fic: (complete) crush // part 1 of 2
crush
Kurt Hummel/Blaine Anderson
R // 5,400 words
Summary:
crush * v.
1. a: to suppress or overwhelm as if by pressure or weight.
b: to oppress or burden grievously.
AU. Blaine Anderson is 18 years old with two semesterss of college courses out of the way and a few thousand dollars saved up. He heads to the nearest station and takes the first train to New York with no intention of looking back. But then he meets the mysterious Kurt Hummel, a quiet boy who doesn't let anyone touch him
Blaine is jostled by the movement of train over track, the muscles in his thighs shaking with the force of it. He places his hands on his knees, palms up, and watches the lines stretching across them blur in the motion. This isn’t how eighteen years old is supposed to feel, as if his shoulders are waiting to crack and splinter, tear along the seams of him.
Ohio always felt too small for all that he knew was inside him, curled up around his ribs, just waiting to be let loose. Accelerated classes at the Lima Community College during his senior year at Dalton Academy and years worth of saved up allowances from financially-uninhibited parents have led him here, seated on a train going fast enough for the trees to turn into slick oil paintings as they pass, racing away from all he has ever known. Most people his age who have come from where he’s leaving, Blaine supposes, would be afraid of New York city. They would see the lights and hear the cars, the clicking of boots along the sidewalk and mindless chatter filling the air and want to pack up as soon as possible and head right back to the comfort of home.
Blaine, though, has never felt at home, lost as he is in his own skin. He imagines the lights of Times Square leading him in like a moth to a flame and takes a deep breath, turning his hands to smooth clammy palms along his jeans.
***
Two hours out of Columbus, Blaine moves from his suite to try and eat. His stomach feels stretched out and too tight all at once, turning at the idea of food. It feels like something an adult should do, though, eating because he needs to and moving out of his solitary car to try and face the world. Or in his case, the one other person sitting in the dining car, picking at a salad and staring out the window. It’s a boy who looks amazingly well put-together, immaculate from the high swoop of his hair to the sharp hinge of jaw that Blaine can just make out in the horrible lighting. He can’t be much younger than Blaine himself, soft around the edges in his sweater with too-long sleeves. Blaine stares at him, wondering and curious and wanting to reach out and press a hand against the boy’s shoulder, try and turn up the edges of him with kind words. If there’s one thing in life that Blaine understands it’s how it feels to be paper-thin, stretched out across waves of others’ disappointment or expectations, billowing in the breeze as a sail on the sea.
This boy, Blaine knows, can tell from the slump of his shoulders, is running from something in the same way that Blaine is running towards this new thing, new place, New York, New York. Blaine picks a seat a few booths back from the boy and waves for a waitress, ordering a glass of water and a small salad. He keeps his eyes on the boy ahead of him and watches how his head tilts just so when Blaine laughs a little hysterically and denies the waitress as she asks if he wants a beer.
Maybe they’re going to the same place; Blaine wonders and waits for his food, tapping restless fingers against the cool table.
He wants to rest a hand on the boy’s shoulder but paper can cut as well as anything, and Blaine isn’t looking to get sliced open anymore.
***
The salad is disgusting. It seems to be constructed of wilted lettuce and too-soft spinach, stale croutons surrounding the edge of its bowl in a meager attempt at garnishment, and Blaine can understand the other boy’s lack of desire in eating it. Blaine’s fork is dull with scratches and detergent residue, and he’s twirling it between his fingers when it slips from his grip and clatters down to the table, startling the boy ahead of him into turning around.
“Clumsy?” he calls standing gracefully to settle himself into the booth behind Blaine’s. The boy rests his chin over thin, crossed arms, and looks at him, one sharp eyebrow arched delicately above a cloudy sky-blue eye. His eyelashes are dark and inviting, fanned out against the pale expanse of his cheeks. Turned to face him like this, his edges don’t seem nearly as sharp; he doesn’t look dangerous at all and Blaine is doing it again, giving up too soon on guarding himself because the hopeful side of him is fighting its way out once more, and maybe this will be the one time that opening himself up will be worth it. Blaine feels tilted, restless and uneven and he isn’t supposed to be like this, isn’t made for meeting curious boys who look at him as if waiting for the punchline to a joke he isn’t being let in on. But the boy also looks expectant and Blaine can’t just leave him waiting.
“Very. I’m sorry, uh, for the noise,” Blaine stutters. The words tangle around his teeth and he knows how ridiculous he sounds by the way the boy lets his head fall slightly to the left and continues to stare.
“I’m Blaine,” he says, because he has nothing else to offer anyone but his name. There’s an iPod full of karaoke tracks stuffed in with the rest of his luggage and Blaine is pretty sure he could put together a quick cover of the latest top 40 hit if he wanted something worthwhile in exchange, but that would be jumping ahead of himself once more and that’s how he ended up here in the first place: putting himself on the line and expecting anything positive in return year after year. He figures it’s best not to get his hopes up again, but there’s something warm bound around his ribs, a hope that he’s never been able to extinguish.
The boy’s gaze seems to soften just slightly, but it’s gone between one blink and the next and he says, “It’s okay, you know. About the noise. I keep forgetting there are other people on this thing.”
Blaine doesn’t know what to say, so he keeps his mouth shut and stares at the boy with what he hopes will come across as an inviting expression. It must work because the guy keeps talking.
“You know whenever I used to see trains on TV or whatever the first thing I thought about was the conductor, and how lonely he must be all by himself in the front of the train.” He pauses for a moment and turns to look out the window once more. Blaine follows the tendons of the boy’s pale throat as he begins to speak again. “But now that I’m actually on a train it’s so easy to imagine that there is no conductor and I’m chugging this thing along by sheer force of will.”
“I am the captain of my fate, and all that,” Blaine says, shrugging slightly.
The boy’s head whips back around to stare at him and the gaze feels heavy enough that Blaine leans back a little from the force of it, blinking quickly.
“You’d think it would be easier to captain your own soul.” He hums the words as if testing out a melody, soft and wavering with uncertainty.
“Well,” Blaine starts to answer, taking in the stern lift of the boy’s eyes and wondering wildly if this is some sort of test, “like most things poets tell us, it’s easier said than done.”
A smile blooms on boy’s face, lighting up his murky eyes like the sun coming out and Blaine thinks that there is nothing in the whole world that’s quite as beautiful as the honesty of a smile like that.
“I’m Kurt,” the boy says, tilting his chin up as if preparing himself for the upward swing of Blaine’s rejection. Blaine has spent his entire life with his head high, stubbornly searching for the best in people against his own better judgment. He can see the strain of Kurt’s muscles as he waits for Blaine to send something sharp his way and Blaine knows, then, that he has nothing on this boy when it comes to being guarded. But Blaine also knows better than most, how it feels to be stripped down and cut open and leaving yourself at the full mercy of a perfect stranger and that urge to pull Kurt close is what pushes him to lean forward and offer his hand.
“Kurt. It’s so nice to meet you.”
Kurt stares at Blaine’s hand, searching it for insincerity, waiting for the joke. After a moment he physically deflates as his walls retreat by the slightest margin, drooping down but letting a smile steal back along his features and places one soft, cool hand in Blaine’s.
***
“I’m not a runaway, you know.”
The sun has gone down and Blaine hears Kurt’s quiet statement as an afterthought; his focus has been centered on the trees passing by the window. Blaine rests his cheek against the cold glass and looks at Kurt, unimpressed.
“Good. The last thing I need is a frantic mother chasing me down for helping her son leave the nest.”
Something in Kurt’s defiant expression shifts and there’s a coolness in his eyes that has nothing to do with the overly air-conditioned train car.
“I don’t have one. A mother,” Kurt says, as if he’s telling Blaine that the sky is blue or water is wet; as if it’s a simple fact of life that he has no say in, no discernible emotion towards, one way or the other. The monotone of his voice makes Blaine uncomfortable; he’s so used to silence or yells or songs as a means to get a point across, and a complete lack of emotion isn’t a creature that Blaine has any experience with.
“Oh,” is the only answer he can give. Kurt has a solitary eyebrow raised once more, cutting through the pale skin of his face like a carefully planned brushstroke and Blaine knows that sympathy isn’t what Kurt wants from him.
“High school is supposed to be the best years of your life, right?” Kurt starts, leaning forward against the back of his seat to rest his elbows atop of it and fix his gaze on Blaine, “And so you show up on the first day of your freshman year and expect to feel different. To feel like whatever hell you went through up until this point was worth it. I mean, you really believe that things can’t possibly get any worse and there has to be nowhere left to go but up.”
Blaine isn’t sure that he’s supposed to respond to that, as it seems that giving Kurt the floor to speak is like puncturing a tire, a steady stream of air and noise that only gets faster as it runs out. Besides that, Blaine doesn’t want to tell Kurt that high school actually is like that for most people. He doesn’t want to suggest that it might just be some kind of fate, two of the unlucky ones ending up together on the same train.
“But then I go to class after class for years and I turn into this person that I don’t even recognize when I look in the mirror. I see the same friends make the same mistakes and listen to them complain about every boy and girl in the school, and let them lean on my shoulder and cry even though their chins are pressing right into a fresh bruise from being tossed into a dumpster for wanting everything they take for granted.”
Kurt pauses and leans forward into Blaine’s space, eyes wide and frantic in their sincerity.
“So I left,” he says, letting the phrase hang between them for a long moment before sagging back down and laughing as if he can’t quite believe it himself, “I left my dad a note and emptied my bank account and here I am, telling things to you that my closest friends don’t know about.”
“If they knew, they wouldn’t blame you, Kurt,” Blaine says gently, as if trying to coax a shy animal to eat out of his palm. Which he is, in some ways, his empathy held out like an offering.
“I’m so selfish, Blaine.” Kurt’s voice cracks the name in half, and suddenly Blaine is standing on legs tired from being immobile for so long and sliding into Kurt’s booth, pressing almost close enough to touch.
“You are, but not for the reasons you’re probably beating yourself up for right now.” Kurt sniffs, a loud wet sound, and Blaine just keeps talking, “It’s selfish to not tell your friends and to deny them the opportunity to help you. But Kurt, self preservation is a skill that takes a whole life to learn and I know it’s not something you can just turn off.”
Blaine holds out a hand and Kurt ignores it, folding himself almost in half to curl around his body instead.
Their arms are touching, Kurt’s warm face pressed right against Blaine’s chest. A waitress walks back into the car to gather dishes and Blaine is expecting Kurt to push himself up and away, to let the distance settle back between them.
“I don’t let anyone touch me,” Kurt whispers, holding on tight to the front of Blaine’s shirt, “I’d almost forgotten what it feels like to hold onto someone.”
Blaine knows he isn’t just talking about the way their bodies are touching and it’s too much, the trust Kurt is giving him. Blaine takes good things and he breaks them. He’s broken his own knuckles fighting away demons, his father’s trust and his mother’s heart. Kurt is so solid and warm against his chest, but there is something breakable under his skin that Blaine is drawn to.
“Do you have your own car?” Blaine asks.
Kurt shakes his head and the motion sends his soft hair skirting against the underside of Blaine’s chin, the ghost of a touch.
“Can you, uh, would you like to stay with me? I have a suite.” Blaine holds his breath, waits.
Slowly, smooth as a cat stretching after a long nap, Kurt sits and looks at Blaine, searching.
“Yes.”