After – YourFairyGodfather
4,254 words — oneshot — complete
The epilogue to Anywhere You Go, the runner!klaine trilogy, written after this year’s Boston Marathon. It’s been three years since Kurt met Blaine back in Ohio, the morning of his first marathon. Some things stay the same, but today (the day of Blaine’s first New York City Marathon) something big is going to change.
Although this is a follow-on fic, I really don’t think it matters if you read this or Anywhere You Go (I’ll Follow You Down) first. I read this one first, basking in the feelings and the humour and the memories. However much you hate running, this could make you want to put on a pair of trainers and get to the finishing line. After all, you never know what is going to be waiting for you.
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Excerpt
The morning was cool and breezy, the first traces of winter beginning to make themselves known in the early November air. The sky was overcast, dulling the glare of the sun to a thinner, more seasonally appropriate watery light. Around him on the sidewalk in Central Park, people were shivering, twisting their gloved hands into coat pockets and tucking their faces into heavier scarves than the city had seen in months.
It was a perfect morning for the annual, notorious New York City Marathon. And although Kurt, dressed impeccably for the 40-degree weather and sipping gratefully from his piping hot Starbucks, wasn’t running, his boyfriend—Kurt’s favorite runner and the love of his life—was less than two miles away from the finish line where Kurt was waiting.
And where, if everything went the way that Kurt was hoping it would, both of their lives would change forever.
It had been just over three years since Kurt had met Blaine, on the morning of his first marathon. He hadn’t run another since, the demands of balancing school and work—and later, the beginnings of his post-collegiate career—too extensive and time consuming to permit the lengthy, occasionally painful process of marathon training. Instead, he’d stuck to shorter distances: local 5Ks, the chance half marathon for charity, jogging a few mornings a week or after work through one of several nearby parks.
Despite his routine, however, and their promising first meeting, it had actually taken more time and effort for Kurt and Blaine to fit themselves together as runners than as a couple, a process that had unfolded smoothly and with such a sense of…inevitability, almost, that Kurt still occasionally found himself staring at Blaine in wonder, hardly daring to believe that Blaine was real, and really his.
Running, though—for all of Blaine’s wide-eyed optimism and aggressively cheerful encouragement, even he had to admit after weeks of trying that the two of them were very different types of athlete. Kurt had flexibility and endurance in spades—and those were qualities that Blaine openly and enthusiastically appreciated in an entirely different context—but lacked the natural speed of a sprinter, and grew easily frustrated trying to keep up with Blaine’s pace as it mindlessly crept up over the course of a run. His irritation would trigger Blaine’s guilt for pushing him too hard, which would in turn make Kurt feel bad for slowing Blaine down, etc.
Trial and error had eventually won out, and they’d ultimately settled on a pattern of starting out and finishing together but otherwise running separately on most days, only sticking to the same route once a week or so when Blaine had run hard the day before and Kurt was feeling good. It had chafed Kurt’s pride a little at first, being the one left behind, but he’d gotten over it quickly, especially after Blaine had confessed over dinner one night that he’d once been passed during a 10K by an octogenarian in a tutu.
Klaine fanfiction 