Author Notes: Hi! So, I've been debated for a while about whether to post this, as it's completely outside of my normal comfort zone of topics to write about, but in the end, I decided that I love Glee, and I love Klaine, and what's the point of fanfic if not to improve your writing? So yeah, nervous! This fic was born (and mutated epically from) me trying to work out what kind of a person Blaine's dad might be. I love reading evil!dad as much as the next person, but I really wanted to try and look at it a different way. So, please read, and I hope you like it!

Set post season 2, with brief references especially to the finale episode. Klaine is going strong, so slash, obviously, but I will stick to the T rating unless something happens, in which case I will give fair warning.

Catch My Shadow

Chapter One

One month, one week, four days, three hours, twenty one minutes, fifty four seconds.

Remember that.

It's important. It's important to know, important to count, important to be precise.

Because numbers, measures, data – they are the only thing in life that will ever, ever make sense.

Summer had been incredible. Or rather, it had been completely, entirely ordinary, but to start with, it hadn't been school, and way more importantly, it had been Kurt's first summer with his incredible, amazing, perfect boyfriend.

Yes. He was utterly head over heels in love.

Weeks and weeks of doing lots, and nothing at all. It had taken a week or two, but the New Directions kids had, grudgingly by many, finally forgiven Finn and Rachel. Bigger news, like Sam and Mercedes, for starters, was way more gossip worthy, and without the enclosed constraints of the high school corridors, things always seemed less intense.

Summer had given them all a lot of time to think, move forwards, and generally just have fun. It was their last summer before senior year. They had way more interesting things to do than bitch about Rachel – they could do that any time of year!

Even more importantly for Kurt and Blaine, they had overcome yet another milestone of their relationship. No, they had not had sex yet! There hadn't really been any discussion, both were just happy to allow everything to develop as and when it felt natural. This didn't mean they were monks – they were two teenage boys for crying out loud, things happen – but they had yet to take that final step. And what had felt natural, soon after they had both said the three most important words in any relationship, was for Blaine to finally take Kurt home to meet his father.

Kurt wouldn't lie – he had been worried. Blaine had never really talked about his dad much. Sometimes, Kurt would catch him looking at Burt and Carole with a strange depth to his gaze, but it had always flitted away when Blaine realised Kurt was watching him.

Other times, he would make a strange comment, one that didn't quite sit right with Kurt, but when Kurt had asked him what he meant by it, Blaine would just quirk that stupidly adorable grin of his, and kiss his boyfriend. A diversionary tactic that always proved very successful.

Of course, Kurt knew that Blaine was out to his family, but when he really thought about it, that was all he knew. He had learned a little, not long after they had gotten together, when out of the blue Blaine had asked him whether Kurt thought his mother would have been proud of him even though he was gay. Kurt had experienced a knee-jerk reaction at that, getting really truly quite angry at Blaine for daring to question what his mother would have thought; he knew without a shadow of a doubt what she would have thought! Even his dad said that she had probably always known. But despite his bitchy reply, despite his tensed muscles as he prepared himself for a very diva storming-out-of-the-room, Blaine had just looked down at his hands, and replied that he didn't think his mom would approve if she knew.

That response had successfully floored Kurt, and so followed one of the first layers of the mystery that was Blaine to be unwrapped. His mom had left when Blaine had been four years old. His dad had caught her in bed with another man, and had given her an ultimatum – either she ended it immediately, chose her family, and they moved state to get away from the mess and start afresh, or she left.

She left – her new man was richer. To stick the knife in further, he was a high powered lawyer at the firm where his dad had been head of accountancy. Blaine and his dad moved state anyway to Ohio, where his aunt already lived, and he had never heard from her. She wasn't really a topic in their household, and neither father nor son dared to broach it, except the one time when Blaine had been nine and finally dared to ask for the truth of why he didn't have a mom.

So, like Kurt and his father, it had always just been Blaine and his father. But unlike Kurt, his mother didn't die. She had been a selfish woman who had left his father alone to bring up a son who he really didn't know how to handle sometimes. Kurt always knew how incredibly lucky he was to have a man like Burt, but equally, Blaine always knew that, while he sometimes envied Kurt's relationship with his father, that he was also very lucky to have his own dad.

Blaine's dad was quiet, softly spoken man who, were his personality manifest, it would be very similar to Kurt's initial reaction to sex talk – which was to hum with his fingers in his ears. Blaine's dad was a man who hated all forms of confrontation, and was abysmal at connecting with people. It was part of the reason why Blaine hadn't truly resented his father for shoving him under a beat-up car for a summer as a reaction to his son coming out of the closet; he didn't do out and out conversations very well, and that had been one of his ways to try and come to terms with what Blaine was telling him.

The only time Blaine had ever seen his dad get angry was when the bullying finally got truly physical after the Sadie Hawkins dance. Blaine had been in Dalton as soon as he was fit enough to go back to school.

So, Kurt hadn't really known what to expect when he had driven over to Blaine's one warm evening in August for his first meet-the-parent dinner. It had been awkward in places, stilted in others, and involved breaks in conversation that stretched a little too long for comfort, but it had also been…fun?

It had helped that when Blaine had kissed Kurt goodbye on his porch he had been grinning even more insanely than he had been in their prom photo, putting more emotion into a simple 'thank you' than Kurt had thought possible. And it had been followed over the course of the summer by a couple more dinners, as well as fleeting meetings in the living room when Kurt had just been round their house.

So, yes, excuse Kurt for saying that summer had indeed been incredible. But nothing lasts, and senior year was now upon them and seriously when did that happen? It seemed like only days ago Kurt had been signing up for New Directions for the first time, and now, here he was, sitting in their last ever first meeting of glee club, at the beginning of senior year, before their final bid at Nationals.

Blaine was sitting next to him, not because he had switched schools – though they had both joked about how awesome that would be, there was no way Blaine would do that to his dad or his friends, and that was if Kurt would let him in the first place – but because Dalton had shorter terms than McKinley, and Kurt was his boyfriend who demanded he come along. Any protests of 'spying' had been quashed when Kurt had snippily pointed out that the Warblers hadn't been pooled against them for Sectionals this time around, and the glee kids had just spent the rest of rehearsals getting back into the groove of working with each other, with Blaine joining in just because he could.

And then, in the middle of Mr Schue giving them that week's assignment, it all ended. Blaine's phone had buzzed on a vibrate tone in his pocket, and he had looked at the caller id with a frown, before excusing himself out into the hall. Kurt had shrugged at a questioning look from Mercedes, but then just turned his attention back to their assignment – something to express what they felt about their coming final year of high school. Mr Schuster also wanted them to think up some ways of getting some new members in; grinning as he pointedly raised the idea to Rachel that she'd probably need a whole year to break in their successors for after they graduated.

Glee club ended before Blaine came back, and as the others filtered out, Kurt pondered whether he should go and hunt down his boyfriend. Finn had already shouldered his bag and was saying something to Puck, who was coming round their house to play videogames. All four of them had planned on leaving together. Just as Finn was starting to fidget, Blaine came back in. Kurt narrowed his eyes – was it just his imagination, or did Blaine look slightly pale? His eyes didn't meet Kurt's, but were instead trained in a strangely fixated way on his bag as it remained sitting against a chair leg. His phone was still clenched in one hand, rigid at his side. "Hey man, thought you'd got lost." Puck grinned, "Let's go."

Kurt now knew something wasn't right, as his boyfriend seemed to take way too long to even register that Puck had said something to him, let alone what those words had been, "Blaine?"

Blaine blinked oddly, and then seemed to shake himself before blurting out in a really strange run of words, "I have to go. I need to get started on schoolwork, and Wes has probably already started looking for a set list-"

Finn interrupted, "Dude, you don't even start school for another week!"

Blaine continued as if he hadn't heard, twitching his hands in a shadow of his usual expressive way of speaking, "Dad said yesterday that I should already be looking at colleges. I really should sort out my applications. I should have done that last month! There's so much to do, and with Sectionals…maybe I shouldn't do glee club, I don't want to risk my grades, and it's already a really long drive home, and damn, I didn't set the dishwasher this morning; Dad's always really annoyed when I forget to do that – he won't have enough clean stuff to make dinner."

Blaine's words had long dissolved into speaking out loud to himself, as if he didn't even realise they were in the room anymore. It was really scaring Kurt, who reached out to touch his arm, "Blaine, what's going on?"

Blaine's head whipped up, and his eyes actually fixed on Kurt's for the first time since he had come back into the room. He blinked again, his eyes reading an expression that Kurt could honestly say he had never seen in his boyfriend before, and even more honestly plead to never see again. His voice stuttered, "I should go and make dinner. He'll want dinner. He always loves it when it's there when he gets home, he-"

It was like a switch had been flipped. Blaine's words literally choked on his breath, as if both were fighting for control, and only one thing could happen at a time, because more than that was just too much. And then his legs just buckled, point blank refusing to work anymore as Kurt gave a shout and Finn's footballer reactions just instinctively kicked in as he caught the smaller boy under the arms from behind and lowered him more gently to the floor, where he just sat, his breath stuttering as much as his words had, his eyes really not seeing anything.

Finn looked beyond freaked out, sending a scared look at his stepbrother, not wanting to remove his hold on Blaine in case something worse happened, but unsure of what else to do. Kurt couldn't help. He was terrified himself, crouching in front of the boy he loved, taking his face in his hands, trying to elicit a logical response from Blaine – hell, any response, "Blaine? Blaine, please talk to me!" Kurt fell back on a strange instinct he didn't even know he had, but it felt vaguely familiar to how he had felt when Blaine had told him about the time he had been beaten up.

Blaine just shook his head, somehow finding a voice again, not seeming to even realise that he now sat on the floor of McKinley's choir room, or that both Finn and Kurt were basically holding him upright. "I should get going. It's a long drive home…"

"Like hell are you driving anywhere, Blaine." Finn choked out, fear fuelling the same protective streak that was such a core of his being.

"No, no, my name's Noah Puckerman. I'm a friend of Blaine's. What's going on? What did you say to him?"

Both Kurt and Finn jumped, having forgotten Puck was even in the room. Apparently the miscreant boy had more sense than either of them in a crisis, because he had grabbed Blaine's phone from where he had dropped it, and called back the last number to have called Blaine.

"Well you tell me, lady, 'cause right now, he looks like crap, and he sure as hell didn't look like that before you called, so why don't you-" Puck's voice juddered to an abrupt halt as the person on the other line interrupted him. Kurt turned his gaze back to Blaine, desperate to try and get through to him, but Finn's eyes never left his best friend's face.

So, unlike Kurt, Finn didn't miss it as Puck's face seem to drain of all colour, the reflexive anger on his face going with it. He didn't miss it as Puck sent a desperate, fleeting glance down to Blaine and Kurt, before his eyes found Finn's. He held up a finger, and strode out of the room, Blaine's phone still pressed to his ear. They could hear his voice down the hall, but were unable to make out the words.

Kurt meanwhile, was getting more and more agitated. Nothing he was doing was helping, and he desperately wanted to do something. He already knew they were out of their depth. He wanted his dad, who always knew what to do in bad situations like this. He wished he could call Blaine's dad, or that Mr Schuster would realise he had forgotten something, and come strolling back into the room. Hell, even Coach Sylvester would do for him right now! But he couldn't do something, because however much he wanted help, there was no way he was leaving Blaine's side right now. "I should go home…" Blaine mumbled again, mostly to himself this time, as if he were listing things he needed to buy at the grocery store. Such a detached tone from his normally expressive boyfriend was just plain unsettling.

And then Puck came back in, fiddling with the now disconnected phone in his hands, an indefinable look on his face, before he took a breath and addressed the brothers. "Do you think your parents would let Blaine stay with you guys tonight?"

"Puck, what's going on? Who were you talking to?" Kurt didn't mean for his voice to come out so aggressively sharp, and regretted it when the normally tough boy flinched, suddenly looking completely out of his depth.

"That was Blaine's aunt. There was an accident…" He trailed off, and Kurt's stomach dropped, as Finn looked confused, while Blaine just continued to blink as if he had lost all feeling for good, and Puck searched for words, "His dad, well, his dad…"

And Kurt didn't need him to finish that sentence as his heart nearly ripped itself from his chest and he just looked at his boyfriend in horror. Because he knew that look on Puck's face.

Kurt, son, I need to talk to you. Your mom, well, you know she's been in hospital a lot recently, your mom, she…

There had been an accident.

There had been an accident, and Blaine's dad was dead.

To Be Continued…

Author Notes: ...so what did you think? Please let me know! This was a bit short and wordy, but I needed to kick everything off somehow!