Disclaimer : Glee isn't mine. Pooie.
AN : This is for a prompt in the glee_angst_meme (Tina/Artie - "You try so hard, to get people to look past the chair, and see the real you. Well I see you. I do. And... you're an asshole.") Unbetad, all mistakes are mine. Also, I apologize for the swearing, only because I never swear and it's awkward for me to use it and that's probably obvious in the fic. Guh.
Tina never expected it to be easy. His initial reaction to her confession was evidence enough of the new rift that had formed between them, and the days passing were only making it worse. He didn't avoid her anymore, he didn't wheel himself away when she tried to sit beside him during practice but his words, when he bothered to address her, were icy at best. And just like the coldest ice, it burned her, and her chest would clench each time he shrugged off her half-whispered apologies to take a stab at her newfound accession into the realm of normalcy.
Because clearly, by the chains and studs of her leather boots, she could now be considered normal.
It should've been a bridge, she's thinks, gripping the strap of her bag tighter as she confronts him for the nine hundredth time, trying to get a word out of him that wasn't dripping in contempt. It should've brought them closer and instead, they're miles apart.
In reality, she's standing not three feet from him.
He's putting away his sheet music after another rehearsal and she wordlessly thanks Kurt as he distracts Mr. Schuester with questions about costumes so that Artie and her are left alone in the choir room. She's been relentless in her attempts to restore their friendship, which she's convinced is all that can be salvaged from the aftermath of her hallway confession, but thinking of what might have been just causes more aching inside of her. Her shoulders sag a little further, especially when she realizes his features have hardened once again, but she's resolved that the only way to survive the rest of her inconsequential life is to just get him back in it.
Simply put, she needs him.
"Artie, please stop this. Can't you see I'm-."
"Yeah, I'm crippled, I'm not blind."
His lips set into a grim line but his eyes spark with annoyance that he is unable to stop his mouth from cutting her off. Thing was, he could keep blaming it on word vomit but every lie held some truth and his tongue was stained heavily with the bitterness in his heart. Lately, it's like his radar for anything that even hinted at disability was going haywire. He refused any help with his chair, glaring down anyone who so much as brushed the handles that had once been reserved for the girl in front of him, and he scowled whenever he heard anything remotely close to a stutter. Go figure they were doing in-class readings of Hamlet and at least 90% of the class was incapable of reading Shakespeare without stammering the hell out of a line; miraculously, Tina was as eloquent an Ophelia as he'd ever heard.
Life was seriously unfair.
"Look, I already told you I don't want to be a prop in your mind games anymore. Why don't you run off with Mercedes and Kurt, and be normal now? I know you've got tons of practice with repeating yourself but your wasting your breath with the sorries. Just leave me alone."
He says it because it feels right, as right as wrong can be. She's staring at him, clearly stunned, and he cringes when his eyes accidentally catch sight of her fist, white knuckled and shaking with the effort of whatever emotion she was currently riding out. Yeah, he was being callous but this was better for her anyway. Now she could grow and discover herself and he could just go back to watching from afar, like he did every other thing in the world because the wheelchair was his very own Berlin Wall. He snaps out of his thoughts when she takes a step forward, and he sets his expression to stoic as he fully expects her to be giving him that sad little frown that makes him feel bad for half a second, until he reminds himself she lied to him. Instead, Artie finds her glaring at him and it's his turn to wear a shocked expression, which he quickly hides beneath a sullen look.
"You know what?" Tina begins, breathing so hard that she thinks she might pass out. "I can't. Even if I wanted to, and you want to know why, Artie? It's really easy. You're my friend, and you're important to me, a sentiment we clearly don't share. All it took was a stupid note in English class about what song you would audition with and I knew you were going to be someone-someone to me." She takes a breath, eyes wild and cheeks flushed and Artie is transfixed by the raw emotion bleeding out of her, out of the cuts and cracks of a very broken heart. "One, stupid little… What was mine? The fact that I stuttered? Is that it? Was that all?"
Apparently, there's five stages when it comes to dealing with grief. Tina doesn't know how accurate that is, she isn't even sure what they all are and in what order they come in, but she thinks she's gone through all of them in the last five minutes. She knows for certain that she's cycled through them at least three times over in the last week, but confronting Artie like this has been a culmination of every scornful reaction he'd given her in the last five days.
"And I know, you've heard it a million times already but I still mean it, every single time. I'm sorry, that it took so long, that it hurt you, that I did it in the first place because I was the dumbest eleven year old in all of Lima. I was just so, so scared - I still am! - but that's still not an excuse."
She stands there in a daze for another stilted moment and when she speaks, her voice is considerably softer. "I've been seeing a psychologist about my shyness." She watches with a sick sense of victory, which at the same time feels like a punch to the gut, when his eyebrows furrow and he looks up, either concerned or disturbed by the new piece of information.
"It's... I told my parents afterwards. Judy," whom he knew to be her speech therapist - she was Tina's middle school SLP who ended up being a close friend and confidante in the last four years. "... Had already arranged treatment for my social anxiety but you were the first person I'd admitted faking it to, because..."
Tina falters again but she pushes down the instinctual need to take back her words, hide away, not be so vulnerable. It's a little late for that, she thinks, but she never did have the same control he had. "I didn't want to lie to you anymore, I couldn't, not when we-." Tina has to stop completely, because the familiar ache tremors so deeply inside of her, she thinks her heart might just stop from hurting so much. "You deserved better."
Artie only hears the past tense.
"You try so hard, to get people to look past the chair, and see the real you," and Tina has to pause because she realizes her voice has become unbearably strained. Her eyes are burning for reasons that she doesn't want to acknowledge so she stares up at the ceiling, refusing to blink until she can get a grip on herself.
After a few seconds, she exhales and Artie pinpoints this moment as Tina finally giving up, and he realizes how badly he's fucked up.
"Well, I see you. I do." Her expression softens for a millisecond, the only trace of hesitation she'll allow herself before she fixes her steely gaze on him. Her chest heaves and she won't - she absolutely will not - let herself be swayed by the round, blue eyes that look up to meet her face.
"And… you're an asshole."
The words fall sharp and clear out of her mouth, and like a noxious gas, it constricts the air around them and neither can breathe for a moment. Artie's hands are still as rocks on his lap and it isn't until she takes a step back, blue-streaked hair whipping towards the door and out of his sight, that he peels off his glasses and buries his face into his gloved hands in exhaustion or frustration or God, he didn't even know anymore.
Tina knows that she's not going to make it to the end of the hallway before running into Kurt, and she swipes angrily at her moist lashes before any teardrops can form. She doesn't even care at this point that she's probably streaked a nice smudge across her face. She'd rather look like a racoon than be like weepy Quinn with her pregnancy hormones or Rachel who was always wearing the same 'kicked puppy dog' look on her face. It was such a girly thing to do and yeah, Tina was hardly a tomboy and she couldn't address a room full of strangers without an instantaneous desire to throw up, but she damn well wasn't weak.
She just had a wheelchair-bound Achilles' heel bent on tearing her apart from the inside out.