This is very likely me zeroing in and beholding connections you never intended, but I'm struck by Blaine's simple line, ""We really do, Kurt." I've always been really aware of Blaine speaking Kurt's name in your fic, possibly because one of your first, most memorable scenes took them to a place where Kurt's name on Blaine's lips sounded deliberate and delicate and almost ritualized, like it meant something to Blaine, almost a stand-in for an honorific: "Yes, Kurt." When he puts it at the end of a sentence like that, it always feels meaningful; it means that Kurt has all of his attention. So seeing it in your 'verse in this new context caught my attention. It's different, here: as focused, but an active focus; not submissive, but an strong, kinetic agreement. It's good to see. It feels like an evolution. Clear, I hope, that I'm not suggesting Blaine needs to evolve out of subbiness, if that's his nature. Nothing wrong or weak about subbing, and that original scene I'm bizarrely finding echoed was nothing but beautiful and right. I just really like the sense of their partnership in the final lines of this scene: Blaine is much less internal, here, than he was. Better equipped to express himself.

It sounds weird, but scenes like this make me feel the worth and rightness and potential of their relationship more than all the fluffy, frictionless "I love you"s in the fandom corpus. Milton, you know: I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.