Klaine Oneshots

Broad Stripes and Bright Stars

"Game day!" cries Kurt's roommate for about the seventh time, and Kurt just rolls his eyes. He's known plenty of sports nuts in his life – hell, he's related to a couple of them – but Paul can be somewhat of a...fanatic. To the point that he's currently got war paint striping across both sides of his face. And luck would have it that he'd end up rooming with Kurt, who was once on a football team and still can't quite muster up the energy to be more than vaguely interested.

Then again, with what Kurt has seen so far at the University of Michigan, Paul seems maybe closer to the norm than he is.

They mill into the Big House with a couple of their other friends, Reed and Sarah and somebody's girlfriend, Kurt can't keep track in the thick press of blue and maize that's crowding around them. Someone steps on Kurt's foot – these are new boots, thank you very little! – and he wonders how he let Paul talk him into all of this, anyway. Well, no, that's a lie. Once they're in the stadium, he really doesn't mind. Kurt may not come for the football, but he comes for the socializing for sure. Kurt loves his new college friends, and he loves spending time with them almost as much as he loves hours of Skype with Tina, or his twice-monthly lunch dates with Mercedes. Kurt loves UMich, the bright sprawling campus nestled into Ann Arbor that is close enough (but not too close) to home and his father and stepfamily, and he loves, as far as he's experienced, the musical theater department. With the possible exception of a little more money or a less football-crazed roommate, Kurt has pretty much everything he could ask for.

Well. Except. Maybe.

As they all file into a row they've finally found enough seats in, Kurt looks kind of sidelong at Matt and his girlfriend, maneuvering through it all hand-in-hand, and okay, maybe he's a little jealous. Kurt hasn't dated since high school, not with any seriousness anyway. Knee-deep in the musical theater crowd there have definitely been a couple guys who've been interested, but there's this spark, this deep-rooted something that Kurt knows any boyfriend of his has got to have, and no matter where he looks he has yet to find it. He knows what it looks like, he's seen it once before – well. But that was high school.

"Damn," says Paul, "I should've gotten some snacks before we sat all the way down."

"Don't eat now," says Matt's girlfriend bitingly, "you'll just shit yourself from excitement." (Oh, Kurt decides he likes her.)

"Anyway," says Sarah, "we're going to trounce these Fuckeyes pretty pathetically hard, so even if you do have to get up later you probably won't miss much."

"Or I'll go, later," says Kurt. "No great loss for me." As long as no one steps on my boots again, he adds silently.

"Good lookin' out, Hummel," says Paul. He slings an exuberant arm around Kurt's shoulders, setting askew Kurt's already fashionably-askew blue-and-maize patterned scarf, and just as Kurt's about to open his mouth to scold him, the stadium loudspeakers pierce the air with an earsplitting whine of microphone feedback.

"Ladies and gentlemen," begins the smooth commentator voice, and that's when they get a little confused, because the field is still empty.

"Wait, where's the band?" says Paul.

"Don't they have a competition, or something?" says Sarah. "I thought – "

But Kurt isn't listening. Kurt can't hear them, because the field is not empty, the field in fact contains one very specific person. Kurt hears "Ohio State University sophomore and choral department student executive member Blaine Anderson," and all other sound drops out of his ears entirely.

Blaine.

He's standing in OSU's endzone; he's so small, so far away, that Kurt can barely see him. Dark hair. Dark jacket. Just him. There is something unmistakable about the way he moves, though, as he bobs and shuffles with the microphone, and once he opens his mouth to sing there is of course no doubt. Kurt's pretty sure the national anthem is one of the most boring songs that can possibly be sung, but carried on Blaine's thick, crystal-clear voice – somehow even more sharply refined, shockingly pure, than the last time Kurt heard it, which shouldn't be possible – Kurt thinks he could listen to it for years.