don’t have to worry anymore.”

“What if I have nightmares?” Kurt had asked, because if he could sleep for more than a few hours, he was surely going to dream something, and that something may not be that nice.

“He’s gonna slay all nightmares that want to invade your dreams,” Dad had assured him. “And when you wake up, he’ll be sleeping so that he can wake up when it’s time for you to go to bed.”

“Do you really think it’s gonna work?”

“You’re not gonna lost anything if you try,” his dad had answered.

Now Kurt climbed back into bed with the stuffed little boy in his arms and pulled the bed cover up to his chin. Then he held the stuffed toy in his hands and looked straight into his button eyes. “You heard my dad,” he whispered to him. “You’re supposed to protect me, okay? I’m counting on you.”

He knew better than to expect an answer; stuffed toys only came alive when no one was watching.

“Good,” Kurt murmured, and he was surprised to feel a yawn coming out of his mouth. He hadn’t yawned while being in bed in days. “Goodnight,” he mumbled, not wanting to give the stuffed boy a name yet. If this didn’t work, what was the point? He would name him tomorrow, and only if he woke up in the morning instead of in the middle of the night.

Kurt turned on his side and closed his eyes.

*

He was lying down on a meadow where the grass was incredibly tall, and he could see it even though he wasn’t standing. Kurt had never gone to a meadow, but he’d seen a lot of those in picture books, so he was pretty sure he was in one. He carefully sat up and then got to his feet. Around him were nothing more than flowers and more grass and more flowers and more grass. The sky was clear, and there were white clouds that were so fluffy, they looked like pillows.

Kurt turned around, and there was a boy standing in front of him.

The boy was smaller than Kurt. He had black, curly hair and brown eyes, and he was wearing really weird clothes: he looked like one of the knights in the fairytale books Mom used to read to him when he wasn’t a grown-up. He also had a bow across his chest, and there was a quiver full of arrows slung on his shoulder.

“Oh, hi!” the boy said with a joyful grin. “Who are you?”

“Um…” Kurt blinked. “I’m Kurt. And you?”

“My name’s Blaine,” the boy said as he did a little bow with the upper half of his body, as if he were really a knight and he were bowing down to a princess. “It’s really nice to meet you, Kurt!”

“It’s… nice to meet you too, Blaine,” Kurt said. This boy was being very friendly, and he wasn’t really used to other kids being friendly with him. Well, not boys, at least. The girls at school didn’t think it was weird that he liked to play with dolls and make his Power Rangers get married, but other boys did.

“How did you get here?” Blaine asked him, narrowing his eyes in curiosity. “I’ve never seen you around here before.”

“I…” Kurt looked around. He didn’t remember falling asleep, so he wasn’t all that sure he was dreaming. “I don’t know.”

“Ah, well, that’s okay,” Blaine said, smiling again. “You can stay with me until you have to get back home!”

Kurt didn’t know if he was dreaming or if all of this was in his head or if he would ever get back home to his room, but Blaine seemed to be pretty nice, and he was inviting Kurt to stay with him until he… well, until he stopped being here, probably. Blaine held out his hand towards him, and Kurt hesitantly took it. He’d only ever held hands with the other kids at school because they went on school trips and they were forced to hold hands; he’d never done it because the other kid wanted to.

“I’ve never gone to a playdate,” Kurt admitted, looking down at the ground between him and Blaine as they walked. He’d had tea parties with Mom, and then with Dad, but he’d never gone to another kid’s house to play with them.

Blaine stopped walking and turned to look back at him. “What’s a playdate?” he asked.

Kurt wasn’t sure of how to answer. “You… don’t know what’s a playdate?” Blaine shook his head, and Kurt had to take a moment before he responded. What boy didn’t know what a playdate was? Then again, Blaine was dressed like a baby knight, and he had bowed to Kurt after meeting him. Maybe he was a little weird. Kurt immediately felt bad thinking about his new friend—at least, he assumed Blaine was his friend—as weird, when other kids thought about him as weird.

“Well,” Kurt began, “a playdate is when you go to a friend’s house and you play together.”

“Oh, that sounds amazing!” Blaine said, like it was the best thing he had ever heard of. “I guess we’re having a playdate, then!” He turned around and started walking again, and Kurt had no other option than to follow him.

Not that he didn’t like holding Blaine’s hand and walking with him or anything. So far, it was kind of nice.

No matter how much they walked, Kurt couldn’t see anything past the meadow they were in. All around them, the grass and the flowers seemed to go on forever, but Blaine appeared to know exactly where he was going. He never slowed the pace, he never lessened his grip on Kurt’s hand… where was he leading them to? Were they just going to walk around forever, or until they got to the edge of the world?

“Are we there yet?” Kurt asked, even though Dad didn’t like it when he did that. He hadn’t said that since Mom was with them, so it felt kind of strange.

“Almost,” Blaine said, instead of the usual Not yet, Kurt, he always got from his dad. “My house is right over there. Do you see it, right there?” Blaine pointed with his finger to the horizon, and where there had been nothing before, Kurt saw a small house painted light brown, with a window on the front and a beige ceiling. There was no door, though, not from where they were right now.

“Yeah, I see it,” Kurt said. “You live there?”

“That’s right!” Blaine said. “I live with my mother and my father, but they’re rarely home.”

“Really? Why?” Kurt couldn’t believe a boy his age—because Kurt guessed Blaine was around his age—lived mostly by himself. The house looked kind of small, and he didn’t think Blaine had any toys or things to entertain himself with. What were they going to do in this playdate? Kurt had only grabbed the stuffed little boy on his shelf to help him sleep, he didn’t have any other toys.

“Because they have jobs in the village,” Blaine answered.

Kurt was now more confused than he’d been with the mysteriously appearing house in the middle of the meadow. “The village?”

Blaine looked over his shoulder. “Yes, the village,” he said with a little smile. “Well, Mother does. She prepares remedies for anyone who’s sick, and Father hunts in the woods outside the village.”

Mother. Father. Blaine wasn’t weird, but he did talk kind of funny. Kurt called his parents Mom and Dad, not Mother and Father. Only people in his fairytale books talked like that. Was Kurt in a fairytale he didn’t know about? Maybe this was the beginning of a fairytale, the part that books never included.

“So your mom’s like a doctor?” Kurt asked.

Blaine stopped walking, and he stood in front of Kurt. They were only a few feet away from the little light-brown painted house now. Then he grinned like he did when he first saw Kurt, like there was nothing else he could think of doing.

“We’re almost there,” Blaine said. “Come on.”

*

Kurt opened his eyes and immediately closed them again. He felt like he was outside his house and the sun was shining down upon him, or like someone had turned on the lights on his room while he was still asleep. He reached for the covers of his bed, grabbed them, and pulled them over his head. Then there was a knock on his door before it was pushed open.

“Kurt? Buddy, are you awake?”

“Nooooooo,” Kurt said, yawning underneath his bed covers, and he heard Dad close the door. He didn’t want to get up yet, he was too tired, and if he was correct, it was Saturday, so he didn’t have to get up until ten in the morning…

Wait. His dad had asked him if he was awake. Kurt had covered his eyes because he felt like someone had turned on the lights.

He was still asleep. He was still asleep.

He’d slept through the night. He hadn’t woken up in the middle of the night, and he hadn’t had any nightmares. He’d only had a very weird dream involving a boy around his age called Blaine, but there hadn’t been any nightmares.

Kurt hadn’t woken up. He had actually slept through the entire night.

He kicked off the covers of his bed and looked for the stuffed little toy he’d kept in his arms when he’d fallen asleep. Where was the little guy? He wasn’t on the bed… he wasn’t on the floor… Kurt got down from his bed and looked underneath his—there it was! He reached underneath his mattress for the stuffed toy and pulled it out, holding it in his hands in front of him.

Kurt noticed that the stuffed boy’s hair and eyes made him look like Blaine, who also had black hair and brown eyes. Of course, his weren’t button eyes, but they were brown, too. And Blaine had been wearing clothes like the ones his book characters always wore, contrary to his stuffed toy, who had a white shirt, a yellow bowtie and pants, and black shoes.

Thanks to him, Kurt had been able to sleep, just like Dad had said it would.

“Thank you, Blaine,” Kurt told the stuffed toy, deciding that he was going to name it like the boy he’d met on his weird dream. He wrapped an arm around it, hugged it to his chest, and went out of his room to go have breakfast.

*

Every time Kurt saw himself in a meadow, he knew he was dreaming.

Every time Kurt appeared in the meadow, Blaine was already waiting for him.

The night after he’d first seen him, as soon as he fell asleep, Kurt was a little surprised when he saw the grass and the flowers again, and now Blaine was immediately next to him. “There you are!” he’d cried out gleefully. “You left so suddenly yesterday that I was starting to believe you wouldn’t come here again!”

Kurt realized that Blaine was practically the same as his doll: he was awake when Kurt was asleep, and whenever Kurt was awake, a night would pass for Blaine so that they were together in Kurt’s dreams, when it was morning for Blaine. Every night, before he fell asleep, Kurt put something under his pillow, and no matter what it was, it would show up along with him in the strange land he was transported to, wherever it was that Blaine lived.

Now he’d brought his Walkman, which his father had recently given him for his ninth birthday.

“So what is this thing?” Blaine asked him, taking it in his hands.

Kurt tried not to laugh at him. He loved seeing Blaine’s reactions when he brought him things from the “Otherland,” as Blaine called his home. “It’s called a Walkman,” Kurt answered. “See, you put in something called a tape, and then you press this button—”

“What are these?” Blaine questioned as he reached for the headphones attached to the device.

“Oh, they’re headphones,” Kurt explained. “You put them over your head, and when you press this button, you hear the music from the tape, like this.” He put the headphones on Blaine’s ears, pressed Play, and saw Blaine as he began listening to the music.

“This is wonderful!” Blaine shouted, probably because he thought Kurt wouldn’t be able to hear him over the sound. “What’s this music called?”

“The Beatles!” Kurt screamed.

*

“So let me see if I understand,” Blaine said as he flipped the pages of one of Kurt’s fairytale books. “These are stories that people used to tell years and years ago?”

“Well, with us, at least,” Kurt replied. “I don’t know if these stories have already been told with you or if the Brothers Grimm even exist here.”

Blaine looked up at him. “The Brothers Grimm?”

“Yeah,” Kurt said. “It’s kind of a long story. They were these brothers who used to tell these stories to the people they lived with. Then the stories were written down and they were put in books for us to read now!”

“And who painted the pictures on the book?” Blaine asked him, looking down at the picture of a prince climbing Rapunzel’s tower.

Kurt blinked in confusion. “I… don’t know. I can look for it when I go back home, and I can tell you tomorrow!”

“Yes, that’d be great!” Blaine continued flipping the pages of the book, and he stopped when he got to the tale of Rumplestiltskin. “Now tell me, why didn’t the princess tell the king that she didn’t know how to spin straw into gold?”

*

“Remind me why we’re cleaning my room again?” Kurt asked his father, who was putting Kurt’s stuffed toys into cardboard boxes. Kurt himself was trying to help, but he kept getting distracted by the drawings in the sketchbooks he’d filled through the ages of ten to thirteen.

“Because we’re donating everything you don’t want anymore,” his dad said. “By the way, you could come help me anytime you want.”

Kurt put his sketchbooks aside—he wasn’t going to throw those away, just as he wasn’t going to throw away the drawings he liked the most from when he was younger—and grabbed a cardboard box. He reached up to the higher shelves of his bookshelf to grab his fairytale books; the coloring books were no use, they were already done. The one book he wanted to keep was under his pillow, and he was keeping it only because Blaine liked to read it with him every once in a while.

Once everything Kurt didn’t want anymore was put away in boxes, Kurt turned back to the table right next to his bed, where he kept a lamp and…

His Blaine doll.

His Blaine stuffed toy, the one with black threads of hair and brown button eyes that had finally allowed him to sleep properly after his mother’s death.

“Dad,” Kurt began, looking around the undone sheets of his bed. Maybe it’d fallen on top of it and Kurt hadn’t seen it. “Where’s the stuffed toy I had on the bedside table?”

“What stuffed toy?” his father asked.

“The one Mom sewed for me when I was seven,” Kurt said, seeking desperately for it around the cardboard boxes on the floor.

“Your mother sewed a lot of stuffed toys for you.”

“No, my mom bought me a lot of stuffed toys,” Kurt said. Where was the goddamn Blaine doll? “The one with the black hair and the little button eyes. It was on my bedside table.”

“Kurt, I put all your stuffed toys on boxes,” his dad said, and Kurt turned on his heels like a character would on a sitcom: with an open mouth and his arms held at his sides. “I figured you wouldn’t want to keep any of them.”

“I want to keep that one, that’s why it’s on my bedside table instead of on the shelves!” Kurt replied as he moved towards the boxes labeled “STUFFED TOYS” and began to rip the duct tape off the closed ones until he found Blaine.

“Sorry,” his father muttered. “Didn’t know you cared so much about it.”

Kurt placed the Blaine doll on his rightful place next to the lamp. “That’s fine,” he mumbled, mainly because he didn’t want to get into an argument with his dad about a stuffed little boy, no matter how important it was to him. He’d probably sound a little ridiculous if he tried to explain that he feared he wouldn’t see Blaine in his dreams if he didn’t have his doll next to him.

And, well, he didn’t want to stop seeing Blaine in his dreams.

“I just don’t think I’m ready to part with it yet,” he concluded.

“Okay,” said his dad. “All right, fine. Now close again the boxes you opened and help me bring them down to the living room.”

*

Kurt looked at the tree only a few feet in front of them. Blaine had said he didn’t have to close one of his eyes, like he always saw the characters do on animated movies, and he was having a really hard time not doing it.

“You just pull the arrow back,” Blaine explained, helping Kurt pull the arrow back on his bow while Kurt tried not to blush at the proximity between them. “Like this. Keep your elbow up—no, not that up. Now aim towards the tree… Okay, you got it! Now you just need to shoot it.”

Kurt let go of the arrow, and he was, quite frankly, a little disappointed when he saw it fall down right in front of him. Thankfully, Blaine wasn’t laughing at him.

“Don’t worry,” he told Kurt with a pat on the back, and Kurt felt his face heat up when Blaine slid his hand down his back instead of simply pulling it away. “That used to happen to me when I first started. Father told me it’s normal. You just need to keep practicing!”

“Yeah,” Kurt said, distracted by the fact that Blaine hadn’t moved away from him. “But you’re still going to help me, right?”

Blaine turned to him with that cute, gorgeous grin of his. “Of course I am! In fact, I won’t stop helping you until you’re a better archer than me.”

“Oh, I’m afraid that’s never going to happen.”

“Well,” Blaine said, looking at the arrow on the ground before them and glancing back at Kurt afterwards. “I guess we’ll be stuck together for a long time, huh?”

There was a twinkle in his eyes that Kurt didn’t want to figure out; not because he thought it meant something bad, but because he feared it meant something good.

Having a crush on a boy he only saw in his dreams was absurd enough—and really, having somehow built Blaine as a personification of his ideal best friend and possible partner was more than ridiculous—, but imagining that same boy having a crush on him?

Oh, but it would certainly be nice, wouldn’t it?

*

“I feel like I should tell you,” Kurt said, probably for the hundredth time, “that I’m not that good when it comes to drawing.”

“Are you joking?” Blaine chuckled, and he used his hands so that he could move forward and keep his legs crossed, as Kurt had asked him to. “You’re incredibly talented!”

Kurt glanced up from the sketchbook in front of him. He smiled with only one side of his mouth perking up, pretending he hadn’t seen Blaine move even though he had. “You’re just saying that because I agreed to draw you.”

“No,” Blaine argued, and Kurt held back his urge of raising an eyebrow at him. “I’m just saying that because I’m your friend. And because you’re incredibly talented.”

Kurt laughed, and when he looked up from the sketchbook again, Blaine was even closer to him. Again, Kurt pretended not to notice.

“Stop talking,” he said. “If you keep doing that, I’m going to have to draw your mouth open instead of smiling.”

“So,” Blaine began, daring to move forward while Kurt was looking at him. “What exactly, if I may ask, would be wrong about drawing me with my mouth open?”

“It’s just not the look I wanted to draw you with,” Kurt answered, concentrating on his sketchbook. “I wanted to draw you smiling.”

“And why would that be?”

Kurt pressed his lips together. He felt his face heat up in a blush, and he simply hoped it wouldn’t spread to his ears. Blaine had told him he looked like an elf when his ears went pink, but he’d done it while smiling, so Kurt had taken it as a compliment. It didn’t mean he liked looking like an elf, or that he liked the fact that Blaine saw him as one.

“Because I like your smile,” Kurt admitted, and he bit the inside of his cheek.

“Really?”

This time, when he looked up from his sketchbook, Blaine was only a few inches away from him. The space between them actually looked kind of smaller, like Kurt could put both of his hands together between him and Blaine but they would barely fit. The twinkle in Blaine’s eyes that Kurt had seen so many times before but had pretended otherwise was there again.

“You really like my smile that much?” Blaine asked him.

Kurt couldn’t help rolling his eyes. “Yes,” he said. “It’s the kind of smile that should be drawn.”

The smile that had been on Blaine’s face turned into a grin, which, Kurt hated to admit it, was even more precious than the smile he’d wanted to draw him with.

“Great,” Blaine said. “I really like your smile, too.”

And then he closed the short distance between them and kissed Kurt.

*

Kurt sighed in relief when the bell finally rang and his Art teacher dismissed the class. It wasn’t that he didn’t enjoy the class or that he regretted having signed up for it, but sometimes he just wanted to go home and sleep, especially when he had artist’s block. If he was tired, the ideas didn’t quite flow, and a small nap (or sleeping through the night, he’d done both) was always the best solution.

He looked at the painting he’d started. He had wanted to paint the meadow where he woke up in his dreams, with the grass that reached up to his knees (now that he was eighteen) and a thousand flowers, all of them of a different kind. He’d had a good start, but when he was halfway done, he didn’t like how the grass looked and then he tried to fix it and he’d ended up with what seemed like something out of one of his old coloring books. His teacher hadn’t said anything to him about it, but the way she’d looked at him wasn’t exactly what he had wanted, either.

“Hey, Kurt!” Kurt turned to the door, where his friend Mercedes was waiting for him with her backpack slung over her shoulder. While he’d signed up for his Art class, Mercedes had taken a Vocalization class. “Ready to go?”

“Yeah, just let me get my stuff.” She stood on the door while he packed his watercolors and his paintbrushes inside his bag. Then he covered the canvas of his monstrosity with a sheet and tied it so that it wouldn’t fall off. When he went up to Mercedes, she raised her eyebrows.

“You’re not gonna show off your next masterpiece to me?” she asked him, and he held back the urge he had of rolling his eyes at her.

“Bad day,” he answered. “If I can help it, nobody but me is going to see this in the next couple of years.”

She made a face at him that he immediately returned. “C’mon,” she said, “it can’t be that bad, right?”

“It’s worse than that bad,” Kurt said, glaring at the covered canvas underneath his arm. “I might need to paint over it and start again.”

“Well, I guess it’s better than throwing it away,” Mercedes added. Kurt nodded to himself, supposing she was right. He didn’t like throwing ruined paintings away, but he’d had to do it a few times before. He didn’t want this to come to that.

Once they were in Kurt’s car, Mercedes turned sideways on her seat—and Kurt told her for the fifth time to buckle up her damn seatbelt—and said, “Any plans for tomorrow? It’s my aunt’s birthday, and if I have to be on her party by myself, I’m gonna end up beating a cousin up or something.”

“Sorry, sweetie,” Kurt said with an apologetic shrug of his shoulders as he turned on the engine. “I promised my dad I would help him on his shop. Try not to beat anyone up. Or kill anyone.”

She turned on her seat again so that she’d face the windshield and pouted. “If I call you from jail, will you pay my fine?”

“Highly doubt it,” Kurt told her, and he laughed when she slapped his arm.

*

Kurt parked his car in the driveway, turned off the engine, and then looked at his covered painting in the backseat. He seriously didn’t want to look at it again today, but he felt bad about leaving it here. Besides, he would have to finish it tomorrow in his last Art class of the summer before he went off to college. Exhaling in an angry sigh, he got down from the car, opened the door of the backseat, and pulled out the canvas, deciding to leave it on the garage, where he wouldn’t have to see it and imagine it staring back at him until tomorrow.

His dad was in the garage when he walked in, apparently searching for something in a toolbox, and he only greeted him with a distracted, “Hey, Kurt.” A lot of Kurt’s things were already packed, and the floor of the garage was full of cardboard boxes labeled with different names.

“Hi, Dad,” Kurt said, placing the painting against the back wall, right behind the box labeled “ART SUPPLIES.”

“How was class?”

He threw his head back and crossed his arms over his chest. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

His father turned from the toolbox to him and glanced down at the covered canvas. Then he glanced at his son. “Bad day?”

“Bad day,” Kurt repeated, turning away from his coloring-book-calamity. “I’m going to lie down,” he told his dad, “but I’ll get up for our Thursday family dinner.” His dad didn’t say anything as he made his way out of the garage.

Kurt’s room was a comfortable space in comparison to the Art classroom, even as empty as it was with most of Kurt’s stuff already packed away; one of his walls was covered entirely with pictures, from drawings he’d done when he was eight to some of his favorite sketches from the last three years. Of course, the drawings he’d made as a kid were not that amazing, but Kurt liked seeing his progress right in front of him.

He turned to the table next to his bed, where he still kept a lamp and his Blaine doll right next to it. He’d kept clothes for Friday and the weekend in his closet, and besides the clothes, the bedside table, the drawings on the walls and the covers of his bed, his room was emptied out.

Kurt yawned and lay down on his bed, staring up at the ceiling. Then he remembered he’d intended to put his sketchbook underneath his pillow, so he got up from bed, took the sketchbook out of his backpack, placed it under his pillow, and lay down again.

As soon as he closed his eyes, he saw the meadow.

*

Blaine was already waiting for him when Kurt opened his eyes; he was actually right above him, so Kurt saw his face upside-down. Blaine grinned, and Kurt couldn’t help laughing at how silly it looked from his point of view.

“Hey, love,” Blaine said, and he leaned down to kiss Kurt. Kurt started to sit up, using his hands as leverage, and Blaine began to laugh as their position became awkward. When they pulled away, Kurt turned around to face Blaine, who was sitting down on his knees, smiling at him. “Did you have a good day in the Otherland?”

“Not really,” Kurt answered, but he realized that what had happened in his Art class didn’t seem so bad now that he was with Blaine. “But I’m feeling a lot better now.” Then he remembered the sketchbook he’d put under his pillow, which was now at his side, and took it in his hands. “Oh, hey, I have some new sketches I want to show you!”

Blaine sat down beside him as Kurt began to flip the pages. He’d been drawing Blaine during some of his classes instead of drawing the models his teacher brought in to help them learn the anatomy of the human body—well, he had drawn the model, he’d just turned them into different designs of Blaine.

“What am I lying on in this picture?”

“Nothing, exactly. I mean, I could probably draw some grass around you to make it look like you’re here on the meadow.”

Blaine turned his head to him, and he was smiling in a way that made Kurt want to kiss his entire face. “You should draw yourself next to me,” he told Kurt as he leaned in to kiss his cheek. “So it’d be just like one of your… what are they called, photographs?”

Kurt grabbed Blaine’s chin in his palm and pressed a kiss to his mouth. “That’s exactly what they’re called, and that’s a great idea.”

“What am I doing in this one?”

“You’re climbing a tower, but I was experimenting a little and sketched it from above, like I’m the sun and I’m looking down on you.”

“I already think you’re the sun, Kurt, you don’t need to draw a picture.” Kurt kissed him by grabbing his face with both hands this time.

They continued flipping through the pages of the sketchbook, and when they got to the near end of it, Kurt put his hand between the pages and closed the sketchbook. Blaine narrowed his eyes in confusion, to which Kurt put up a finger to keep him from asking questions.

“I have a surprise for you,” he said. “I know you told me you didn’t need anything for your birthday, but I wanted to do something for you, so…” Kurt opened up the sketchbook and gave it to Blaine so that he could flip through the pages at his own pace and see what Kurt had done for him.

“Oh, heavens…” Kurt watched Blaine’s eyes widen as he saw a picture he’d drawn of his parents from how Blaine had described them to him through the years. Then they got watery at a picture Kurt had done of Blaine’s father teaching him how to shoot with the bow. “Oh, Kurt, these are all beautiful.”

“Do you like them?” Kurt asked, because although he knew Blaine liked his pictures, he hadn’t heard Blaine say he liked these ones.

“Of course I do!” Blaine exclaimed, and he put his hands on Kurt’s nape to bring him forward and repeatedly kiss his lips. “They’re gorgeous, Kurt, my goodness, I love them!” Kurt managed to break the two of them apart with his hands on Blaine’s chest, and he laughed against his mouth. “Can I keep them?”

Kurt’s smile wavered, and he glanced down at the sketchbook in Blaine’s lap. “You can,” he told Blaine. “But I don’t know if they’ll stay here once I go back to the Otherland.”

Blaine’s mouth took the shape of an “o” before he bit his lower lip. “What if I bring some paper from the village and we copy the pictures? Then I’m sure they won’t vanish when you leave.”

“Hm,” Kurt groaned, leaning his head against Blaine’s shoulder. He had no problem copying the pictures now that he had drawn them, but the words “when you leave” coming out of Blaine’s mouth didn’t comfort him at all. “I don’t want to leave.”

“Because of college?”

“Oh, don’t even remind me,” Kurt mumbled.

He was excited about going to college and looking for art exhibits and maybe get into some performing arts programs, of course he was. But he didn’t know what he was going to do with the stuffed doll of Blaine he kept on his bedside table. He feared that if he didn’t take it with him, he wouldn’t dream with Blaine anymore, but he also feared what whoever his roommate in college would say if he did take the doll with him. Kurt’s dad hadn’t told him anything for keeping the stuffed toy with him during high school, but he knew how cruel people could be.

And in his dreams, there was only Blaine, and Blaine loved him.

“I just wish I could stay here forever,” Kurt muttered.

Blaine wrapped his arms around him and pulled him tight against his chest. “I wish you could stay here forever, too.” He sighed deeply, and Kurt did exactly the same thing.

“Anyway,” Kurt said, “come on, let’s go get the paper from the village so that we can copy the sketches.”

*

So he hadn’t finished the painting, big deal. A lot of artists didn’t finish their paintings, and besides, Kurt wanted to sketch, not paint. He could learn how to do landscapes when he was in college; meanwhile, he would sketch with pencil and charcoal. Now that he knew how to do.

Kurt put the art supplies he’d taken to his Art class that day in the box where they belonged, and he decided that he was going to throw away the stupid meadow painting that looked nothing at all like a meadow, because he wouldn’t bear to bring it with himself and imagine the word failure written all over it.

“Going somewhere?” his father asked him when they’d finished dinner (at least, Kurt had, his dad was still chewing his last bite of pasta) as he made his way to the door with the covered canvas under his arm.

“Yeah,” Kurt answered. “I’m going to throw this away so I don’t have to look at it anymore.”

“You’re not taking it with you?”

“No,” he responded. “And please, Dad, don’t talk with your mouth full.” Once he’d put the painting next to the trash can outside, Kurt walked back inside his house, announced to his father that he was going to bed—“It’s your turn to do the dishes, we settled it last week so that I didn’t do them on my last night home!”—and went up to his room.

His Blaine stuffed doll was still on his bedside table. He was going to put it away tomorrow morning on a bag that would be kept in their basement for when he came home for the holidays. Still, Kurt thought it looked weird next to the lamp, which he turned off before he closed his eyes and fell asleep.

*

“Kurt, get up! It’s almost noon, you said you wanted to leave before noon! Besides, I’m not letting you outta this house without breakfast!”

No, it can’t be noon, Kurt thought as he heard his father’s voice through his room’s door. I haven’t slept nearly enough, and I haven’t seen…

He sat up so quickly that he got dizzy, feeling like his entire room (or what was left of it) was spinning around him.

It couldn’t be noon. He hadn’t dreamed with Blaine, so that could only mean that he hadn’t fallen asleep yet.

No, no, it couldn’t be noon.

“Kurt!”

But it was, it was almost noon, and he had to get up and have breakfast before he put all of his boxes in his car and drove away to get settled into his dorm.

And yet…

“KURT!”

“I’m awake, I’m awake!” Kurt yelled back. “I’ll be down in a second!”

He glanced sideways at his Blaine doll on the bedside, next to his lamp. He held back the urge to grab it in his hands and shake it while screaming, Why didn’t I see you last night, you were next to me! You’ve been with me since I was eight, I’ve dreamed with you since I was eight, where were you last night?!

Kurt did take the stuffed toy in his hands and held it in front of him, just like he’d done so the first night he’d slept with it in his arms.

“Well,” he said with a resigned sigh. “I guess this is it.” There were so many things he wanted to say, but they all sounded so cheesy, and being cheesy was… well, it had been Blaine’s thing. He smiled when he remembered Blaine saying he was the sun, and he swallowed back the tears he felt prickling behind his eyes. How stupid was he being now, crying over someone who had never been truly real?

“I only wish I’d known,” Kurt told the Blaine doll, as if the Blaine from his dreams could hear him through it. “Then we could’ve spent our last day together doing something else besides copying sketches and staring at the sky.”

It had been a good last day together, nonetheless. It hadn’t felt like a goodbye at all, and Kurt was glad for it. He hated goodbyes, he probably wouldn’t have been able to say it even if he had known. But there was no use sobbing over it now. Now he had to get downstairs, have breakfast with his father, and get ready to leave.

*

Kurt had never seen the gallery so full.

People could barely walk between the bodies tightly packed together into the enormous crowd watching the new exhibit, showing off New York’s newfound talents, portraying from sixteen-year-old prodigies to elderly people who had just gotten their chance after waiting years for it.

It was better than California, at least, where no one had shown any interest in his sketches and charcoal pieces. He had managed to draw a landscape, but they had always wanted more, and he thought he’d wasted enough time on the one.

“Kurt, darling!” Kurt turned at the sound of his boss, April Rhodes, calling his name. She stood next to him and made a show of pretending to kiss both his cheeks, which Kurt hurriedly returned. He hadn’t grown used to that kind of salute yet, but he was getting there. It kept him away from April’s breath, which always reeked at least a little bit of alcohol. She had a glass of champagne in her hand now, so Kurt would rather she talk to him before she was even drunker. “How are you liking the exhibit so far, dear?”

“It’s amazing,” Kurt said with all honesty. “I never thought there would be so many people.”

“Are any of your old friends here? Any relatives? The more, the merrier!”

“Not yet,” Kurt answered, and he felt a little disappointed. Mercedes had promised she would talk to one of her cousins and get a ride with them, and his father had assured him he would be there. So where were they? “But I’m still hoping they get here soon.”

“I assure you they will, love,” April said. Kurt tried not to think about her use of the word love as a term of endearment. The last time he’d heard it being used that way was the last night he…

He didn’t want to think about it.

“Anyway,” April continued, “have you seen that a lot of people are looking at your masterpiece?”

Kurt waved a hand nonchalantly, but he couldn’t help glancing at the crowd surrounding his so called “masterpiece”: it was a charcoal sketch of the side of a person’s silhouette pulling back an arrow on a bow. The background was painted a mixture of bright and dark colors, like a line of bright green mixed with three dark blue lines, and those lines were mixed with other colors that wouldn’t look good in any other place. Kurt had learned that a random splash of colors didn’t seem that random to other people.

Or maybe it did and he still hadn’t understood that other people were just pretending to get it.

And of course, if the piece had been inspired by an archer Kurt had fallen in love with, it was for him to know and for everyone else to find out.

“Would you look at that, Kurt? And you thought no one was gonna like your silly landscape!”

Kurt glanced back at April when she playfully slapped his arm. He didn’t know what she was talking about until he looked at the corner where he’d asked his landscape to be put: he had finally managed, after years, to paint the meadow with grass and glowers he had dreamed with most of his life, but since he still didn’t think it did justice to the actual—well, fantastic—thing, he had asked April to put it where people wouldn’t pay it any attention.

But someone was.

It was a young man with black hair gelled down to his skull, and Kurt winced when he saw it. He walked towards the man, who had his arms behind his back, like he was examining the painting and the details on the flowers, which really weren’t many. Why was he looking at such a small thing when there were so many other pieces to look at?

As he came to a halt next to the young man, Kurt noticed that he was wearing yellow pants that didn’t cover his ankles and black shoes, along with a navy blue jacket.

“Hello,” Kurt said, and the man immediately turned to look at him. Not only did he have black gelled hair, he also had brown eyes that looked almost caramel-colored underneath the lights of the gallery.

And his face looked an awful lot like…

And he was wearing a white shirt with a yellow bowtie underneath his navy blue jacket.

Get over yourself, Kurt thought. There’s no possible way and you know it.

“Hi,” the man said with a smile that Kurt found incredibly familiar, which only made him want to punch himself in the gut. “I thought I was the only one who thought this landscape shouldn’t be here.”

“You…” Kurt bit the inside of his cheek. “You like the painting?”

“I think it’s one of the best landscapes they’ve got in here,” the young man said as he stared at the painted meadow. “I love how real the grass looks, like the canvas is a window and you can just open it and reach out to touch the flowers.”

“Hopefully you’re not allergic to any kind of flowers, those are not only one kind,” Kurt said, and even though he’d attempted to make a joke, he was surprised to hear the man laugh.

“Do you recognize all the flowers?” he asked Kurt.

“I should,” Kurt answered, “I’m the one who painted them.”

The man turned his entire body towards him so that they were face to face, and Kurt could almost imagine him wearing the clothes of an archer from a fairytale with a bow slung across his chest and a quiver on arrows on his back.

Stop it, Kurt scolded himself.

“You painted this?” he asked, pointing with one finger at the landscape.

“I did,” Kurt grudgingly admitted. “I’m surprised you like it, I kind of don’t.”

“You don’t?” The man glanced at the meadow again. “Why not? You did a gorgeous job with it.”

“I like working with charcoal more. I was never good with landscapes.”

“So why did you do this one?”

“Well,” Kurt explained, “it started out as a project in my summer Art class, and I really didn’t want to leave it incomplete, so.” Looking at it, the meadow had turned out quite pretty, but it still couldn’t compare to the beauty that had made up Kurt’s dreams.

Of course, that was also because a certain someone wasn’t there, but Kurt pushed down that thought before it fully arose to the front of his mind.

“I see,” said the young man, turning back to look at Kurt. His smile was warm and kind, like being in an art gallery was the best place he could be spending time at during a Saturday afternoon. “I know this is going to sound random, but…” He narrowed his eyes at Kurt, like he was trying to figure out where he’d lived before moving to New York. “Have we met before?”

Kurt opened his mouth to say that he hadn’t known him, exactly, he’d met a boy who was an archer in a meadow in his dreams that looked identical to him, but then he closed his mouth and smiled. “No, I don’t think so. I’m sure I’d remember you.”

The young man scoffed, but he blushed and the corners of his lips perked up in a grin.

“That was going to be my pick-up line,” he said, “but I guess I’ll just have to come up with another one.”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to steal your pick-up line,” Kurt said. Actually, he hadn’t meant to flirt with a complete stranger—because the man was a complete stranger—, it had just… come out like that.

“Are you completely sure we haven’t met before?” the young gel-helmeted man insisted. “Because you look really familiar…”

“No, I’m pretty sure we haven’t,” said Kurt, although, with the man’s insistence, he wasn’t that positive anymore. Maybe he’d seen him on the streets as a child, and the stuffed doll his mother had sewn for him had looked just like him, and that was the reason Kurt had dreamed with a black-haired, brown-eyed archer for so many years. Still, that didn’t explain why the dreams had ended, or how this man had ended up here if Kurt had seen him back home, far away from New York.

Same way you did, Kurt thought. Car, airplane… the world is big, Kurt, but it’s not impossible to travel through it.

“All right,” said the man, finally seeming to admit defeat. “So, prodigious artist,” he said, and Kurt’s face heated up with the compliment. “May I ask for your name?”

“It’s right there on the label,” Kurt said while he pointed to the label next to the landscape that included his own name and the title of the painting. “But if you’d prefer I tell you myself, I guess that’s okay, too.” He held out his hand. “My name is Kurt. Kurt Hummel.”

The sole admirer of his landscape’s eyes widened. Before Kurt could ask, he apparently recovered himself, and he took Kurt’s hand to shake it with his own.

“It’s nice to meet you, Kurt. I’m Blaine Anderson.”

Blaine.

With the black locks of hair instead of thread and the brown eyes that weren’t buttons.

With the same clothes as the doll but not the same ones as the archer.

Blaine Anderson.

Of course you are, Kurt thought.

“So,” Blaine said, and Kurt held himself back from grabbing his arms and asking him if he didn’t happen to be a boy who lived in a house in a meadow, who had tried to teach him how to shoot an arrow, who had kissed him when Kurt was trying to draw him, who had kept the copies of the sketches Kurt had done as a surprise for his birthday. “Maybe you’d like to have coffee sometime? I’d like to see some of your charcoal pieces, if you’d be willing to show them to me.”

Kurt wanted to point out that there were only three pieces in the entire gallery made with charcoal, shouldn’t Blaine assume they were his by what Kurt had told him?

Or maybe he had assumed it, and he was simply hoping Kurt wouldn’t realize it. The twinkle in his eyes—which Kurt perfectly recognized, it wasn’t the first time he’d seen it—certainly reflected the mischievousness of a child who knew he would get away with whatever he wanted to do.

“Yeah,” Kurt answered. “I’d love to go get coffee sometime. And showing you my charcoal sketches depends.”

Blaine narrowed his eyes at him again, but he was smiling now. “On what?”

Kurt looked right at Blaine, and he hoped that he also had a twinkle in his eyes. “On how the first date goes.”

From Blaine’s reaction, he did.

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