Step by Step (fic) - Part 1
Characters: Kurt/Blaine, Unique
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: 4.06 "Glease"
Word Count: ~12,500
Warnings: depression/negative self-talk, living with other people's alcoholism
Summary: 4.06 reaction fic. Blaine learns that it's possible to mend a broken heart - but it takes a lot of work. Or, "the one where Blaine goes to Alateen." Hurt/comfort with a big dash of Klaine endgame schmoop.
Also on tumblr.
Author’s Notes: Thanks to the-multicorn for being really sweet at the same time as asking the hard questions and keeping me from getting too lazy, topunkkitten2113for being a hardnose with a soft heart, tolavender_love00for crying at the right times, and to countess7 for reassuring me that this story was not esoteric. Any errors are mine.
Disclaimers/Credits: I don’t own Glee, I don’t make any money writing this stuff, and I am not a spokesperson for any 12-step program. Title from the folk/union song Step by Step.
***
Step by Step
***
It's Blaine's fourth time meeting with Ms. Pillsbury, and even though she listens to him - and that feels really, really nice, like lying in a sunny window seat after coming in from the cold on a winter day - he's not ready to tell her that the reason that Kurt left was because Blaine cheated, or that he feels so lonely sometimes he's not sure how he keeps breathing.
And nothing is getting better. Kurt's still not talking to him, and probably never will, and since that's really the only thing that matters to Blaine - well, he's stuck, isn't he?
"Blaine," Ms. Pillsbury says twenty minutes into the meeting, during one of those lulls that happens every time Blaine has to stop and blow his nose. "I want to continue having these visits with you, but I think you need more help to get through this than I can give you. What would you think about seeing a psychologist?"
She slips a pamphlet across her desk: Getting My Head Shrunk Hurt a Lot Less Than I Expected.
Blaine wipes his nose. "I've thought about it."
"Is it something you'd feel comfortable talking to your parents about?"
"No."
"Can I ask why?"
Blaine leans over to drop the folded Kleenex in the trashcan next to Ms. Pillsbury's desk, then helps himself to the hand sanitizer next to the Kleenex box. "Um …" His stomach churns a little at the thought of explaining this to Ms. Pillsbury. He's never even told Kurt about this. But she's looking at him with those big, innocent doe eyes and she's so soft and sweet and she doesn't send him out of her office to wash his hands every time he blows his nose even though she has OCD and if that's not sympathy, he doesn't know what is. So he tries.
"I don't like to worry my parents." It feels a little like the room is spinning and Blaine wonders for a moment if he's going to throw up.
"Blaine, you're not breathing. Take a breath, okay? And then take as much time as you need to tell me."
Blaine nods and inhales, the air rushing into his lungs. He pushes it out, pulls it back in, pushes it out again - just keeps breathing until his stomach settles and the room stops moving.
"Okay," he says when he's as ready as he'll ever be. He pulls a couple Kleenexes out of the box just so he can twist them in his hands as he talks. "Just … my mom. She used to drink a lot - I mean, she's not an alcoholic like those people on Intervention. She didn't hit me or drive drunk or anything - and she's been mostly sober since I got back from Dalton, but I just worry - if I stress her out, you know? Maybe she'll start drinking again? But it's not like - I mean, it's not that bad when she drinks, anyway, she's just mostly asleep all the time and just not there and sometimes she says stupid things but mostly it's just embarrassing and - yeah."
"Oh," Ms. Pillsbury says. "Well, I have a pamphlet for that, too." She reaches into a drawer and sets a leaflet on her desk. It's the same size as her other pamphlets, but instead of being a trifold, it's just a single sheet of paper. And there's no funny title on it - just the words Has Your Life Been Affected by Someone Else's Drinking? Alateen Is for You in large type at the top, followed by 20 questions in tiny red print. "Number six," she says, tapping at the leaflet.
Blaine silently reads the sixth question in the list: Are you afraid to upset someone for fear it will set off a drinking bout?
He hears Ms. Pillsbury's voice: "Have you heard of Alateen before?"
Blaine shakes his head. "No."
"Okay. Well, Alateen is a group for kids who are affected by someone else's drinking. It doesn't cost anything, so you don't have to tell your parents you're going unless you want to, and it's anonymous, so you don't have to worry about anyone finding out that you were there. Kids who've gone through some of the same stuff you're going through get support there and learn how to work through problems in their lives."
Blaine shrugs. "But … I haven't seen my mom drunk since the Fourth of July. The only problem in my life is that Kurt's gone."
Ms. Pillsbury smiles sympathetically and nods. "I get that. But sometimes, when kids are raised with a parent who drinks a lot or used to drink a lot, they get low self-esteem and don't learn the healthiest ways of relating to other people, and that can affect their other relationships, too. Alateen can help with that." She pulls another sheet of paper out of her drawer. "There are a couple of Alateen meetings here in Lima. Here are the times and places. Do you think you could check one out before we meet again next week?"
Blaine looks at the paper. There's one on Saturday mornings, which he usually spends sitting in bed looking through his scrapbook of Kurt pictures and crying. He supposes he could move the crying to Saturday afternoon.
"Okay." he says. "If you think it's a good idea."
***
Step 1: We admitted we were powerless over alcohol-that our lives had become unmanageable.
They are three minutes into the meeting. So far, they've just been sitting around a table taking turns reading stuff off of sheets of paper. The girl to his left is reading, "'Alateen is a fellowship of teenage relatives and friends of alcoholics who share their experience, strength, and hope in order to solve their common problems. We believe alcoholism is a family illness and that changed attitudes can aid recovery.'"
Blaine has already forgotten her name, even though she said it less than a minute ago, right before she started reading. She looks kind of like Marley, but with straw-red hair. Blaine doesn't recognize her from McKinley; he doesn't recognize anyone of the ten or so kids seated around the table, and none of them have shown any sign of recognizing him. It's kind of a relief.
Blaine realizes he's not paying attention to what the girl is reading. He tries to refocus.
"'Alateen has but one purpose: to help other teenagers of alcoholics," she continues. "We do this by practicing the Twelve Steps, by welcoming and giving comfort to other teenagers of alcoholics, and by giving understanding and encouragement to the alcoholic.'"
"Thanks, April," says one of the two adults in the room. Blaine thinks the guy's name is Joe, but he wasn't really paying attention. Blaine has a hard time paying attention to much of anything lately; he's too tired and queasy most of the time for his brain to function properly. It's like someone removed it in his sleep the night after Kurt left for New York and replaced it with cotton batting.
Blaine hears the other adult - was it Susan? - say something, too, but he doesn't catch what it is, and then the straw-haired girl is nudging Blaine's elbow and holding out a piece of laminated paper to him. She's pointing to the line at the top.
Everyone's looking at him expectantly. "Blaine, would you read the first step?" the adult woman says. It occurs to him that she's repeating herself. He kind of wants to slap his own face and tell himself Snap out of your daze; people are talking to you - pay attention!
He doesn't do that, though. Instead, he takes the paper from April - or was it Amber? - and reads out the first step, "We admitted we were powerless over alcohol - that our lives had become unmanageable." The kid to his left reaches for the paper and mumbles Step Two, but Blaine doesn't hear it. He feels like the word unmanageable punched him in the gut. He leans forward to grab a Kleenex out of the box at the center of the table.
The straw-haired girl pats Blaine's arm sympathetically as the rest of the kids continue reading the Twelve Steps. Blaine doesn't hear any of it. He's still thinking about the word unmanageable and his mind's eye is darting from Eli's jacket, to Kurt's face in Central Park right before Blaine said that awful thing, to Kurt in the hallway of McKinley saying I don't trust you anymore. His stomach is churning the way it did after Sadie Hawkins when Mitch Gooding kicked him in it, and his skin is cold and clammy, and for the millionth time in the last month, he just wants to evaporate - to literally become the nothing that Kurt now sees him as.
Blaine has a hard time paying attention for any length during the rest of the meeting. He's too busy seeing Kurt's face and hearing his voice and his anger, feeling Kurt's disappointment in the marrow of his bones. But he catches a few things, here and there.
A kid in a Buckeyes cap who looks kind of like an Arabic version of Warbler Thad talks about how, before Alateen, he used to think that being happy meant keeping other people happy without thinking about your own feelings.
Of course that's what being happy means, Blaine thinks, but he doesn't interrupt.
The kid goes on. He talks about how he always tried to make sure that his parents were happy so that they wouldn't drink, and how this turned into trying to keep his teachers and his friends and his teammates and his girlfriend happy, and he wouldn't pay attention to how he felt himself until, out of the blue, he'd get really angry or sad suddenly and do something really, really stupid that hurt someone else or himself, like get drunk and make out with his girlfriend's best friend. And then no one was happy - not his parents and not his girlfriend and not himself.
Blaine tries not to pay attention to how eerily similar the story is to his own, but it keeps coming back to him at his loneliest moments throughout the week, along with the thought: "There's someone else in Lima who knows how I feel."
When he meets with Ms. Pillsbury on Thursday, she asks him if he checked out Alateen.
"Yes," he says.
"And how was it?" she says.
"It's hard to explain."
"Do you think you'll go back?"
Oddly enough, for someone who likes to plan as much as Blaine Anderson does, he hasn't given much thought to that question until this moment. He lets the answer come out of him before he can give it any thought. "Yeah," he says. "I think I will."
***
Step 2: Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
Two weeks later, Blaine goes to an ice cream shop after the meeting with April, the straw-haired girl. He turned her invitation down at first with an "I bat for the other team," which only made her chuckle, because as it turns out, she bats for the other team, too.
"So … I have to believe in God in order to do these Twelve Steps?" Blaine says, biting delicately into his scoop of vanilla.
"No." April shakes her head. "I mean, we use the term 'god' a lot, but it just means a higher power. Like, something more powerful than you or your parent's alcoholism. Something that you can turn to for help."
The image of Kurt on the staircase at Dalton, laced in black leather and looking down at Blaine with sweet-shy confidence, pops uninvited into Blaine's brain. "Oh," he says. "I used to have one."
"But not anymore?" April says, swirling her spoon through the caramel sauce on her banana split.
Blaine looks down and shakes his head. "No," he says. "He broke up with me."
"Oh, sweetie." April sighs and reaches across the table for his hand. "Well, my old higher power broke up with me, too, so I had to find a new one."
Blaine looks up. "I don't think I want to."
April squeezes his hand. "You don't have to shut him out of your life. But even if you were still dating - even if you get back together - it's not good to have a person as your higher power. It puts a lot of pressure on them, you know? And it opens you up to a lot of disappointment."
"So what's your higher power now?"
April lets go of Blaine's hand and lifts a spoonful of ice cream to her mouth. "A higher power is a very individual thing," she says, rolling the ice cream over her tongue as she speaks. It's both disgusting and endearing - not heart-flutteringly endearing like when Kurt used to talk with his mouth full, but endearing the way a kitten can be.
"You don't have to tell me if you don't want," Blaine says.
"No, I want to." April swallows. "I just wanted to warn you, because it's not, like, God or love or Buddha or world peace or anything like that. And what my higher power is now - well, it might change later."
"Okay. I'm intrigued now. What is it?"
"Well, when I first got into Alateen, it was the feeling I got when I'd go downhill skiing. But then I crashed into a tree downhill skiing and broke my leg, so that one went out the window. And I was feeling really sorry for myself because I had to stay home from school for a while and all I could do was lie in bed and play on the computer and read, but it turned out okay, because that's how I found my current higher power. You know the book Little Women?"
Blaine nods. "I've heard of it, but I haven't read it."
"Well, it's a good book, and I always feel really good about life whenever I read it - even during the sad parts. Like, they're a family and they love each other and they take care of each other and they grow up and they start new families and even when they're alone, they feel … connected. And I feel connected to them, and to … humanity, I guess. It's like, there's a place for all of us, you know?"
"So Little Women is your higher power?"
"Not Little Women, exactly. More like, the feeling I get when I read Little Women."
"Huh," Blaine says. "A feeling can be your higher power?"
"A head of lettuce can be your higher power."
Blaine chuckles.
April shakes her straw at him. "I am totally not kidding about that. My uncle is in AA and he told me his first higher power was the lettuce in his fridge because it didn't worry, it didn't hate itself, and it never got drunk."
"I don't think I want my higher power to be a head of lettuce."
"Well, what makes you happy?"
Blaine frowns. "Not much, lately."
"Well, what used to make you happy? Or connected?" She gives him a meaningful look. "And don't tell me your boyfriend."
"Singing, I guess."
"Maybe that's your higher power."
Blaine shakes his head. "But singing doesn't always make me feel connected."
"So the times it makes you feel connected, why is that?" She slurps the last of her tea. "Or do you want to reconsider taking on the head of lettuce as your higher power?"
"I don't know. It's hard to explain. But I guess when I can make the feelings in the song real, to me or to the audience - when I do that, it becomes art."
"So maybe your new higher power is art."
Blaine smiles. It's not the performance smile he put on while playing Teen Angel or the fake smile he puts on every day at school. It's real. He can't remember the last time his face felt this light. "I think it is," he says, and nibbles another bite from his cone.
***
Step 3: Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
Before he cheated on Kurt, Blaine used to sing all day - in the shower and the kitchen, while doing his homework or on his way to school, while reading fashion magazines or standing at the toilet to pee. Before Kurt left they were mostly happy songs, and after he left, they were mostly full of sadness and heartache and anger. But he sang them, all the same.
After he cheated on Kurt, the singing dwindled. He walked around in silence most of the time, lips tight, because if he started to sing, he would start to feel, and the feelings that were his to be had were all horrible. Even without singing, though, his feelings would come to him sometimes, unbidden, churning in his stomach and pushing against his skull and throat. He would try to close his eyes to shut them out, but it never worked, because they were inside him, trying to needle their way to the surface. Every few days, he'd surrender. He'd go somewhere that no one could hear him - small closed spaces, like the choir room after everyone had left; or spaces so large that they drowned out his voice, like the football stadium; or in front of people like Artie and Finn who could hear his song, but not what it meant - and he'd belt his heart out, because he couldn't not. But there was no relief in it.
After Kurt said that Blaine wasn't trustworthy and walked off with the hand of a glaring Rachel on his back, Blaine stopped singing altogether outside of New Directions rehearsals, where he sang just enough to blend in and keep his silence from becoming glaring. It took no effort to stop singing. There was no urge there.
After his third Alateen meeting, Arabic Thad (his name turns out to be George, which at first makes Blaine feel bad about assuming he was Arabic, until George explains that his parents immigrated from Bethlehem, where half the Arabic Christian boys are named after St. George) hands Blaine a tiny red book that says Alateen: A Day at a Time on the cover. "I read a page of this every day, first thing when I wake up. It really helps."
Blaine hands it back. "I don't think I could take this home."
A tiny girl named Teresa - she must not be any older than 13 - pipes in. "If you're worried about your parents seeing it, I can make a book cover for you. Hold on just a minute." She reaches into her backpack and pulls out a roll of bright green duct tape. Within five minutes, she's transformed the tape into a book cover. "There," she says, taking the book from George and slipping it into the cover. She hands it to Blaine. "Now you don't have any excuses."
"Um, okay." Blaine takes the book and slips it into his satchel. "Thanks?"
When he gets home, Blaine goes up to his room and opens the book. There's a day of the year printed at the top of each page, followed by a couple of paragraphs about things like the Twelve Steps or courage or detaching from the alcoholic (Blaine's not sure what that means, although it must be important because he's heard it half a dozen times already and he's only been to three meetings). The writing isn't very good - it's apparently all written by teenagers who didn't go to Dalton - but the fears the kids write about, and the worries - all of that could have come out of Blaine's own head, although he likes to think he would have written it more eloquently. The strange thing is that each story ends up with something hopeful. He wonders if he can learn to hope again, the way that these kids do.
He reads it every morning, first thing after he turns off the alarm and turns on the bedside light. He reads it before he gets out of bed, because honestly, he doesn't feel like getting out of bed at all lately, but this book makes him think that maybe he's not completely hopeless and crazy, that maybe he's not the only person who tried to be perfect and instead made a stupid, unforgivable mistake. That maybe he's not as alone in the world as he felt before Kurt appeared in it and after Kurt left.
A week into this new routine, he's washing the dishes when a familiar song starts playing in his head. It's only just out of reach: down the block, on a beach, under a tree. I got a feeling there's a miracle due, gonna come true, coming to me. Could it be? But the mood is less confident and sure than the original, a jazzy sort of blue, the fragile hope that's born of heartbreak.
It's not until he's twenty lines in that he realizes that he's actually singing it.
The next morning, he adds something new to his routine. After he closes the little book and hides it under his mattress - the same place he used to stash copies of the International Male catalog before he came out to his parents - he flips through his mp3 player and picks a playlist to sing along to while he gets ready for school. He sings along even if he doesn't have enough energy, or if he's feeling too much and the first note makes the tears come pouring out of his eyes, or if he feels almost nothing at all.
He lets the music take care of him as he gets ready for school and, by the end of the playlist, he starts to feel human again.
***
Step Four: Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
Blaine isn't quite as miserable as he was at his first Alateen meeting, and he thinks maybe going to the meetings and reading the book and turning his life over to the care of art (and maybe truth and beauty, too, although those things are part of art, aren't they?) have something to do with it.
One Friday after school lets out early for teacher conferences, he decides to start his Fourth Step. He sits down to list, from the beginning, everything that went wrong in his relationship with Kurt. He figures that's as good a place as any to begin for an inventory of his moral failings. He starts with his first act of dishonesty - the way he flirted with Kurt during their first meeting even though he wasn't ready for a boyfriend - and moves forward from there.
He takes a short break to go downstairs and makes himself a sandwich for dinner. He brings it back up to his room with a can of diced pineapple and keeps writing his whole way through their relationship until, at 1 a.m., he gets to Eli. He cries for the next two hours, as he lists everything wrong he did to follow up that event - not telling Kurt immediately, not telling Kurt the right way, trying to tell Kurt everything - and by 3 a.m., he's done with his moral failings as they pertain to Kurt, at least for now.
He'll probably come up with more tomorrow.
Even though he's exhausted and really needs more sleep, he gets up early to go to the Alateen meeting. Susan, one of the adult sponsors of the group, bellows loudly when he walks into the room, "You look like something that the cat dragged in!" and for some reason, that makes him smile. Maybe because everyone out in the real world walks around him on eggshells now, always afraid that anything they say will make him burst into tears.
He sits down next to her and asks for a hug, because he needs one and other kids in this meeting ask each other and the sponsors for hugs all the time. It struck Blaine as a little weird and maybe also a little pathetic the first few times he saw it - shouldn't you just wait for someone to offer you a hug, and do without if they don't? - but pretty soon he started to get jealous that they knew how to ask for what they wanted. Maybe if Blaine had known how to ask Kurt for what he wanted - to hear you tell me you love me, to tell you about my day and my fears and know you're listening even if you don't understand, to make love with you over the phone, to visit you in New York now instead of two weeks from now - he wouldn't have broken Kurt's heart.
Susan hugs Blaine the way a golden retriever would hug, if a golden retriever had arms. "What's wrong, Blainers?" she says when she lets him go.
"I was up late last night working on my Fourth Step," he says. "It turns out I have a lot of moral failings."
Susan rubs his back vigorously. "Oh, kid, the Fourth Step isn't supposed to be an inventory of your moral failings. It's an inventory of your moral character. You have to include the good stuff, too."
He leans his elbows against the table and props his head in his hands. "I don't know that there are any good things."
She smiles wistfully, the upward curve of her lips matching the upward curve of her cat-eye glasses. "The thing is, Blaine, you've already spent a good chunk of your life inventorying your moral failures - or what you think they are. Not making your parents happy, not making your friends happy, not getting the alcoholic to stop drinking, not being perfect, not being what other people want you to be. All of us in this room have done it. That's part of why we end up here."
"So … that's not what I'm supposed to do for my Fourth Step?"
"Your Fourth Step is about finding out who you are, Blaine - the good and the neutral as well as the bad. It's about learning to see yourself as your higher power sees you."
"Huh." Blaine tries to imagine how art sees him, but it's a bit much for him to process first thing in the morning.
At the end of the meeting, Susan hands Blaine a workbook with Alateen's 4th Step Inventory printed on the front. "I think you'll have an easier time doing your Fourth Step with this. It tends to help people be a little more objective and not just beat themselves up."
"Um, okay," Blaine says. He wants to be as excited as he was yesterday afternoon about starting his Fourth Step, but right now all he wants to do is drink a gallon of coffee and/or crawl into a dark corner and fall asleep.
"When I did my Fourth Step, my sponsor suggested I say the Serenity Prayer at the start of every session and again at the end. Do you have a higher power yet?"
"Art," Blaine says.
Susan doesn't even blink. "Okay. So it might help to think about art and say the Serenity Prayer to it. And I'd love it if you called me or another Alateen friend to check in, just so we can remind you not to berate yourself. Would you be willing to do that?"
"I don't want to be a bother."
Susan squeezes his arm. "We all know how not to answer the phone when we're busy, and if we don't - well, it'll be a good chance for us to learn, won't it?"
Blaine starts the workbook that afternoon, after a three-hour nap and some highly sugared coffee, and works on it a little each day for the next few weeks. It's not so hard to write down all the things wrong about himself, but whenever the book asks him to write the good stuff, it takes a long time to think of anything. He gets a little faster at it, though, as the days go by.
He calls Susan every day when he's done, and she usually answers. Her first question is always, "How do you feel?"
The first week, his answer is always "Fine." The second week, it becomes, "I don't know." The third week, it changes from day to day - sometimes neutral and sometimes bad and sometimes, though not very often, good.
The day he finishes his inventory, she asks him again how he feels.
He pauses for a moment and really thinks about it. There's this warmth in his chest - it reminds him of how he used to feel when he'd sit on the couch with Kurt, his head resting on Kurt's shoulder, Kurt whispering I love you into Blaine's hair. The world felt so safe then.
"I feel like I did something right," Blaine says finally.
***
Step 5: Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
Blaine sets up a time to talk with Susan. He brings his Fourth Step workbook and all those sheets of paper he filled listing the mistakes he made in his relationship with Kurt, and he reads them to her.
She listens patiently. She hugs him when he needs it, gets him water when he starts crying, stops him several times when he's being too hard on himself.
"You know," she says when he's done reading and his heart and throat feel as wrung out as damp rags, "I think you might have forgotten something."
Of course Blaine forgot something. He can't do anything right.
"What's that?" he says.
"Well, tell me if you disagree with me - because some people see this as a wrong and some people don't."
Blaine's heart almost bolts out of his chest. Susan's been kind and sweet this whole time, lulled him into this false sense of security, and now she's going to tell him there's something wrong with being gay. He should have seen this coming. No one has ever loved him just as he is. He puts on his polite mask and prepares for the assault.
It never comes. "I was just thinking, from everything you've shared with me today," she says with a gentle smile, "that you have so much love in your heart to share with other people, but you don't share very much of it with yourself. That might be something to think about, whether you want to love yourself a little more."
***
Step 6: Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
Blaine thinks he might be ready to let go of his jealousy and self-absorption and neediness and total inability to know or say what he wants until it's too late.
But he doesn't feel ready to love himself. When he looks in the mirror, he still sees the same face he saw when he got back that afternoon from Eli's house. He sees the face of the person who told Kurt to go to New York because everything would be okay. He sees the face of a person that Kurt doesn't trust anymore.
He has to remind himself, daily, that Kurt is no longer his higher power. He slowly comes to understand that, before Kurt, his higher power was the Warblers, and before that, it was his parents, and on and off throughout the years, it was Cooper. He needed to be perfect for them, to make them proud, because they were all he had in the world, and he couldn't disappoint them.
If they saw how flawed he was, they would leave him behind.
They have left him behind.
Susan and April and the books and the pamphlets say that's not how a real higher power works. A real higher power doesn't need you to be perfect, and when you totally screw up, it doesn't take it personally and it doesn't stop caring for you. All it needs is for you to be you, and to be willing to become a better person day by day, if the situation calls for it.
"Don't go to the hardware store for a loaf of bread," Susan likes to say. He thinks he's starting to understand what she means. All his life, he's been pinning his hopes in the wrong place, believing that if he tries hard enough to earn the approval of the people he loves, they will make him feel like he's good enough.
But it never worked out that way. There was a time when Kurt approved of him, and still - Blaine felt safe sometimes, but he never felt good enough. He never fully trusted Kurt's judgment when Kurt would tell him he was perfect.
(He wonders if that's part of why he cheated - if he needed to show Kurt how imperfect he truly was.)
The hardware store is full of things that people need. Blaine needed - he may still need - Kurt's courage and ferocity and tenderness and love. But Blaine also needs something else that Kurt can never give him.
Blaine needs to learn how to be comfortable in his own skin.
***
Step 7: Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
Blaine would never admit it to anyone, but he's taken to standing in front of the bathroom mirror and singing Christina Aguilera's "Beautiful" to himself every morning. He doesn't believe a word of it most days, but at least a week into it he's able to look into his own eyes during some of the lyrics.
At some point, he notices that his eyes are pretty, and his eyelashes, too, and he thinks that the way that Kurt fell for him might not be completely inexplicable.
***
Step 8: Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
Kurt goes first on Blaine's list, for obvious reasons.
Blaine's mom goes next, for all the times he'd find her passed out on the couch upon coming home from school and clean up her mess in hopes that his dad would be none the wiser when he got home from work.
Blaine puts his dad down on the list, too, because Blaine has been angry at him for a long time for not fixing his mother, and he's let that anger bleed everywhere into their relationship, becoming suspect of every overture toward closeness his father makes. He's been thinking a lot, lately, about the summer that they fixed the Chevy together, and he's not as sure as he used to be that his father's motive was to turn Blaine straight. It might have been a misguided effort to make up for Blaine's crappy childhood.
He adds all of the New Directions, for not being at his best self at all this year; and the Warblers, for leaving when they didn't want him to; and every teacher he's ever had, for not living up to his potential; and the entire senior class, for being so distracted during his presidency.
Blaine calls Susan. "So, I have my list of people I've harmed. But how do I become willing to make amends to them?"
"Well, writing their names down is a good start," she says. "How long is your list, anyway?"
"I'm not sure." He tries to remember how many students are in the McKinley senior class. He adds in about 6 teachers a year for each year of middle and high school, and the Warblers, plus … "I think maybe 450?"
Blaine can hear Susan's smile over the phone. "I have a feeling your list might be a little long."
"Well, I had to include the whole senior class because I haven't been a very good president this year."
"Do you have a copy of the Twelve Steps handy? Would you mind reading Step Eight to me? Just the first part."
Blaine pulls a 12-step bookmark out of his copy of Alateen - A Day at a Time and reads, "'Made a list of all persons we had harmed.'"
"What was that last word?"
"You mean 'harmed'?"
"Yes," she says, and then she's silent.
"I have the feeling you're trying to make a point."
"All I know is that when I was doing Step Eight, my sponsor told me to look up the definition of 'harm' in the dictionary and then look up the definition of 'disappoint,' and note the difference."
Five days later, Blaine calls Susan back with a much shorter list.
***
Step 9: Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
He wants to make direct amends to Kurt first of all, but he's not sure how to do it, since Kurt hasn't said or written a word to him since Grease. He asks April if she thinks a letter would be the right approach.
"You might want to think twice about that," she says. They're in a coffee shop this time.
"Why?" Blaine says.
"Well, if he's not talking to you, it's probably because talking with you hurts. Hearing from you might hurt him more, you know? And we're not supposed to hurt people in Step 9."
"But I want to make him feel better."
"You can't make him feel better, Blaine. I can't make my dad stop drinking, and you can't make Kurt feel what you want him to feel."
Blaine frowns. "That's kind of harsh."
April shrugs. "Actually, I think it's kind of liberating. When I know what I can't do, I can focus on what I can do."
"And what's that?"
"Well, I can't make my dad stop drinking, but I can show him I care about him in other ways. I can love him with detachment. Maybe that's what you should do with Kurt."
"I still don't understand what all this detachment stuff means. It sounds like not caring to me."
April shakes her head. "It just means you love someone without hurting yourself, and without expecting the person to love you back in exactly the way that you want them to. You care about them, but you don't invest your whole life in what they think of you. At least, that's what it means to me." She takes a slurp of her bubble tea. "Anyway, I could be wrong. But I think when Kurt's ready to hear from you, God will arrange something."
"Wait. I thought you believed in Little Women, not God."
April puts her tea down. "I believe in Little Women and I believe in G-O-D: good, orderly direction. They're all part of the same thing, for me."
While Blaine waits for G.O.D. to send Kurt his way, he sets about making amends to the people he has actually harmed, not merely disappointed.
He doesn't, for the most part, apologize to anyone. "It's not about saying you're sorry," Susan tells him. "People say 'sorry' all the time without really changing. Making amends is about making things right - about fixing what you can, if you can, and doing things differently in the future."
He decides to start with Unique. He treated her awfully when she first joined the New Directions, and everything has been awkward between them since. It's gotten even more awkward now that she's being forced to come to school dressed as Wade every day. Blaine feels, sometimes, like he can see her soul withering away just behind her eyes.
He can't stop what the grown-ups are trying to do to Unique, but he can stop being part of the problem himself.
He catches her after Glee Club one day, when she's walking back to her locker.
"Do you have a minute?" Blaine says.
"Not really," Unique says. "I'm kind of itching to get out of here so I can go home and put my face back on."
Unique's answer catches Blaine off guard, but it really shouldn't have. Susan told him that he can't expect to make amends to people at his own convenience. It doesn't work that way. "Of course," Blaine says. "Maybe we could get coffee later? Or I could stop by your house?"
Unique grins broadly as she opens her locker, twirling a strand of invisible hair around her index finger. "Are you asking me on a date, Blaine Anderson? Because last time I heard, you were gay. And in case you haven't noticed, I'm a girl."
Blaine stammers and looks at his feet. He can feel the blush creeping across his cheekbones. No one has flirted with him since Eli. It's a weird feeling.
Unique touches him on the arm. "I'm just teasing. You're not my type and, anyway, I know you're still in love with Kurt Hummel."
Blaine looks up. "How do you -"
Unique adjusts her pants around her knees like she's pulling down a wayward skirt that's started to slide up too much. "I notice things. Someone like me spends a lot of time observing. It's a survival skill." She shuts her locker. "I would have thought you'd be the same."
Blaine shrugs. "I used to be. But I've been in kind of a fog lately."
"I know." She reaches out her hand and curls it around Blaine's elbow. "If you want to talk, you could be a gentleman and walk me home."
Outside, the sky is gray, and the clouds are hanging so low it feels like night will descend at any minute. It's not threatening, though. It makes Blaine feel secure, like the sky is a heavy blanket right within his reach, and if anything gets too scary, he can pull it down and wrap himself up in it, feel safe and warm.
"I don't understand why you're being so nice to me," Blaine says, even though that's not at all how he practiced beginning.
"You look like a kicked puppy." Unique squeezes his elbow and steps a little closer by his side. "I have a thing for sad animals. We got both our dogs from the shelter."
"We never got off on the right foot, because of me," Blaine says. "I didn't treat you right when you came to McKinley, and I've felt awkward about it ever since."
Unique shrugs. "I'm kind of used to it. I take what I can get."
Blaine stops and looks at her. "That doesn't make it okay. I was wrong not to welcome you into the New Directions. You have a beautiful voice, and I saw that as a threat instead of an asset, and that was short-sighted of me."
Unique looks back at him warily, like she's waiting for something else.
"And it was wrong of me to tell you when you should wear makeup and who you should be. Really, really wrong. I was only thinking of myself, and worrying what people thought of me, and I hurt you."
"Yes," she says quietly. "You did."
"Is there anything I can do to make things right with you?"
Unique doesn't say anything at first. She hooks her arm further through Blaine's elbow and leads him forward on the sidewalk. She's looking down at the ground ahead of them, contemplatively.
"Well," she says finally, "Unique hears you have an extensive collection of back issues of Vogue."
"I do," Blaine stammers. He's not sure where this is leading. Certainly she's not going to ask him for them. He'd give them to her, of course - anything to make up for what he did - but it seems an odd form of penance.
"So maybe," she says, "you could be my fashion consultant."
Blaine lets out a surprised guffaw. "I think you're confusing me with Kurt." And then he frowns, because he really should be past dropping Kurt references into his conversations by now.
She turns to him, reaching past his coat collar to tweak his bowtie. "You have style sense of your own, Blaine Anderson."
He feels himself blushing again. No one but Kurt ever comments on the clothes he wears except in derision. (Okay, maybe Eli and Sebastian said nice things about his outfits, too, but they don't count, because they wanted something from him that he shouldn't have been giving away.)
The rest of the way to Unique's house - and then inside, because she invites him in for cocoa and toast - she tells him how she's been thinking about the administration's rules, and it's just about having to wear pants and no wig, and even though Unique prefers skirts and a pageboy cut, there's more than one way to be a woman. "Alfre Woodard was beautiful with natural hair, and Solange Knowles is, too, and Ellen DeGeneres really knows how to rock a suit."
They spend the afternoon going through Unique's closet, finding outfits that pass the dress code but don't make Unique look like a boy. "It's not a solution. We need to work on my parents and the policy. But maybe until then …" She fades off.
"I don't know if you know about this, but I used to go Dalton Academy."
Unique turns to him. "Of Warblers fame?"
"Yeah. Kurt transferred there for a while because he was getting harassed at McKinley. But then he got to come back because Santana started an anti-bullying club."
Unique rolls her eyes. "Santana didn't seem so interested in anti-bullying when bullying meant she could steal Rizzo out from under me."
Blaine shakes his head. "No, she didn't. But it's not about Santana. It's about the people at the school now. We take away the bullying, we take away the grown-ups' excuse for making you hide yourself."
Unique shrugs. "I don't know if it will work. But I don't object to you trying."
In 2014, McKinley High School wins a national award for the anti-bullying program that Blaine Anderson started with Unique during his term as senior class president. And in 2015, Unique walks across the auditorium stage wearing a sequined dress and three-inch heels under her red graduation gown. It takes the threat of a lawsuit, but on her diploma, her name appears as Unique W. Adams.
There are other amends to be made, too. Blaine starts telling his parents I love you on the nights they get home before he goes to bed, because pretending he doesn't isn't helping anyone. It's awkward, at first, and even more awkward when they start saying I love you back. But, eventually, it starts feeling right.
***
Step 10: Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
"I was thinking," Blaine dad says on a rare weekday evening in which he is actually home for dinner (Blaine's mom is still at work), "we haven't been golfing together in a while. You're probably getting rusty on your form."
Blaine stares at his own fork as he twirls it in his spaghetti. He's not exactly playing with his food (he would never do that); he's just dragging the eating of it out. "I stay in shape other ways."
"It's important in other ways." His dad cuts into a meatball with tight precision. "You may need it one day for your career."
Blaine shrugs. He doesn't really want a career where his advancement depends on his golf swing.
"So I've decided we should start going to the club every Saturday morning from now on. You should be in good shape by the time you leave for college."
Blaine drops his fork on his plate's edge. Its loud clank is only slightly offset by the cushioning of the pasta beneath it. "No," Blaine says.
He doesn't remember ever using that word with his father.
His dad's eyes go wide. "Excuse me?"
Blaine swallows. "If you were ever home, you'd have noticed by now that I already have something I do on Saturday mornings." He throws his napkin next to his plate and backs his chair away from the table, letting the legs squeal against the tile floor.
His father's voice is steady. "I'm sure you can reschedule whatever it is. These were tough reservations to get."
Blaine doesn't look at him. He storms out of the room and up the stairs, slams his bedroom door loudly behind him.
He turns on his mp3 player to find something angry to sing along with, but instead he ends up picking Lindsay Lohan's "Confessions of a Broken Heart." He rereads his daily page from the Alateen book, and then checks the index for "parents." He reads everything in the list, but he's still angry and sad by the time he gets to the end of it. He calls Susan.
"He told me to stop going to Alateen," Blaine says.
"You told him you go to Alateen?" she says.
"Well, no. I mean, he wants me to do this golfing thing with him on Saturdays and I told him I already have something I do on Saturdays and he told me I could reschedule it."
"And what did you say?"
"Um, nothing. I kind of stormed off."
"Well, do you think you could tell him about Alateen?"
Blaine sighs. "I don't know. We don't talk about … my mom, and we don't talk about our feelings and stuff."
"Well, now is often a good time to start."
They stay on the phone for a while, Susan helping Blaine figure out what to say to his dad, until she catches on that Blaine is just trying to keep her on the phone so that he doesn't have to go back and face him.
"Just remember, your higher power is with you. And call me afterward and let me know how it went, okay? If you need to do this thing with your dad on Saturdays, there's always the Tuesday meeting you could go to."
Blaine closes his eyes and thinks of the feeling he gets when he looks out into the audience and someone is smiling because of the music he's making. He thinks about the way his toes tingle when Unique or Jake sing with their hearts, their voices caressing each note like a lost child that's found it's way home again. He breathes deep and goes downstairs.
He finds his dad in the study, face glowing blue in the light of the computer. Blaine doesn't usually go in there; it's a sacred space for his father, a sign to the rest of the household to leave him alone. But the door is open, which could be an invitation. Blaine knocks on the doorframe. His dad looks up.
"It was wrong of me to leave dinner that way, without explaining why I was upset. We don't have to talk about it right now if you're busy, but I'd like to at some point, when you have the chance."
His father waves Blaine in and turns on the desk lamp before shutting his laptop closed. "I don't like you to talk to me that way."
Blaine sits across the desk from his father. "I don't like to talk to you that way, either. I just - I'm not very good at talking about things sometimes."
His dad frowns. "Neither am I."
Falteringly, Blaine starts to explain what he does on Saturday mornings: why he went there, what he's learned, how his life has changed. He keeps things vague. He doesn't go into detail about what happened with Kurt, or quite how lonely he felt - just that his life hadn't been going well, and he wanted people who understood him, and he found them and started to feel real.
"I'd like to spend more time with you, Dad," he says. "Just not on Saturday mornings."
His father looks tired, like he's holding the weight of years just behind his eyes. "That's mostly what I was looking for, too. I feel like we've become strangers."
Blaine doesn't say anything. Most of the time, he feels like he never got to know his dad in the first place. But he thinks he might want to, now.
His father opens his desk calendar. "Do you have Saturday afternoons free? Maybe - if you don't like golf, you could come up with other things we could do."
Blaine nods. "I'd like that." He discovers, as he speaks the words, that they're true.
***
Step 11: Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
Through the New Directions grapevine, Blaine hears that Kurt is dating again. He cuts out of rehearsal early and goes to the weight room. There's another kid hitting the heavy bag when Blaine gets there, but all Blaine has to do is give him one look and the kid surrenders it to him with the words, "You look like you need this a lot more than me."
Blaine hits it harder with every blow. He feels the impact in his shoulders, in his chest, in the cells of his bones. He punches it until the forgotten muscles in his arms are vibrating like strings on guitar, punches it more until they're wobbly like jelly and he can't hit anymore. By the time he gets in the shower, his arms are so weak he can barely lift them to his head to rub the shampoo into his hair.
He collapses on his bed as soon as he gets home, not waking up until well past the time he should have made himself dinner. He bursts into tears, but they don't last long - he's too tired even for that.
He calls Susan. "I'm not ready for this," he says. "I still love him."
"You don't have to stop loving him," she says. "You just can't make him love you back the way you want him to."
Every night, he prays. He's not sure to whom or to what, but he does it anyway, on his knees next to his bed, like his grandmother taught him when he was little. The words are different, though. "Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference," he starts, and then he says more. He asks for help in learning to let go, in learning to love himself, in learning to accept love from the people who want to give it to him. He asks that Kurt find the love that Blaine wanted to give him, and the sense of trust that he wasn't able to. He asks to learn to love Kurt the way that Kurt needs to be loved, even if that means never seeing Kurt again.
He sings a lot - mostly songs about letting go. He sings "Nobody's Crying" and "I Miss You" and "Candles" and "Let Him Fly" and "I Will Always Love You." Those are prayers, too.
One day he finds himself walking down the hall at McKinley, passing Kurt's old locker, and he remembers exactly how Kurt stood there one afternoon last spring, back resting against the closed metal door and hips canted out, watching Blaine approach. It was the day after his audition for NYADA, and his eyes were lit with fire and hope and love - love for himself and love for the world and love for Blaine - and when Blaine stepped into that bubble of space Kurt likes to keep around himself, Kurt broke into a smile and took Blaine's hand and pulled him closer, until the toes of their shoes touched, and there was something more to the gesture than there might have been, something warm and sacred, and deep in his bones Blaine knew that Kurt would conquer the world the way he'd conquered Blaine's heart.
Blaine doesn't know how or why it happens, but his heart doesn't break. He finds himself smiling at the memory and hoping that, off in New York, Kurt is smiling like that once again.
***
Step 12: Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to others, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
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