Crossed Fingers

By: RavenHeart101

Disclaimer: I own nothing besides the few original characters thrown in here and there.

Summary: Being perfect can be hard, especially when you have a potential boyfriend on the ins, a toxic home life, and exams coming up. Sometimes all you can do is hope that you don't break in front of the wrong person, and keep your fingers crossed when you do.

Warnings: Possible triggers. This isn't meant to start out as a happy story. Slash (is it still slash if it's between two gay guys?). Swears. Slurs. Yeah...

He resented ever snapping at Kurt. It wasn't like it was the boys fault or anything, it was just that Blaine was about ready to blow if he heard one more thing about how disgusting the uniforms at Dalton were. He regretted snapping at Kurt because he hadn't really meant to. He had meant to, simply... well Blaine wasn't sure what he had meant to do. But he certainly hadn't meant to cause Kurt's face to fall and take on a guarded look full of something that Blaine really recognized. Fear. And... well screw him. Blaine was just so stressed. He sighed loudly, angry with himself, and flopped back on the taller boy's couch cushion. "Kurt... I'm sorry." He said maybe a little too loudly. "I didn't mean it. I'm just-"

"Stressed?" The other boy's face was clear and open now. And he had a small smile tugging at the side of his lips. Blaine's heart leaped into his throat. He almost scowled, but that wasn't right because Blaine wanted to smile back so much. So he did. And Kurt's smile grew just so much more that it was almost taking up his whole face.

"Yeah." He let out a tiny, airy laugh, propping himself up on his elbows and feeling his blazer pool around his elbows with the tiny movement.

Kurt tilted his head, and his bangs (which he hadn't bothered to style for once) fell to the left and into his oh-so-amazing eyes. His smile only grew. "You should get some sleep." He said lightly with a small teasing edge to his voice.

"Probably." Blaine agreed, knowing that once he went back to his dorm he wouldn't actually sleep. Wes would probably ask him to help him make an educated decision on the Warblers Regionals set list. And Blaine, being the nice guy he was, would help without a second thought. "But I need to finish this essay." And with that said he pushed himself up off his elbows and gripped his laptop to pull over and into his lap. He ignored the way Kurt was, obviously, staring at him, and, instead, tried so very hard to focus on his essay. It wasn't as though he didn't like the attention – in all honesty Blaine loved the attention Kurt easily gave him – he just really needed to get this essay done. Sure it wasn't due until a few days, but Blaine was pretty sure he would be busy helping Wes and David and Kurt with something or other that he would never get it done.

"That essay isn't even due until Tuesday. And it's Friday." Kurt wrinkled his nose adorably and tried to push Blaine's computer out of his way. His eyes glittered a little in concern. "You don't have to do it now."

"If I don't do it now I'll never get it done." Blaine reprimanded lightly, reaching out and giving the other boy's hand a light squeeze. Holding hands was a big step for both of them (one that they had actually conquered when they first met on that staircase), and Blaine was sure to take every opportunity to do so when he could. Plus, Kurt didn't seem to mind. It actually seemed to make him inconceivably happy. And if Blaine could see that wide smile and blissful look on Kurt's face everyday his life could be complete. He smiled back, his own eyes sparkling slightly as he typed slowly with his left hand.

Kurt leaned over his shoulder, dainty eyebrows furrowed in confusion as he attempted to make sense of whatever Blaine was typing. The boy blinked before sighing and leaning his head on the back of Blaine's shoulder. "How can you do that this late?" Blaine looked down at the clock on his computer, confused for a second until he realized just how late it was. 12:37 AM glared at him tauntingly.

"Shit." He cursed softly, ignoring Kurt's small flinch at the swear word. Blaine seldom swore. And whenever he did Kurt seemed to least expect it. He groaned, rolling his shoulders after Kurt moved his head and rubbing his nose with his hand. "I should probably get back to my dorm. I'm surprised the monitors haven't caught me yet."

Kurt wined when Blaine tried to pull away, tugging the boy back down onto the bed with him. "Rest up." He said lightly, with a teasing smile. Blaine smiled back, Charming Smile Number 67 coming out full force. His hands tapped lightly on his leg, frantically tapping out the chords of some song or another as his brain attempted to fight down the stress that was growing with every second. Charming Smile Number 67 didn't seem to work as well as he had hoped, Kurt's smile had flowed steadily off his face, a concerned crease forming on his spotless forehead.

"I would Kurt, really I would... But I have to finish this essay and I really need to get back to my dorm before the monitors find me still out here." He smiled for one last time. "And you need to head home before your father decides to hunt both you and me down for being out so late." He pointed out softly.

He chuckled softly at Kurt's fake pout before the other boy tugged him back down onto the couch, a more serious expression overtaking his angelic looks. "You need to sleep, Blaine."

"And I will." He smiled easily at the other boy. "When I'm done with this essay."

"It's nearly one in the morning Blaine. You need to sleep now." Kurt stressed, his hand gripping Blaine's in an almost painful grip. He forced his hand to cease tapping against his knee. "You need to relax. Is everything okay?"

The concern was almost too much. Blaine was supposed to be the mentor, not Kurt. Blaine was supposed to be the one to comfort and listen, not anyone else. Everyone came to him with their problems. It was a cycle. Blaine knew almost everything about every boy in their year. It just so happened that none of them knew much about him. He remembered losing it to Wes and David once. But that was only once. And it would only be once. "I'm fine, Kurt."

"Then get some sleep. I'll know if you don't. I'll make Wes tell me by kidnapping his gavel and refusing to give it back until he gives me a very thorough and embarrassing report on how you acted overnight." Blaine didn't doubt that he would. And damn Kurt and Kurt's eyes that could easily make him do anything. He found himself agreeing – reluctantly at that – to go back to his dorm and sleep. Kurt smiled lightly at him before pulling him towards him in a hug. Blaine let it linger maybe a bit too long, but he was comfortable and his brain was close to swimming due to the comfort level he was receiving in that one hug. It was almost too much to describe, but, somehow, Blaine had a feeling that Kurt saw just how stressed he was.

"I'll see you Monday." Blaine squeezed his hand and did something daring. Something that was placing a small kiss onto Kurt's cheek before pulling him back in for a slightly tighter hug. Kurt laughed softly, squeezing him back and resting his cheek on Blaine's hair.

"You need anyone to yell at you to go to bed just call me."

"Got it."

It turned out that Blaine didn't get it. Because he was still awake at three in the morning after successfully convincing Wes that he was asleep. He was sitting in the bathroom with a few candles lit and his essay out in front of him, his pen running across the paper softly. With a flourish he finished off his sentence and moved on to the next one. The only sounds were his soft humming, the flame's flickering, and the pen moving over the paper. It was almost soothing.

The most soothing thing in the bathroom was the dancing flame. Blaine found himself entranced in it. His pen slowed over the paper as his finger reached out to lightly trace the outline of the candle. He flinched lightly as the wax dribbled onto his finger. The jerk just simply caused the candle to shake and more to fall onto his hand. As he quickly rushed to wash it off so that it didn't stick he realized that his mind was no longer panicking over the essay. He felt completely calm and serene. It was a first.

He blinked and sat back down on the toilet top, his brows knitted together in confusion as he gazed down at the hardening wax on his hand. Slowly, he reached out and gripped his pencil, the sentences suddenly coming quicker and clearer than before.

He finished his essay with a flourish and a smile. His hazel eyes stared at the candle in amazement before he shook his undone hair out of his face and blew it out, the bathroom becoming completely engrossed in the suffocating darkness. "Blaine...? Man what the hell are you doing up?" Wes's sleep rattled voice asked from directly behind the closed and locked door.

Blaine cursed, scrambling to collect all his belongings. In his haste his left hand (the one he wrote with) somehow got one of the candles to spill onto it. With another curse he threw the throbbing flesh under the sink, his right hand frantically turning to nob of the cold water. "Blaine? Are you okay?" So... maybe he wasn't be as quiet as he hoped he had been. Wes had obviously heard. And he was obviously worried enough to talk so loud at... what time was it again?

"Fine." He forced out, gritting his teeth as the cold water was twisted off and the candles were shoved in the cabinet that was for his use only.

"Did I, uh... interrupt something...?" Wes actually sounded embarrassed and Blaine surprisingly found himself collapsing over the bathroom table with a loud bought of laughter. For some reason he felt relieved. He wasn't sure why though. It wasn't as though he had done anything wrong.

"No, Wes, you didn't interrupt anything."

"Oh. Okay then." The two of them were silent for a moment, both waiting for the other to talk. "Well, uhm, can you hurry up? I've really got to pee."

His friend obviously wasn't the most subtle so early in the morning. "Yeah." Blaine swallowed, folding his essay into a perfect square and pushing it into his pocket. "All yours, Wesley." The other boy's suspicious eyes followed him until his laid down in bed, his hair spewing across his pillow as he willed his eyes to shut.

He may not have slept that night, but, for some reason, he was the most relaxed as he had ever been in the past few years, even though his hand throbbed from where the candle's wax had fallen.

"Good morning!" Kurt choked on his sip of coffee as Blaine literally bounced into the seat beside him on Monday. "How was your weekend?" He refrained from strangling the positively chipper boy beside him by gripping the foam coffee cup closer to his inner arm.

"It was okay. I spent Saturday with Mercedes and Rachel, and Sunday having a 50's movie marathon with Tina and Mike, and teaching Britt how to feed her cat." He shrugged lightly, stopping himself from smiling at the way Blaine's face stayed lit up like a Christmas tree. If there was one thing Kurt loved about Blaine (and to be honest there was more than one thing Kurt loved about Blaine) it would have to be his annoyingly chipper attitude in the mornings even when everyone else was ready to fall back into bed. Even if Kurt hated mornings on his good days, Blaine always managed to somehow make him smile and laugh and wake up. Maybe it had something to do with the brightness of his smile, Kurt honestly was not sure anymore. "How was yours?"

Blaine shrugged and reached over to steal a piece of toast off David's plate as the other boy rested his head on the table in exhaustion. "It was fantastic! I finished my English essay with two days to spare, and then I helped Wes with the Regionals set list, and managed to get a few all right songs written for Music Theory. I'm practically done with that project." Kurt was shocked into silence with the amount of words the boy could push out in one breath, and while still wearing that wonderful smile that managed to turn him into a pile of mush on the cafeteria's floor.

"Uhm..." He blinked, looking down at where Blaine had grabbed his hand somewhere during the long sentence. Their skin tones looked wonderful together the teenage girl part of his brain pointed out with a squeal. He tried to fight down the blush that was threatening to rise. "That sounds... productive..."

"Productive?" Wes snorted, his hand slapping David in the back of his head in order to wake him up as he took his spot next to Blaine at the table. "It's freakin' insane." The thing about Wes and David was that they had a severe case of mood swings from the time the woke up to the time they went to bed. Or at least around Kurt they did. At any given morning Wes was horribly grumpy, and David was horribly tired. By the time it got to the afternoon David had woken up considerably, and Wes was in Warbler-mode. At night Wes had finally let up, and David was in crazy-mode. How Blaine managed to live with them (and find them more than mildly entertaining) was sometimes beyond Kurt's comprehension. Then again, Kurt had gone to a school as crazy as William McKinley High School for the first two years of his schooling. Maybe the two of them acted as normal teenagers were supposed to act and McKinley was simply hysterically insane? He still had yet to figure that out. "How you found the time to do more than half of that project in two days is beyond me."

"Actually I did it all Sunday." Kurt blinked again (he found himself doing that a lot lately), turning his eyes back to Blaine, his forehead creasing in confusion. "What? I had nothing else to do." Blaine said defensively at his three friend's shocked (and dare he say it, concerned) looks. Kurt's was the worse by far.

"You helped Wes practically make the set list for Regionals minus solos!" David's voice was louder than was necessary and Kurt pushed down a visible wince at the volume.

"Writing songs isn't hard." Blaine muttered into his toast, his eyes shifting down to the table at Wes and David's incredulous looks. Kurt was mainly concerned, and that he could deal with easily. Wes and David? Well they knew. They had seen what he was like once last year.

"Maybe for you it is." Kurt said lightly, smiling a bit at the shorter boy and squeezing his hand even tighter. Wes and David traded a tense look with one another as their friend stood up from the table and grabbed his bag.

He smiled down at Kurt before turning to face the other two. "Is it okay if I use the rehearsal room? I want to see if I can get the other two done before classes start."

Wes nodded wordlessly, his wide eyes ignoring David's insistent look for him to refuse as he tossed Blaine the keys. "Knock yourself out."

"Wes, you're an angel." He sent out Charming Smile Number Seven and jogged down the hall towards the choir room, ignoring the confused looks sent his way over his cheery attitude.

"Is he...?" Kurt asked the other two in confusion. The other boys just shook their head in dismissal before turning back to their food. They needed to have a talk with Blaine. The problem was figuring out just how to have said talk.

The problem with Blaine was that it was almost impossible to get him alone enough that you wouldn't spill any of his carefully kept secrets to random people in listening distance. The problem with Wes was that he didn't understand that and decided to call Blaine out on the way he was acting in the middle of Warbler practice. Luckily, it was while they had extra time and no one was really listening anyway. Kurt wasn't sure just what Wes was trying to do when he came over and stole Blaine from their conversation, but he was pretty sure it had something to do with the secretive looks Wes and David had been sending each other all day long as Blaine slowly, but surely, lost the energy he had that morning. He pretended like he wasn't spying on them as he sat in on Nick and Ryan's conversation about some football team or another.

"You're doing it again." David started out, corning Blaine on the left as Wes stood to his right. There was a wall directly behind Blaine, and a table directly in front of him. There was no way for him to escape except by crawling under the table, and he obviously wasn't about to do that when he had those knew uniform pants on. That would just be horribly detestable. Or, at least, Kurt thought so.

"Doing what again?" Blaine raised a confused eyebrow, and sent a confused look over at the countertenor, who simply shrugged in response. He didn't know what was going on any more than Blaine did.

Wes sighed and sat down in the chair beside him. "Stressing yourself out. Overworking. Blaine you are going to run yourself into the ground doing this."

"Yeah. I mean... remember what happened last year?" David offered quietly and Kurt had a feeling that it was a secret. His feeling was confirmed by the way Blaine's eyes shifted over to him before looking back over at David and Wes.

"Last year isn't this year." He said shortly, moving to walk away from Wes, only to be pushed back into the chair that David pulled up for him.

Kurt moved to stand up, only stopping when David subtly shook his head at him to sit back down. "You're right. You weren't as bad as this."

"What do you mean? I told you I was going to stop and relax and I have-!"

"You're not sleeping!" Wes snapped. "We just got that project assigned to us Friday and you're already more than halfway done when it's due in two weeks!"

"So I like to get my homework done? That's an issue now?" Kurt was almost beginning to panic. He had never seen Blaine act like this before. It was all rather disconcerting.

Blaine's fingers tapped frantically against his leg, and Kurt recognized it as some piano chords. The fingers on his other hand were crossing and uncrossing, as though looking for some form of good luck. He suddenly felt the urge to reach out and hold the hand in his. "No. That's not a crime. But insomnia is, and so is hurting yourself." David said reasonably.

"Tell me, Blaine. Been near any sharp items lately?"

"I do not cut Wesley!" Blaine yelled. The Warbler's froze. Wes froze, David froze, and, yet, Kurt moved. He reached out to touch Blaine's hand.

"Blaine..." The boy turned terrified hazel eyes onto him. And then Kurt noticed. Oh God... Blaine wasn't breathing. "Blaine breathe."

Then there were quick, sharp breaths and he fell back into the chair, missing it almost completely and bringing David down with him. The room reacted almost immediately. Kurt was acutely aware of Nick rushing out of the room to alert the nurse and of Eddie making sure that everyone stayed back. "Breathe man, breathe." Wes said almost frantically, pushing Blaine's head between his knees.

But Kurt noticed the small glittering on Blaine's face. He was crying. Oh God, Blaine was crying. If Kurt didn't already know that the boy wasn't perfect he would have had his dreams shattered right there. "It's okay. It's okay." He said soothingly, sitting down on the floor next to him. He grabbed at Blaine's hand and attempted to soothe down his nerves. In all honesty Kurt didn't really know what to do, he was running off episodes of Gray's Anatomy and from what he remembered from when his dad had one after his mother died. "Shh." He said softly, stroking back the curly hair gently. "Breathe, Blaine. Just breathe."

Too bad that was harder to do than Blaine expected. It had never been so hard to breathe before in his life. The only thing he could concentrate on was David's comforting hand on his back, rubbing circles, and Kurt's dainty hand holding his own and patting out some sort of pattern in his hair.

With a small sigh of relief Kurt noted how Blaine's frantic breathing had started to slow down. He was regaining control. "Hey." He said, smiling gently at the shorter boy as he leaned his head back against David's knee. Blaine's lips quirked up a little at the edge as Kurt continued petting his hair. "Just breathe, okay?"

He nodded breathlessly as Wes' hand gripped his shoulder tighter. "Mr. Anderson?" The nurse said kindly, trying, and failing, to push Kurt away from his side. "Can you stand up? I had the secretary call your parents to pick you up." And then Kurt noticed it again. The tapping on the leg and the crossing of the fingers and the frantic breathing and how Blaine closed his eyes and leaned forward, almost as though curling in on himself. He turned his head away from Kurt's concerned face and into David's knee as he tried to focus on breathing. But, instead, all he could think of was the fact that he would have to go home.

He may or may not have passed out.

A: N- This is my first time writing something like this so straight forward. It's new to me, and I honestly have no idea if I'm doing this good enough. So, yes it is multi-chaptered (Kurt hasn't found out the reason for Blaine's incredible break down in the choir room or what happened the year before yet!). And, yes, it is Blaine centric. Because, no matter how much I love Kurt, I honestly hate the idea that Blaine is simply Mister Perfect. He needs some flaws. And history. And... well everyone's taking this angle but I hope mine is a bit original. :)