Archive of Our Own ^beta

If there’s anyone in the current crop of Starfleet Academy cadets who’s infamous, it’s Kurt Hummel.

Blaine has never shared an astrophysics lab with him or even laid eyes on him, but after all the stories that have gone around the academy (Cadet Hummel stared down Captain Kam’har over a question of Federation Treaty history; Cadet Hummel’s ingenious jerry-rig after the simulator engines were disabled helped bring his captain’s crew the closest to defeating the Kobayashi Maru scenario that anyone has managed in three years; ice runs in Cadet Hummel’s veins, possibly literally; Cadet Hummel once got into a bar fight with 16 Klingon warriors and a sehlat, and won), Blaine is picturing a larger than life figure.

So he gapes at the slender figure sitting at a table by himself and slowly eating some kind of salad as he peruses material on his PADD. He has elfin features and long fingers, and he looks like he spends a lot more time on his hair than Blaine ever would have imagined.

“That’s Kurt Hummel,” Blaine says dubiously.

“You’ve got ears; I know you heard what I said,” says Trent, with attitude, and Blaine vaguely swats at him without looking away from where Kurt Hummel is lightly tapping his own ear with a stylus.

“Nobody ever mentioned he was…” Blaine ignores Trent and all of his irritated attempts to smack Blaine’s hand away, his eyebrows furrowing as he tries to come up with the right words, “so…”

Across the galley, Hummel’s head rises sharply. There are enough tables and people between them that he can’t possibly have heard any of this conversation, but his head turns and he looks unerringly, straight as an arrow, directly at Blaine. His eyes have narrowed but Blaine can see even from here that they’re dark but also a strange, remarkable, changeable color; even as they make eye contact for all of four seconds, Blaine decides that they’re ringed blue, then he changes his mind to green, then gray.

Hummel glances away again, his expression unchanging; he snaps his PADD case shut and rises with his tray. He is broad in the shoulders and trim in the waist, clearly taller than Blaine, and as he walks toward the replicator, Blaine notes that he moves with remarkable self-assurance and grace.

“I don’t want anything to do with this,” Trent comments, but it’s said placidly as he chews on a mouthful of some Denobulan delicacy that smells like fish that’s been sitting out on the wharf for days.

“Anything to do with what,” Blaine asks dumbly, watching Hummel go.

“None of it,” Trent reiterates.

Trent is full of empty threats; after Blaine asks very nicely, he introduces Blaine to the cadet who shared an astrophysics lab with Cadet Hummel last year.

Blaine doesn’t learn very much from the conversation, except that Kurt Hummel keeps to himself, rarely smiles, and seriously knows his stuff.

Blaine also learns that the cadet who Trent introduces him to takes a nervewracking amount of joy in discussing his peers. After he says something about a weekly broadcast, Blaine extricates himself from the conversation as quickly and diplomatically as possible.

Despite Blaine’s newfound interest in Cadet Hummel, their next run-in is both literal and very, very accidental.

Scrambling down the broad staircase, Blaine doesn’t watch where he’s going as he struggles to settle the cuffs of his uniform jacket sleeves to make sure they’re in regulation order, and he collides with something warm and solid that yelps. By the time he’s fully aware of what’s happening, he’s sprawled on the stairs staring up into Kurt Hummel’s face. Cadet Hummel looks momentarily stunned, hunched over with an iron grip on the balustrade. A sea of cadets in red uniform stream past all around them, late stragglers headed for the assembly.

Blaine becomes aware that his mouth is hanging open. He shuts it, then promptly opens it again so he can say, “Wow, I am so sorry. Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” says Cadet Hummel. He actually sounds breathless, like Blaine knocked the wind out of him; his voice is improbably high and fluting. And — oh.

His irises are enormous and (and Blaine doesn’t know how he missed this, even from across the galley) almost completely black, ringed in the same striking blue-green-gray color that he had noticed before. Blaine has never seen anything like it.

Up close, he’s even more attractive than he’d looked from a distance. His lips are parted slightly as he stares at Blaine.

And then an instructor shouts from down below, the doors giving the telltale hiss that someone has given the order to close them, and Blaine lunges up and instinctively grabs Cadet Hummel’s hand. It’s warm and smooth and dry, and his long fingers spasm, presumably with surprise, as Blaine pulls him along. They dash through the doors seconds before closing and Blaine flings himself into the nearest seat, just in time to escape censure. Cadet Hummel yanks his hand away like he’s been scalded, but drops into the empty seat beside him very, very quickly.

They sit through the mandatory lecture on the Prime Directive in silence. Blaine takes copious notes, flicking through screens on his PADD as fast as he can, but when he glances sideways at Hummel, he finds him sitting perfectly straight, one leg crossed over the other and his hands clasped over his knee, giving every appearance of listening intently.

Afterward, they maneuver the exiting crowds side by side. “I’m really sorry about running you over, by the way,” Blaine says, glancing sideways at the other cadet. Hummel nods without even looking at him; he honestly seems bored by the entire interaction. “I’m Blaine. Blaine Anderson.” He extends a hand, smiling.

Hummel flicks his eyes very faintly sideways and politely pretends that he doesn’t see the gesture. After several seconds, Blaine hesitantly pulls his hand in. He’s beginning to think that this was a bad idea; it’s hard not to feel stupid and embarrassed. Sometimes, he thinks he can make it through by smiling and faking confidence when he doesn’t actually feel it and being diplomatic and friendly and highly competent, but that’s just not the way that it works. He needs to be able to read a situation, too; he needs to demonstrate actual leadership.

Something flickers in Hummel’s face, something that would be a twitch on anyone else but Blaine thinks has to be significant, and then he softly says, “Kurt Hummel,” and presses his thumb into Blaine’s palm in the faintest of handshakes before letting go.

The crush of other cadets separates them within seconds, but Blaine would swear that he can feel a phantom hand brushing his for the rest of the day.

Blaine may have taken to haunting the galley at off-hours.

Trent and David and Nick tease him about it, because he’s apparently the most transparent guy on the entire west coast of the United States, but they leave him be; Blaine privately thinks that they’ve probably decided that this is a healthier interest than the time he decided that the active-duty advisor in his astronav course was dreamy and then used star patterns to try to draw his face.

His galley hunch pays off when he takes an obscure Klingon dialect recording for some studying and a late night snack, and he finds a solitary figure hunched over a table.

Blaine tips his head from side to side, working the kinks out of his neck, and he shakes his fingers out in a burst of nerves. Before he can even approach, Hummel’s back stiffens and he turns around. Their eyes meet, and they look at each other, and Cadet Hummel turns back to face the table, which Blaine takes as a tacit invitation. He crosses the galley to the other side of the table.

“Hi,” Blaine says, tray carefully balanced. “Mind if I join you?”

Hummel takes a look around at all of the other empty tables, and then he says, “It’s a free federation.”

“Do you get some of your best thinking done in the galley?” Blaine asks, sitting down, and he’s rewarded by an immediate glance that makes him feel like Hummel (A) has no idea what he’s talking about, and (B) is silently judging him. “I’ve seen you here a couple times,” he clarifies; “mostly late at night.”

“My roommate is Aquellian,” Cadet Hummel says, and Blaine nods.

“They’re really diurnal, right?”

For about two seconds, Hummel looks mildly impressed. “He swears that if so much as one ray of light strikes his eye-stalks between the hours of 2200 and 0430, whether I have a life-changing exam to study for or not, he’ll shrivel up and melt,” he says, dry. And then, much to Blaine’s surprise, he adds, “He’s a drama queen, and I know from drama.”

Blaine laughs, delighted. “Really? Because—” He wrestles with it for a quick beat, then asks, “Can I be honest with you?”

He studies him through those dark eyes for several long seconds, clearly assessing, and then he says, “Yes, you can.”

“I kind of spent weeks trying to figure out if you had Vulcan ears.” Hummel stares blankly at him. “You’re a little intense. Not in a bad way; just in a … logical way.”

There is a pause, and then one side of Kurt’s mouth tips faintly upward and he turns the side of his head toward Blaine, and he lifts the wing of hair that is covering the very tip of his ear. It’s smooth and pink and perfectly rounded. “Now you know,” Kurt says.

It takes Blaine two hours of casual but surprisingly light conversation to realize that he has started thinking of him as Kurt in his head.

It only takes the first ten minutes to realize that he wants to make Kurt smile all the time.

Kurt is funny; that’s the thing. A lot of people seem to think that he’s humorless or has some kind of a stick up his ass, but it’s not true. He has a fantastic — if dark — sense of humor, and he waxes endearingly, amazingly poetic over the sound of a perfectly calibrated warp core.

They start out with careful conversations over class notes, but they end up wandering farther afield and exploring adventurous dining options both on and off the Starfleet campus. They sprawl across the lawn on a sunny San Francisco afternoon, and Kurt starts coming to Blaine and Trent’s room at night when he doesn’t want to hole up surrounded by darkness and his roommate’s snores.

David presses tickets to this experimental Andorian theater piece into Blaine’s hands, after the girlfriend who wanted to go dumps him, and Blaine spends three very confusing hours in a dark theater listening to actors shout in a language that he doesn’t understand, but it turns out okay in the end because Kurt watches rapt at his side and then loudly argues about the production’s subtextual meanings for the entire trip back to the academy dormitories.

Blaine finds out little tidbits about Kurt’s life in flashes here and there. He’s from a small town somewhere in the midwest and doesn’t seem to have been happy or felt particularly welcome there, but he speaks warmly of his father and stepmother. He never mentions his mother or any friends from home; Blaine suspects that he never had any of the latter. And that’s a shame, that’s wrong, because Kurt is confident and hilarious and steely and passionate and honest and sarcastic and thoughtful and absurdly, stunningly sweet. Sometimes, Blaine thinks that Kurt can figure out what he’s thinking even before Blaine himself does. He’s a little stiff when first getting to know people, but Blaine gets to introduce him to all of his friends and watch him slowly begin to unfurl, and it’s like some old-world idea of magic.

The first day that Blaine sees Kurt walking in the halls and he isn’t alone (he’s with a petite, laughing Orion girl; his mouth is twisted in good-natured distaste as he makes a doubtless perfectly cutting remark), Blaine smiles after his back until Cadet Lopez demands to know what the hell is wrong with him and how she can avoid catching it.

Blaine doesn’t know why Kurt went inward as far as he did (he has vague ideas sometimes, maybe, of Kurt needing to focus on classes and his commission in order to make his father proud, but then Blaine thinks that he’s probably just projecting), and he doesn’t have an inflated enough sense of self-worth to think that the obvious changes in Kurt are taking place because of Blaine.

But he likes to think that their friendship is helping.

Blaine finally figures it out when Kurt drops by after Trent’s grandmother passes away.

The death wasn’t totally unexpected, from what Trent has said, but from other things that Trent has shared over the two years that they’ve been rooming together, Blaine knows that he was really, really close to the grandmother who raised him. Trent pulls it together and says he needs some air before he starts getting the necessary permissions to go home for the funeral. He says that he wants space, which Blaine can respect, even if it worries him. He feels better after he hears David greet Trent in the hall just outside their door, and two pairs of feet walk away together.

When the door chimes 20 seconds later, Blaine doesn’t glance up from the performance schedule that he’s checking. “I think he’s going to be o—” he calls, and then the door chimes again. Blaine blinks and rolls out of his bed.

At the door, he’s treated to about a half a second of Kurt’s smug smile before his expression shifts like somebody has punched him in the stomach. He lurches and Blaine grabs his elbow, trying to steady him.

“Kurt,” he begins, feeling panic spike up, and Kurt flings himself away from him.

“Don’t touch me,” Kurt orders, sharp and a little shrill, and they face off just inside Blaine and Trent’s room.

Kurt’s mouth and hands are shaking minutely, Blaine notices; his eyes are wide and wet-looking and Blaine knows that he has issues with people getting physically close to him (it’s been impossible to miss, over the last two months), but this is dramatic beyond anything he has ever witnessed.

The door quietly hisses shut.

“What happened?” Kurt demands. Blaine stares at him, silent and not understanding. “In — here,” he clarifies, his eyes looking a little distant for a half a second. “It happened here; what are you — are you okay?” He looks and sounds utterly desperate, like he’s reading Blaine’s clear panic right on his face and feeding off of it.

“I’m,” Blaine starts, and then he tries again. “Trent’s grandmother died; he’s upset, but I’m okay Kurt.” He doesn’t bother to finish one sentence before beginning the next. “What’s going on?”

“I don’t — I probably should have told you,” Kurt says, and he sounds a little choked, but he draws his shoulders up very, very tightly, one hand on his hip. It’s a defensive posture that Blaine recognizes. “My mother was Betazoid.”

Blaine can feel the bottom drop right out of his stomach.

From the immediate shift in Kurt’s attempt at a brave face, he strongly suspects that Kurt can feel it as well.

“You’re a telepath?” Blaine asks, stunned, and all that he can think is: are you reading my mind right now?

“No,” Kurt says emphatically, his arms folded. “I can’t read anyone’s thoughts or talk without opening my mouth. As I believe I mentioned, I’m only half Betazoid.”

Blaine must pull some kind of astonished expression, because Kurt shoots a bitchy face right back at him and says, “Oh please; the first thing everyone does when they find out is start thinking about whether I can hear them.”

He blinks, and then — he laughs. It just bursts out of him; he wasn’t planning on it, and honestly, if he’d realized it was threatening to erupt, he would have done his level best to suppress it. But now it’s out there, no matter how fast he stifles it, and Kurt’s expressive face shifts from fear to anger to something that looks very much like hurt. “I’m sorry,” Blaine manages; “I’m sorry; it was just a surprise, and then you—”

Kurt doesn’t look impressed. “I’m empathic,” he says fiercely, one hand balled into a fist and tucked beneath his other arm, which is wrapped around himself. “It means that I can sense or feel people’s emotions, if they’re strong enough. Walking in here was like getting hit in the face with a brick. That’s what’s going on.” He looks stiff and brave and very pale, standing several meters from Blaine; like he’s being marched to his execution.

Blaine thinks about it for a half a second, and then he carefully says, “Okay” and takes a step toward the door.

“What are you doing?” Kurt demands, and it’s a snap, but Blaine can hear the fear.

“Trent’s grandmother died,” Blaine says, trying to keep as calm and as level as he can, “and he was really upset, so I thought we could go talk somewhere that doesn’t make you feel like someone’s hitting you.”

He stares for several long seconds, and then he nods jerkily and lets Blaine lead the way.

They walk down three corridors and step into the turbolift before Kurt says, “Is Trent okay?”

“He’s out talking to David.” It’s not a real answer to the question, but it’s the first thing that comes to mind as they stand side by side and he hears the faint thrum of the lift’s thrust. “He’s sad.” God, that was such a stupid thing to say. “Obviously. But she’s been sick for a while; his family knew it was coming.”

Kurt slowly, quietly nods; like he’s giving this a lot of thought. “Tell him I’m sorry,” he says, a little hesitant, and Blaine tells him that he will.

The turbolift doors open on the hydrobotanical gardens under the dorms. It’s like hitting a wall of thick, wet heat rolling into the lift; everything as far as the eye can see is green and damp, mostly gigantic unfamiliar leaves and bushes.

Kurt is looking at Blaine like he has totally lost it.

“I like it down here,” Blaine says. “It’s mostly for the Axanar and Chaldonian cadets, but it’s warm and quiet.”

“You can say that again,” Kurt mutters, and he pokes his head out of the turbolift and waits for Blaine to disembark before he finally steps out onto the packed-dirt floor.

Blaine’s instinct is to take his hand, but he’s well aware that that’s a bad instinct. He holds back and leads Kurt through the thick foliage, away from the hum of machinery and deeper into the rustle of leaves and the sound of distant running water and the quiet clicks and chirps of little bugs. There’s a bench only 20 or 30 meters from the turbolift; it’s clearly been built for members of a very tall species who have a sharply curved back, but Blaine sits down anyway. The heat is heavy, like it’s pressing down on them; it’s more the way that heat has felt on the couple of occasions that he has visited his mother’s family in Manila than it feels in California.

Kurt elects to remain standing, his arms folded and his fingers tightly wrinkling his jacket over his biceps. His face isn’t giving away much, which is a little frightening, given how expressive Blaine has found out that he really is. He looks like he’s closing himself off as tightly as he had when they first met.

“Why didn’t you say anything?” Blaine asks, as gently and non-judgmentally as he can. He’s fighting not to feel hurt; to remind himself that this is about Kurt, not about him, and that Kurt can probably feel it — and won’t appreciate it — if he takes this personally.

“You don’t understand what it is like,” Kurt says, his voice wound way too tight, “to be around thousands of people all day, every day, and to feel what they feel.”

Blaine has a suddenly improved understanding of why Kurt used to be alone all the time; why he ate meals at odd times and kept to himself, and why he pulls away when touched.

“I don’t want to,” he continues, but then he stops, and for the first time since they left the room, he looks right at Blaine. “Let me be clear: I am proud of my differences. They elevated me above the small-minded philistines in that town and helped me get into Starfleet, and this particular ability is from my mother, but if I had the choice—” He doesn’t finish the sentence, apparently unwilling to say it out loud. His hand clenches and unclenches on his upper arm. “People at home were threatened by me,” he says matter of factly. “They looked at me like I was some kind of predator.” He sniffs. “As if I wanted to share in their pedestrian disappointment when Bessie the cow calved a runt.” That sounds more like the Kurt that Blaine knows, and he smiles faintly. He hopes it’s an encouraging expression.

“They were wrong,” Blaine says, firm and trying not to be too angry; trying not to picture whispers or worse and a younger Kurt proudly hunching up. That will only get him off track. “But this is Starfleet. There’s a guy in my psychology lecture who doesn’t even have a mouth.” He tries to catch Kurt’s gaze. “You’re not the only person here who can do what you do.”

“I know,” Kurt says, his eyes flicking away, and Blaine watches him painfully stand there in the muggy, oppressive silence for a few seconds.

“What are you getting from me right now?” he asks.

“Oh,” says Kurt, faintly. “I don’t…”

Blaine watches him steadily, and he doesn’t say anything.

“It’s not that easy.” Kurt’s fingers are tightening and loosening again; he looks so tense that it has to hurt. “I can’t just—” He waves a hand in a sharp gesture. “—Wiggle my nose and tell you what you’re thinking; it’s not like I’m hearing sentences or words. It’s — feelings, and only the stronger ones.”

“Okay,” he says easily. “Then what would you call those feelings?”

“Concern,” Kurt finally answers, looking wary; like this is some kind of a trap. “Calm. Confusion. Some conflict.”

“Nice alliteration,” replies Blaine, and Kurt laughs, looking startled. Blaine leans forward over his knees. “Kurt, I’m not afraid of you.” Kurt draws in a silent breath that looks shaky. “Don't get me wrong, it’s a shock,” and he laughs a little, because he has to, “but I’m not scared that you can tell how I’m feeling. We’ve always been honest with each other; is this really that different?”

Kurt isn’t moving at all now. He’s just watching Blaine, listening, silent. Blaine doesn’t have to be empathic (empathic!) to realize that Kurt has become resigned to the idea that if Blaine found out about his abilities, they wouldn’t be friends any more.

“This is part of who you are, and I like who you are.” Please understand, Blaine pleads, even though he knows Kurt can’t hear him. I really mean it. “You’re my best friend. You are so, so important to me.”

Kurt stares at him. “You can hug me now,” he says, quiet and sudden, and Blaine rises up off the bench and pulls him into a firm hug. Kurt is warm and solid and he holds on to Blaine tightly, arms wrapped around his waist. He’s slouching so that he can tuck his face into Blaine’s collar. Blaine thinks about surrounding him with caring and positive emotion; cocooning him in how badly Blaine wants everything to be okay.

“Please don’t do that,” Kurt says, muffled against his shoulder, and Blaine jerks and guiltily tries to go as blank as he can.

“It’s okay,” Kurt assures him, without lifting his head; “it’s not bad, it’s just—” He sucks in a breath. “It’s overwhelming.” He sounds overwhelmed. Blaine thinks that he probably doesn’t touch people like this on a regular basis, much less have them exploding feelings at him while their chests press together.

Blaine tries to step back, but Kurt doesn’t let go of his fierce grip on the back of Blaine’s cadet uniform jacket, and they stand there for a long time.

Blaine spends a lot of time researching telepathy.

It feels a little weird, like he’s prying, but Kurt willingly told him about his mom and what it’s like for him, and this is all freely available scientific information. Betazoids’ brains apparently have a lobe devoted specifically to telepathy; they can communicate telepathically with other Betazoids and some members of other species, mostly in special circumstances. There’s some stuff about something called imzadi, which gets confusing and Blaine skips for the time being, because the next paragraph informs him that the only way to physically tell Betazoids apart from humans is the fact that their irises are entirely black.

It’s all freely available scientific information, and it’s not particularly helpful.

Blaine does his own independent research, quietly asking around and staring at people’s irises enough that half of the command track probably thinks he has some kind of eye fetish, but it doesn’t get him very far.

Speaking to a few specific classmates, sketching scenarios in carefully-broad hypotheticals, proves marginally more successful.

“It's apparently called the paracortex,” Blaine says, lying on his stomach on Kurt's bed, squeezed in almost shoulder to shoulder with him.

Kurt rolls his eyes, stylus tucked neatly behind his ear as he uses his fingers to scroll through his reading. The last time that Blaine glanced over his shoulder, there were more mathematical equations than he even knew what to do with. “I know.”

“You know?”

“One, I’ve obviously done my own research over the years, and two, I reread the most easily searchable sources last week, since I wanted to see what you’d be learning.” Blaine stares at him. “It’s not an empathic thing; you’re just predictable,” Kurt says dismissively.

Blaine laughs, shaking his head, and Kurt cracks a tiny smile.

“I'm supposed to be able to communicate telepathically with full Betazoids, but I've never actually met any. Starfleet apparently isn't a popular career choice,” Kurt says, dry.

“What about your mom?”

“Telepathic abilities don’t kick in until puberty. My mother had been dead for years by the time I would have been able to talk to her like that.” He says it casually, offhand; almost lightly. Blaine apparently projects more surprise than he’d realized, because without looking at him, Kurt adds, “She died when I was eight, Blaine; I miss her, but I’m not crying into my scarf collection every night.” Within a split second, he seems to realize what he just did, and his head quickly comes up.

“It's okay,” Blaine says, before he can say anything. “Kurt, I want you to say stuff like that. I know that you can sense what I'm feeling; there's no point in pretending you can't, especially when I'm fine with it.” Kurt watches him warily. “Really,” Blaine promises, letting his mouth curve into a smile, and he very gently nudges Kurt's shoulder with his. “I promise.”

Kurt slowly begins to smile back.

“I did some other research, too,” Blaine admits, and Kurt lifts a perfect eyebrow at him.

“Oh? Do tell.”

“I asked around – very discreetly, I promise.”

“Uh huh,” says Kurt, clearly unconvinced.

“--And there don’t seem to be any Betazoid instructors or cadets at the academy, but the Betazed embassy has a small branch here, in San Francisco.”

“And why would I care about the Betazed embassy?” he asks, all too casual.

“I knew your mom died when you were young and you couldn't have had a lot of contact with Betazoids in Lima--”

“Try none,” Kurt says, wry, his wary eyes on Blaine.

“--so I thought you might want to know where you could talk to someone.”

He doesn’t say anything. He just studies Blaine through narrowed eyes, and then asks suspiciously, “What else did you do?”

It’s one of the first times since Kurt’s revelation that Blaine has really, really wished that Kurt wasn’t able to read his emotions.

“I talked to Coldara’a,” he says, reluctant, because he really was going to try to ease into this one, “from my psych lecture – I actually used female pronouns in order to make it harder to guess that I was talking about you, so you’d probably have to correct zir on that; zie has some struggles when it comes to understanding humanoid gender identity – but my point is: zie is telepathic and would be willing to try to teach you some basic mental shielding and stuff, if … you ever wanted to do that.”

Kurt's expression is inscrutable, which is pretty tough to manage, considering how closely they're sprawled together. “That was presumptuous.”

“I know,” Blaine says steadily. “It seemed like you didn't want to deal with it.”

“So you dealt with it for me,” he says, with more than a hint of an edge.

“No,” says Blaine, immediate. “I researched some options. That's it. It's completely up to you to decide if you want to use them.”

“But you'll judge me if I don't.”

Blaine groans his name, frustrated, and Kurt closes the cover on his PADD and starts to roll off the bed. Blaine catches his sleeve, stopping him in his tracks. “I would never judge you,” he says. “It’s your life and it’s not my place. I would just – I’d be a little sad if you didn’t at least think about it. It seems like this is really overwhelming for you, Kurt. I just want to help.”

“Well,” Kurt says, all too crisply, “you can't. I think it's time for you to leave.”

Blaine can't help the surge of surprised hurt that rises in him, and Kurt flinches back like he's been struck.

“Please leave.”

Blaine gathers his things and goes.

His communicator chirps three days later, while Blaine is busily trying to pretend that he doesn’t have a gaping, awful Kurt-sized hole in his life; while he’s doing a piss-poor job of convincing himself that he should really be focusing all of his energy on his studies and not cultivating relationships or having friends.

(It's an exam period; it's stressful.)

“Please,” Kurt's voice says briskly, and Blaine tries not to make his relieved exhale too obvious, “don't take this as any kind of concession that you were right or that you weren't intrusive, because you weren't and you were, in that precise order, but if I wanted to contact this Coldara'a … how would I go about it?”

“How do you do it?” Blaine asks, throwing his stylus down in frustration as the general library hubbub reaches a dull roar.

Kurt raises a cool eyebrow at him. “How do I do what?”

“Sit here, surrounded by all of these people and their feelings, and not totally lose it.” He waves a hand around them, signaling table after table filled with studying, chattering cadets. “They’re driving me out of my mind, and I’m not even an empath.”

“Well,” Kurt says, slowly. “I used to concentrate. I always had coursework with me, and if I focused intensely on engineering equations, I wasn't paying attention to the girl having a psychotic break at the next table. I stayed away from the galley during regular hours and I didn't come near this place just before exams, and I didn't talk to people.” He seems to be seriously thinking about this. “The Kobayashi Maru was the worst,” he admits. “The fear, adrenaline rush, and pure body odor of 12 nervous people crammed into one small space was overwhelming.”

And still, Blaine thinks, Kurt managed to pull off a now-legendary rerouting of power from the nacelles to the proton torpedo bays. He asks, “How do you do it now?”

“I concentrate,” Kurt says, but this time, his eyes flick over and linger on Blaine for a couple seconds. He blinks and glances away again. “—And I’ve been using some of the techniques that Coldara’a is teaching me. He—”

“Zie,” Blaine corrects gently. “Gender neutral species, Kurt.”

“—is really, really good at shutting people out.”

Kurt is pretty good at that, too, when he wants to be, Blaine thinks, and then he’s glad that Kurt can’t read specific thoughts.

At lunch, Jeff jokes that Kurt must have eyes in the back of his head, after Kurt makes a quick-witted quip about Blaine silently laughing behind his back. Kurt doesn't even skip a beat in response. He says, “No, just the ability to sense strong emotions,” and as a few of the others at the table begin to stare at him, he lightly buffs his nails against his wrist, “so whoever decided that it would be the height of hilarity to slather my doorpad in toothpaste should probably start preparing his or her apologies.”

It takes some further conversation to clarify that Kurt wasn't kidding about the empath part, and Blaine isn't sure who he cares for more in this moment: the cadets who started out as Blaine's friends but are now Kurt's, too, who ask a few interested questions but otherwise don't bat an eyelash, or Kurt, whose jaw is set tight with nerves but who is smiling and laughing all the same.

Somehow, Kurt is there right when Blaine needs him. He swears that it isn’t a telepathy thing; just good timing.

Or maybe bad timing, Blaine suggests morosely, and Kurt shakes his head and rests a hand on his shoulder, which somehow becomes a really amazing hug that Blaine tells himself is a hug but is mostly Kurt curling around him while they both stand up.

Talking to his father is the worst. Blaine can always hear the disappointment in his voice and see it in every resigned face that he makes. Nothing is ever good enough; nothing will ever be good enough. He would never say it out loud — that wouldn’t be proper — but they both know it’s all that he’s thinking. Normally, Blaine finishes a talk with his father and he goes to box in the fitness facilities or he pulls a pillow over his head and listens to angry-sounding Klingon music (which, for all he knows, are a bunch of love ballads), and it’s juvenile, but it helps.

But today, Kurt happened to walk in just after Blaine closed the channel, and Kurt — Kurt holds onto him and rubs tiny circles into his back, and all of a sudden, it’s like a – Blaine can’t put words to it, because there were no words in it; it was a tidal wave of sudden emotion, caring and desperate reassurance and warmth. It’s completely foreign and a little scary, and way too intense to be some sudden swell of his own personal feelings. It’s trying to tell him that everything is going to be okay.

And it somehow, without a face or voice or anything even remotely identifiable, feels like Kurt.

“Whoa,” Blaine says, awed, drawing back.

Kurt holds him at arms' length and flatly stares at him like he has gone off the deep end. “--What?”

“You didn't – that wasn't out loud. Did that just happen?”

He blinks for several seconds, and then his mouth drops open. “Oh,” Kurt says. “Apparently it did!” He clicks his tongue, winks, and points finger-phasers at Blaine, in a clear sign that he’s uncomfortable and trying to make a joke so that they can stop talking about this.

“I thought you couldn't project stuff.”

“I can't.” The admittance is like pulling teeth. “Not to most people.”

“Most people?” Blaine asks.

“Sometimes,” Kurt says, and he looks so thoroughly miserable that Blaine wants to stop him right there, even though he has no idea what's going on, “even weak empaths can communicate telepathically with – people they're close to.”

Blaine isn't understanding why he looks like someone has just stolen his puppy; not even a little bit. “Kurt, that's fantastic,” he says, and he gives Kurt a light nudge to the ribs, teasing. “You and Rechela are always saying you guys wish you could talk without being noticed during botany, right?”

“I'm … not talking about Rechela,” Kurt says, looking right at him with those dark eyes, and Blaine abruptly gets it.

“—Oh,” Blaine says, deeply startled, feeling like he’s been struck; “Kurt, I—” And he’s lost for words, but he doesn’t need them; not when Kurt can doubtless feel his spike of surprised, confused, uncertain fear. Sure, Kurt initially caught Blaine’s eye across a crowded room because he was gorgeous, and yes, Blaine absolutely loves Kurt – but is he in love with him? Can he do that? Can he face the idea of eventually breaking up with Kurt and not having him in his life anymore? He needs Kurt in a way that is suddenly dizzying and terrifying, but maybe still not enough.

Kurt smiles at him, sad and quiet and resigned, and Blaine’s heart clenches. Kurt is getting much, much better at sensing Blaine’s emotions instead of drawing them into himself and inadvertently suffering through them, too.

Blaine shouldn’t hug him again; it’s sending mixed messages. But he needs to do something to try to tell Kurt how much he cares, even if he isn’t sure if it’s in the way that Kurt wants him to care, and it feels good to be wrapped up in Kurt’s arms and let someone else take care of things for a change.

Just for a little while.

Things should be awkward after that. Kurt all but admitted something that Blaine doesn’t even want to acknowledge, because the depth of it scares him, and Blaine – Blaine let him down. Blaine didn’t even get a full sentence out of his mouth. Blaine looked up Betazoid empathy again. He got about two and a quarter words into the rough translation of imzadi (“first true l—”) and only a little deeper into why it’s relevant (“weaker telepaths have been known to be able to communicate -- primarily through crude telepathic images and impulses -- with non-Betazoids when there is a strong shared emotional connection, particularly im—”) before he had a borderline panic attack and flung his PADD away.

And that’s the thing about Kurt — more than anyone, he’s aware of how much of Blaine’s charm and self-assurance is a front, but he doesn’t seem to mind. He cares about Blaine anyway.

Still, it should, by all rights, be incredibly weird.

But somehow, life goes on as normal. They laugh and joke and tell each other stories, and Kurt swears at his botany coursework while Blaine tries to help, and they attend theaters and dance at an absurd club in the Castro with Rechela, and Kurt delights in studying Blaine’s non-uniform wardrobe. They go to Kurt's top three vintage stores on Sunday afternoons to search through the new arrival items, and Blaine introduces him to his favorite video-karaoke bar in Little Osaka, where Kurt blows him away with a stunning singing voice. Half of their friends think they’re going to date and the other half think they’ve already added their names to the academy’s truly impressive list of hook-ups, Blaine is pretty sure, but no one asks and so neither does Blaine.

And maybe life would have stayed that way, if it weren't for the Kobayashi Maru.

“Really?” Kurt asks, wrinkling his nose at him under the umbrella that they're sharing.

“What, you don't want to be part of my crew?” Blaine mock-pouts at him; he's about to widen his eyes and try to lay his head on Kurt's shoulder while they're walking, but Kurt laughs and pushes his arm. Blaine nearly goes out from under the shared umbrella and into the rain.

“I don't have a problem with being part of your crew,” Kurt says patiently; “I just think you might want to pick a chief engineer who isn't already infamous for being an integral part of an effort that almost beat the simulation last year. They'll be taking every possible step to thwart me.”

“To thwart you,” Blaine repeats, and Kurt shoots him a beady-eyed are you mocking me, Blaine Anderson, because you will regret it look. Blaine tries to make it clear that despite the teasing, he really means it when he says: “You're the best, Kurt. I want the best.”

“Fine,” says Kurt, like he thinks Blaine will regret it, but his face has gone a little pink.

“Seriously, though,” Blaine says, stepping around a puddle and letting rain flicker down on his head and shoulders for a few seconds before he ducks back under the umbrella with Kurt, “I know you said it was difficult for you last time; I don't want you to feel like you have t--”

“Blaine,” Kurt says, “I'm a Starfleet cadet, not a puppy that you have to protect. If I had a problem with doing the simulation again, I would say so.”

They hold eye contact for several steady seconds, and Blaine is the one who finally blinks.

Three different officers are shouting more than three different sets of information at once; calling out shield integrity, distance from the nearest Romulan warship, distance from the helpless Kobayashi Maru, weapons status, life support, a constant list of which decks are now sucking space vacuum. The next hit sends the navigation panel up in sparks and throws Blaine to the deck; the girl who’d been sitting at the panel isn’t as quick to get up.

He can’t do this. Why did he ever think he could do this? Why did he go into the command track? He only did it to try to impress his father; it was foolish. It was stupid. It was arrogant. He shouldn’t be here. He’s at Starfleet because of his parents’ connections, not because he earned his place.

And then it’s like someone shouts his name, but without words or sound; it cuts straight through the dull fog surrounding him. It’s the same warm reassurance he’d felt before, but it’s sharper this time, more forceful. It’s someone wordlessly telling him that he can do this, he needs to take courage, he belongs here, he’s brave and confident and so much better than what he is doing right now, and that he’s being an idiot and he needs to move. It’s like an invisible, fierce hand suddenly gripping his and yanking him to his feet.

The bridge shudders under another direct hit. “Shields at 39% and rapidly dropping,” contributes the ensign who has been placed in charge of bridge security. He sounds bored; he must be a serial crew member on the simulation.

Not a simulation, Blaine tells himself. Treat this like it’s the real thing.

Blaine offers Cadet Ngabe, who’d been flung out of her chair, a hand up. “Sick bay or bridge?” he asks, and she grabs his arm and, without a word, heaves herself back into her station.

“Shunt everything we’ve got to the forward deflector shield,” Blaine says, and he’s barely aware of half the heads on the bridge turning toward him in shock at the fact that he just gave an order; he’s too busy running scenarios and making lightning decisions to pay them any heed.

He leans over the back of Ngabe’s chair, holding on as another blast rocks the ship. “Take us right up to the Kobayashi Maru, as close as possible -- we’re going to try to piggyback their shields off of ours. Keep the ship between them and the Romulans as much as you can.” Ngabe nods, her hands flying across her instrument panel, and the deck plating groans underfoot as the wounded ship begins its ponderous turn toward the freighter.

“Open a channel; tell them to abandon ship and use us as cover.” Perched at the communications station, Wes nods smartly, turning away and lifting his hand to his ear. Blaine turns toward the Arcadian bridge officer in the back. He has a quick glimpse of Kurt flitting past behind her, snapping an order at someone, but Blaine can’t give him more than a split second of his attention; not even that much. He points at the Arcadian officer. “Evacuate all nonessential personnel,” he orders, and she nods.

The bridge is filled with smoke and the warning klaxons are shrieking, everything lit in flashing red warning lights, and Blaine realizes that everyone on board this bridge is doomed, but as he crosses to the weapons officer’s station, he finds himself filled with a rising sense of grim satisfaction all the same.

He’s the front man; this is where he belongs.

The post-mortem with his instructors is both exhaustive and exhausting. By the time that he is allowed to leave, Blaine has been thoroughly humbled. He was humbled to begin with, well aware that he panicked and then unforgiveably froze in the first few minutes, but now that he has been walked through every single error that he made, he feels seriously schooled.

The commander and the lieutenant were harsh, but not undeservedly so, and they pointed out what he did right as well as what he did wrong. The point of the exercise was for the cadets (but mostly Blaine, as the student actually being tested) to accept that they were going to die and to learn how to carry on, and they pointed out about 20 stupid things that Blaine did after he pulled himself together – but they praised several of his decisions, too.

He's going to do better. He's going to be better.

Blaine goes back to the dorms with the recording, and he starts it up again.

As ready and willing as he is to go over his mistakes, it’s hard to watch himself dwarfed by that big chair, shouting bad order after order and then getting thrown onto the deckplates. He knows that he’s eventually going to fall silent, his face slack, and then snap out of it. But he’s seen this recording nine times already, and this is the first time that he has watched it without a hard-faced instructor over each shoulder.

His eyes drift to the back – and then hold there.

Kurt stands at the engineering console, his feet firmly planted. While most of the other cadets go flying as the bridge rocks and rolls, Kurt sways but holds steady, one hand clutching the console and the other darting across the controls. His face is intent on his work. The entire effect is graceful and terrifyingly competent.

Past-Blaine freezes on the bridge, stops even trying to control the situation, and Kurt glances up for the first time. He didn’t look away from his calculations when the alarms went off; he didn’t even flicker on the biggest explosion, but just after Blaine loses it, Kurt’s eyes rise. He looks at the back of Blaine’s head for several seconds, his face cool and unreadable, then he says something indistinct about venting atmosphere. And that’s it. He’s right back to his duties.

In the recording, Blaine lurches into motion; he helps Cadet Ngabe up.

Current Blaine, though – he can't tear his eyes away from Kurt Hummel.

Kurt does many things very, very well, but Blaine is suddenly aware that he’s seeing him in his element here; that this is where Kurt truly shines. He dimly wonders what it would be like to see Kurt in an actual engineering room – checking warp core dilithium levels, shouting out orders, resting his feet on the outside of the ladders so that he can confidently slide down til his boots hit the deckplates.

Blaine wants to see that.

Kurt saved him in the simulator, but gratitude is not why Blaine finds himself tapping the screen to pause it. Two loose pieces of hair have escaped Kurt’s pompadour in the moment where Blaine froze the recording, and they hang over his forehead as he works, his movements calm and impossibly fast. Blaine wants to reach out and brush his hair into place. He wants to be able to see Kurt’s hands, which are moving so quickly that even paused, they’re a pale blur. He wants to touch Kurt’s face and trace the concentration lines furrowed into his forehead; he wants to—

Oh, Blaine thinks dumbly.

Oh.

Slow and tiny and disbelieving, the corner of his mouth begins to rise.

“Hold the door!” Blaine lunges for the turbolift, hurling himself through at the last possible second.

“Oh my God,” Kurt yelps, some sort of leafy greens flying out of his take-out container as he throws up his hands in shock.

Blaine skids to a stop just shy of plowing right into him; he was not at all expecting to find anyone in the turbolift, much less Kurt himself.

The doors slowly hiss open again behind Blaine, the sensors belatedly registering that a body wedged itself through them.

They stare at each other.

“—Sorry,” Blaine says, his heart suddenly pounding, “sorry, I thought—” He swallows.

Blaine’s first instinct had been to take a step back; to take it slow. Work out what he’s feeling. But he knows what he’s feeling, and the thing is: Kurt will know it, too, the second that they see each other. There’s no point in playing it coy.

The whole idea of running to find him and giving a spontaneous confession seemed a lot more romantic and appealing, and less frightening, before Blaine found himself face to face with a real-life wide-eyed Kurt Hummel.

Blaine is trying to feel too much at once; excited and scared and nervous and so, so hopelessly awkward now that Kurt is within arms’ reach. He kind of thinks he might throw up.

From the way that Kurt is staring at him, pressed back against the rail, Kurt can feel most of that, too, and he isn’t getting a lot of sense out of it.

The turbolift doors close.

“I’m – I owe you,” Blaine says, and then he winces, because that is not the appropriate way to start this. “That’s not what this is about, at all, but thank you, for what you did earlier; I couldn’t have made it through without you.”

Kurt’s expression isn’t any less stunned. Blaine is ranting like a madman and, to top it off, is essentially doing the equivalent of shouting nonsense right in Kurt’s face. He takes a deep breath, shuts his eyes, and wills himself to stop being such a jumbled explosive mess.

“I didn’t contribute as much as my skills would have allowed,” Kurt finally says, wary, his eyes flicking from Blaine’s hands clenching at his sides to Blaine’s face. “Someone programmed the simulator to anticipate me; it was blocking every rerouting maneuver I tried to ta—”

“You ‘didn’t contribute as much as your skills would have allowed,’ ” Blaine repeats, extremely dubious. “You mean besides when you boosted power to the deflectors by 15%, and when I completely panicked and you snapped me out of it and saved the entire mission?”

Kurt’s face freezes up. He looks, Blaine realizes, like he’s about to start apologizing; like he thinks it was a bad thing that he was able to give Blaine a telepathic kick in the uniform trousers. Blaine knows now that the fact that Kurt can broadcast to him, when Kurt doesn’t have strong abilities and Blaine has about as much telepathic potential as a rock, is important; that it means that Kurt has strong feelings for him, and that he might be that person for Kurt who fits the Betazoid word that frightened him when he first looked it up.

He hopes he is.

“You were amazing,” Blaine says, firm; tone booking absolutely no argument. “In every way. That’s why I’m here. Kurt, there’s–” He breathes. “There’s a moment, when you open your eyes and you say,” he feels himself give a faint, breathy, disbelieving laugh, “ ‘oh, there you are; what was I waiting for?’ ”

Kurt looks flushed and painfully confused, and Blaine goes to reach out to him – and the turbolift whirs into motion. Blaine says, “Stop” and it comes to an abrupt halt, sudden enough that Blaine staggers and Kurt, braced against the rail, grabs him.

Blaine knows that he’s doing the right thing when Kurt’s hands on his elbow and his waist feel like they’re branding him right through his uniform. The feeling that rushes through him at that – it can’t be misunderstood, even through a tumultuous empathic link.

Kurt’s mouth drops open. Those same two licks of hair have fallen out of their rightful place again, and Blaine reaches up and very, very carefully tucks them up with the rest of Kurt’s bangs. “That was a moment, for me. About you. I was going to watch the recording again, to study all the places I went wrong,” Blaine says, barely aware of the fact that his voice has dropped, “and all I could watch was you.”

Kurt’s eyes are glassy, and though he blinks a few times in rapid succession, he can’t – and Blaine doesn’t think he’s trying to – hide that they’re wet. His lips are parted and he looks incredibly dazed; stunned, like he doesn’t dare to believe what’s happening.

Blaine is not afraid anymore. He doesn’t feel like he’s going to be sick. He just thinks he’s going to vibrate himself to pieces if he doesn’t kiss Kurt.

So he does.

Kurt tilts his face and for the first second or two, they’re both a little shellshocked. Then Blaine rests his hand on Kurt’s cheek and tips his jaw into the kiss and he’s completely overwhelmed by the feel of the soft mouth hesitantly pressing back; by the fact that he’s kissing Kurt Hummel. He’s kind of giddy and he almost might laugh, except he’s so serious about this and that would mean separating their mouths, and he just wants to do this all the time, because he doesn’t just need Kurt; he needs Kurt.

Kurt draws in a shuddery breath through his nose and then there are steady fingers on Blaine’s jaw and ear and Kurt is parting his lips. His mouth is warm and slick and eager. Blaine goes up on his toes for a better angle, and this is it; this is the real deal. When Kurt sucks on Blaine’s upper lip, the pressure somehow simultaneously sweet and shockingly filthy, Blaine’s legs go shaky. He starts to slump and Kurt follows him down like he can’t get enough, until their mouths part with an audible, if quiet, sound.

Kurt gapes at him and his hand falls away from Blaine’s face and clangs against the rail. Blaine glances down, smiling and flushing so hard it feels like his face might split, and he spots Kurt’s salad scattered across the turbolift floor.

Blaine only realizes that the turbolift had started moving again when it stops and the doors open.

His knees are bent, one hand clutching at the railing, and Kurt is looming over him, and they must look like a pair of idiots in a sea of Terellian lettuce. There’s a faint voice from behind him.

“No,” Kurt says immediately, to whoever it is. “Absolutely not. Occupied. Go; tenth floor.” The turbolift doors slide shut again and the turbolift ascends.

They stare at each other, and then Kurt starts to smile in an expression that Blaine has never seen before, surprised and thrilled and shaky and hopeful. In the same instant, they reach for each other and their mouths collide so hard that Blaine can feel it right down to his toes.

Heat and happiness and intense shock and love, overwhelming love, and something that feels like didn’t think I would get this – it all hits Blaine at once from an outside source, like someone throwing a building at him. It’s too much.

“—Sorry,” Kurt is saying, and it slowly registers that he has an arm looped around Blaine’s waist and is struggling to hold him up, because Blaine’s knees are trying to go out from under him. “I’m sorry – Blaine? Blaine.” He sounds steady, but Blaine can feel Kurt’s arm and his side shaking against him.

“Wow,” Blaine says. He can hear himself almost slurring, and definitely grinning like a fool; he grabs the turbolift rail with a weak hand to try to lift some of his weight off of Kurt. “Where’s the shuttle that hit me?”

“That would be me,” Kurt says, shamefaced, and then he grunts, “Come on” as he manhandles Blaine out of the turbolift.

“You?” Blaine asks, incredulous. He almost feels drunk.

“I wasn’t paying enough attention,” Kurt admits, “and I accidentally blasted you.”

“So – that was you,” Blaine reasons, letting Kurt haul him down the corridor, “telepathically talking to me.”

“That is what I said, yes.” Blaine blinks as Kurt keys in the code at a door without even having to stop to think about it, and he realizes that it is his door. Kurt apparently spends enough time here that he knows Blaine and Trent's access codes. He eases Blaine through the door and sets him down on the bed, where Blaine is more than happy to thump onto his back and pull his boneless legs up, and stare at Kurt for several dumbfounded seconds.

“Wow,” says Blaine again. The mattress dips as Kurt perches on the edge of the bed, beside Blaine’s hip. “Is this what it’s like for you all the time?”

“No.” Kurt reaches toward him then hesitates, like he’s not sure this is okay. Blaine cranes his neck toward him and Kurt takes the not so subtle hint; the corners of his lips lift, and he runs light, careful fingers through Blaine’s hair. It feels like heaven. “It used to be, but I turn down people’s volume more easily now. I can still sense it, but it doesn’t…”

“Make you feel like someone dropped a piano on your head?” Blaine suggests, and Kurt’s face sets into a tiny, amused-but-guilty smile as he skates his fingertips along Blaine’s temple. Blaine smiles up at him. “It’s okay, Kurt. I’m good. It actually…” He trails off thoughtfully and Kurt’s hand stills in his curls, his face going leery. “It was obviously way too much at once, but honestly, it felt amazing.”

Kurt is staring at him like he can’t quite figure out what Blaine is trying to say. Blaine plants his hands on the mattress and pushes himself up, Kurt catching his elbow – seemingly automatically – to help. “I wouldn’t be opposed to trying it again sometime,” Blaine murmurs, resting his left eyebrow against Kurt’s. “If you would be okay with that.”

He can hear Kurt’s breathing pick up. “The feedback loop could get even worse than it was in the turbolift,” he warns, his words puffing lightly against Blaine’s cheek. “I’m overwhelmed, so you’re overwhelmed, so I’m overwhelmed, so you’re overwhelmed, so Trent comes back and finds us in the fetal position.”

Blaine laughs, sitting cross-legged with one of his knees overlapping Kurt’s. Everything is warm and comfortable and right. “So we take it slow,” he says. “Open the floodgates a little bit at a time.” He can feel Kurt’s eyebrow try to twitch, at that, and Blaine drags his jaw across Kurt’s until their mouths align again.

And Blaine hadn’t actually meant right this very minute, he’d meant maybe they should give it a try after the first night of giddy kisses, but as Kurt clutches at the front of his uniform jacket, Blaine realizes that Kurt is trying again now. It’s slow and steady and gradual this time, instead of a full-on onslaught; more a rippling ankle-height stream of Kurt’s emotions than a towering wall of them. Kurt is feeling the kind of bone-deep contentment that Blaine always thought was reserved for people much older than them; warmth and comfort and barely-contained joy and disbelief, all threatening to boil over the top of Kurt’s shaky control, and Kurt never wanting to move from this spot.

Kurt is trying to show him how he feels. Some of it is jumbled to the point that Blaine can’t make heads or tails of it, but the important stuff – it’s loud and clear. The fact that they can do this, that Kurt will willingly open up and make himself so vulnerable in something that’s reserved solely for Blaine, is amazing. Kurt is amazing.

Kurt is also really, really into the kissing. Blaine could get that from him even without the low-level telepathy; from the way that he cups Blaine’s face in his hands and doesn’t let their mouths separate for more than a second or two at a time, and he slides the tip of his tongue along Blaine’s lower lip. But Blaine can feel it through the connection, too; the slow heat building between them and how Kurt feels unsteady, dormant arousal prickling just under his skin, and there’s a moment where Blaine is not sure where Kurt’s reactions end and his own begin. And it’s a little frightening, but it’s okay, too, because Blaine loves Kurt and trusts him. Kurt moves him.

Kurt shudders, and Blaine doesn’t think it’s (entirely) because of the kissing. He thinks it’s because he’s soaking up Blaine’s feelings like a sponge.

When Trent bursts through the door with his usual fanfare, he finds them wrapped up in each other. It’s nothing particularly scandalous; they’re sitting on the bed with Blaine’s head resting on Kurt’s shoulder, and they’re talking.

Trent still says a word that he must have learned from one of the Arcadian cadets, and he claps his hand over his eyes and blindly backs out the door, grinning fit to bust.

Blaine starts laughing. “The entire command and engineering tracks are going to know about this within ten minutes.” He considers it for a second. “Maybe security, medical, and communications, too. Definitely science.”

“I have no objections,” Kurt says, and he nuzzles his nose against Blaine’s hair.

At first, once they began to settle in together, Blaine wondered how he was ever going to date a non-empath, after Kurt; after he got used to wordless conversations at dinner, and never needing to explain how he’s feeling (though he still does, because letting empathy do all the work is just lazy, and he knows that Kurt likes to hear the words as much as Blaine likes to say them, and it’s frighteningly easy to misunderstand each other without speech).

It’s not that it’s always easy or good. Untrained empathic abilities make the first few times they try to have sex incredibly awkward; Kurt reaches a point where he can’t concentrate on the muting effect that he needs to apply to feelings this intense, and it’s way too much for both of them. He’s embarrassed and not a little repressed, and flat-out refuses to talk to any other telepaths about coping strategies. They work it out (slow and steady wins the race, and practice makes perfect; really seriously perfect), but it’s an early struggle.

Empathy can make fights both harder and easier. Easier because they both know it when they’re hurting each other and most of the time, neither of them has the stomach for it, and harder because they can feel it when they really mean the ugly things that they say.

But in the end, Blaine doesn’t really care whether they can sense each others’ feelings. He cares about Kurt. It’s about Kurt.

He comes to the slow realization, after a year and a half, that he doesn’t want there to be anyone after Kurt.

So when Kurt says a remarkably crabby, “You’ve been avoiding this conversation for four months, Blaine Anderson, and we’re going to have it right now,” dread sinks his heart.

“Commencement is in two months,” Kurt says firmly, sitting down on Blaine’s desk, right in front of him, “and assignments will be made in six weeks. We need to talk about it, just like we talk about everything else.”

Blaine half-heartedly considers sliding a hand up his thigh and trying to distract him; from the beady-eyed look that Kurt shoots him, he’s pretty sure that Kurt has figured out the thought and that it would be a really terrible idea.

“Okay,” Blaine says, looking up at him from his desk chair.

Kurt is still in full-on annoyed mode, which makes a fascinating contrast with the words that he’s actually saying. “I don’t want to leave you,” he says. “I just can’t rock the long distance relationship where I get up at 0330 to talk to you from across the solar system; I need my beauty rest.”

Blaine can feel his face contort as he tries not to laugh, both in genuine amusement and in grateful relief. “I don’t want to leave you, either, Kurt,” he says, and when he rests his hand on Kurt’s knee, it’s with no ulterior motive whatsoever. “I’m sorry, I know I’ve been—”

He doesn’t know quite how to classify the way that he’s been acting, but from the way that Kurt’s face softens and a wave of affection rolls off of him, he knows that Kurt can feel his genuine remorse, and how ripped up he is about the idea of them being separated. “It’s okay,” Kurt murmurs, bracing himself with a boot on Blaine’s knee and then hunching over until their foreheads are pressed together.

“It’s not okay,” Blaine says, shutting his eyes and finally letting himself say the words that have been eating at him for longer than he wants to admit. “There’s a ten-to-one chance we won’t be on the same assignment, Kurt.”

“What if I said that I had an idea that could improve those odds?” Kurt asks, like he’s carefully selecting his words, and Blaine slowly leans back to stare at him. They’ve been improving at communicating actual thoughts and words lately, instead of bombarding each other with emotion, and that was definitely an inadvertent montage of wedding-related images from Kurt before he could shut it down.

“Seriously?” Blaine forces out through a suddenly dry throat.

“We are way too young for this,” Kurt says, which is not at all how Blaine had ever idly imagined this conversation starting, “and I don’t know about you, but I don’t feel ready—”

“I don’t either,” says Blaine.

“—But if we got married this week and submitted the proof to Starfleet, they would actively try to assign us together,” Kurt says intently. He’s wringing his hands low in his lap and quietly watching Blaine. “There’s a 66% probability, instead of the 9.2% chance if we just list standard assignment preferences.” Kurt did the math. Of course Kurt did the math.

Marry Kurt. It’s something that Blaine has definitely thought about, but not in the here and now; not before they even receive their commissions or leave the planet for the first time. Kurt’s the romantic in this relationship, but Blaine had dreams, too, of one or both of them going down on one knee; of coming back to Earth on leave once Kurt is rapidly ascending the ranks of the engineering crew and Blaine is tagging along on away team missions to collect specimens for future study, and gathering all of their friends and family (well, maybe not Blaine’s immediate family) and having the big stylish wedding that he knows that Kurt has been planning since he was four.

“This is crazy,” he points out. “And we’d have to live together.”

“Obviously. What do you think?” Kurt presses, and Blaine knows that he is genuinely impatient, but that the short tone mostly comes from fear.

“I think,” Blaine says, slowly, “that was the least romantic proposal in the history of proposals.”

He can feel Kurt’s anxiety and annoyance levels simultaneously spike. Blaine smiles broadly at him and squeezes his knee, hard. “I’m in.”

In the end, they don’t tell anyone. They have the conversation on a Monday and go to the courthouse after cadet fitness examinations on Wednesday; they submit the documentation to Starfleet, and they hope. This is a crazy thing that they’re trying, and there are no guarantees. They decide to keep it to themselves and treat it as the simple legal contract that it is. If they don't stay together in the end (which Blaine can't imagine), they’ll get a quiet divorce and that will be that. No one will even have to know they were married.

They don’t talk about what they’ll do if they aren’t assigned together. Blaine knows they’re both trying not to think about it.

That lasts for six weeks, until Kurt steps into the study block where Blaine and Jeffrey and several other friends are frantically preparing for final command evaluations. Blaine’s head snaps up the second that the door opens. He doesn’t need to look at Kurt to know that their assignments have come in, but he looks anyway. His boyfriend’s eyes are over-bright and his hands hang awkwardly at his sides.

“We got it,” Kurt says, and he smiles tremulously, and Blaine knocks his chair over in his haste to get to Kurt. Kurt is strong and solid in his arms and loud in his head, completely nonsensical in his tumult of relief and excitement and adoration; Blaine sees flashes of a warp drive and an Excelsior-class starship and them holding hands and, incongruously (but so, so Kurt), something that looks suspiciously like a set of drapes. That last one makes Blaine laugh and saves him from getting teary-eyed in front of a bunch of their friends.

“The Potemkin,” Kurt says, beaming, to everybody who is gathering around and clapping them on the backs. “We’re on the Potemkin.”

“How,” Wes says, once Kurt and Blaine have let go of each other, and he can reel Blaine in for a congratulatory hug, “did you two manage to score the same assignment?”

Blaine honestly doesn’t mean to say it. His eyes are on Kurt’s handsome face over Wes’s shoulder and he’s so proud and happy that it just slips out. “We got married.”

Rechela shrieks, “What?” and the room erupts, and then they have to explain the whole thing and there’s another round of congratulations and someone starts making plans for a post-commencement pre-duty wedding party.

When they have a second to themselves in the madness (there is no studying being done here now; absolutely none), Kurt threatens, “I’m letting you tell my dad, Mr. Big Mouth,” but he’s shining, and he squeezes back tightly when Blaine grips his hand.