Prompt Post #7
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'Yeah. I go a couple of times a week at least.'
'That's my boy,' his father exclaimed. 'You'll be taking on Mike Tyson himself in no time, I bet.'
Blaine rolled his eyes. 'Dad, it's not like I compete.'
'Well, maybe you should,' his father argued, excited suddenly.
'I doubt I'm good enough for that,' Blaine evaded. The truth was that he didn't particularly want to involve other people in his sport, because the solitude of the boxing was exactly what drew him. It was kind of like therapy, but not in an anger management kind of way. Rather, when he was poised in front of the punching bag, he was able to block out everyone and everything, and he was alone in the world, all his problems gone. They always came back of course, but somehow after a round with the punching bag, they seemed less important for a while.
'But maybe with the right incentive, you could be,' Blaine's father went on. 'I remember Cooper getting so much better at baseball once he joined a proper team. He wasn't that great at first - though please don't tell him I said that - but by the end he was one of the best, I think.'
'Mm, yeah, well, maybe once I've had top surgery.'
The excitement faded from his father like the air from a balloon. 'You're still set on that, then?'
'Yes?' Blaine replied as though his father had just asked him if the sky was still blue.
'It's just that surgery is a major step,' his father explained. 'Major. There's no going back after that.'
'I wasn't really planning to,' Blaine stated evenly.
'Well, obviously you're not planning to, but I'd just hate for you to do something you're going to regret later on.'
'So you're still going to make me wait?' It was more of a statement than a question. Blaine was regretting bringing up the topic at all. 'Because if it's about the money, I'll pay you back, I swear--'
'It's not about the money. It's about not wanting to let my kid undergo major surgery for something that isn't life threatening.' There was a note of finality and an edge of annoyance in his father's voice.
'And when I'm eighteen?'
'Then we can start to talk about it.'
Blaine sighed and leaned back in his seat. He had a hard time seeing what another four months was really going to do except prolong his daily pain needlessly.
*
A little before ten, Blaine was dropped off for his appointment with Dr. Richards, while his father went to pick up Cooper from the airport, promising to be back by the time Blaine was done.
Blaine liked his therapist. In the beginning he had struggled a lot with the idea of exposing himself to a stranger and putting himself in that vulnerable position. It had taken him a while to come to know that he could trust her and that nothing bad would happen. Eventually he had gotten not only the diagnosis he needed and the go-ahead to start hormone replacement therapy, but he had also come to appreciate the sessions themselves for giving him the chance to air some of his deepest worries and fears - and in some cases to realize what those worries and fears were in the first place. Although not holding back in therapy also meant that he was left pretty emotionally drained by the end of a session, and today - Blaine having had more to talk about than usual - was no exception.
When he walked out of Dr. Richards' office, however, his father and Cooper were sitting in the waiting room, and Blaine couldn't help the grin that spread across his face upon seeing his brother again.
'Coop.'
'Blainey!' Cooper called out and, as he rose to meet Blaine in a warm hug, something in Blaine stilled and calmed. He couldn't really explain what it was about his brother that made him react this way, and sometimes Cooper could be infuriating, but there was something about the energy that Cooper radiated that made Blaine love to be in the same room with him, even when he sometimes hated it. If he had to call the feeling anything, he supposed it would be "safe".
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'Hi, I'm Cooper. Blaine's my little brother.'
'Juliette Richards. So...' Dr. Richards seemed to be appraising Cooper. 'This is the famous Cooper. I've heard a lot about you.'
Blaine felt heat creep into his cheeks. He didn't talk about his brother that much, did he? Cooper, however, seemed to take it as a comment on his status as a so-called "celebrity" and proceeded to flirt with the poor woman, leading Blaine to roll his eyes and share an exasperated look with his father.
Yep, Cooper Anderson was back in Ohio.
*
After Valentine's Day, Thanksgiving was Blaine's favorite holiday. He had always loved it, even before he had really been able to explain why. He liked the concept of giving thanks and being grateful, and while he wasn't actively looking forward to spending the entire weekend with his father's family, he wasn't about to let them ruin it for him. So when his father asked him and Cooper for help with the holiday shopping, which would include ingredients for dinner for fourteen people, Blaine complied with a smile. There was more than enough to do, and by the end of the afternoon they were all exhausted, but still smiling, as they sat in the dining room, making their way through the two large pizzas, that they had brought home with them.
Blaine rolled his eyes fondly as Cooper went on and on about the amazing work he was doing in LA and the idiotic casting directors who rejected him, when his talents were clearly superior to everyone else's. He had just bit into his fourth slice of pizza when his father's phone went off but, figuring that it was probably just his work calling, neither Blaine nor Cooper paid any attention, when he answered it. Instead Cooper turned to Blaine, changing the topic and telling him, 'So... I got the recording of West Side Story that you sent me.'
'And?' Blaine prompted. He waited with baited breath, watching as Cooper took a bite of his pizza, chewing slowly.
'Pretty impressive production,' he offered through a mouthful of pizza, before swallowing and continuing. 'Your foot work was a bit sloppy, though, and Tonight could have been better.'
'I-- okay. I guess I'll work on that,' Blaine replied quietly, hating that he could never seem to please his brother, but - in the spirit of Thanksgiving - he supposed he should be grateful that Cooper cared enough to watch, let alone give notes.
Blaine glanced over at his father whose usual smile was gone. 'You cannot be serious,' he hissed into the phone, before catching his sons looking and getting up to continue the conversation in the kitchen.
'So anyway,' Cooper resumed their conversation from before. 'I have a list on my laptop. We can go over it later, if you want.'
'Sure, that'd be great,' Blaine replied. He wasn't honestly particularly looking forward to watching the musical with Cooper pointing out his every single mistake, and he wondered vaguely how long that list was, but he would be damned if he was going to let anything - least of all his own brother - break his holiday spirit.
'I know it's your job! I don't give a damn about your job! Tell them to shove it!' Their father was yelling in the kitchen and his voice carried clearly into the next room, where Blaine and Cooper were sitting. 'This is Thanksgiving and we're your family. You know, I'm so sick of this with you.'
Not even that.
Blaine and Cooper shared a look across the dinner table as they both tried to concentrate on eating, but their father was practically shouting and it was impossible not to catch fragments of his side of the conversation.
'That's not fair. It's not the same thing and you know it. At least I'm here when it matters. I don't ditch my family on the holidays.'
'So I guess Mom's not making it back,' Blaine concluded, his tone casual as though he was talking about the possibility of rain tonight.
'I'm sorry,' Cooper spoke quietly. 'I know how much Thanksgiving means to you.'
Blaine shrugged, letting the disappointment wash over and out of him. 'It's alright. We'll make it work.' He offered a wry smile. 'At least this way we won't have to watch her and grandma fight.'
*
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Guests started to arrive early on Thursday, and it went about as smoothly as Blaine could have hoped for. First to arrive were Blaine's grandmother, oldest uncle, Peter, and his wife. Blaine's grandmother spent a long moment regarding him, before finally giving a dissatisfied 'Hm,' and Blaine thought he saw Peter send his youngest brother a critical look.
Next came the middle brother, Andrew, with his second wife and their teenage son. Stephen was, to Blaine's recollection, a good three or four years younger than him, and already a good inch taller than Blaine. He looked Blaine up and down, not bothering to hide his curiosity, but Blaine stubbornly stood his ground, refusing to shrink back or appear embarrassed. Eventually the boy's mother had to reprimand him, hissing at him, 'Stephen, what did I tell you? It's rude to stare.'
Last to arrive were Blaine's grown cousin, Lucy, with her husband and two young daughters. The girls, who were nine and eleven respectively, looked confusedly around the room between the younger members of the group, and Blaine had the sudden thought that they had expected one of them to be a girl, and now they couldn't work out what was what.
This really wasn't that bad though, Blaine thought. Sure, Stephen was even more obnoxious as a teenager than he had been as a child, and his grandmother was being who she had always been, but no one had used the wrong name or pronouns on him. Of course, they hadn't used the right ones either. Blaine suspected they were trying not to gender him at all and, whether they were doing it for him or themselves, that at least was something. In fact if this was as bad as things were going to get, Blaine thought he could handle it just fine. Kurt was probably right: It was Thanksgiving and no one wanted to rock the boat. They would all just have to get through this weekend, and then continue on with their lives as they had separately.
Later that night Blaine would chastise himself for ever being so foolishly optimistic.
The first real warning sign came when Blaine was invited and expected to help out with cooking the big Thanksgiving dinner. It wasn't that he had a problem with cooking or that he prescribed to the silly stereotype that the kitchen was a woman's domain - his father was a better cook than his mother, although admittedly that wasn't saying much - but every other person in the kitchen was a female and it was clear that he was here because they all still viewed him as such. However, Blaine didn't think that getting pissy with his family on Thanksgiving was going to solve anything, and probably the best thing he could do to win them over was to be the polite, well-mannered boy that his parents had raised him to be.
So he stayed, helping out to the best of his abilities and listening to the four women's chatter about family and politics (Blaine had to bite his tongue several times at some of the opinions that were spewed, many of them of the I'm not racist, but... variety). For the first hour or so nothing much happened, except for Blaine's grandmother complaining loudly that the kitchen was so small, she didn't understand how they ever got anything done in here. Blaine tried to keep his scowling to a minimum. Admittedly they didn't actually get a lot done here, but that had more to do with his mother's aversion to cooking than the size of the kitchen. Blaine didn't know what his grandmother was complaining for, anyway. She had been the one to insist on coming here.
Eventually the women seemed to run out of things to talk about amongst themselves, and they turned to Blaine, questioning him about his school and social life and what his hobbies were. His two aunts spoke to him in an oddly accusatory tone, that made Blaine feel like a criminal on trial, while his cousin Lucy spoke to him in the same kind of gentle and vaguely patronizing voice that one might use on a mental patient. Blaine thought maybe he preferred his grandmother's approach of not speaking to him at all.
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'Yes, I have a boyfriend,' Blaine told her. 'Kurt. He's amazing.'
'Ooh, boyfriend!' the nine-year-old exclaimed, forgetting about her quest for water. 'I wanna see! I wanna see! Do you have a picture?'
Blaine had to laugh at the little girl's excitement. 'Sure. Let me find one.' Blaine pulled out his phone and began scrolling through his gallery in search of a suitable photo of Kurt. Paige was practically hanging off his arm and bouncing up and down.
'Let me see, let me see, let me seeee.'
'Paige, behave,' Lucy called sternly over her shoulder from the stove. 'Give poor Amber a chance. She's doing what you asked.'
Blaine froze in his search. He had expected this to happen at some point, but it did not make it sting any less. Except for Kurt asking about the baby photo the other week, it had been years since Blaine had heard anyone refer to his birth name or call him “she”. It felt kind of like a slap to the face, but he kept calm as he turned towards his cousin.
'Actually, it's Blaine now,' he informed her with as much politeness and patience as he could muster. 'And I'd prefer it if you didn't refer to me as “she”.'
From the adults this statement garnered no response whatsoever. None of them even looked up at him. Paige, however, cocked her head at him, and she seemed to be working something out in her head. She pulled at Blaine's arm and peeked at the photo that was showing on his phone, which was of Blaine and Kurt in their Dalton days, the first one they had taken together as boyfriends. Comprehension dawned on Paige's face.
'You're gay.' Her words seemed to surprise her a little, but there was no malice or prejudice in her voice at all. Blaine nodded, and she grinned in response. 'Cool.'
Blaine smiled fondly after Paige as she skipped off. There was hope for this family yet.
'Amber, dear,' Linda, who was Lucy's mother, called. 'Come help me out for a minute.'
Blaine kind of wanted to shout at her Do I LOOK like an Amber? but instead he walked calmly over to join her by the stove, repeating in a quiet but firm voice, 'Please, my name is Blaine. It has been for over three years.'
'Here, stir this,' Linda instructed him, pretending not to hear him.
*
If cooking dinner had been unpleasant, sitting down to eat it was absolute hell.
It started out with the normal holiday chatter of catching up with each other's families - whose daughters were getting married, whose sons had received a promotion recently, which couples were having kids, and where were they all spending Thanksgiving - and it went on long enough that Blaine was lulled into a false sense of security. For a while he even managed to enjoy it all, choosing to let himself be entertained by, rather than annoyed with, his family’s hopelessly outdated values and the way his father seemed to absorb them as his own in their presence.
Around the time when everyone was tucking into their second helpings, however, his grandmother, who was sitting at the head of the table, put down her knife and fork with a loud clatter and announced in a clear voice, 'I'm sorry, but I just can't keep ignoring this.'
'What, Mother?' his father inquired from the other end of the table, sounding politely puzzled.
'That, John!' She gestured wildly at Blaine, who froze in the middle of cutting up a piece of turkey. Next to him, Cooper's movements tensed.
'Mother, this is not the time--'
'How could you let her do this, John? I thought pulling her out of that Dalton school meant you had put a stop to it. I don't know how you afforded it for so long, anyway.'
Blaine became aware that the room had got very quiet. Everyone had abandoned their previous conversation, and all were all staring at either his grandmother or father, if not at Blaine himself.
'Look, can we not do this right now?' his father insisted.
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'I have to agree,' Lucy spoke up then, agreeing with her father. She turned to Blaine. 'No one is blaming you, sweetheart. It's not your fault that your parents didn't know how to help you.'
'We did help him,' his father commented. 'I told you all this years ago. He's transgender.'
'Mommy, it's true,' Paige spoke up in barely more than a whisper but, in the silence that had fallen over the table, it was loud enough for everyone to hear. 'Amber's a boy. Sh-- He told me. It's Blaine now, and he's gay.'
Lucy shushed her daughter. 'Paige, honey, this is grown-up stuff, okay? Eat your dinner.'
The girl sank back in her chair with a frustrated frown on her face, and Blaine wanted to send her a smile or a wink or something, but he couldn't seem to get even simple motor skills to function, so he sat still frozen in his chair.
'She's sick, John,' Blaine's grandmother implored. 'She thinks she's a boy, for Christ's sake. You don't treat something like that by letting her live out the fantasy. If I told you I'm the king of France, you wouldn't indulge me, and start calling me your majesty, would you?'
It was Cooper's turn to join in. 'Really, grandma, it's not the same thing at all. He has a diagnosis and it's not “crazy”. We didn't pull any of this out of our asses.'
'Be quiet, Cooper,' she sneered at him. 'You're hardly equipped to talk about this. I think we all know what kind of people end up in your particular profession, don't we?' She looked around the table for confirmation that yes, actors were in fact stupid. 'Did you even finish college?'
Cooper opened and closed his mouth at her, too exasperated for words, as she turned back at their father.
'This is what happens when you marry a liberal,' she declared. 'I told you that Grace was bad news. And where is Grace, by the way? Couldn't be bothered to show up, could she? I guess her kind don't care about family.'
Blaine stared down at his plate. A loud ringing had started in his ears, and he tried to concentrate on that, rather than the words of the people around him, but it was impossible to drown out. The comments kept coming, everyone joining in now, and Blaine was hardly aware of who was saying what anymore.
'I don't care what any doctor says, there's no such thing as “transgender”. There's just very sick and confused people and the people who choose to indulge them.'
'I think it might be some kind of internalized misogyny.'
'She doesn't even act that masculine.'
'She admitted to having a boyfriend.'
'She will always be a girl, no matter how much she thinks she isn't. No amount of hormones can change that.'
'God made her a girl and trying to change that is an insult to Him.'
'You're making her a freakshow.'
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No one paid any mind, however, and the next thing Blaine knew, he felt a hand tugging at him, and Cooper's voice in his ear, 'Come on.' No one seemed to notice when Blaine followed Cooper into the kitchen, all too involved in handing out opinions and offering possible cures. Blaine caught a glimpse of his father, who looked completely overwhelmed and lost.
In the kitchen Blaine leaned heavily against the counter, trying to get his breathing to return to normal. He accepted the glass of water Cooper offered him, swallowing it down with difficulty, his throat too constricted to work normally. Cooper stood a few feet away, watching him with a sad expression. He didn't seem to know what to say.
'I was going to come out to Kurt on Monday,' Blaine spoke in a hollow voice. 'What if--' He shook his head, forcing himself to end the train of thought there. Kurt wasn't like that. Whatever he was ultimately going to do or say, he was still Kurt. He wasn't like those people in there.
'I'm sorry I wasn't more help in there.' Cooper's voice was full of regret.
'It's okay,' Blaine assured him. He understood. There was an unspoken understanding in the Anderson family that you didn't cross grandmother Angela, and she could get downright vicious if you tried. Blaine suspected she had struck a nerve when she had all but called Cooper stupid, and he at least had tried.
'Why didn't you speak up for yourself?' Cooper wondered.
Blaine crossed his arms over his chest, and responded a little defiantly. 'Because what good was it gonna do? And because I shouldn't have to.' He paused for a moment and let his arms hang slack against his sides again, adding in a thin voice, 'Because I wanted Dad to.'
Blaine let a small sob escape his throat, and Cooper crossed the space between them and drew Blaine into an embrace, allowing him to stifle his frustrated cries against his brother's chest.
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