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When he thinks about it, and he tries not to but sometimes the thoughts are there, closer to the surface than he’d like, unavoidable and looming and black as pitch, Blaine can’t remember which happened first. He can’t remember when the lesson started. He doesn’t remember when he first learned that people leave. If he’s not the boy people expect, if he’s not perfect and polite and strong and talented, people will always leave. In Blaine’s experience, affection is transitory. People stop loving. Affection comes with caveats, and the single common factor is him. He learns to try harder, to be more, and to push away to protect himself. It can’t hurt him if the parting is on his terms.
When he does think about it, he thinks the first person was Cooper. Cooper left when he was 8, but it wasn’t like they’d been close before that, really. He’d idolised his big brother, though, the way you’re supposed to, they way they tell you you’re supposed to. Cooper, with his perfect hair and his perfect teeth and his perfect everything, and Blaine, with his kinky hair and too big eyes and his uncoordinated limbs… Cooper had had a lot to say about Blaine. He’d been critical of his dancing, of his singing, of the tiny limpet who followed him around the house and who every one of his girlfriends had adored. Blaine tried to follow all of Cooper’s advice, even when he contradicted himself, tried to be something Cooper would be proud to be seen with, and then, when Blaine was 8, Cooper was gone. He left, and he didn’t come back, and he barely said goodbye.
Blaine could only wonder what exactly he’d done to make Cooper hate him. All he’d ever done was look up to him, try to be like him. Cooper left anyway.
After that, he can’t remember whether it was his dad or his friends. When he was 12, he admitted to himself his first full blown crush. His name was Jereme. Jereme was in his grade, and Jereme had a bright brilliant smile and Jereme sometimes smiled at him in the cafeteria or waiting at the bus stop, and Blaine would feel his tummy swoop a little, and would hope that he wasn’t blushing too obviously. He had the vocabulary for what he was feeling, but not the confidence, and he focused on trying not to feel it.
It didn’t work. In the fall, Blaine met a boy called Nate. Nate was cute in a decidedly dorky kind of way, with his glasses and his sweaters. He confessed, shortly after Blaine’s 13th birthday, to having something of a crush on him. Blaine didn’t even try to contain his blush. He preened under the attention, let it bolster his confidence, and - shortly before Christmas - he told his mom he was gay. It came out as more of a stuttering confession, hedged for confirmation that she would still love him if he were different, if he weren’t, y’know, normal, and she’d wrapped her arms around him and said what mattered to her was his safety. Besides, Blaine had had a tendency to gravitate towards the TV room when ER was on since he was tiny.
(Later, much later, she’ll come to Pride with him and Kurt, and she’ll wear a pin on her lapel that says she’s proud of her gay son, and she’ll watch the young men and women around her with fascination and without judgement, and she’ll share a can of beer that she never usually drinks with a woman her own age who wears same pin on her chest, and she’ll say, holding Blaine’s hand firmly in her own, that she had her suspicions from when he was small, dampened somewhat by his equal and abiding love of comic books and football but present all the same. She’s proud of him. He’s her little ray of sunshine, and always always will be. Blaine’s heart will expand in his chest until he can barely contain it. It will take time to trust his mom with his everything, but they’ll get there.)
As a 13 year old harbouring an ancient secret, though, school still wasn’t easy, not even with a friend, or friends. There was a group that grew around Blaine and Nate. Misfits and oddballs, they talked about their passions and formed bonds where they overlapped. Nate enjoyed tabletop gaming, and Blaine loved football, and they met in the middle where they agreed that Han definitely shot first. For all that they had friends, there were still the whispers and the stares and the constant barrage of taunts and catcalls.
Conspicuously, not a single member of the faculty seemed inclined to protect either of them. Blaine wasn’t at all surprised.
In January, Blaine and Nate went to Sadie Hawkins. Nate brushed his hair back, and Blaine gelled his, and they got matching boutonnieres. They weren’t a thing, or not an official thing. Blaine wasn’t his boyfriend. They were just friends, and they were gay, and they were together. And - that’s really all it took in a town like Lima. They were waiting for Nate’s dad to give them a ride home when they were attacked by three jocks. It was both everything and absolutely nothing at all. Blaine split his lip and ruined his suit. Nate chipped a tooth. They would both be bruised and shaken, and both would have x-rays taken of their ribs and spend the night in hospital. Afterwards, Nate wouldn’t talk to him about what happened, deleted him from Facebook, pretended like Blaine was a thing that never happened. It hurt. Blaine wanted – needed – to be able to talk about it, and there was no one he thought would understand. He’d already learned that the problems he faced were his and his alone.
His mom suggested to his dad that perhaps he needed a therapist, and his dad spent an uneasy evening meal watching Blaine smile brightly and chat about his day, filling the lingering silences with words. Two days later, his mom drove him to a clinic where he met with a man who had unruly red hair and a smile that was all for him, and he talked a little but didn’t feel like there was a connection, didn’t feel like he trusted the man he was talking to. He told his mom on the way home. Her smile was sad, and she took him three more times. Then the visits stopped, and they didn’t try again.
He didn’t creep back into the closet, and he didn’t consciously try harder to pass. His clothing didn’t change, but the colours did. His bright primary colours shifted to the back of his wardrobe, in favour of greys and greens, burgundy red and deep dark blue. He didn’t try to disappear, just to make it through his days unnoticed.
He tried to pretend that it didn’t hurt when Nate sat at the other end of their table and, eventually, the other side of the room.
In February, Blaine’s dad made the decision to pull Blaine from public school and send him to a private school in Columbus, or a suburb of Columbus. Blaine looked it up on the map, and then had Google tell him how long in minutes it was from everything that was familiar. His dad refused to talk about what happened at the dance, and at the hospital, and in the weeks that had come between. Sometimes Blaine saw him, though, looking at him, watching him. Blaine knew without them having to talk about it. None of this would be a problem, none of it, if Blaine were straight. Not for the first time in his life, Blaine felt the slow crawling shame of disappointing the people who mattered most to him.
In the weeks that followed, Blaine’s old friends, one by one, stopped commenting on Facebook, slowed down responding to email and texts and invitations for dinner or movies. Their lives moved on, and they moved on a different pace to Blaine’s. Blaine was the new kid in a new school, where the curriculum was beyond anything he’d encountered before and the boys wore blazers with the school logo on the breast pocket. Blaine felt wildly out of place, but he had manners and he could fall back on those if nothing else. He started styling his hair more rigorously, and began his assimilation into everything Dalton Academy required him to be.
When Wes and David invited him to audition for the school’s a capella show choir, and no one seemed put off or threatened by the fact he was a gay kid who lived ninety minutes from most of them, he tried to forget that there was a world outside of the gates of acceptance. He gave himself over to Dalton in its entirety, and pretended until he believed that it didn’t bother him that his old friends forgot him even quicker than Cooper did. At Dalton, he was special. He was adored. At Dalton, Blaine learned to shine.
Over the summer, Blaine spent what time he could with his Warbler friends, and tried to pretend everything at home was exactly the same. He still saw the looks his dad shot him, though. Pity, judgement, resentment. Blaine began to pull away from his parents, or from his father, specifically. He still enjoyed letting his mom ruffle his hair on Sunday mornings, when it was clean of product and he was relaxed in front of the Cartoon Network watching episodes of shows that were old before he was born. “Your dad has a fun new project for you both,” she said one morning, and Blaine looked up from his books and away from the TV, and into her forced smile that, if he was honest, looked a lot like his these days. They’re both very good at pretending to be happy.
“Yeah?” he said, sceptical. She nodded, and fussed with his books, and his socked feet on her fifty dollar cushions, and he knew she was dissembling because he did it too. “Mom?”
“He thinks it would be fun for you to have a project to do together,” she said eventually, holding a cushion by its corners, her eyes focused on her nails, on the zipper, on the pattern of the rug. When she did look at him, her honey brown eyes were troubled. “We’re worried about you, sweetheart. We just want you to be happy.”
“I am happy,” he said, and flicked her a bright smile that almost made it to his eyes. They both knew it was a lie.
The project, when his dad finally spoke to him about it over dinner, was fixing up an old Chevy he’d bought. Blaine smiled politely and stabbed his green beans with intent. Neither he nor his dad had ever shown any inclination towards mechanics. What Blaine heard, underneath the civility and the bonding, was that building a car was very masculine, incredibly blue collar. Building a car with a son who loved show choir and other men would give them something they could bond over, something in common. Football and ‘Star Wars’ clearly weren’t enough. To win his dad’s love back, Blaine had to be a man.
He tried not to cry. Boys don’t cry. Boys don’t cry. Boys don’t cry.
Somehow, between them and their communication failure and Blaine’s knowledge that he wasn’t Cooper, he wasn’t the perfect straight all-American son his dad wanted and would have preferred, and his dad’s well-bred, well-meant, badly executed fumbling to find a way to talk to Blaine that didn’t make both of them feel lost, they managed to get the Chevy running. Any accomplishment Blaine felt was drowned out by the way his dad clapped his shoulder and said, “Good man,” to him.
He wasn’t before he knew what a carburettor was?
His sophomore year, when he was just 15, a miracle happened. He found himself a place at Dalton where he fit, where he belonged. Prodigious talent and diligent practice placed Blaine front and centre of the Dalton Academy Warblers. He was young for the role – usually they reserved lead for the graduating seniors – but Blaine had proven himself time and again. He was a star in its ascendancy, a legend in the making. Future generations of Warblers would speak Blaine’s name with reverence. He’d be something to live up to, something to be remembered and idolised long after he’d left Dalton’s hallways far behind. Dalton was going to be something he talked about with pride, the thing that saved him, when he is interviewed in the future, when his name is in lights and on scrolling marquees. “My initial training? I performed lead vocals for an all boys a capella show choir when I was a teenager,” he’ll say with a laugh in his voice that he actually means. His husband will be waiting for him to be finished so they can get dinner together, and walk home together, hands and hearts intertwined. “And I had gigs in theme parks over the summer. I learned early how to play to a difficult crowd.”
Dalton made him the happiest he’d been for years. Perhaps not happy, but happier.
And then Kurt Hummel happens.
Kurt is, initially, just a boy on a flight of stairs. An attractive boy on a flight of stairs, wearing a blazer and formal shorts, and looking so out of place that Blaine’s heart melts on sight. He should, he knows, take Kurt to the administration, and have him escorted back onto the main road. He doesn’t. He can’t. The boy asks what is happening, and Blaine says, evasively, that it’s the Warblers. They’re giving an impromptu performance. “It tends to shut the school down for a little while.”
“Show choir is cool here?”
“The Warblers are like rock stars!”
He takes a perfect stranger’s hand and they run together. Blaine sings ‘Teenage Dream’, and he’s not singing for the boy staring at him from the doorway, but it feels that way all the same.
Afterwards, they talk. Talking to Kurt gives Blaine a sense of purpose. Kurt comes to Dalton the same way that Blaine did. He, too, is running from his bullies. Blaine has a chance to do everything right this time, to confront the issue head on. Kurt’s bully is like them, it should be easier. He’s just scared of the way he feels, and is lashing out. Blaine can protect Kurt in a way he couldn’t protect himself, or Nate. For the first time in a long time, Blaine feels like he’s the boy his dad wanted and would be proud of.
Protecting Kurt becomes second nature, even after Kurt transfers. Protecting Kurt means helping him fit in, helping him to not try so hard. Blaine fits at Dalton because he allowed Dalton to change him. That’s what he wants for Kurt.
It’s not how Kurt operates. Blaine really sees that the day Kurt sings ‘Blackbird’ for a dead canary. It’s probably about more than just the canary. ‘You were only waiting for this moment to arise, Blackbird, fly.’ It seeps into Blaine’s subconscious, straightens his spine, forces him to look, to see, to admit how much of himself he’s changed.
Changing back is hard. Loving Kurt, though, that’s easy.
He can talk to Kurt. That’s the foundation. They talk about everything – interests and hobbies. Kurt loves fashion, whilst Blaine takes only a little more than a passing interest. Blaine enjoys clothes, creating and maintaining his image, can name designers and inspirations, but he doesn’t have Kurt’s abiding love of high fashion, not really. He loves photography, though, and flicks through his mom’s magazines while he makes himself toast before school some mornings. Blaine learns that Kurt enjoys comfort food, drinks low fat mocha, and he files the information away, carefully storing each thing about Kurt for future reference. One day, he thinks, these individual things will be important.
In turn, he learns that Kurt played football once (“Just a kicker,” Kurt says, with a self deprecating smile, and Blaine says, stoically, there’s nothing “just” about being the kicker; games are won and lost that way), but is not a football fan. His dad is, though. Blaine feels himself seize up at the idea of Kurt’s dad. Kurt is brilliant – he’s witty, and beautiful, and devastatingly intelligent, and he wears sweaters that Blaine knows for a fact come from the women’s department. His own dad would have a fit if Kurt were his son. He can’t for even a second conceive of a place in Ohio where Kurt is accepted the way he is.
Kurt tells him about his summer jobs, working for his dad in the shop. “What does he do?” Blaine asks, stirring cinnamon into his coffee and breaking biscotti into pieces. Kurt smiles over the rim of his cup.
“You know Hummel Tires and Lube?” he asks, and Blaine nods his head. Kurt smiles and shrugs and arches his (perfect, Blaine thinks, conscious of his own suddenly) eyebrows, and Blaine takes a sip of too hot coffee that tastes slightly burnt, which is maybe about right for Lima’s only non-Starbucks coffee shop.
Kurt tells him about his mom, and how she died when he was 8 (“That’s tough,” Blaine murmurs, and Kurt smiles sadly and says it’s old news now, but thank you), and how he and his dad have had to learn to get by with just the two of them, and every single day, Blaine feels himself falling more in love with Kurt. He tries not to, and then, when it stops being something he can fight, he tries to show Kurt that he is worth the time, worth everything.
It’s for nothing. Kurt is another name on Blaine’s list of people who leave him. He transfers back to William McKinley High School in the summer, before their show choir Nationals competition, back to the friends he knows. Blaine arranges with the Warblers to say a formal goodbye, sings ‘Somewhere Only We Know’ for him, and wraps his arms around him. Kurt hugs him tightly, holds on for dear life, and Blaine tries to let himself believe that this isn’t goodbye, tries to be something that Kurt will want to keep around, just for a little bit longer at least.
“I’m never saying goodbye to you,” Kurt says against the shell of his ear, and Blaine breaks away from him.
He will do anything to make that true.
Before New York, before Nationals, Kurt calls him most nights, sees him most weekends. He catches Blaine on Blaine’s way home from school, and they go for Lima Bean coffee dates where Kurt talks effusively about the future, about school in New York, life in New York. Blaine says nothing, doesn’t want to assume anything, but Kurt lays it on the line when he says, “And of course, you’ll be there.” Blaine tries not to cry when his heart starts beating, nods and sips his coffee to hide the tremor he feels in his throat.
“Of course,” he says when he trusts his voice again. “I’ll come for the bagels, if nothing else.”
Kurt’s laughter is musical.
It’s still musical when he comes back, when he talks with more detail about their grand future, his and Rachel’s and Blaine’s. About singing on a Broadway stage. About everything. Blaine falls in love with every word, and doesn’t try to hold it back. “I love you,” he says for the first time, and Kurt pauses and demures and then grins.
“I love you, too,” he says.
Why isn’t that enough?
Perhaps Blaine’s clearest lesson, though, is Sebastian Smythe. Sebastian comes from from nowhere, transfers to Dalton and takes Blaine’s place as if he had never existed. He makes the right noises, tells Blaine that the Warblers never stop talking about him. “I was like, I don’t know who this Blaine guy is, but apparently he’s sex on a stick and sings like a dream,” he says, and Blaine smiles and bows his head and lets the praise nestle deep in his chest, lets it soothe the ache of knowing he is absolutely replaceable. Sebastian plays to his vanity, courts him for knowledge, and tips, and smiles at him in a way that makes him feel like meat but that he can’t turn down either.
Blaine doesn’t know how to be anything other than polite to Sebastian (“He’s a Warbler, Kurt,” he says, like that explains everything, only for Kurt to scoff like that means nothing at all), and so he texts him occasionally, talks to him when they meet. It’s not his proudest moment, but Blaine knows one thing to be true: he enjoys the hot flare of Kurt’s jealousy about Sebastian as much, if not more, than he enjoys Sebastian himself. The rush, the twist inside of him, makes him feel like he’s worth fighting for.
Then comes Sectionals, though, and Michael Jackson, and a slushie full of red food dye and rock salt. It’s meant for Kurt. It’s meant to hurt Kurt. Blaine sees it happening, and steps into the breach, throws Kurt backwards and takes it in his own face instead.
The pain is enough. The rock salt scratches his eye, blinds him completely, and he’s in agony on the floor, Kurt’s hands on his trying to keep him from rubbing at his eyes, Kurt’s voice the only thing he can hear. When he can open his eyes again - or one of them, anyway - he’s in a hospital, surrounded by cards and flowers. He thinks he’s learning to hate hospitals. Nothing good comes from hospitals. He hears his mom’s voice, talking quietly to someone, and he scans as quickly as he can, turning his head sluggishly to cover his blind side, and finds her by the door, speaking in hushed tones with Kurt. He tries to smile, but the drugs make his reactions slow. He still see the smile that brightens both of their faces.
Kurt is just leaving, but he takes five minutes to press a kiss to Blaine’s brow, and promises he’ll see him tomorrow after school. Blaine nods, and his mom takes the seat by his bed. She reads him his littany of Get Well Soon messages, shows him the cards and the text messages.
Not a single one of them is from one of his Dalton friends.
Replaceable, he reminds himself. Forgettable.
Love is something you keep earning. It’s not something you can simply rely on existing.
It’s around this time that the reality of Kurt leaving starts to sink in. Kurt is graduating, and Kurt’s plans are to move 600 miles away, across two state lines. The people Blaine loves forget him when he moves two towns away, and soon, Kurt will be much, much further away than anyone Blaine has ever given his heart to before.
He does the only thing he knows how to do: to protect himself, he pulls away. In preparation for the inevitable, he begins the task of letting Kurt go, piece by painful piece. It will hurt less, he thinks, if he’s already said goodbye.
It’s even more effective than he thinks. Kurt hasn’t even left Ohio when he finds someone else. Kurt likes how Chandler makes him feel.
Of course he does. It’s been a year. Blaine doesn’t make him feel much of anything anymore, except perhaps annoyed.
They talk though. Or they sort of talk. Or, Blaine sort of cries, and Kurt sort of says there’s always New York, and Blaine doesn’t know how to say that’s not enough. He doesn’t know how to say, ‘But what about tomorrow, and next week. What about when other people finally see what I see? Will you remember me when you have all of New York?’ So he nods, and tries hard to pretend it’s enough. It’s got to be enough. They can do it. They’ll see each other every day, still, or speak at least. There’s still text messages, and Skype, and they’ll watch their shows together, and Blaine goes back to forcing his smile, because Kurt sounds so positive and Blaine wants to believe him, he really does…
...And then Kurt isn’t on the other end of the line. Kurt doesn’t return his calls. Kurt flat out cancels them, sends quick texts of apology. ‘Work,’ he types. ‘Sorry.’ ‘Late night,’ he sends, ‘I’ll call you tomorrow. xx’
Blaine feels like he’s in a relationship with a grey box, with a dial tone, with the idea of a person who maybe existed, once. For all that Blaine can get his attention, for all that they promised one another forever, Kurt has forgotten him as quickly as everyone else has.
Eli doesn’t have expectations of him. Blaine likes that, or tells himself he does. It’s perhaps the exact same thing, or possibly not, if the way it preys on him afterwards is an indication. What he knows is that he’s not ready to give up on Kurt. He asks his dad if he can go to New York, alone. His dad’s eyes are irrevocably sad, but he says yes all the same. “We’ll pick you up at the airport when you get in, champ,” he says, and Blaine nods and crams another bite of dinner in his mouth to avoid having to talk around the lump in his throat. The lump is always there, these days, a sliding scale between the back of his throat and the pit of his stomach.
Guilt, he decides, is the worst. Guilt will eat you up inside.
Or maybe guilt is better than the devastation that comes with not knowing. In his heart, he’s not single again. His heart is entrenched. It’s never belonged to Kurt more than it does when Kurt doesn’t want it. He does the thing he knows how to do. He buys Kurt presents, sends them to New York. He sends care packages, DVDs, letters. He sends texts that go unread for hours and unanswered for days, and then for weeks.
Blaine throws himself into school to occupy his mind, finds a friend in Sam (which is new and interesting, because being Sam’s friend is easy - Sam doesn’t require anything of him, except that he talk and that they have fun, which they do; accidentally, Blaine gives his heart to Sam to take care of for a while, because he knows that Sam will never break it - he can’t if he doesn’t know he has it), and reconnects with the Warblers because they accept him for who he is, or for who they think he is, or what he can do. They feel safe to him, regardless.
His dad says no, and his mom says yes, and Sam says, is he sure he’s not villainising himself in this whole situation. Blaine says Sam doesn’t understand, he broke something precious.
Sam says maybe he should try talking. Try explaining. Try using the words to Kurt that he uses in the hallways of McKinley. Blaine can’t do that. Kurt has New York. What can a kid in Lima Ohio know of that?
It’s the first time he admits to himself that he’s in a race to catch up to where Kurt is, to be Kurt’s equal in everything.
It’s the first time he thinks, perhaps he never can. He’ll never be in the right place at the right time for Kurt ever again.
That stops him breathing for a minute. His anchor isn’t merely gone, but is drifting on a current and the wind is blowing in the wrong direction. He’s stuck stationary, and Kurt is getting further away. He’ll never run fast enough...
(Sam also says he knows Blaine has a crush on him.
Sam says he doesn’t care.
Blaine buries himself in the hug Sam offers him.)
For a while, Blaine fills himself up on what Kurt will let him have. He gorges on a phone call, gluts himself at Valentines when Kurt takes him back to his hotel room, thinks, if he can get by on these little things then that can be enough. He tells himself that these things mean Kurt does still want him, that Kurt hasn’t forgotten him.
He percolates a plan to make it official, flying in the face everyone who says that he’s too young, that they’re not even together, that it’ll never work. He buys a ring, and tries to ask and can’t quite form the words, up until the moment that he can.
Back in the place where it all began, Blaine gathers the people around him who have led him here, and he asks Kurt to marry him, asks to spend the rest of his life loving Kurt.
Best of all, Kurt says yes.
Being in the circle of Kurt’s arms again is like coming home.
They’re six months in to their New York dream when everything falls apart, when everything Blaine has trapped in his heart for six years bubbles free and over and seeps into the cracks in his eroding self-confidence. Everything is different in New York. Kurt has a life in New York that Blaine isn’t part of. Kurt has forged a life for himself that doesn’t have a place in it for Blaine. The apartment is Kurt and Rachel’s apartment, not Blaine’s home. It’s just the place he comes back to every night. It’s where he washes and eats, where he sleeps every night in Kurt’s bed and never their bed. He’s an alien in this space as much as Sam is, for all that he contributes to the shopping and the cooking and the cleaning. It’s the first gnawing disconnect on an endlessly growing list.
The second thing is the fact that Kurt doesn’t need him. It’s not the foundation of their relationship, but it’s always made Blaine feel special. When they met, Kurt needed him. Kurt made him feel strong and capable, like a mentor. Kurt gave him a way to work through his own insecurities, to be the man he knew his dad would be proud to know. The New York version of Kurt doesn’t need any of that. The New York version of Kurt works out, is strong on his own merits. He’s grown into himself, and into his city. That’s just another thing that Blaine needs to catch up to, and another thing that he resents for making him feel small, weak, young.
He fills the empty spaces with things that won’t judge him for the pettiness he harbours. He turns to food for comfort, watches his waist expand and waits for Kurt to notice, to talk to him about it. Kurt doesn’t, so Blaine fills the spaces in for him, lets the jealousy eat away at him a little more. Kurt is the jock now - he’s the leading man, the centre of attention. Blaine’s place as protector and cheerleader is moot. He eats more, watches porn, and slowly pulls away again. “We should talk about this,” he says, when it comes to a head. Kurt shakes his head, “I don’t want to talk.”
And that’s the worst of Blaine’s crashing realisations: that they don’t talk. They’ve never talked. Not about them, not really. They know one another, one another’s likes and dislikes, their favourite foods, favourite stores and magazines and designers and football teams. They know one another’s parents, and shoe sizes, and are familiar with the finer points of one another’s bodies. But they’ve never talked, not about the things that make them who they are.
So when Blaine says he’s scared that one day Kurt will wake up and realise that he doesn’t love Blaine anymore, Kurt’s emphatic, “Never,” shouldn’t be the bear hug that it is.
Blaine’s biggest mountain is learning to believe that that’s true.