Short fic: runaway from the river to the street, Kurt/Blaine, PG-13
Title: runaway from the river to the street (and find yourself with your face in the gutter)
Author: littlemrstom
Fandom: Glee
Pairing(s): Kurt/Blaine
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Brief, non-detailed mentions of violence
Word Count: 3, 500~
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction; I own nothing but the plot. I especially do not own Glee. Sad times.
Summary: Unlike Kurt, Blaine hasn’t always known who he is, but there have been clues.
Author Notes: Title lyric is from ¿Viva La Gloria? (Little Girl) by Green Day.
Blaine gets his first girlfriend at the tender age of nine years old. It’s a big deal, because the girl is Bethany Jones, aka the most popular girl in his class. She has curly blonde hair and big green eyes, and everyone thinks she’s super pretty. Blaine can kind of see it, but he doesn’t understand why all the boys suddenly want to be his friend because she’s invited him over to her house for lunch. She’s just a girl and he’s only going because when he’d told his parents they’d cooed and clapped and his mother had taken him shopping to buy a new shirt right away.
Bethany is nice enough, Blaine decides at her house the following Saturday. She tells him she likes pink and horses and drinking tea, which her mother apparently tells her is something that usually only big girls drink. Blaine doesn’t like any of those things. He prefers the colour blue and tigers and Coke, even though he’s only allowed it on the weekend.
Bethany’s mother makes them finger sandwiches and gives them a bowl of fruit and ice cream, and Blaine eats it all, even though he doesn’t like the cheese inside his sandwich. He sees ham in Bethany’s and refrains from asking to swap. After they’ve eaten, Bethany shows him her tree house and her dolls in the garden, but Blaine just looks at the ground and watches in fascination as an army of ants crawl over his shoe.
“You’re so cool, Blaine,” Bethany says, sat down next to him on a pink flowery blanket on the floor of her tree house. There’s so much pink in here.
“Uh, thanks. So are you,” he replies, and Bethany grins and looks at him in what he’ll realise years later is coyness. Blaine doesn’t remember when she moved, but suddenly she’s kissing him, just a quiet press of her lips against his, and she tastes like ice cream and strawberries and her lips are wet with something minty smelling.
“You’re the best boyfriend ever,” she says, pulling back with cheeks that match the colour of the blanket they’re sat on.
-
Blaine watches a movie with his parents that night. In it there’s a boy and a girl eating together, much like Blaine and Bethany had done earlier, except at the end the girl kisses the boy, but then the boy says something to the girl and she starts to cry and throws something at him and then she runs away.
Blaine goes back to Bethany’s house the next day because his mother told him Bethany had called to invite him over again. He takes the flower his mother gives him that he’s sure was in their garden yesterday afternoon when he was playing football with his dad even though he doesn’t think he’ll need it. He hopes Bethany won’t cry. Even more, he hopes she won’t throw something at him.
“Hi, Blaine!” Bethany says, and she leans in and kisses him again. This time she tastes of toothpaste.
“Hi, Bethany,” Blaine says.
“Aren’t you going to come in?”
Blaine twiddles the flower aimlessly between his fingers. “Is this for me?” she asks brightly, taking it from him anyway. She smells it and sighs. “Oh, Blaine.”
“I guess. I don’t think I want to be your boyfriend, Bethany,” Blaine says slowly, because yesterday he hadn’t liked the taste of her minty lip gloss and as nice as Bethany is, he doesn’t like pink or horses or tea.
The girl’s eyes fill with tears and she throws the flower back at Blaine. It drops pathetically to the floor and Blaine just shrugs, walking away. He feels mean for making her cry, but in the film the girl had found another boy a few days later, so Blaine thinks Bethany will be fine.
Kurt grins as Blaine kisses his forehead, at the same time twirling the flower he holds between his fingers around and around. It’s a cliché red rose, but Kurt seems to like clichés and Blaine seems to like giving him them. He likes dinners for two in crowded Italian restaurants; he likes Blaine giving him sweet kisses in public, Blaine holding his hand as they walk down the street. Kurt just seems to like Blaine.
“Is this for me?” Kurt asks shyly, nodding towards the flower Blaine is holding. Blaine smiles, nodding modestly as he holds it out. Kurt takes it, smells it, and sighs. “It’s beautiful.”
Blaine gets three proposals for dates by girls on Monday, and a group of boys ask him to join their soccer team even though Blaine doesn’t know how to play properly. Bethany scowls at him as he takes his place in front of her in class, but he notices that by the end of the lesson she’s laughing with her friends and he’s been forgotten.
He politely declines them all. Apparently his one day of being Bethany’s boyfriend has made him the most popular boy in class. He’s not really sure why, he only kissed her twice and he hadn’t liked it either of those times. They boy and girl in the film he’d watched had kissed a lot, and they’d seemed to like it before they girl started crying. Blaine wonders if he’s weird, and when he gets home he asks his mother about it worriedly.
“Oh Blaine, honey, of course you’re not weird,” she says, wrapping an arm around his shoulder and pulling him into her chest. “Anyway, you’re only nine. You shouldn’t be kissing girls yet.” She taps him playfully on the cheek and Blaine sneezes as her perfume gets up his nose. “Maybe in a couple of years you’ll like kisses better.”
He lets out a sigh of relief and kisses his mother before running away, because kissing her doesn’t feel weird.
---
At twelve, Blaine still doesn’t understand the appeal of kisses from anyone but his mother. His current girlfriend’s name is Francesca and Blaine still isn’t sure how she came to be in that position. She asked him if he wanted to go to the movies to see the latest Harry Potter film, and yes, Blaine did, so he told her so. One large popcorn and three hours later, Blaine finds himself walking the girl home and being kissed goodbye.
“I really enjoyed the movie,” Francesca says when she pulls away, her cheeks and lips flushed pink. Blaine watches them sparkle against the sun that’s shining down on them, and when he licks his own lips he tastes vanilla this time. It’s nicer than the mint he remembers Bethany wearing, but he still doesn’t really like it. He wonders why girls want to make themselves taste like food.
“So did I,” Blaine replies. “I can’t wait for the next one to come out.”
“Me either!” Francesca beams at him. “Maybe we can go see that one together, too.”
Blaine fidgets. “Maybe,” he says half-heartedly.
The smile on Francesca’s face turns down at the corners slightly. “You don’t want to? I thought we had fun today.”
Blaine doesn’t really know what to say to keep her from throwing something at him, so instead he says, “You ate most of my popcorn.”
“Blaine Anderson, you are the worst boyfriend ever,” Francesca tells him sternly, and Blaine frowns, shrugging as he walks away from her house, leaving her stood on the doorstep. He doesn’t understand how he can be the worst boyfriend ever when three years ago he’d been the best.
”Blaine, you shouldn’t have!” Kurt cries in delight as he opens the envelope in his hands. He pulls out two tickets to the midnight showing of Harry Potter. “Are we really going to do this? I know you don’t like staying up late on a school night.”
“Of course we are,” Blaine says, steeling himself as Kurt turns and begins running towards him. A moment later, he has an armful of Kurt and together they fall backwards onto Blaine’s bed. “I’d do anything to make you happy.”
Kurt just gives a happy sigh as his head comes to rest on Blaine’s chest. He can hear his heart beating below his shirt and he curls his fist softly around the material of Blaine’s t-shirt. “You’re the best boyfriend ever, you know that right?”
Blaine just places an arm behind his head, strokes the outline of Kurt’s face with his free hand, and allows his breathing to fall into sync with Kurt’s.”If you say so.”
Francesca seeks Blaine out the next day in the library, where he’s sitting in a large armchair, reading a book and listening to his mp3 player.
“You left yesterday,” she says, coming to stand in front of him. Blaine tugs out his earphones and looks up at her, uncurling from the ball he’s somehow worked himself into.
“Huh?” he asks.
“You left yesterday,” she repeats, voice harsher this time. “I’m your girlfriend, Blaine. You don’t just leave after we have an argument.”
“Well, you seemed mad,” he replies. He shuts his book, using his forefinger as a bookmark between the pages. “What else was I supposed to do?”
“Fix it?”
Blaine is silent. His music hums in the background, a quiet buzz emanating from his headphones, wound like a worm in his lap.
“Do you not want to fix it?” Francesca asks shrilly. Blaine can see the librarian look over their way and scowl. He remains silent. “I’ll take that as a no,” she concludes, her hands on her hips. Blaine watches as her eyes darken angrily and she reaches forward to pull his book from his fingers, throwing it to the floor before stalking away.
Blaine just sighs, reaching forward to retrieve his book and check it for any damages. He sends the elderly librarian a look of apology and plugs himself back into his own little world where there are no girls.
---
The first time Blaine feels a semblance of attraction to another person is when he watches Titanic for the first time at the age of thirteen, only it’s not Kate Winslet who catches his eye. Something in Blaine’s stomach flips the moment Leonardo DiCaprio makes his first appearance on the screen and he has to put his hands over his belly to quell the pressure he feels building up inside it.
It’s weird. Blaine doesn’t understand what this feeling is. Or rather, he has an inkling, but he doesn’t want to think too hard about it in case his inkling is correct. He waits with baited breath for the drawing scene, the one all his friends have told him to look out for, and when it arrives he sits up, elbows resting on his knees.
Kate Winslet is beautiful, Blaine can admit that much. Her robe drops and his voice catches and he holds his breath and waits and waits… but he feels nothing. The smooth curves of her body are nice, he figures, but they don’t make his stomach flip like Leonardo’s face does. He finds himself noticing the lines on Leonardo’s face as his character draws Kate’s more than he notices Kate’s breasts or the long lines of her legs.
When the car scene arrives, Blaine has to pause the film and slip his hand down the front of his pyjama pants before he can watch the end.
”God, he is so beautiful.” Kurt sighs out his appreciation against Blaine’s cheek, his head resting on his shoulder as they lay together on Kurt’s couch, enjoying the peace of his family out for the day.
“I know, right?” Blaine counters, and it’s bittersweet when he smiles as he remembers the first time the realisation hit him.
“And Kate Winslet is so classy. Even when spread out naked on an ugly green sofa, she’s classy.”
Kurt scoffs (and Blaine isn’t sure if it’s out of jealousy or not) and Blaine just smiles quietly.
Even when they’re both older, Blaine still finds Leonardo DiCaprio hot.
---
Blaine comes to terms with the fact he likes other boys when he moves to high school, and it’s ironic because high school seems to be the most uninviting place on Earth for people like him. He makes friends with a boy called Scott in gym class when all the other boys are running laps and Blaine has feigned a sprained ankle to get out of it. His eyes follow the others, trained on them as they sprint relentlessly around the field.
“I know how you’re feeling,” Scott says, looking up from where he is tying his laces. “It’s hard.”
Blaine’s resolve instantly crumbles. “How did you know?”
“It’s written all over your face. Have you told anyone yet?” Blaine shakes his head. “Then don’t.”
-
“You want to what?” Scott asks incredulously. His locker slams shut and Blaine flinches.
“Go to prom with me,” Blaine says again. “But just as friends. The assholes at the school need showing that two gays can be friends without it being anything more.”
Scott shakes his head sadly, swinging his bag onto his shoulder and heading for the exit. “I don’t think it works that way, Blaine.”
“Then let’s try it,” Blaine decides, and he knows by the look on Scott’s face that they ultimately will. “What have we to lose?”
“They did what?” Kurt asks, curling his fingers into the hem of Blaine’s polo shirt as he has a habit of doing. “Are you serious?”
Blaine nods sadly. “Scott had a broken arm, I just had bruised ribs. And it was all my fault.”
“It was not, Blaine,” Kurt says, his voice stern, and Blaine can tell by the loosening of the grip on his shirt that Kurt is trying to refrain from pointing his finger. His voice becomes gentler then. “They barely did anything to me in comparison.”
“Kurt, come on.”
“No.” Kurt reaches up and kisses Blaine softly on the lips. “Thank you.”
Blaine’s transfer is imminent.
---
Dalton is different to his old school. He’s not spoken to Scott since The Prom Incident, but he’s made new friends here already. Most of them are from The Warblers, and a few are in his Spanish class. The halls echo around his footsteps, the classrooms are way too big, the sofas in the common room too expensive for a school.
But it’s safe. His bruises have just about healed enough that he can wash himself without wincing at every stroke of his cloth, but the memories still flash behind his eyelids whenever he tries to sleep.
The feet collide with his chest time and time again and all he can hear is Scott crying out beside him. The teachers arrive later in his nightmares, but he never gets to see what they do when they get there because he wakes up screaming too quickly.
Kurt’s bed is always nicer than his own. Blaine decided that after the first time he was allowed to use it for a whole night. Kurt’s bed doesn’t have a stray spring that pushes against his shoulder from within the mattress no matter what position he sleeps in. It doesn’t have worn sheets that he needs to get replaced but keeps forgetting about, his pillows aren’t lumpy because he’s too attached to them to get new ones. He doesn’t wake up screaming in this bed.
It also has Kurt, which is a tremendous bonus.
Blaine likes that part the best.
Blaine settles into Dalton properly after about a month. He gets a solo with The Warblers, and then he gets another the week after and he feels great because apparently no one else has managed to do that before. He begins to wear his tie with pride, and suddenly the blazers don’t feel like they’re suffocating him. The work is hard and his grades drop, but that’s alright. Bad grades won’t bruise his ribs.
---
Blaine sees him the first time he goes into the Gap after school with Wes and David. He’s ringing up socks for the customer he’s currently serving and their eyes meet over a rack of half-price jumpers. Blaine buys one just so he can talk to him, and he comes away with an ugly, ill-fitting jumper and a coffee date for tomorrow.
It goes swimmingly. And it isn’t until Blaine is staring at him over his Medium Drip that he realises just how beautiful Jeremiah really is. He tells him, and Jeremiah brushes it off. Blaine does the same.
They meet for coffee again three days later. By now, Blaine has bought another two ugly, ill-fitting jumpers and just for irony’s sake, a pair of socks to match.
Jeremiah doesn’t seem to notice.
”Blaine, why do you have these monstrosities in your wardrobe?” Kurt asks one afternoon, during which they are (read: Kurt is) raiding Blaine’s closet. He pulls out three grey and burgundy woollen jumpers, still with their half-price price tags attached.
“Oh god, I forgot about those,” he says, walking over to them and plucking one out of Kurt’s grip.
“Still waiting for an explanation, Anderson,” Kurt says.
“They’re from The Gap,” Blaine answers, laughing dryly. “Need I say more?”
It turns out Jeremiah had lied when Blaine asked him if he liked music. Jeremiah had said yes, but when Blaine and The Warblers had surprised and serenaded him at work, he’d scowled all the way through the performance and he would have ignored Blaine afterwards had Blaine not stayed behind to catch him when his shift finished.
Blaine gets over it after a week. He couldn’t love someone who doesn’t love music, anyway.
---
Blaine never expected to be playing Spin the Bottle later that night when Kurt invited him to Rachel Berry’s party. He’s heard about this Rachel character - animal sweaters, coloured tights, collared dresses. Spin the Bottle doesn’t usually go hand in hand with a person of that nature.
He never expected to be kissing the host, either, especially not with tongue and for a prolonged amount of time. Turns out, though, Rachel is a fantastic kisser and Blaine just… well, he can’t seem to stop. His hand comes up to hold the back of her neck and he can see the distraught look on Kurt’s face out of the corner of his eye and he can’t help but push it out of his mind because Rachel also tastes pretty nice. Something vaguely strawberry-like. Only then Kurt is clapping awkwardly and he takes that to mean the kiss is over.
“Your face,” Rachel says when she’s crawled back to her seat in the circle, “tastes awesome.”
Blaine grins, because he obviously tastes pretty nice, too.
“As much as I hate to admit this,” Kurt says one evening, pulling his lips away from Blaine’s. Tonight, they’re on Blaine’s bed, Kurt above him, positioned between Blaine’s legs and whilst it’s all more or less completely innocent, the position makes him hotter and more flustered than he ever remembers being. “Rachel Berry was right about something.”
Blaine pulls back when Kurt moves in to continue kissing him. “What?” he asks, perplexed, because it takes a lot for Kurt to admit someone else is right and it takes a landslide for him to admit Rachel Berry is right. “Please explain.”
Kurt smiles against Blaine’s lips, fighting his way back because Blaine can’t escape backwards very far. “Your face does taste awesome,” he says, and Blaine happily accepts the next kiss he’s given.
Kurt hadn’t forgiven him for the Rachel debacle until weeks afterwards. That alone made him feel even more confused about everything.
He eventually comes to the conclusion that alcohol just isn’t for him… and that he simply likes kissing. Kurt seems glad that he’s staying away from booze, but Blaine wonders if there has been another party since the last or if Kurt has just given up inviting him now.
---
“I love you.” The words slip from between his lips and Blaine doesn’t try to stop them when he knows they’re coming.
Kurt looks at him over his coffee cup, his eyes wide and shining under the artificial lighting that plagues the room. “I love you, too,” he says, and Blaine can’t do anything for a minute because he’s too busy trying to process how such a delicate figurine as Kurt could possibly love someone like him.
It’s bizarre and unreal and he wants to say something else, wants to thank Kurt for his love, maybe, but everything his mind comes up with is cheesy and lame and would make Kurt roll his eyes hard enough to strain something vital. So he says nothing else on the subject, and it’s beautiful because this is them and this is what they do. They don’t need to detail their feelings because they’re just there. Blaine wears his heart on Kurt’s designer sleeve and they both know it, and even though it’s taken Blaine a long time to get to this stage, the one where he no longer wakes up screaming and clutching his ribs or flinching whenever he hears the name Scott, he wouldn’t have had it any other way.
Author: littlemrstom
Fandom: Glee
Pairing(s): Kurt/Blaine
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Brief, non-detailed mentions of violence
Word Count: 3, 500~
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction; I own nothing but the plot. I especially do not own Glee. Sad times.
Summary: Unlike Kurt, Blaine hasn’t always known who he is, but there have been clues.
Author Notes: Title lyric is from ¿Viva La Gloria? (Little Girl) by Green Day.
Blaine gets his first girlfriend at the tender age of nine years old. It’s a big deal, because the girl is Bethany Jones, aka the most popular girl in his class. She has curly blonde hair and big green eyes, and everyone thinks she’s super pretty. Blaine can kind of see it, but he doesn’t understand why all the boys suddenly want to be his friend because she’s invited him over to her house for lunch. She’s just a girl and he’s only going because when he’d told his parents they’d cooed and clapped and his mother had taken him shopping to buy a new shirt right away.
Bethany is nice enough, Blaine decides at her house the following Saturday. She tells him she likes pink and horses and drinking tea, which her mother apparently tells her is something that usually only big girls drink. Blaine doesn’t like any of those things. He prefers the colour blue and tigers and Coke, even though he’s only allowed it on the weekend.
Bethany’s mother makes them finger sandwiches and gives them a bowl of fruit and ice cream, and Blaine eats it all, even though he doesn’t like the cheese inside his sandwich. He sees ham in Bethany’s and refrains from asking to swap. After they’ve eaten, Bethany shows him her tree house and her dolls in the garden, but Blaine just looks at the ground and watches in fascination as an army of ants crawl over his shoe.
“You’re so cool, Blaine,” Bethany says, sat down next to him on a pink flowery blanket on the floor of her tree house. There’s so much pink in here.
“Uh, thanks. So are you,” he replies, and Bethany grins and looks at him in what he’ll realise years later is coyness. Blaine doesn’t remember when she moved, but suddenly she’s kissing him, just a quiet press of her lips against his, and she tastes like ice cream and strawberries and her lips are wet with something minty smelling.
“You’re the best boyfriend ever,” she says, pulling back with cheeks that match the colour of the blanket they’re sat on.
-
Blaine watches a movie with his parents that night. In it there’s a boy and a girl eating together, much like Blaine and Bethany had done earlier, except at the end the girl kisses the boy, but then the boy says something to the girl and she starts to cry and throws something at him and then she runs away.
Blaine goes back to Bethany’s house the next day because his mother told him Bethany had called to invite him over again. He takes the flower his mother gives him that he’s sure was in their garden yesterday afternoon when he was playing football with his dad even though he doesn’t think he’ll need it. He hopes Bethany won’t cry. Even more, he hopes she won’t throw something at him.
“Hi, Blaine!” Bethany says, and she leans in and kisses him again. This time she tastes of toothpaste.
“Hi, Bethany,” Blaine says.
“Aren’t you going to come in?”
Blaine twiddles the flower aimlessly between his fingers. “Is this for me?” she asks brightly, taking it from him anyway. She smells it and sighs. “Oh, Blaine.”
“I guess. I don’t think I want to be your boyfriend, Bethany,” Blaine says slowly, because yesterday he hadn’t liked the taste of her minty lip gloss and as nice as Bethany is, he doesn’t like pink or horses or tea.
The girl’s eyes fill with tears and she throws the flower back at Blaine. It drops pathetically to the floor and Blaine just shrugs, walking away. He feels mean for making her cry, but in the film the girl had found another boy a few days later, so Blaine thinks Bethany will be fine.
Kurt grins as Blaine kisses his forehead, at the same time twirling the flower he holds between his fingers around and around. It’s a cliché red rose, but Kurt seems to like clichés and Blaine seems to like giving him them. He likes dinners for two in crowded Italian restaurants; he likes Blaine giving him sweet kisses in public, Blaine holding his hand as they walk down the street. Kurt just seems to like Blaine.
“Is this for me?” Kurt asks shyly, nodding towards the flower Blaine is holding. Blaine smiles, nodding modestly as he holds it out. Kurt takes it, smells it, and sighs. “It’s beautiful.”
Blaine gets three proposals for dates by girls on Monday, and a group of boys ask him to join their soccer team even though Blaine doesn’t know how to play properly. Bethany scowls at him as he takes his place in front of her in class, but he notices that by the end of the lesson she’s laughing with her friends and he’s been forgotten.
He politely declines them all. Apparently his one day of being Bethany’s boyfriend has made him the most popular boy in class. He’s not really sure why, he only kissed her twice and he hadn’t liked it either of those times. They boy and girl in the film he’d watched had kissed a lot, and they’d seemed to like it before they girl started crying. Blaine wonders if he’s weird, and when he gets home he asks his mother about it worriedly.
“Oh Blaine, honey, of course you’re not weird,” she says, wrapping an arm around his shoulder and pulling him into her chest. “Anyway, you’re only nine. You shouldn’t be kissing girls yet.” She taps him playfully on the cheek and Blaine sneezes as her perfume gets up his nose. “Maybe in a couple of years you’ll like kisses better.”
He lets out a sigh of relief and kisses his mother before running away, because kissing her doesn’t feel weird.
---
At twelve, Blaine still doesn’t understand the appeal of kisses from anyone but his mother. His current girlfriend’s name is Francesca and Blaine still isn’t sure how she came to be in that position. She asked him if he wanted to go to the movies to see the latest Harry Potter film, and yes, Blaine did, so he told her so. One large popcorn and three hours later, Blaine finds himself walking the girl home and being kissed goodbye.
“I really enjoyed the movie,” Francesca says when she pulls away, her cheeks and lips flushed pink. Blaine watches them sparkle against the sun that’s shining down on them, and when he licks his own lips he tastes vanilla this time. It’s nicer than the mint he remembers Bethany wearing, but he still doesn’t really like it. He wonders why girls want to make themselves taste like food.
“So did I,” Blaine replies. “I can’t wait for the next one to come out.”
“Me either!” Francesca beams at him. “Maybe we can go see that one together, too.”
Blaine fidgets. “Maybe,” he says half-heartedly.
The smile on Francesca’s face turns down at the corners slightly. “You don’t want to? I thought we had fun today.”
Blaine doesn’t really know what to say to keep her from throwing something at him, so instead he says, “You ate most of my popcorn.”
“Blaine Anderson, you are the worst boyfriend ever,” Francesca tells him sternly, and Blaine frowns, shrugging as he walks away from her house, leaving her stood on the doorstep. He doesn’t understand how he can be the worst boyfriend ever when three years ago he’d been the best.
”Blaine, you shouldn’t have!” Kurt cries in delight as he opens the envelope in his hands. He pulls out two tickets to the midnight showing of Harry Potter. “Are we really going to do this? I know you don’t like staying up late on a school night.”
“Of course we are,” Blaine says, steeling himself as Kurt turns and begins running towards him. A moment later, he has an armful of Kurt and together they fall backwards onto Blaine’s bed. “I’d do anything to make you happy.”
Kurt just gives a happy sigh as his head comes to rest on Blaine’s chest. He can hear his heart beating below his shirt and he curls his fist softly around the material of Blaine’s t-shirt. “You’re the best boyfriend ever, you know that right?”
Blaine just places an arm behind his head, strokes the outline of Kurt’s face with his free hand, and allows his breathing to fall into sync with Kurt’s.”If you say so.”
Francesca seeks Blaine out the next day in the library, where he’s sitting in a large armchair, reading a book and listening to his mp3 player.
“You left yesterday,” she says, coming to stand in front of him. Blaine tugs out his earphones and looks up at her, uncurling from the ball he’s somehow worked himself into.
“Huh?” he asks.
“You left yesterday,” she repeats, voice harsher this time. “I’m your girlfriend, Blaine. You don’t just leave after we have an argument.”
“Well, you seemed mad,” he replies. He shuts his book, using his forefinger as a bookmark between the pages. “What else was I supposed to do?”
“Fix it?”
Blaine is silent. His music hums in the background, a quiet buzz emanating from his headphones, wound like a worm in his lap.
“Do you not want to fix it?” Francesca asks shrilly. Blaine can see the librarian look over their way and scowl. He remains silent. “I’ll take that as a no,” she concludes, her hands on her hips. Blaine watches as her eyes darken angrily and she reaches forward to pull his book from his fingers, throwing it to the floor before stalking away.
Blaine just sighs, reaching forward to retrieve his book and check it for any damages. He sends the elderly librarian a look of apology and plugs himself back into his own little world where there are no girls.
---
The first time Blaine feels a semblance of attraction to another person is when he watches Titanic for the first time at the age of thirteen, only it’s not Kate Winslet who catches his eye. Something in Blaine’s stomach flips the moment Leonardo DiCaprio makes his first appearance on the screen and he has to put his hands over his belly to quell the pressure he feels building up inside it.
It’s weird. Blaine doesn’t understand what this feeling is. Or rather, he has an inkling, but he doesn’t want to think too hard about it in case his inkling is correct. He waits with baited breath for the drawing scene, the one all his friends have told him to look out for, and when it arrives he sits up, elbows resting on his knees.
Kate Winslet is beautiful, Blaine can admit that much. Her robe drops and his voice catches and he holds his breath and waits and waits… but he feels nothing. The smooth curves of her body are nice, he figures, but they don’t make his stomach flip like Leonardo’s face does. He finds himself noticing the lines on Leonardo’s face as his character draws Kate’s more than he notices Kate’s breasts or the long lines of her legs.
When the car scene arrives, Blaine has to pause the film and slip his hand down the front of his pyjama pants before he can watch the end.
”God, he is so beautiful.” Kurt sighs out his appreciation against Blaine’s cheek, his head resting on his shoulder as they lay together on Kurt’s couch, enjoying the peace of his family out for the day.
“I know, right?” Blaine counters, and it’s bittersweet when he smiles as he remembers the first time the realisation hit him.
“And Kate Winslet is so classy. Even when spread out naked on an ugly green sofa, she’s classy.”
Kurt scoffs (and Blaine isn’t sure if it’s out of jealousy or not) and Blaine just smiles quietly.
Even when they’re both older, Blaine still finds Leonardo DiCaprio hot.
---
Blaine comes to terms with the fact he likes other boys when he moves to high school, and it’s ironic because high school seems to be the most uninviting place on Earth for people like him. He makes friends with a boy called Scott in gym class when all the other boys are running laps and Blaine has feigned a sprained ankle to get out of it. His eyes follow the others, trained on them as they sprint relentlessly around the field.
“I know how you’re feeling,” Scott says, looking up from where he is tying his laces. “It’s hard.”
Blaine’s resolve instantly crumbles. “How did you know?”
“It’s written all over your face. Have you told anyone yet?” Blaine shakes his head. “Then don’t.”
-
“You want to what?” Scott asks incredulously. His locker slams shut and Blaine flinches.
“Go to prom with me,” Blaine says again. “But just as friends. The assholes at the school need showing that two gays can be friends without it being anything more.”
Scott shakes his head sadly, swinging his bag onto his shoulder and heading for the exit. “I don’t think it works that way, Blaine.”
“Then let’s try it,” Blaine decides, and he knows by the look on Scott’s face that they ultimately will. “What have we to lose?”
“They did what?” Kurt asks, curling his fingers into the hem of Blaine’s polo shirt as he has a habit of doing. “Are you serious?”
Blaine nods sadly. “Scott had a broken arm, I just had bruised ribs. And it was all my fault.”
“It was not, Blaine,” Kurt says, his voice stern, and Blaine can tell by the loosening of the grip on his shirt that Kurt is trying to refrain from pointing his finger. His voice becomes gentler then. “They barely did anything to me in comparison.”
“Kurt, come on.”
“No.” Kurt reaches up and kisses Blaine softly on the lips. “Thank you.”
Blaine’s transfer is imminent.
---
Dalton is different to his old school. He’s not spoken to Scott since The Prom Incident, but he’s made new friends here already. Most of them are from The Warblers, and a few are in his Spanish class. The halls echo around his footsteps, the classrooms are way too big, the sofas in the common room too expensive for a school.
But it’s safe. His bruises have just about healed enough that he can wash himself without wincing at every stroke of his cloth, but the memories still flash behind his eyelids whenever he tries to sleep.
The feet collide with his chest time and time again and all he can hear is Scott crying out beside him. The teachers arrive later in his nightmares, but he never gets to see what they do when they get there because he wakes up screaming too quickly.
Kurt’s bed is always nicer than his own. Blaine decided that after the first time he was allowed to use it for a whole night. Kurt’s bed doesn’t have a stray spring that pushes against his shoulder from within the mattress no matter what position he sleeps in. It doesn’t have worn sheets that he needs to get replaced but keeps forgetting about, his pillows aren’t lumpy because he’s too attached to them to get new ones. He doesn’t wake up screaming in this bed.
It also has Kurt, which is a tremendous bonus.
Blaine likes that part the best.
Blaine settles into Dalton properly after about a month. He gets a solo with The Warblers, and then he gets another the week after and he feels great because apparently no one else has managed to do that before. He begins to wear his tie with pride, and suddenly the blazers don’t feel like they’re suffocating him. The work is hard and his grades drop, but that’s alright. Bad grades won’t bruise his ribs.
---
Blaine sees him the first time he goes into the Gap after school with Wes and David. He’s ringing up socks for the customer he’s currently serving and their eyes meet over a rack of half-price jumpers. Blaine buys one just so he can talk to him, and he comes away with an ugly, ill-fitting jumper and a coffee date for tomorrow.
It goes swimmingly. And it isn’t until Blaine is staring at him over his Medium Drip that he realises just how beautiful Jeremiah really is. He tells him, and Jeremiah brushes it off. Blaine does the same.
They meet for coffee again three days later. By now, Blaine has bought another two ugly, ill-fitting jumpers and just for irony’s sake, a pair of socks to match.
Jeremiah doesn’t seem to notice.
”Blaine, why do you have these monstrosities in your wardrobe?” Kurt asks one afternoon, during which they are (read: Kurt is) raiding Blaine’s closet. He pulls out three grey and burgundy woollen jumpers, still with their half-price price tags attached.
“Oh god, I forgot about those,” he says, walking over to them and plucking one out of Kurt’s grip.
“Still waiting for an explanation, Anderson,” Kurt says.
“They’re from The Gap,” Blaine answers, laughing dryly. “Need I say more?”
It turns out Jeremiah had lied when Blaine asked him if he liked music. Jeremiah had said yes, but when Blaine and The Warblers had surprised and serenaded him at work, he’d scowled all the way through the performance and he would have ignored Blaine afterwards had Blaine not stayed behind to catch him when his shift finished.
Blaine gets over it after a week. He couldn’t love someone who doesn’t love music, anyway.
---
Blaine never expected to be playing Spin the Bottle later that night when Kurt invited him to Rachel Berry’s party. He’s heard about this Rachel character - animal sweaters, coloured tights, collared dresses. Spin the Bottle doesn’t usually go hand in hand with a person of that nature.
He never expected to be kissing the host, either, especially not with tongue and for a prolonged amount of time. Turns out, though, Rachel is a fantastic kisser and Blaine just… well, he can’t seem to stop. His hand comes up to hold the back of her neck and he can see the distraught look on Kurt’s face out of the corner of his eye and he can’t help but push it out of his mind because Rachel also tastes pretty nice. Something vaguely strawberry-like. Only then Kurt is clapping awkwardly and he takes that to mean the kiss is over.
“Your face,” Rachel says when she’s crawled back to her seat in the circle, “tastes awesome.”
Blaine grins, because he obviously tastes pretty nice, too.
“As much as I hate to admit this,” Kurt says one evening, pulling his lips away from Blaine’s. Tonight, they’re on Blaine’s bed, Kurt above him, positioned between Blaine’s legs and whilst it’s all more or less completely innocent, the position makes him hotter and more flustered than he ever remembers being. “Rachel Berry was right about something.”
Blaine pulls back when Kurt moves in to continue kissing him. “What?” he asks, perplexed, because it takes a lot for Kurt to admit someone else is right and it takes a landslide for him to admit Rachel Berry is right. “Please explain.”
Kurt smiles against Blaine’s lips, fighting his way back because Blaine can’t escape backwards very far. “Your face does taste awesome,” he says, and Blaine happily accepts the next kiss he’s given.
Kurt hadn’t forgiven him for the Rachel debacle until weeks afterwards. That alone made him feel even more confused about everything.
He eventually comes to the conclusion that alcohol just isn’t for him… and that he simply likes kissing. Kurt seems glad that he’s staying away from booze, but Blaine wonders if there has been another party since the last or if Kurt has just given up inviting him now.
---
“I love you.” The words slip from between his lips and Blaine doesn’t try to stop them when he knows they’re coming.
Kurt looks at him over his coffee cup, his eyes wide and shining under the artificial lighting that plagues the room. “I love you, too,” he says, and Blaine can’t do anything for a minute because he’s too busy trying to process how such a delicate figurine as Kurt could possibly love someone like him.
It’s bizarre and unreal and he wants to say something else, wants to thank Kurt for his love, maybe, but everything his mind comes up with is cheesy and lame and would make Kurt roll his eyes hard enough to strain something vital. So he says nothing else on the subject, and it’s beautiful because this is them and this is what they do. They don’t need to detail their feelings because they’re just there. Blaine wears his heart on Kurt’s designer sleeve and they both know it, and even though it’s taken Blaine a long time to get to this stage, the one where he no longer wakes up screaming and clutching his ribs or flinching whenever he hears the name Scott, he wouldn’t have had it any other way.