Apparently, I write Glee now. I blame Darren Criss.
I don't even know where this came from. I just thought that, despite all those older sisters of Blaine that are hanging around, for some reason I think of Blaine as being an oldest child… and so he acquired a younger sister.
Apologies for anything overly-British that's snuck in here. I hope you realise how much it pained me to write "math" rather than "maths" …
He's two when he finds out he's getting a baby sister. He wants to call her Cinderella, or Arthur, or Stephen, because he likes those names; but for some reason nobody listens to his suggestions. When she's born, they name her Eleanor. He thinks this is stupid, but then he also thinks she's stupid: all she does is cry; she can't count or draw people like he can. She can't even speak.
He forgets about this, though, and soon enough he's thirteen and she's eleven and significantly more interesting than she'd been as a baby. She's clever, and funny, and she's his only ally in the house (though of course this war is imagined; they're at the age where parents are becoming the enemy, because they're so grown up and their parents are restricting them, and it just isn't fair). She's starting to look at boys as something other than playmates. He's starting to realise that maybe he wants to look at boys a little more than he wants to look at girls. He's not really sure what to do with that knowledge. He knows people don't like it: he's heard the boys at school calling each other "gay" or "queer" or "fag", and he knows they don't mean it in a nice way. He keeps quiet.
She notices, though. They're going to the movies one day, and she mentions that she's got a boyfriend.
"A boyfriend?" he says, eyebrows raised, because she's eleven and what does she want a boyfriend for?
"His name's Tom," she tells him. "He's really nice." And then, after a short pause in which they make their way to the desk to buy their tickets, she adds, "Are you going to get a boyfriend someday?"
He doesn't know what to say to that. Because he's thirteen, he's only just worked out that he likes boys, and the concept of getting a boyfriend is slightly alien and completely terrifying and yet it's exactly what he wants.
"How – how did you - ?" he manages to say.
"You're too subtle. You'd have been more obvious if you liked girls."
Obvious about what, he wonders, but instead he moves forward to buy their tickets, and nothing more is said about it that day. He thinks it will be forgotten, or at least ignored for a couple of days, but then school happens.
"Hey, Anderson, I heard you're a fairy now!"
"You'd better stay away from me in the locker rooms, you fucking queer."
"Out of the way, gay kid."
He has no idea what's happening, what's gone on, because she'd never have said anything to them. She doesn't even know them; she's eleven and they're in his grade and it's not like they're his friends. Eventually it transpires that one of the more popular boys happened to be behind them in the line at the cinema, and overheard everything. "He didn't even deny it," he says when telling the story.
That night he cries for the first time in a while.
She hears the next day, because apparently even the younger kids are interested in rumours about some unknown eighth-grader's sexuality.
"What the hell does it have to do with you?" she says to the kid telling the story. "Unless you have a crush on him or something I don't see how it affects you."
She comes home with a grim smile and a couple of new friends who were apparently impressed by her fierceness. He comes home with bruises and a lost look. Nothing big enough to be noticed.
It dies down a little after a few weeks. By the end of the year, the kids are almost completely over it.
But he's fourteen now, and that means he starts high school in the fall.
It's only the first day when it starts. The same boy who'd started it all the previous year appears to come to the conclusion that the entirety of the freshman year needs to know all about Blaine Anderson's sexuality. By lunchtime, people he doesn't even know are telling him he's fucking disgusting.
He's relieved when the end of the day comes. He meets her outside the middle school, and attempts to hide everything away from her; but people from his grade are yelling things at him as he walks with her.
"You have got to tell Mom about this," she says, looking at him in a way that tells him she's trying not to cry. He hates that look. It means she feels sorry for him, and he doesn't want that. He doesn't even want her to know. She's twelve. He should be looking after her, not the other way round.
"I think that would involve telling her that I'm gay," he says lightly. "I think Dad would literally explode if I did that."
"I don't care. You can't deal with that every day."
"He'll blame himself for not being around enough, and then we'll be treated to half an hour on why his life is so difficult. Because, of course, our lives are totally fucking easy in comparison."
He realises belatedly that he's never said that particular word in front of her before. She seems rather unfazed by it, though, and he supposes she's probably heard it at school anyway.
"You've never given him any reason to think your life isn't as easy as that," she points out. "You tell them tonight, and I don't care what you tell them, but you can't have that every day of your life."
He hates when she's right, and he hates when she's trying to protect him. He wants to be able to protect himself. And because he's fourteen and resents being told what to do, he argues.
"It's not every day. It hasn't happened for months. They'll all be over it in a couple of weeks."
She considers this.
"If it's still happening next month, you're telling them."
He doesn't respond to that. He's not going to tell them. He's not.
They stop yelling abuse at him outside school, and she's satisfied that it's stopped, and no longer pressures him into telling his parents. It hasn't stopped, though; if anything, it's worse, and it's moved past the stage of upsetting him and into acceptance, because it's not like there's anything he can do about it.
Despite this, he's acquired some friends. Well, he calls them friends, but really they're just people to hang around with: a couple of quiet, nerdy types from his English class. They're nice enough, and he's grateful for their company, but he'd hardly call them interesting.
This goes on for a couple more months. And then, over Christmas break, he reads something about how gay kids are significantly more likely to commit suicide than straight kids. And he realises that it's not fair, it's not right, what they're doing to him, just because he happens to like boys. He's going to do something about it, he decides.
He goes back to school in January full of optimism and hope and a quiet, burning anger. And it all goes wrong. He tries to stand up to them, he really does, but he freezes and can't think of anything to say and he can't think how it would have stopped them, anyway. But he's still angry, and he still wants to do something. So he tells his English teacher.
"Oh, that's awful," she says. "I'll have to do something about that." He gets the feeling that she doesn't really care, and when it's still happening the next week, he tries his history teacher, and gets the same reaction.
And when, three weeks later, still nothing has changed except for the fact that it's been getting worse, he realises that he can't do this any more. He's angry, all the time, but because he can't do anything to the kids at school, all the anger's coming out at home. Specifically, on Ellie, his sweet, fierce, protective little sister who's not even turned thirteen yet. And she yells right back at him, because she can stand up for herself, unlike him. And in one of these arguments that are starting to happen every night, she says something about how he can yell at his sister but can't yell at those morons who are bullying him for being gay – which is entirely accurate, of course; because she's not stupid, she knows that it never stopped, but she thought it had at least quietened down until he started being this angry all the time – and their parents are in the room.
There's a hideously awkward silence then. Because their parents had assumed that all the arguing was something to do with teenage hormones or something and had let them get on with it; but now they have to face the knowledge that their son is both being bullied and homosexual.
"Is this true?" their father asks, after a pause which seems to last a whole year. And Blaine can't think of anything to say, so he nods. Ellie's looking at him, a slight smile building on her face, a smile of apology and forgiveness and hope, all at the same time. And though it's the last thing he feels like doing, he smiles back.
"Why didn't you just tell us?" asks their mother, moving to hug him, and then there's another silence.
"I want to transfer to another school," he says eventually, because, well, they know now, and he can't cope with it all any more, because it's just turning him into this ridiculous horrible angry person and he doesn't want to be that person. He wants to be respected, nice, the awesome older brother to his fairly awesome sister.
Apparently this is shocking, because his family is silent again. It is, he supposes, seeing as he's never even really thought of it as an option before now; but it's something he needs to do.
"It's that bad?" his mother asks, and he just nods again, and part of him feels so pathetic for not being able to stand up to them, especially with his father looking at him in that way, because all he really wants to do is prove that he can do it, prove that he doesn't deserve to be treated like this, prove that he should be liked. But he's tried that, and he wishes he could … he doesn't even know.
It's a month or so before he can transfer, and it's to a private school called Dalton Academy. He thinks the name's kind of ridiculous, but the zero-tolerance policy on bullying makes it pretty much the best place he's ever heard of. When he goes there, it's huge and terrifying and everyone's in uniform and he wonders if this was a good idea; but then as he's wandering down the corridor looking for his math class, someone comes out of nowhere and asks, rather pleasantly, if he's lost.
"I've got math with Mr Read," he says.
"That's actually right in front of you," the boy says with a grin. "And I'd better get to class before I'm late. I'm Wes, by the way."
"Blaine," says Blaine, and he walks into math.
Wes somehow manages to find him again later to take him to history and to lunch, where he introduces him to his friend David. And then they ask if he can sing. And somehow by the end of that first week he's joined the Warblers, which is possibly the most hilariously brilliant thing ever to happen to him. He's in an a capella choir at a private school. He's never even really thought about singing before.
"You're in a glee club," Ellie giggles at him when they're at home together, and it's nice because they aren't arguing, they're just talking.
"It's better than it sounds," he protests, and then their father walks in to say that he's doing something with a car, and would Blaine like to help, and he thinks that he might as well, seeing as he never really spends time with his dad these days.
They finish building the car around the time that Blaine develops a really awkward crush on Thad in the Warblers. His mother finds it amusing. Ellie tells him that Thad is definitely, definitely straight so please don't do anything about it, not that she thinks he will, but just as a precaution, because she knows Thad has a girlfriend. Their father has a more quiet reaction. The sort that suggests that he's still not quite happy about Blaine being gay. And … well, there's nothing Blaine can really do about that.
It's a long time before Blaine meets Kurt. Blaine's a junior, and Ellie's a freshman at the school Blaine went to, a long time ago. He worries a little about that: what if the kids remember her as his sister? What if they pick on her because of him? But it seems that she's okay, and he makes sure to ask her every now and then, just in case. And then one day, on his way to the senior commons, this boy in a black jacket and red tie turns up claiming to be new. Clearly he's not – Blaine remembers his first day, and he was definitely in the Dalton uniform – but Blaine takes his hand and runs down the corridor with him anyway. Then he sings to him about hands and skintight jeans; finds out he's having trouble with bullies; and gets his number.
Ellie loves that story. It makes her laugh so hard she falls off her chair when she first hears it; and then when she finds out that this Kurt is being bullied in the same way that Blaine was, she suggests he transfers to Dalton so you can be together forever! Blaine doesn't point out that she was going to be "together forever" with Tom, and they lasted for a week. He also doesn't point out that Kurt needs a friend. He just smiles, rolls his eyes, and tells her that he doesn't need a boyfriend right now.
"Nor do I, but I'm still trying to get Jake to ask me out," she says cheerily.
Blaine smiles at that, because he'll finally get to be annoying and protective, and she won't have any reason to do the same – because even if he needed an overprotective sibling, and even if he was going to be with Kurt, he's probably the least threatening person in the world.