Fic: Beauty (2/10)
Title: Beauty (2/10)
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Blaine Anderson was blessed with the perks of being beautiful in a world where people are literally separated into classes based on being "beautiful" or "ugly". Kurt Hummel was not. This is their journey together in throwing off the world's labels, of finding true beauty among a constellation of charades. This is their love story.
Word Count: this chapter, 1,556
A/N: Thank you to everyone who's reading it so far! I really appreciate it.
Chapter 2
“Kurt!”
Kurt turned around to see Sam jogging up to him in the hallways of McKinley High School.
“Dude, wanna hear my ‘Dwayne the Rock Johnson’ impression? Him in his acting roles? I’ve totally got this down.”
“The Rock, huh? Pretty intense stuff, I don’t know if I’ll be able to handle it.”
“It’s easy, all you gotta do is assume a very macho position, subtly emphasize your ginormous arm muslces, and play a very confident and somewhat arrogant character.”
Sam proceeded to straighten, flex his arms, and spread his feet apart. He assumed a mocking posing of the face, as if he were looking towards a camera in the distance.
Kurt was laughing, subconsciously leaning closer to Sam, and Sam was laughing too, completely comfortable around Kurt. There was a time when Kurt had a crush on Sam, and Sam tolerated it, but he never reciprocated feelings. Just toleration. Reciprocated feelings never really happened for him.
Suddenly he felt rough pressure on his arm, and then it was in the air. He whirled around, almost colliding into Azimio as he smirked, despicably smug, at him. He was by his side yelling out to the entire hallway, “And give it up for the homo on fire!”, and then, quick as if he never existed, shoved into a locker and discarded, Azimio walking on disinterestedly. Sam looked on at Azimio disgusted, but made no attempts to pick a losing fight.
“Hey, man, I’m sorry! They’re idiots; you know that.”
“Yeah I know, Sam.” He stayed curled up, his legs drawn to his chest, on the ground by the lockers. “Go on without me, okay? I still have to get some stuff out of my locker.”
“Okay,” Sam said slowly, making only small movements to leave. “Um… see you in glee, okay?”
“Okay.”
Sam walked away, looking back a few times before something like pity finally clouded his eyes, and he left.
Kurt bristled and carefully wiped his long green-grey trench coat, standing up and taking care not to give any indication that lockers were metal and thus painful, and that his back was flesh and thus easily pained. He looked around the hallway, watching the students stream past as if nothing had happened. They supported the people that were doing this to him, usually the comelies who had chosen to stay in public school or the brasher “standards”. It was despicable.
”Who gave them the right to do that?” he thought indignantly. “What Neanderthal made that brilliant decision?”
He supposed he shouldn’t think of “God” like that. Or the higher being up in the skies. The mystical force that ties all things together. The “greater entity”. Whichever phrase floated your boat; they were all the same thing to him. Something was up there, or maybe nothing was up there and this was all purely orderly chaos, but the shots were being called, and his set of shots happened to be tremendously unfortunate.
He had thought that being typecast as ugly at birth was enough to fill his quota of bad luck for life, but apparently he was wrong. He didn’t mind the classification so much: being an unsightly was not that bad if you looked at it the right way. What he minded was his classification within the classification. People in this class were brutal. He was inherently put at the bottom of the stack because of some set of stupid numbers that someone in a place of power had come up with, probably after they had just snorted marijuana or gotten themselves dangerously drunk, because to be in a situation where you would willingly put superficiality above morality and have millions of people stand behind that faulty reasoning… that’s when you knew it was bad. And here he was, a victim of their unattainable standards, being shoved into lockers and jeered at in the halls every day, having to fight past the nasty rumours that were spread about him to simply have a friend, and having to forever assure himself that someone someday would want him for more than just a convenient punching bag for their own frustrations. Maybe someday someone could actually want him, as a partner or a lover or su amor. But that day was a long ways away, and the most he could do for now was hope that the fantastical being in the sky would take pity on him, and that maybe he would get a chance to start living his life.
He hadn’t known it at the time, but a certain slick-haired comely was going to give him that chance.
~~
The first time Kurt Hummel met Blaine Anderson, he hadn’t made much of it. Sure, he had, by some bizarre twist of fate, befriended a comely. An agreeable comely. A different comely. Blaine was mannered where the others were brutal, he was kind where the others were presumptuous, he was carefree where the others always seemed to be so uptight. Caught in the moment, Kurt had been captivated. He could feel his spine relax once they got to talking, he could feel the blush threatening to rosen his pale cheeks, he anticipated all the embarrassingly tell-tale signs that he liked someone bubbling up inside him and blooming on him, body reacting and mind flurrying. But he simply dismissed it once Blaine was out of sight. Out of sight, out of mind, right? It had only been one encounter. He returned home that day, exiling the warmth budding in his chest to the corner of his heart where he expounded reality, and tried his best to look at this practically. It was a hopeless case; he should not try to pursue it. The most he could let himself indulge in were fantasies. That was all.
He went to bed that night and dreamt of Blaine, Blaine’s gorgeous green-brown eyes taking the spotlight.
~~
He awoke to a harsh glare illuminating his room. Rolling out of bed, he walked straight past the source of the glare to the bathroom, first splashing water on his face and taking care of morning hygiene. After feeling content with his breath and styling his hair into his usual high swoop, he walked back into his room, finding the source of the glare to be his phone. Bottle of hairspray in hand, he casually picked it up and almost immediately dropped it.
Blaine Anderson: Hey, Kurt! This is probably way too soon to text your friend that you only just briefly met yesterday, but considering that I’m in adept at following social protocol, all should make sense. Either way, I was wondering, do you like coffee? I go to this coffee place, “The Lima Bean”, all the time before school and I figured you’d like it. Shoot me a text if you want to come! Or just look for me there!
A coffee date with Blaine Anderson was not something Kurt was willing to pass up, no matter how much he had insisted on confining his crush to the precincts of his mind. He smiled to himself, laughing a little bit at how quickly his resolve had unraveled. Kurt had even been to the Lima Bean before, a couple times before with his dad. The coffee there was divine, and the boy he was going to be there with even more so.
Kurt Hummel: Meet ya there!
Twirling his phone in his hand and humming “Sing a Song of Sixpence”, he headed to his closet to properly dress up for the event. He wasn’t sure why that old nursery rhyme had popped into his head at that particular moment, but he felt as if it had a strange sort of relevance.
Sing a song of sixpence,
A pocket full of rye.
Four and twenty blackbirds,
Baked in a pie.
When the pie was opened,
The birds began to sing;
Wasn't that a dainty dish,
To set before the king?
The king was in his counting house,
Counting out his money;
The queen was in the parlour,
Eating bread and honey.
The maid was in the garden,
Hanging out the clothes;
When down came a blackbird
And pecked off her nose.
Kurt felt as if there had to be another happier verse after that, something to alleviate the inevitably sad ending.
~~
He came into the kitchen humming, preparing his breakfast entirely too cheerily for the morning.
“What’s up, kid?” his dad asked, smiling at the sight of his son practically doing pirouettes as he danced around. He stopped pirouetting and turned to face Burt. “One Mr. Kurt Hummel has got himself a date!” he sang.
“This morning?” Burt asked bemusedly.
“Yes, father, and I have prepared a special ensemble for the occasion. You like?”
“You know how I am about fashion,” he responded wearily, as if this were a point he had reiterated thousands of times, laughing to himself.
“Right. Well, I like it. And I hope Blaine’ll like it too.”
“Blaine?”
“Mhmm,” he sang again. “Blaine. We’re going to the Lima Bean this morning!”
“You’re drinking coffee before school? Is this really a date, Kurt?” He raised his eyebrows. “Really?”
“Ah, just let me enjoy this,” he retorted immediately, his tone clearly playful.
“Alright, kiddo, I’ll let you go enjoy your,” Burt made air quotes, “’date’.”
“Thanks; see you later dad! Love you!”
“No problem kid, love you too.”
Kurt skipped all the way out.