Blaine is shocked. Pavarotti's dead? He just saw the bird yesterday, chirping away happily in his burberry-draped cage. Kurt is understandably upset. Blaine knows Pavarotti was more than just a pet to him. Kurt always took the care of the bird very seriously, knowing how important entrusting the bird to him was. Kurt pulls out a tape and soft guitar chords float through the room before Kurt begins to sing.

At first, Blaine is thinking about Pavarotti, Kurt's high, melodious voice drifting through the back of his mind as he he thinks about the songbird. He joins in the backing vocals without even realizing it but as he looks up into Kurt's tear filled eyes, his focus shifts and his own shock is enough to silence him.

He's seen those eyes before, and not in the past few months he's known the boy.

He saw them on the side of a highway nine years ago, in the face of a boy who'd just lost his mother. It was Kurt, Blaine realizes, in shock from a sudden loss just as he is now. He looks down, focus shifting inward as he tries to remember. More memories come to the surface. A boy in playgroup with shimmering blue eyes, a football player being hoisted up in the shoulders of his teammates, eyes peering through the darkness around the hood of a car, beaming from the TV screen as he belts his heart out.

Blaine remembers the first time he met Kurt - or what he thought was the first time - on the stairwell less than twenty feet from where he is sitting. How it struck him how familiar the boy was to him, like he'd known him all his life. Like he was always meant to know him.

It all makes sense now.

Kurt has been there time and time again. Has given him strength and love without even realizing it.

Blaine looks up again, into the sparkling eyes of his best friend and realizes this is the person he's been looking for forever. And he hadn't even known it.

And there it is. I hope you liked it.