Title: When The Music Stops.
Rating: M, to be safe.
Pairing: Klaine.
Length: 700/800?
Summary: Kurt pretty much thinks this boy is perfect, the epitome of calm and brave and courage, and Burt can’t help the feeling that seeing his hero with booze on his shirt and blood on his fists is going to shatter his heart.
Disclaimer: Not mine!
AN: No spoilers, title&cut from Bare: A Pop Opera, and this written for this prompt over at glee_angst_meme :
"Blaine has a horrible family life. One weekend he goes home and after a particularly brutal physical fight with his father he copes the only way he has learned how, with alcohol. He steals a bottle of vodka from his parent's liquor cabinet and runs out to a nearby park and gets pretty smashed.
Burt is driving somewhere and recognizes the staggering teenager on the side of the road from Kurt's facebook pictures. He pulls over to see that Blaine is completely drunk out of his mind, has no idea where he is, and has a pretty bad bruise on his face...."
*
A bottle of Grey Goose, Blaine thinks, will do the job quite nicely. He leaves the front door swinging, his mothers voice ringing out behind him as he ducks around the silver and black cars in his driveway and lets the electronic gate slide shut behind him. His shoulder is stinging, and when the cold wind hits his face, it bites at the lump rising on his cheek. The lightness on his shoulder reminds him that he’s not packed a bag, he didn’t even grab his phone or his wallet, and then the heaviness in his chest reminds him that he is not going back. He’s not entirely sure where his feet are leading him, until he finds his way to a park where he used to play field hockey in his childhood. He can almost see himself, shorn-haired and screaming along the field, small and terrified of what the older boys would do to him when the coach turned his back.
He’s sure the entire state can hear the rock-star hiss when he pulls the cap off without twisting it and brings it to his lips.
*
And then some kid comes out of nowhere and Burt nearly knocks him down. The boy stumbles back and disappears beyond the ditch at the edge of the dirt road. Burt slams his breaks on and jumps out of the door, peering around for him, and then a groan rings out a few feet away. As he pulls the young boy up, a streetlight to his right casts his face into balmy, yellow light and Burt has to bite down on the inside of his cheek.
He knows him. He’s knows him from all the times he’s walked behind Kurt, home for the weekend and using the time to talk to the people he’s lived with all week, flicking through pictures on his laptop. The boy in the pictures always had a big white-tooth smile, or was crossing his eyes and sticking his tongue out, or was carrying Kurt on his back and howling in laughter as friends cheer them on in some ridiculous game. But the boy in Burt’s arms is half-asleep and slurring words under his breath and a sickly combination of thick red blood and expensive vodka is swirling on the back of his right hand. The boy- Blaine, Burt remembers, from many of Kurt’s overexcited stories during his visits home- squints in the light and reaches behind him for the bottle, now smashed into oblivion and leaching into the mud; Burt grasps his hand.
“Maybe you should stop now.” Blaine looks up at him, eye brows wrinkled and and mouth turned up in protest.
“What’re you like the p’lice or somethin’?” Burt reels back, then sighs.
“No. I’m Kurt’s Dad. Blaine Anderson, right?” He nods. “What’re you doing out here at this time, son?” Blaine shrugs, pulling himself into a sitting position against the face. “I don’t...don’t....can’t go home n’ Datlon’s closed for Chris’mas. ’m homeless.” He says, not quite looking Burt in the eye. “I don’t...where am I?” he mumbles, and Burt realises just how out of it the young lad is. When he grabs Blaine’s shoulder to pull him onto his feet, he pulls away, twisting like something possessed, but eventually, ten minutes later, Blaine is in the backseat of Burt’s work truck because what was Burt supposed to do, leave him there for the actual police to find...or worse. God, it could be so much worse.
*
As he carefully veers around speed bumps and pot holes, he lets the finger on his free hand hover over Kurt’s name in his phonebook. Does he ring? Does he not? He wonders what it would do to Kurt to see Blaine like this. Burt pretends not to notice how his son’s cheeks burn red whenever he talks about Blaine, not for his own benefit but to save Kurt that first-crush embarrassment. Kurt doesn’t exactly make it easy, his voice gaining in speed and pitch, and not pausing for breath whenever a story about Blaine comes up in conversation, but from what Burt has gathered,Kurt pretty much thinks this boy is perfect, the epitome of calm and brave and courage, and Burt can’t help the feeling that seeing his hero with booze on his shirt and blood on his fists is going to shatter his heart.