All the Other Ghosts (Boyxboy Superhero AU Fanfic (Klaine))

Chapter 19

Blaine wakes up because Kurt wakes up, sucks his breath in and lifts his head, and from the kitchen Rachel says, "Well, excuse me for wanting a cup of herbal tea in my own apartment. How was the first half of your movie?"

Blaine blinks, looks at the TV screen in front of them rolling its credits. He's resting mostly on top of Kurt on the sofa, where Kurt puts a palm over his eye, digs the heel in a little, his body shifting comfortably under Blaine's. His voice is a little heavy from sleep, quietly, warmly sexy; "Hi, Rachel."

Rachel picks her mug up, pressing the teabag's string to its side with her thumb, and walks to stand behind the sofa. "So did you two originally bond over your weird erratic narcolepsy or did you infect your boyfriend with it at some point along the way, Kurt?"

Blaine shifts his leg with a little wince, and wriggles his chest closer along Kurt's stomach. "Naps are amazing."

"You two even injure yourselves simultaneously, you're turning into one of those couples who do everything together."

Couples who fight crime together stay together. Kurt's hand settles into Blaine's hair and he slumps his head back on the sofa's arm again, making small drowsy noises, while Blaine nuzzles his cheek closer to his comfortable, sturdy warmth. Rachel says, "I want to watch the news."

"It's miserable," Kurt supplies in a sleepy almost-purr, without opening his eyes. "All those ridiculous new security measures after that bomb threat and endless salacious digging up of that cult-thing behind it. You'd think the rest of the planet didn't exist."

"This whole city almost got wiped out."

"Supers saved it!" Blaine crows happily into Kurt's chest, raising a triumphant if sleepy fist.

"That doesn't mean war, politics and people the whole world over stopped existing," Kurt mutters, and scuffs his fingers through Blaine's already-scuffed hair. "Come on. My room."

"More napping?"

Kurt smiles, kisses his forehead, supports his shoulders to bear Blaine's weight while he hauls himself off him; Kurt has been the epitome of an attentive boyfriend since Blaine 'pulled a muscle', and he doesn't know how much of that is just Kurt, and how much of that might be guilt. He doesn't want him to feel guilty. He doesn't ever want to be the thing that makes Kurt feel bad.

Rachel just watches them unamused. "It doesn't make what they do right. Some - good consequences don't mean it doesn't stop being illegal -"

"You are actually upset that superheroes stopped us all being blown up." Kurt says, holding Blaine's wrists now he's sitting up properly, wriggling himself upright again. "You really have a problem with them, don't you?"

"They think they're special. They think the rules don't apply to them because they're special. The rules apply to everyone! Why do they get away with doing what they want? Why do they get to go around being special -"

Kurt looks away from her, and Blaine doesn't know what to say, feels such an odd weird twisting guilt-resentment, says, "They didn't ask to be born like that, they're just doing the right-"

"They act like they can do what they like, like they should get different rules to the rest of us, no-one gets to be special." Rachel snarls, and Blaine's seen her pissed a few times - she and Kurt squabble pretty much daily, over who took the last bagel and left their hairdryer in the bathroom - but he's never seen such a spark of hate in her eyes, never seen her fists get tight like that. "They don't have the right to act like they're better than us."

"Come on," Kurt says quietly, pulling at his hand, standing up.

Blaine says, feeling like he's in a corner, "They're only -"

"Careful," Kurt murmurs, as he takes his weight on one leg to stand.

"They don't know what it's like for us. They don't have the right. Rescuing people, like we're so much less than-"

"If someone needs help they're hardly going to argue who's-"

"Both of you," Kurt snaps, "shut up. God why can't someone in my life not be obsessed with superheroes -"

He bangs his bedroom door closed on Rachel, and locks it while Blaine sits a little awkwardly on the edge of the bed, all thrumming-angry-startled-upset, like he's been smacked with a newspaper and he doesn't understand why. "What is her problem? Why does she have to be so-"

"I shouldn't have poked that fire, it's my fault, sorry. Just - ignore her."

"How can you ignore her, saying all that - complete crap, she doesn't have a clue -"

"Rachel's got her own life, she's got her own reasons. She's not a bad person."

"She's a bigot. She just hates supers, no-one asks to be born a super."

"She's always wanted to be special." Kurt stands by the door, rubbing his arm, speaking quietly to the leg of his bed. "She wanted to be on Broadway. The biggest star. Only she was rejected by the performing arts school she wanted to get into and - and she's never really resigned herself to that. She's spent her whole life believing she's good and then someone told her she wasn't good enough. So, yes, she hates superheroes. No-one ever tells them they're not good enough. No-one can." He shrugs, tightly. "We do get different rules, don't we? We make our own, because we have to, because we're different. Do you honestly think we'd be doing this if we weren't supers?"

"No - but -"

He doesn't even know what he wants to say, he just feels rattled and he doesn't know what to do with himself, how to make himself feel less -

Kurt startles him out of it by clapping his hands around his face and kissing him, and saying, "Speaking of which, I need to get out there. Are you okay amusing yourself in here until I get back?"

". . . yeah, sure." Kurt smiles at him, brushes his cheeks with his thumbs, kneels down to get at the bottom of his wardrobe. Blaine resists the urge to touch his own mouth, then resists the urge to scratch the back of his leg where the wound itches through the glow of healing heat, then says, "Is your mouth okay? You didn't hurt -"

"I'm allowed to kiss my boyfriend." Kurt stands up, begins unbuttoning his shirt.

"I'm allowed to worry about my boyfriend."

"It's a little bruise, I think my worrying about my boyfriend's shot leg is slightly more proportionate."

"I'm still going to worry," Blaine murmurs, watching him pull his undershirt over his head, not even especially ogling, really, just noticing the way the lamp's light runs over Kurt's side as the muscles flex and shadow smudges the scar wrapping around it. "I mean, you're going out, I'm staying in, we both always worry -"

"Blaine," Kurt says, wriggling his naked shoulders against the cold and pulling on the long-sleeved underlayer of his winter costume, skintight grey, "I'm going to go out, yes, and then I'm going to come back, safe and sound, and I'm going to get into bed with you, and I'm very sorry but at that point I'm probably going to wake you up a little because I imagine I'll want to cuddle. Plus it's cold outside and you're kind of a radiator. But that's what's going to happen this evening, no surprises, no bad news. Just a normal night. A 'normal' night."

Blaine swings his one painless leg on the edge of the bed. "Promise?"

Kurt leaves his belt half-open, leans down with his palm on Blaine's good knee and murmurs to his mouth, "Promise." and kisses him again. Blaine catches his hand into the back of his hair to hold him there for a moment, a good meant moment, and then lets him up to glance down at him, checking him, before Kurt goes back to taking off his pants and Blaine thinks wistfully, How long until I get to do that for you again . . . ?

Mask on, fading bruise camouflaged, the Ghost kisses him again threading his fingers into his hair before he leaves. "Get some sleep," he says. "Early nights are your silver lining, Blaine."

He smiles at him, because he doesn't want the Ghost worrying about him when he's supposed to be focusing on not getting killed by criminals, and the Ghost smiles back, one of those real and a little shy smiles, the smiles that mean too much, a very Kurt smile; and then he disappears even as he's turning for the window, and there's not even a sound to indicate when he might have slipped through it, insubstantial as a dream.

Blaine sighs, snags his iPad from his bag by the bed, hikes his leg onto the mattress and settles himself back on Kurt's pillows for some blogging. The one thing he can do, while he's 'grounded', is keep up with the internet, because he never before realised quite how full-time an occupation that is . . .

If you actually go looking for it, the wank is daily and it is absurd; all someone needs to do is take the wrong tone and it can deteriorate in the space of two posts. There are people in fandom he follows specifically to be aware of what current topic is particularly volatile so that he can steer clear of inadvertently whipping it up, but the people he actually counts as friends are, like him, not exactly large causes of contention. Not people who write the fic everyone talks about, not people who post the gifs everyone reblogs; just those happily milling around in the middle, enjoying what they enjoy, reblogging and chatting and keeping the fandom rolling. Without them, there wouldn't be a fandom.

Mostly everyone's still preoccupied with that bomb and what it could have meant for the city, which Blaine understands; even a week on that was not a minor incident, it's been practically the only thing that even the national news has talked about since then. Commissioner Figgins (He thinks he is the genuine undead, Blaine aches to blog, he thinks he's come back from the grave to haunt this city, he wants us arrested because he's scared of *ghost stories*, *seriously*) released a statement not even mentioning the Ghost and Phalanx's involvement, only unconfirmed eyewitnesses, anonymous cops, have placed them there. It only takes that to completely explode the always-touchy debate around supers again.

Look, Draxie has posted amidst all the clangour, people do actually have their reasons for standing against vigilantism besides just being anti-super, ok? You do not help this argument by immediately calling them a bigot. The ones who are bigots, go ahead and call them bigots, if they didn't want to be called a bigot then they probably shouldn't have, you know, been a bigot. Otherwise maybe at least *listen* to them first? Please? That way you can actually *respond* to them if you want to defend the superboyfriends. Which, naturally, I encourage you to do <3

He hasn't read Draxie's fic in a long time now, but he reblogs that. He wonders if he could read some fic, there must be something someone has written that wouldn't, on some level, sit wrong (it isn't like that/it's wrong to look at him like that/it's wrong to look at me like that/it's really, really just not like that). In the end, he just finds himself wandering the internet, uploading some new photographs of New York to his blog, meandering through the Ghost sites, reblog, reblog, reblog, not really thinking, smiling now and then.

He doesn't think he's ever read a piece of fanfic where they find in the trash . . .

People don't think about what superheroes do, what they spend most of their time doing. Blaine didn't before he actually was one. Do any of them even realise that their utility belts are mostly full of tissues and bandages and heat packs and cold packs and they even have candy in case they need to comfort a child, don't they realise that it's not just the fight, it's the before and the after, it's not just action but people? He does realise himself, now, that the reblogs there are on Reblog if you've ever been rescued by the Ghost . . . rely on the person rescued actually already being online, on the blogging sites, already in some way connected to this community which is in its own way quite isolated; god, that thing has so many reblogs and they're a fraction of the real number, they hardly represent anything of what the Ghost does, what they do. The tip of an iceberg, and all the rest down there in the dark. And no-one ever reblogs anything when it goes wrong. Sometimes there's not even anyone there to do the reblogging, when it goes wrong.

- don't think about it going wrong when the Ghost's out in it alone. Don't. Don't.

An Australian fanghost has asked, So are you ever going to post photos of the world's most perfect boyfriend? We need evidence ;)

Am I going to post photographs of my boyfriend online and specifically for the consumption of people who spend their days minutely scrutinising photos of the Ghost? Well, um, no. Because I'm not that stupid. Even though I do want all of you to know that I actually do have the most perfect boyfriend in the world, seriously, I am going to have to get shot more often, I get a bagel in bed and fresh squeezed orange juice every morning . . .

That, he silently tells any karmic agents who might be listening, was a joke. I would really rather be unhurt enough to help him out. He doesn't have a shield at his back tonight, and seriously, if anyone in the world deserves that, it's him. I need to be out there with him again. I know there's been - things, bad things, I know it's been hard, but -

(That little foot, that little foot . . .)

But he's out on his own, and . . .

He replies, He's kind of camera-shy, you'll see them if I ever get them!

Blaine's still waiting for Kurt to come to him and say, I'm ready for that photograph, if you want it.

He has actually taken that photograph a thousand times already, without ever having a camera in his hands. Kurt leaning over him in bed, naked arm outstretched for the lamp, drowsy eyes on what he's doing and drowsy mouth relaxed, ready for sleep; Kurt waiting for him in a coffee shop, ankles crossed beneath his seat, head propped on one hand, eyes elsewhere through the steam from his mug, dreaming-green; Kurt walking through his apartment for the kitchen, stretching his arms broad and backwards, eyes closed and head high, satisfaction in every long-drawn muscle; Kurt tilting his head to attend to Blaine speaking, all cat-like curiosity focused on him, wearing a perfectly angled maroon hat to make his eyes so blue; Kurt seen through the steam-edged window of a bus, holding a rain-spangled umbrella over his shoulder, cell in his hand like a salute. Blaine flicks through them in his mind like a slideshow and it's too much in his stomach, the thought of how perfect he is, the amount of love hems him in like cliff faces, feels shocking in its proportion, how can he feel so much when once he thought there were walls that his feelings would never scale - ?

Kurt bought him a copy of the Iliad for Christmas, mostly to make him laugh, Blaine thinks. He has been reading it, though. It's nothing like he thought it was, the idea he had of it just from how people talk about it, and movies. It's brutal and merciless, there's a horrible riptide feeling to it, the feet can scrabble to slow but they can't stop the unrelenting approach of the end. Every death, and there are lots, belongs to a person, a person with family and friends and a life.

Helen of Troy, he'd once thought of, as a symbol of all feeling in love - beautiful beyond rationality, lives on lives sacrificed for that passion; but now he thinks, White-armed Andromache, and he kisses Kurt's shoulder in bed. Loyalty and love, and strength in the face of all horror. We might be caught in our own strange war, but please, please, we'll be okay, if we look after each other, won't we . . . ?

What a strange Andromache to choose, because the last thing the Ghost is in the world is helpless.

Kurt would ask him why he gets to be Hector.

Blaine would concede that Kurt has a point.

My brave soldier, Kurt says, and kisses him. And Blaine sometimes doesn't know how much of a soldier he feels like until he remembers that people don't become soldiers because they want to kill people. They become soldiers because they want to protect something. And what Blaine wants to protect is

(Kurt lit by his family's Christmas tree, all softened and rosy in that glow with a thousand fairy lights like fireflies in his eyes, leaning on Blaine's shoulder while they watched a good, happy movie on a good, happy evening, safe and warm; Kurt walking with him beside the river on a Sunday afternoon, arm in arm with a steel-grey sky overhead and a steel-grey river alongside and Kurt wearing the bluest blue there's ever been, glorious eye-stopping ultramarine, Kurt the most dazzling thing in sight; Kurt in Cooper's fancy spinny armchair, feet on the seat and coffee cup in his hands, wearing a throw like a cloak and his eyes so full of thought, and the clean cool daylight noted the strength in the set of his jaw; Kurt at the airport, glancing up at Blaine's shout, the second's startled need in his eyes, all for him, all for)

him.

He'll be out there in the cold now, protecting someone else.

He lets the iPad droop a little on his chest. It's warm in Kurt's bedroom, and the pillow smells so distractingly of Kurt, like a dream . . .

"You are terrible for doing this," someone says, taking the iPad from his hands.

Blaine says, "What?" and blinks, struggling to prop himself up on his elbows, and Kurt yawns, very hard, and pulls at the covers underneath Blaine's body. "Get underneath. How late were you up until?"

"I - what time is it?"

"It's nearly three. I'm so tired. Come on, Blaine . . . careful, your leg, do you need -"

"It's healing, I'm fine. Come here." He runs his hands around Kurt's hard sides through his t-shirt as he wriggles under the covers with him. "You're cold."

"Mm," Kurt says, nuzzling his cheek into the pillow, eyelashes flickering but not rising at the kiss on his brow. "Tired, Blaine."

"Sleep, then." He runs his fingers through his hair, and turns the lamp off, and with his teeth gritted he slides his legs down the bed to join him on the pillow. "Just go to sleep, Kurt . . ."

In the dark, just the ever-glow of a lit-up New York night through the blinds, Kurt's breathing steadies and settles, long and easy. And Blaine thinks, Kurt with his cheek to the pillow, his eyes closed, perfect framing lashes easy and low, Kurt looking so wearily sweetly peaceful beside him in bed; one more for the album.

He scoops his arm around Kurt's sleeping side, and closes his eyes to sleep.