Work Text:
The Setup
Two months after they finally move into their first house, Blaine quits his godawful, only-barely-worth-the-exorbitant-salary-when-Kurt-was-trying-to-start-a-business-from-nothing-and-definitely-not-worth-it-now, suit and tie, office building sales job, exactly six weeks before their first adoption is supposed to go through. He spends the next couple of weeks finally, finally getting around to putting up the border of little yellow ducks and finishing all the brightly-colored painted stencils on the walls of the baby’s room, scoping out every park, playground, and hospital emergency room within a ten mile radius of the house, and obsessively re-reading every baby book in the house. Kurt teases him about it over dinner, but Blaine’s a little scared of babies. Kids, kids are great—babies just seem so breakable.
Three weeks after that, they get the call that their unborn baby’s father is back in the picture and suing for custody, and between his lawyers and the mother’s own indecision, they don’t really have a snowball’s chance in hell of going home with a baby next month. Blaine ends up calling Kurt at work to tell him, and Kurt comes home three hours early even though he’s planning a massive benefit dinner at the Museum of Natural History in four days and a wedding the weekend after next. They go out for pizza and a movie and don’t talk about it, really, until they’re in bed much too early, Blaine curled around Kurt from behind in the dark.
“I really don’t want to have to get another job,” Blaine says out of nowhere.
“You’re not getting another job like that,” Kurt says instantly. “I’ve been trying to get you to quit for a year. We don’t need the money.”
“What do stay-at-home spouses without kids even do all day?” Blaine wonders. The past couple of weeks have been full, but most of that’s been planning. Without that…
“We’ll find another one,” Kurt promises. “Until then…I’m told that hobbies are a big thing. Crafting, or having lunch, if the ladies I work with are anything to judge by. I could give you some of my old books on sewing.”
Blaine laughs into the back of his neck. “I’ll stick to trying to be a halfway decent cook compared to when you’d do it,” he says. Back when Blaine was working eight to six on his good days and Kurt was still trying to found a business empire using one corner of their tiny New York apartment bedroom as an office, he’d come home exhausted and find coq au vin bubbling away on the tiny stovetop as often as not. He’s getting pretty good, himself, but maybe having more time to practice is a good thing.
“I have been enjoying having dinner ready as soon as I step in the front door these past few weeks,” Kurt murmurs, and Blaine smiles in spite of everything. It’s still on his face as he falls asleep.
October
“Are we having raw pumpkin for dinner?” Kurt calls towards the staircase. They’d gone out to one of those pick-your-own-pumpkin places together last week, although they’d spent most of their time getting into a dead leaf fight in the apple orchard and then making out behind the shed for the hayrides. They definitely didn’t bring home the dozen large pumpkins currently sitting, half hollowed out, on the newspaper-covered dining room table.
“Sorry, we’re in the kitchen.” Blaine’s head pokes around the doorway, not from the main front entrance with the wide staircase leading upstairs, but the steps to the basement and laundry room. “There wasn’t enough space on the kitchen table, and I didn’t want them all over the floor.”
“Why do we need so many pumpkins?” Kurt asks with his eyebrows raised.
“I ran into Margot from down the street at the supermarket, and she says they have a Halloween decorating contest every year,” Blaine explains, ushering Kurt into the kitchen where the little bistro table has already been set with tablecloth and candlesticks. “It sounded like a lot of fun, plus it’s a really good way to meet some of the neighbors, and I know we haven’t been here that long, but…”
Kurt understands. In the city, they’d had dozens of neighbors right on top of them. The new house is beautiful, and spacious, with a huge backyard for someday-kids to play in, but Blaine must feel isolated living out here by himself. When they were in college, Long Island might as well have been the other end of the universe.
“Would it show them up too much if we beat the entire neighborhood our first year here?” Kurt asks, and spreads the napkin at his setting over his lap. Blaine grins.
“I hope not,” he says, and carefully carries a steaming pan of lasagna over from the oven. “We’re going to kick their asses.”
November
There are cats in Kurt Hummel-Anderson’s living room.
Kittens, to be precise. Three of them.
He eyes the little basket of moving fluff suspiciously. “Blaine?” he calls cautiously. “Do I even want to know?”
Blaine appears a moment later, a little breathless, apron on and an open, half-empty can of cat food in one hand. “Stacy’s daughter found them,” he says, explaining approximately nothing.
“Stacy?” Kurt asks.
“Stacy Longren, from down the street, they live in that old Tudor with the tire swing? Her daughter found them freezing and abandoned under a hedge and brought them home, and they’re way too young to be alone, but her husband has allergies—”
“So now we have cats,” Kurt says. The basket mews.
“Only until Stacy finds homes for them,” Blaine says. His eyes are about as wide as a puppy’s. When Kurt glances down at the basket of kittens, one of them has raised its head apart from its siblings and is looking at him with the exact same facial expression.
“All right,” Kurt says, forcing himself not to think about cat hair getting all over his wardrobe or the living room furniture. Blaine is the one who does all the vacuuming. “We have cats.”
December
“Blaine?”
“Yes, Kurt?”
“I know you spent all last week getting the lights on the front yard for the ann-”
“Annual neighborhood Christmas decorations competition. We’re going to cream the McAllisters at this one.”
“Well, dressing your cousin up as the boogyman and hiding him on your front lawn as extra decoration is just cheating, anyway. My point is, we are still both going back to my parents’ in Ohio for Christmas this year, right?”
“Um, yeah, as far as I know, why?”
“Then why do we have approximately seventeen dozen different Christmas cookies cooling on racks on the counter?”
“Maryanne and Valerie are having a bake sale for the homeless shelter. They’re all getting wrapped up and sold at the community center on Saturday.”
“Even the little anatomically correct gingerbread men wearing bow ties and nothing else?”
“Well, no, I don’t think those would go over too well at the community center. Those are for us.”
“Merry Christmas, Blaine.”
“Merry Christmas, Kurt.”
January
There’s one room down the hall on the second floor that Kurt doesn’t really go into any more, for fear of disturbing a small mountain of scrapbooking things and sending it all cascading down like an avalanche in shiny paper.
Blaine, and his camera, love scrapbooking. Kurt’s actually a little bit envious, since he’s seen the kind of care, coordination, and intricate detail Blaine puts into some of his pages, and it seems like one of the few forms of art Kurt is never going to have time to learn. The puppy loves Blaine’s scrapbooking room.
Ah, yes. The puppy. The scruffy little black puppy with the huge paws that showed up a couple of weeks after Stacy Longren found homes for the kittens, half-starved and shivering. Kurt hadn’t even begun trying to argue that one. He’d wanted to cuddle the poor thing almost as badly as Blaine did.
Roxy is very much Blaine’s dog, and she’s taken to following him around like, well, a puppy, but she and Kurt have an understanding. That is to say, apparently, they have an understanding when Blaine isn’t out at his book club for the next two hours, and Kurt hasn’t just accidentally left a certain door ajar while looking for his fabric scissors.
Kurt gazes at the aftermath of an absolute tornado of destruction in the form of one very small mutt. Said dog is currently happily splayed out on her back on top of a pile of shiny, crinkled paper, rolling around like the happiest little pup in the world. Then again, there’s really not many places she could be standing that aren’t covered in paper.
Blaine is going to kill him over this.
February
For Valentine’s day, Kurt makes reservations at one of the nicest reservations in the city, three months ahead of time. He has everything perfectly arranged in his own head: the flowers, the card, the new Swiss watch with the gold band, the hotel room for afterwards. It’s going to be perfect.
For Valentine’s day, Blaine spends two weeks planning the proper four-course menu of every aphrodesiac he can find a recipe for. He gets Maryanne, who’s divorced, to promise to watch Roxy for the night, and stores half the ingredients in Valerie’s fridge so Kurt won’t get suspicious. He has everything perfectly arranged in his own hand: the flowers, the candles, their old wedding china, the pricey imported cologne from France, the playlist for their bedroom, afterwards. It’s going to be perfect.
It takes until Kurt’s leaving for work that morning for them to realize that they’ve double booked. Kurt takes one look at Blaine’s hopelessly confused expression, almost exactly like Roxy’s, wraps his arms around his husband, and kisses him right then and there in the kitchen. Blaine surges forward in his arms, matching him tongue for tongue, his own hands sliding around to cup Kurt’s ass, and Kurt forgets all about any hotel room.
He manages, with great effort, to pull out his cell phone while Blaine sucks sharp little kisses along the line of his neck, and call in to tell his secretary he wouldn’t be coming in today. He drops the phone on the kitchen floor as soon as he hangs up, faced with the much, much more pressing task of stripping Blaine out of a pair of jeans that were far too obscenely tight for any married man, and the frilly white apron he’d started wearing to make breakfast.
He fucks Blaine up against the kitchen counter, fast and driving until they’ere both gasping desperate, and then a second time face-to-face on the floor, slow, kissing the whole time. Then they collapse on the linoleum for a while until they remember that not only are they too old to survive going two rounds in a row without some serious recovery time, they’re also much too old to lay on cold linoleum with their pants around their ankles.
They eat honey-soaked pomegranate seeds and avocado slices in bed, flick through daytime talk shows and talk about making over all the hosts until they feel recovered enough to roll over and trail their sticky fingers down each other’s skin, lick the traces of honey off after, and start all over again. Eventually they haul themselves out of bed long enough to get Blaine’s bag of fresh raw oysters out of the freezer and eat them for dinner, right out of the shell at the kitchen table and unable to keep from meeting each other’s eyes and grinning the whole time.
Next year, Kurt figures, he’ll skip the reservations.
March
There’s a dog sleeping on Kurt’s bed. Normally this wouldn’t be cause for too much alarm, but this dog is brown and white in spots, and looks sort of like a beagle. Also (Kurt squints) it only appears to have three legs.
“Blaine!” he calls down the hall. Blaine’s there a moment later, wiping his hands off on an old rag. He’s been painting and regrouting the guest bathroom lately, now that it’s warm enough to crack the windows.
“Oh hey, you met Norbert,” Blaine says, and reaches over to scratch the sleeping beagle between the ears. “He used to belong to Donna’s brother-in-law’s ex-girlfriend, but now he’s moving to Alaska and couldn’t take him with, so…”
“Of course he did,” Kurt says, and stretches out a hand to pet the dog’s rump. Norbert is clearly staying for a while, so Kurt might as well get used to it.
“So hey, I was thinking, after that bathroom we could really stand to do some work in the dining room,” says Blaine. “Wanna look through wallpaper swatches?”
April
“Blaine?”
“Yeah, Kurt?”
“We don’t have a front lawn any more.”
“Right! Annual neighborhood landscaping competition.”
“And your plan to finally beat the McAllisters is…to not have a lawn?”
“Stacy and I are going down to the nursery tomorrow morning. She said there’s a guy there who can teach me how to put in a koi pond!”
“…right.”
“Do you remember when we moved in last year? The McAllisters had an entire Japanese rock garden with a waterfall.”
“Dare I ask how you plan to top it?”
“Really awesome landscaping design. And a koi pond.”
“You just want more pets, don’t you.”
“And if all else fails, sabotage.”
“Really, Blaine? To win a neighborhood landscaping competition?”
“They paid off the local radio to get ‘Carol of the Bells’ playing in time with the flashing of their lights. They’re going down.”
May
“So the community center bake sale is on Saturday, which means I’m going to be making bread all day Friday, and then the Harmonics have their show on Sunday night, which means rehearsal gets pushed to this Friday and next Wednesday, and book club’s getting moved to Thursday afternoon. Tuesday is Stacy and Paul’s anniversary so I promised I’d baby-sit in exchange for them watching the dogs when we go home for your dad’s birthday. Next Saturday is Emily’s baby shower, and at some point I’ve got to help Valerie finish that scrapbook for Rob’s graduation.”
“This Sunday is the Petersen wedding, with the daughter of Dad’s old friend from the House,” Kurt said, reading through his own day planner with a sense of increasing despair. “Monday I’ve got to have dinner with half a dozen members of the board of the New York Philharmonic so I can keep them happy about hiring me to do this year’s gala, and I have most of Thursday off but we don’t get our hands on the ballroom for Friday’s cotillion until Thursday at five, and the Hofsteders practically want the whole thing reconstructed, so I have to be there. Next Sunday we’ve got those matinee tickets at the Philharmonic.”
They looked down at the table, Kurt’s sleek palm pilot and Blaine’s dog-eared leatherbound calendar, and then back up at each other. Between Blaine’s co-founded a capella group and his dozens of local neighborhood friends, and Kurt’s unpredictable everything, sometimes it was even harder to plan a night together than it had been when they were both working.
Blaine breaks into a sudden smile. “So,” he says. “Does this mean what I think it means?”
Kurt raises his eyebrows. “That we’re not going to see each other for the next week and a half?”
“I was thinking more along the lines of putting Stacy and Paul’s kids to bed early and making out on the couch like teenagers,” says Blaine, and Kurt laughs.
“That can be arranged,” he says.
June
They own a barbecue grill. Kurt discovers this when he sits down for dinner and finds a platter of perfectly grilled barbecue chicken, and sweet corn roasted in its own husk.
“So how much did this cost?” Kurt asks, raising an eyebrow. Then he takes a bite of the corn. Not that he would have objected anyway, but whatever Blaine paid for that grill, it wasn’t enough. This corn is worth gold.
“It’s top of the line,” Blaine says. “Full rotisserie system, three separate burners, and an internal sear burner that gets up to 10,000 BTU’s. Even Phil McAllister doesn’t have a sear burner like that.”
Kurt takes another bite of corn, savoring how perfectly sweet it is, before asking, “So, when is the annual neighborhood barbecue cook-off competition?”
“Three weeks,” says Blaine.
“What ever happened to sabotage?” asks Kurt. Not that he really wants to be encouraging Blaine into any sort of criminal activity, but Debbie McAllister was a smug bitch who liked to box people in in parking lots.
“Motion-sensor security system,” says Blaine. “Stacy says she and Maryanne tried three years ago and almost got caught by the cops.”
July
Kurt’s dad, Carole, and Finn all visit for the fourth. Finn raises his eyebrows the first time he sees Blaine speed-walk out to the grill in back, loaded down with a platter of raw meat.
“Dude, your apron,” says Finn. Kurt glances over. Blaine isn’t even in the red and pink ruffly one, just the old novelty one Stacy gave him for his birthday.
“It’s a lie,” Kurt says. “He’s a better cook than me these days.”
“Only on the barbecue grill,” argues Blaine, heading back into the kitchen at speed, dirty platter in one hand, basting brush in the other. “I still can’t make a souffle like Kurt can.”
“That’s because we live in a house where every pipe creaks and that enormous dog of yours thumps around even more loudly than Finn,” says Kurt. Roxy turned out to be some kind of lab mixed with something massive, and she may be mostly grown, but she still acts like a puppy.
“Hey, so long as nobody’s getting poisoned,” starts Burt, and Kurt cuts in with,
“We’re better off than Finn and Puck were in their first apartment.”
“Plus we’re getting laid more,” Blaine says as he sails past, marinade in one hand and plate of veggies in the other. Kurt looks down at his strawberry daiquiri and sips delicately, knowing he’s red all the way at the tips of his ears. Blaine’s friends talk about their sex lives way too much. Not only has Kurt never wanted to know that much about the orgasms, or lack thereof, of a bunch of straight women, but it’s really rubbing off on Blaine in the worst way.
August
“Blaine, that’s a kitten.”
“Yeah, she is.”
“We’ve had this conversation before, Blaine.”
“Technically that was three kittens last time.”
“The pets in this house can’t outnumber the humans. You promised.”
“I thought the deal was that no one particular species could outnumber the humans in this house.”
“…you brought in those koi just to get me to agree to that, didn’t you.”
“Maybe.”
“I hate cats, Blaine.”
“But she’s so little! And fluffy! And look, Kurt, her eyes are blue, just like yours.”
“Your dog is going to eat her in one bite.”
“No way, Roxy actually gets along with her really well. Norbert is kind of afraid of her, but he’ll calm down.”
“There’s really no way I’m going to win this argument, is there?”
“Not really, no.”
September
“Blaine, what’s that?”
There’s a small stack of paperwork on the dining room table when Kurt comes home. The whole house smells like roasting pork and applesauce, but Blaine is sitting in the dining room, toying with a pen, just staring at the pages.
“Chandra faxed it over,” he says. “She called this morning.”
Chandra was their adoption agent. Is, really, but they haven’t heard from her in…
Kurt grips the back of a chair and sags into it. “What did she say?” he asks.
“She said another set of parents fell through at the last minute, and there might be a child for us in about a month.” Blaine doesn’t look at him as he says it, just keeps gazing at the stack of documents to read and sign and fax away, and Kurt grabs for his wrist in excitement.
“Really? Are you serious?” Blaine turns to look at him, slowly, and Kurt is surprised to see the faintest glimmer of tears in the corners of his eyes. “Blaine?”
Blaine smiles, blinking through the wetness of his eyes, and takes Kurt’s hands in his. “We’re gonna be parents,” he says, and Kurt squeezes his hands back.
“We are,” he says.
“She couldn’t promise anything, but she said-”
“If it’s not this one there will be another one,” Kurt promises. “If we have to, we can give in and ask Rachel to surrogate.” Blaine makes a face and Kurt grins.
“I love you,” says Kurt.
“I love you too,” says Blaine. It feels like an old promise, long since fulfilled, but still just as true as ever. It reminds Kurt a little of another day, seated like this around another table, a smaller one covered in glitter and the paraphernalia of death instead of birth.
This time Kurt leans in to kiss Blaine first, and Blaine’s hand comes up to kiss his cheek, but the rest of it feels exactly the same.
October, again
The dining room table is covered in pumpkins and paint swatches. Kurt gives it a wide berth and heads into the kitchen, where Blaine is stirring a sauce so rapidly he must be freaking out.
“I don’t think painting our jack-o-lanterns rose pink is going to be enough to beat the McAllisters,” Kurt says lightly.
“There’s no time,” says Blaine. “The baby is due in two weeks, and Halloween is the week after that, and her room still isn’t painted, and how are we supposed to cope with an actual baby if we can’t even manage to beat the McAllisters once without her?”
“I’m pretty sure parenting and creaming smug neighbors at their own game are two different skills,” Kurt says. He comes up behind Blaine and fits himself carefully along the length of his body, avoiding the elbow of Blaine’s stirring arm, and wraps his own arms around Blaine’s waist and chest. “We’ll manage.”
“Stacy wants to throw us a baby shower,” sighs Blaine. He sags back into Kurt’s arms, going heavy and boneless, though he doesn’t quite stop stirring the sauce. “I told her, not until she’s actually here, I just don’t want…”
“To get our hopes up,” says Kurt.
“Right,” says Blaine. Kurt squeezes him a little tighter, and nips at Blaine’s left earlobe.
“You are going to be an amazing father, Blaine Anderson,” Kurt says right into Blaine’s ear, once he’s sure Blaine is listening. “You’ll spoil her, and train her even better than Roxy, and read to her, and all the things that you’re going to be better at than I am because you actually know what you’re doing here.”
There’s a tinge of hysteria to it when Blaine laughs. “I have no idea what I’m doing,” he says.
“My dad swears that’s normal,” says Kurt. “We’ll make it. We love each other. We’ll be good parents.”
“I hope so,” says Blaine. “I want us to be.”
Kurt can’t stop himself any more from craning his neck around so he can meet Blaine’s lips with his own. He can hear the whisk clatter against the cooktop as Blaine drops it entirely, but Kurt’s arms tighten around Blaine, preventing him from turning around or changing position.
“After dinner, let’s take advantage of still being the only humans living in this house,” Kurt murmurs against Blaine’s lips, and they curve up into a smile.
“Then you’ve got to let me finish cooking or I’ll break this sauce,” he says. Kurt loosens up, but only barely.
“I think I’ll stay,” he says. “Looks like you’re stuck with me.”
“How did I ever get so lucky as that?” Blaine muses, and reaches for the whisk.
Kurt isn’t entirely sure, but whoever was responsible for it? He’d really like to thank them.
(and, just for good measure, November
They name her Rose.)