Prologue - The Sky is Falling
The first time Blaine ever understands hate isn't the first time he hears a homophobic slur or gets shoved into a locker or even the first time someone grabs a fistful of his curls of hair and calls him a hobbit. It's before middle school, before he comes out, before any of his peers have been on the Earth long enough to turn close-minded and cruel.
Instead, he's nine years old, and he's standing at the banister of the stairs, clutching them like they're prison bars while his father's furious voice roars and swells in living room below. The worst part is not knowing what's happening below. Every time his mom fails to scream back at his father, Blaine wonders what's happened to her, why can't he hear her. The fear is paralyzing. Blaine knows that probably nothing will happen, because that's only the stuff of scary horror movies, but he would still rather be downstairs so that at least he would know that things weren't any worse than whatever they were. He wishes that he'd kept quiet and just shrunk back into his corner, but instead he'd implored aloud to nobody in particular and asked what he should do, and his mother had snapped, "Blaine, go upstairs." So now, on top of everything else, he's afraid that she's mad at him, because then he'll have no one.
He lies down on the floor and presses his ear against it, straining to listen, because he still can't hear anything in between the deafening shouts of his father. Blaine wishes that he could just cover his ears and stop caring, but when he tries, the terror is so much worse than being aware of whatever he can, that he gives up almost instantly.
It is excruciating to crouch by the stairs and wait, to have no power at all over himself or the child's world that is falling apart all around him. An old nursery rhyme comes to mind - the sky is falling, the sky is falling. And today, it truly is. Everything Blaine has ever known to be solid and dependable and there, everything he's ever counted on to hold his child's world together, is disappearing.
Just because he can't do nothing, Blaine begins to whisper the words of his favorite song to himself, as if they can hold him together. When he stops to catch his breath, the voices below seem to grow louder again, and even though he knows it could just be because he can listen to them fully now, Blaine starts reciting the lyrics again on the off chance that they somehow really were keeping his family together. He doesn't stop when his mouth gets dry or when his voice is so tired that it's nearly breaking.
Lying there on the floor, as he hears his father bellow out yet another threat, Blaine knows that it has to be hate that could make anyone so terrible. He's ashamed when he realizes that, in the part of his core that used to get excited when his father arrived home from work early or swung him up onto his lap, he now he feels nothing, and Blaine wonders if that deadness is hate, too. However, at the same time, as his lips numbly begin the song yet again, Blaine feels a growing warmth elsewhere. In the same instant that he first questions his love for his father, he finds another love, because music has been waiting right here for him the entire time, and will remain steadily there for the next hour Blaine spends on the floor there, and every time after.
Six years later, when Blaine's eyes light up as a boy dressed all in black sings Blackbird, something shifts in that deadened part of him. And in that moment of vague hope that he can't quite find the source of, Blaine forgets what it means to hate.
A/N: I know this chapter is really short, but it is just the prologue. The rest of this story will take place primarily in the context of Blaine's present life, not his childhood.
I also know that there are a lot of fics out there that write Blaine as having a troubled family, and for a while it seemed pointless for me to add another one to the mix. But I needed to write this, if nothing else just to express that all of us have pain that we are afraid to show, and that there is always a light at the end of the tunnel.
Please review. Since this story is about such a personal and sensitive subject for so many people, I am planning to wait for 5 reviews before I update again, just to get a sense of whether or not I am on the right track.