Jacobellis v. Ohio Part 1: For Will in Us is Overruled by Fate
Title: Jacobellis v. Ohio Part 1: For Will in Us is Overruled by Fate
Rating: R
Acknowledgement: Glee’s creators built the playground, I’m just playing around until they tell me I have to go home.
Spoilers: This was conceived (and in part written) back during the hiatus. I’m sure some things wormed their way in for characterization purposes because I can’t compartmentalize, but no mention is made of anything concrete.
Warnings: As a whole, this one is going to be a bit of a bumpy ride folks, strap yourselves in. This part, however, is fairly mild.
Summary: Kurt really wants to be in love with Blaine, but he’s just not.
Author’s Note: This is the sequel to Lesser Evils. You could probably muddle through this without having read that, but I suggest at least glancing at it -- it’s short, I promise. As a side note, after Lesser Evils I swore I’d never write in the present tense again (or in whatever weird hybrid that was) because it caused me no end of trouble. Then I did it anyway. I’m very bad at standing by my convictions.
It lies not in our power to love or hate,
For will in us is overruled by fate.
When two are stripped, long ere the course begin,
We wish that one should love, the other win;
And one especially do we affect
Of two gold ingots, like in each respect:
The reason no man knows; let it suffice
What we behold is censured by our eyes.
Where both deliberate, the love is slight:
Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?
from “Hero and Leander” -- Christopher Marlowe
When he left Dalton, Kurt had pretty much expected to be completely stupid for Blaine within the month. Then they’d spent that month not speaking and he worried that he’d be doomed to spend his life half in love with a boy he would never see again. After that day in the coffee shop he’d optimistically given himself until the end of the summer before he was pining and perfecting his sigh and constructing elaborate plans that ended with them making out in the rain. He couldn’t see how it could end any other way because Blaine is kind of perfect, and kind of everything he’s ever wanted when he constructed A Boyfriend in his head (okay, maybe not everything because he’s pretty sure that tall had been in there at some point and easygoing, but fantasies can be revised). How could he possibly not be in love with Blaine? To be honest, he’d been rather looking forward to it.
Two years ago, when he’d been in love with Finn, he’d relished how normal it made him feel. He tried to explain that to Mercedes once, but she’d laughed and asked how making dewy eyes at a boy could possibly make him fee normal. She’d meant it to be funny, but he stopped trying to explain it to her after that.
He wonders sometimes how things would have gone if he’d tried to explain it to Rachel. She’s insufferable, but right up until the moment he met Blaine, Rachel had been the only person he’d ever known who had any frame of reference for what it was like to be gay in Ohio. She confessed to him once, in one of their rare moments of camaraderie, that as a child she hadn’t understood why her fathers wouldn’t let her answer the phone. When she was six and her parents were both out in the garden she’d been so proud to grab the phone off the cradle and show them that she was too old enough. When they came in the phone was humming a dial tone, but she was still shouting into it and sobbing.
Rachel might have understood if he’d told her that obsessing over someone he liked was probably one of the most normal teenage experiences he would ever have, that when he was thinking about Finn he wasn’t thinking about dumpster tosses or anonymous phone calls or homophobic jocks. She might have understood, she certainly wouldn’t have laughed, but they had still been rivals then and he had been horrible to her and she’d been horrible right back and at the time it hadn’t even crossed his mind to talk to her.
Kurt really wants to be in love with Blaine, he’s tried really hard to make himself feel that fluttering, gnawing, slightly sick to his stomach sensation he used to feel whenever he got near Finn, but summer has already ended and they are three weeks into the fall term and his stomach remains stubbornly still.
As he drives to one of their twice weekly meetings (Wednesday nights in Bellefontaine for coffee, Saturday morning brunch in either Lima or Westerville) he tries to remind himself of all the reasons he should be in love with Blaine. Kurt thinks about Blaine’s voice, pitched low and soft around the edges until he gets excited when it jumps up an octave. He thinks about how Blaine doesn’t even think twice about flirting with Kurt in front of an auditorium full of people (because by now Kurt is pretty sure that’s what he’d been doing) and while he’s at it, Kurt thinks about how Blaine flirts in song which is pretty much Kurt’s biggest dream ever. He thinks about how Blaine dresses terribly but smiles when Kurt throws up his hands in disgust and rifles through Blaine’s closet to find something that doesn’t make him look like a homeless clown. Kurt thinks about all these things for the entire hour it takes to drive from Lima to Bellefontaine, but when he arrives at the coffee shop, he’s still staunchly not in love with Blaine.
Blaine is already there, sitting at a table in front of the window with two cups of coffee. He’s engrossed in a textbook when Kurt arrives and when he glances up and smiles Kurt has to stop a moment to catch his breath. Kurt might not be in love with him, but Blaine is still gorgeous, alright?
“Hey” Blaine closes the textbook -- European History -- and slides one of the cups across the table, “I got your non-fat, no-whip thing.”
Blaine likes to pretend that he can’t remember what Kurt’s drink is (non-fat caffé mocha hold the whip thank you very much) but in the weeks they’ve been meeting for coffee, he’s never once got it wrong. It’s maybe a little strange, but this -- smirking while Blaine so obviously lies about forgetting Kurt’s coffee order -- is easily his favorite part of their Wednesday evenings. It’s the only moment that Blaine will drop the Dalton stiffness (because Dalton Blaine would never even pretend to forget and he certainly would never lie about it, not even badly). These three seconds are the closest they’ve come to the easiness they used to have since Kurt left Dalton.
There’s a distance between them now, and a stiffness, and Kurt wonders if it’s his fault, if Blaine is still angry that Kurt transferred back to McKinley, but that seems like a long time to hold a grudge, especially when Blaine is so clearly (an so annoyingly) making an effort to be the model of etiquette. No, Kurt is pretty sure that this distance, this awkward thing they have going on is Blaine’s fault and he’s just as sure that it goes a long way in explaining why he’s finding it so hard to fall in love.
“How was your day?” It’s always the first thing Blaine asks, often before Kurt has even had a chance to sit down. Honestly, Kurt is kind of giddy at the concern, but there’s a part of him that wants to tell Blaine to knock it off because when he looks at him like that -- soft, but intent, concerned, the same way he did the first time they had coffee together -- it’s so much harder to pretend that things are good.
Sometimes, when he’s forced to try and cobble together a coherent outfit after the football team manages to drench all three of his backup ensembles before lunch, he kind of misses his Dalton blazer. Sometimes, when Finn, and Puck, and Sam, and Mike, and Artie all stop justshort of touching him, like Gay or Social Pariah are particularly catching, he misses the easy way the Warblers would bump shoulders with him. Sometimes, when Mercedes asks if he might just look for things to be offended by because he thinks indignant is a good look for him, he misses how effortlessly Blaine seems to understand him. Sometimes he misses Dalton, but he can’t ever tell Blaine that. Blaine is too well-mannered to actually come out and say “I told you so” but he would sigh a little and give a smile that’s meant look sympathetic, but what it really means is poor, stupid child.
Kurt isn’t sure he could take it, so instead he gives Blaine the same sort of edited story he’s been giving his father. Enough truth that he can’t be caught in a lie, not so watered-down that it will be unbelievable, but told casually and without detail so that it’s clear that there is nothing to worry about. With Blaine, Kurt adds comments about how nice it is to be part of a glee club that isn’t afraid of a little sparkle, how much he enjoys being able to have style again, how much freer he feels at McKinley.
It’s stupid, because Blaine is probably the only person Kurt could comfortably talk to, it’s maybe a little bit cruel, knowing how Blaine feels about Dalton, but Kurt can’t help it. He can’t help feeling that if he convinces Blaine that this was the right decision, maybe he’ll be able to believe it himself.
Of course, the trouble is Blaine doesn’t believe him. Kurt doesn’t know anyone else who so stubbornly refuses to be fobbed off. Finn can be deterred if he’s bitchy enough, Mercedes will drop it if he’s supercilious enough, his father will back off if he’s flippant enough, but Blaine just tilts his head, studies Kurt’s face for a moment, and cuts right through whichever smoke screen Kurt’s trying to throw up straight to all of the things he isn’t saying.
“Do you still have your protection detail in the hallway?”
Kurt could kill Finn for letting that slip to Blaine. His first days back at McKinley New Directions had taken it upon themselves to be his body guards, surrounding him in the halls as if standing straight enough and glaring hard enough would force the world to reshape itself into something kind and decent and fair -- as if he hadn’t been trying that for years. Kurt can’t really manage to be angry about it, even if it is a little humiliating. Their determination is touching, like Blaine’s concern, but they’re disaster tourists; turning up to gawk at the ruins and pity the natives before they have to return to their sheltered little lives where they forget everything but how beautiful the sunset was with no buildings to get in the way.
Okay, so maybe he can manage a little anger about it.
Still, it had worked -- mostly -- at first. No one was going to throw a slushie in his face or slam him into a locker when Finn, Puck, Mike, Santana, and Mercedes were all glowering around him, but it didn’t last forever. Santana got bored eventually, Mike got busy, Puck got distracted. Finn and Mercedes have stuck around, but they are significantly less intimidating alone and even they have their own lives to live.
“They’ve been able to back off a little” he says instead of admitting any of that, “with enough knuckle-cracking from Puck and snarling from Santana, even the jocks at McKinley will get the point eventually.” It isn’t exactly a lie, or at least not much of one, but it makes him feel a little sick all the same. For no reason Kurt can fathom, he’s grown significantly less comfortable lying to Blaine. He’s about three seconds from breaking and telling Blaine about how abandoned he feels now that he’s no one’s cause of the moment, about how some of the jocks seem determined to make up for all the time they lost last year, all the opportunities they missed to ridicule him. He almost tells Blaine about the worst of it, the notes slipped into his locker and the --
His phone rings just as he’s opening his mouth the vomit everything out.
Come bring me your softness....
Kurt can feel all of the blood rush out of his head and it’s only sheer force of will that prevents him from passing out in the middle of the coffee shop. He scrabbles at his bag to pull out his phone, pressing “ignore” without even looking at the message and shoves the phone back into the bottom of his bag so quickly that he wonders if maybe he and Blaine can pretend it never happened. When he turns back to Blaine the other boy makes no effort to mask his worry. For once Kurt is grateful for the stiff manners that prevent Blaine from prying too deeply.
“Do you need to take that?”
It’s clearly not the question Blaine wants to be asking, but Kurt is fairly certain it’s the only one he will.
“No,” Kurt concentrates on wiping up an imaginary spill so that he doesn’t have to focus on Blaine, “It’s just Finn, he and whichever girlfriend he’s on this week are fighting about something stupid and he’s decided since I’m basically a girl anyway that I have some secret insight into the workings of the female mind. He can figure out what stupid thing he did this time on his own, I can’t deal with it anymore, I’m out.” Kurt can tell his hands are trembling and he tries to adjust his cuffs to cover it.
Blaine’s face barely changes, it’s still soft and concerned, but it seems to have frozen there. Although his posture is already impeccable, his shoulders straighten further, and tighten, he leans back in his chair and pulls his hands from the table to hold them stiffly in his lap.
Kurt can’t help regretting how open he’d been with Blaine last year, how easy he’s made it for Blaine to tell when he’s lying. He can’t stop the echo of his own words in his head.
I can’t deal with it anymore, I’m out.
If he stays there any longer, Kurt is certain he’ll start crying or confessing and either way Blaine will know just how pathetic he is and he can’t take that. He tries to be casual as he gathers his things and offers his excuses, but Blaine clearly doesn’t buy it. In that moment, more than anything, Kurt wants to be in love with Blaine because Blaine understands him so well, and maybe he can’t help, and maybe he gives terrible advice, but Blaine would listen and care and understand and maybe if Kurt loved him he’d be able to bring himself to tell Blaine; but he can’t bring himself to love Blaine, and he can’t bring himself to tell him.
Kurt pulls out his phone when he reaches his car. It’s stupid because it’s mostly morbid curiosity, but Kurt always reads the messages. A part of him likes to think that it’s a little bit smart too, likes to think that this way he’ll know if it ever gets serious, likes to think that if it does he’ll tell someone. He isn’t certain it’s true, but it’s a comforting thought either way.
There is a single message from a number that by now he recognizes but can’t match to a name.
Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.
Kurt slips his phone back into his bag and drives back to Lima.
Part 2
Rating: R
Acknowledgement: Glee’s creators built the playground, I’m just playing around until they tell me I have to go home.
Spoilers: This was conceived (and in part written) back during the hiatus. I’m sure some things wormed their way in for characterization purposes because I can’t compartmentalize, but no mention is made of anything concrete.
Warnings: As a whole, this one is going to be a bit of a bumpy ride folks, strap yourselves in. This part, however, is fairly mild.
Summary: Kurt really wants to be in love with Blaine, but he’s just not.
Author’s Note: This is the sequel to Lesser Evils. You could probably muddle through this without having read that, but I suggest at least glancing at it -- it’s short, I promise. As a side note, after Lesser Evils I swore I’d never write in the present tense again (or in whatever weird hybrid that was) because it caused me no end of trouble. Then I did it anyway. I’m very bad at standing by my convictions.
It lies not in our power to love or hate,
For will in us is overruled by fate.
When two are stripped, long ere the course begin,
We wish that one should love, the other win;
And one especially do we affect
Of two gold ingots, like in each respect:
The reason no man knows; let it suffice
What we behold is censured by our eyes.
Where both deliberate, the love is slight:
Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?
from “Hero and Leander” -- Christopher Marlowe
When he left Dalton, Kurt had pretty much expected to be completely stupid for Blaine within the month. Then they’d spent that month not speaking and he worried that he’d be doomed to spend his life half in love with a boy he would never see again. After that day in the coffee shop he’d optimistically given himself until the end of the summer before he was pining and perfecting his sigh and constructing elaborate plans that ended with them making out in the rain. He couldn’t see how it could end any other way because Blaine is kind of perfect, and kind of everything he’s ever wanted when he constructed A Boyfriend in his head (okay, maybe not everything because he’s pretty sure that tall had been in there at some point and easygoing, but fantasies can be revised). How could he possibly not be in love with Blaine? To be honest, he’d been rather looking forward to it.
Two years ago, when he’d been in love with Finn, he’d relished how normal it made him feel. He tried to explain that to Mercedes once, but she’d laughed and asked how making dewy eyes at a boy could possibly make him fee normal. She’d meant it to be funny, but he stopped trying to explain it to her after that.
He wonders sometimes how things would have gone if he’d tried to explain it to Rachel. She’s insufferable, but right up until the moment he met Blaine, Rachel had been the only person he’d ever known who had any frame of reference for what it was like to be gay in Ohio. She confessed to him once, in one of their rare moments of camaraderie, that as a child she hadn’t understood why her fathers wouldn’t let her answer the phone. When she was six and her parents were both out in the garden she’d been so proud to grab the phone off the cradle and show them that she was too old enough. When they came in the phone was humming a dial tone, but she was still shouting into it and sobbing.
Rachel might have understood if he’d told her that obsessing over someone he liked was probably one of the most normal teenage experiences he would ever have, that when he was thinking about Finn he wasn’t thinking about dumpster tosses or anonymous phone calls or homophobic jocks. She might have understood, she certainly wouldn’t have laughed, but they had still been rivals then and he had been horrible to her and she’d been horrible right back and at the time it hadn’t even crossed his mind to talk to her.
Kurt really wants to be in love with Blaine, he’s tried really hard to make himself feel that fluttering, gnawing, slightly sick to his stomach sensation he used to feel whenever he got near Finn, but summer has already ended and they are three weeks into the fall term and his stomach remains stubbornly still.
As he drives to one of their twice weekly meetings (Wednesday nights in Bellefontaine for coffee, Saturday morning brunch in either Lima or Westerville) he tries to remind himself of all the reasons he should be in love with Blaine. Kurt thinks about Blaine’s voice, pitched low and soft around the edges until he gets excited when it jumps up an octave. He thinks about how Blaine doesn’t even think twice about flirting with Kurt in front of an auditorium full of people (because by now Kurt is pretty sure that’s what he’d been doing) and while he’s at it, Kurt thinks about how Blaine flirts in song which is pretty much Kurt’s biggest dream ever. He thinks about how Blaine dresses terribly but smiles when Kurt throws up his hands in disgust and rifles through Blaine’s closet to find something that doesn’t make him look like a homeless clown. Kurt thinks about all these things for the entire hour it takes to drive from Lima to Bellefontaine, but when he arrives at the coffee shop, he’s still staunchly not in love with Blaine.
Blaine is already there, sitting at a table in front of the window with two cups of coffee. He’s engrossed in a textbook when Kurt arrives and when he glances up and smiles Kurt has to stop a moment to catch his breath. Kurt might not be in love with him, but Blaine is still gorgeous, alright?
“Hey” Blaine closes the textbook -- European History -- and slides one of the cups across the table, “I got your non-fat, no-whip thing.”
Blaine likes to pretend that he can’t remember what Kurt’s drink is (non-fat caffé mocha hold the whip thank you very much) but in the weeks they’ve been meeting for coffee, he’s never once got it wrong. It’s maybe a little strange, but this -- smirking while Blaine so obviously lies about forgetting Kurt’s coffee order -- is easily his favorite part of their Wednesday evenings. It’s the only moment that Blaine will drop the Dalton stiffness (because Dalton Blaine would never even pretend to forget and he certainly would never lie about it, not even badly). These three seconds are the closest they’ve come to the easiness they used to have since Kurt left Dalton.
There’s a distance between them now, and a stiffness, and Kurt wonders if it’s his fault, if Blaine is still angry that Kurt transferred back to McKinley, but that seems like a long time to hold a grudge, especially when Blaine is so clearly (an so annoyingly) making an effort to be the model of etiquette. No, Kurt is pretty sure that this distance, this awkward thing they have going on is Blaine’s fault and he’s just as sure that it goes a long way in explaining why he’s finding it so hard to fall in love.
“How was your day?” It’s always the first thing Blaine asks, often before Kurt has even had a chance to sit down. Honestly, Kurt is kind of giddy at the concern, but there’s a part of him that wants to tell Blaine to knock it off because when he looks at him like that -- soft, but intent, concerned, the same way he did the first time they had coffee together -- it’s so much harder to pretend that things are good.
Sometimes, when he’s forced to try and cobble together a coherent outfit after the football team manages to drench all three of his backup ensembles before lunch, he kind of misses his Dalton blazer. Sometimes, when Finn, and Puck, and Sam, and Mike, and Artie all stop justshort of touching him, like Gay or Social Pariah are particularly catching, he misses the easy way the Warblers would bump shoulders with him. Sometimes, when Mercedes asks if he might just look for things to be offended by because he thinks indignant is a good look for him, he misses how effortlessly Blaine seems to understand him. Sometimes he misses Dalton, but he can’t ever tell Blaine that. Blaine is too well-mannered to actually come out and say “I told you so” but he would sigh a little and give a smile that’s meant look sympathetic, but what it really means is poor, stupid child.
Kurt isn’t sure he could take it, so instead he gives Blaine the same sort of edited story he’s been giving his father. Enough truth that he can’t be caught in a lie, not so watered-down that it will be unbelievable, but told casually and without detail so that it’s clear that there is nothing to worry about. With Blaine, Kurt adds comments about how nice it is to be part of a glee club that isn’t afraid of a little sparkle, how much he enjoys being able to have style again, how much freer he feels at McKinley.
It’s stupid, because Blaine is probably the only person Kurt could comfortably talk to, it’s maybe a little bit cruel, knowing how Blaine feels about Dalton, but Kurt can’t help it. He can’t help feeling that if he convinces Blaine that this was the right decision, maybe he’ll be able to believe it himself.
Of course, the trouble is Blaine doesn’t believe him. Kurt doesn’t know anyone else who so stubbornly refuses to be fobbed off. Finn can be deterred if he’s bitchy enough, Mercedes will drop it if he’s supercilious enough, his father will back off if he’s flippant enough, but Blaine just tilts his head, studies Kurt’s face for a moment, and cuts right through whichever smoke screen Kurt’s trying to throw up straight to all of the things he isn’t saying.
“Do you still have your protection detail in the hallway?”
Kurt could kill Finn for letting that slip to Blaine. His first days back at McKinley New Directions had taken it upon themselves to be his body guards, surrounding him in the halls as if standing straight enough and glaring hard enough would force the world to reshape itself into something kind and decent and fair -- as if he hadn’t been trying that for years. Kurt can’t really manage to be angry about it, even if it is a little humiliating. Their determination is touching, like Blaine’s concern, but they’re disaster tourists; turning up to gawk at the ruins and pity the natives before they have to return to their sheltered little lives where they forget everything but how beautiful the sunset was with no buildings to get in the way.
Okay, so maybe he can manage a little anger about it.
Still, it had worked -- mostly -- at first. No one was going to throw a slushie in his face or slam him into a locker when Finn, Puck, Mike, Santana, and Mercedes were all glowering around him, but it didn’t last forever. Santana got bored eventually, Mike got busy, Puck got distracted. Finn and Mercedes have stuck around, but they are significantly less intimidating alone and even they have their own lives to live.
“They’ve been able to back off a little” he says instead of admitting any of that, “with enough knuckle-cracking from Puck and snarling from Santana, even the jocks at McKinley will get the point eventually.” It isn’t exactly a lie, or at least not much of one, but it makes him feel a little sick all the same. For no reason Kurt can fathom, he’s grown significantly less comfortable lying to Blaine. He’s about three seconds from breaking and telling Blaine about how abandoned he feels now that he’s no one’s cause of the moment, about how some of the jocks seem determined to make up for all the time they lost last year, all the opportunities they missed to ridicule him. He almost tells Blaine about the worst of it, the notes slipped into his locker and the --
His phone rings just as he’s opening his mouth the vomit everything out.
Come bring me your softness....
Kurt can feel all of the blood rush out of his head and it’s only sheer force of will that prevents him from passing out in the middle of the coffee shop. He scrabbles at his bag to pull out his phone, pressing “ignore” without even looking at the message and shoves the phone back into the bottom of his bag so quickly that he wonders if maybe he and Blaine can pretend it never happened. When he turns back to Blaine the other boy makes no effort to mask his worry. For once Kurt is grateful for the stiff manners that prevent Blaine from prying too deeply.
“Do you need to take that?”
It’s clearly not the question Blaine wants to be asking, but Kurt is fairly certain it’s the only one he will.
“No,” Kurt concentrates on wiping up an imaginary spill so that he doesn’t have to focus on Blaine, “It’s just Finn, he and whichever girlfriend he’s on this week are fighting about something stupid and he’s decided since I’m basically a girl anyway that I have some secret insight into the workings of the female mind. He can figure out what stupid thing he did this time on his own, I can’t deal with it anymore, I’m out.” Kurt can tell his hands are trembling and he tries to adjust his cuffs to cover it.
Blaine’s face barely changes, it’s still soft and concerned, but it seems to have frozen there. Although his posture is already impeccable, his shoulders straighten further, and tighten, he leans back in his chair and pulls his hands from the table to hold them stiffly in his lap.
Kurt can’t help regretting how open he’d been with Blaine last year, how easy he’s made it for Blaine to tell when he’s lying. He can’t stop the echo of his own words in his head.
I can’t deal with it anymore, I’m out.
If he stays there any longer, Kurt is certain he’ll start crying or confessing and either way Blaine will know just how pathetic he is and he can’t take that. He tries to be casual as he gathers his things and offers his excuses, but Blaine clearly doesn’t buy it. In that moment, more than anything, Kurt wants to be in love with Blaine because Blaine understands him so well, and maybe he can’t help, and maybe he gives terrible advice, but Blaine would listen and care and understand and maybe if Kurt loved him he’d be able to bring himself to tell Blaine; but he can’t bring himself to love Blaine, and he can’t bring himself to tell him.
Kurt pulls out his phone when he reaches his car. It’s stupid because it’s mostly morbid curiosity, but Kurt always reads the messages. A part of him likes to think that it’s a little bit smart too, likes to think that this way he’ll know if it ever gets serious, likes to think that if it does he’ll tell someone. He isn’t certain it’s true, but it’s a comforting thought either way.
There is a single message from a number that by now he recognizes but can’t match to a name.
Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.
Kurt slips his phone back into his bag and drives back to Lima.
Part 2