disclaimer: without prejudice. the names of all characters contained here-in are the property of FOX and Ryan Murphy. no infringments of these copyrights are intended, and are used here without permission.
author's notes: future!fic. inspired by a gifset by spuffina created for Tumblr's Seblaine week's Angst prompt, created with permission from the artist :) special thanks to my beta Inwenalas. title taken from Lost and Broken by Good Charlotte.
warning: future!fic, ANGST, OCs, strong language
Hurt Beneath My Skin;;
It was never meant to happen again.
Not like it once had in a Dalton common room, a song and dance and schoolboy flirtation, the Courvoisier and talk of Paris and coffee after. The texts and IMs and Facebook messages, the quiet interest just shy of stalking.
That was the past.
And it was never meant to come back around. That's why he avoided New York after graduating college, why he'd defied his father's wishes, which had become a rare occurrence in recent years, but he couldn't and he wouldn't move to New York, no matter how generous the job offers. He figured Blaine and Kurt had settled down there long ago, got married, started a family maybe.
He made due, took on a comfortable position at a big corporation in San Francisco, made his fair share of money, met a guy, Connor, settled down himself, knowing every single step of the way what got him there. Spending every second of his life looking back.
That's why it feels like someone dropped a boulder on his chest, air rushing from his lungs, crushing weight on his windpipe, when the boy who'd been at the back of his mind for over a decade walks through the door, crazy dark curls unrestrained, a playful smile coloring his features, glasses tinted darker to hide something missing. Something taken. Something lost.
He tries to breathe but there's a chokehold around his throat; he turns and he's stumbling towards the restroom where he throws up, a conditioned response forced on him once Santana spoke the words "He lost his eye," and now only comes back when he experiences this kind of panic.
Warblers backing away from him, arms uncrossing, his own face falls, gasps and teenage boys shaking their heads. Tears in Santana's eyes.
He coughs and dry heaves for minutes, throat burning, until his stomach's out of bile and it's only the nausea left behind.
What was it, hu? Glass? Asphalt? He licked his lips, heat rushing to his head. No, not Blaine, not this. Stay calm. She's bluffing.
He breaks out in a cold sweat that the splash of water to his face doesn't manage to still and he's shaking, hands clutching tight at the sink to keep from crying. Why, he thinks, why now, why here, why him? Of all the mistakes he's made why did it have to be his biggest one to come back and haunt him?
By the time he makes his way back into the coffee shop Blaine is gone. For a split second he wonders if it was real, wonders if Blaine was really there or just a figment of his guilty conscience playing cruel tricks, because no, Blaine can't be here, he'd granted him the respect of distance, forced himself to face the mistakes he made and accepted this life as his penance. Only he knows this isn't punishment at all. No matter what he tells himself he's built a life here to be proud of, keeping his past just at arm's length.
And here it is, casually strolling back in.
Maybe his punishment has just now begun.
When Connor asks him why he doesn't touch his dinner that night he almost loses it, loses grip of this neatly organized mess that is now his life—work and Connor and friends, thinking and fucking and laughing—and Connor's eyes dig into his and it spills out, everything, all of it, words stuttered between tears, thoughts that haven't occupied his mind for years sneaking back in through cracks he thought he mended long ago.
"It was meant for Kurt," he cries. "I never meant to—"
He shakes his head, willing his tears down, pushing hard at his grief—he's made himself not feel this for years. On top of everything, the guilt and hurt and inconsequence, he knows he's not allowed to feel sorry. He made a mistake, he hurt a boy who despite everything had meant something to him in a new and surprising way and he had to pay for that somehow.
He deserves this punishment.
"It was a prank," he says, voice steady again. "It was a stupid prank that got out of hand."
Only somewhere between his pride and youthful lust he'd thrown any morals out the window. His view of the world was black and white; he wanted Blaine but couldn't have him because Kurt Hummel was in the way. The math on it had felt so devastatingly simple that rock salt became part of the equation without too great an effort. But what did it all add up to? It added up to lawyers and six months of mandatory counseling, money his parents never thought they'd be spending in a legal settlement with the parents of a boy they'd never even heard of.
Blaine curled up on the ground, slushie staining blood red across the concrete. Agonized screams. Hands covering Blaine's eyes.
It's all disorganized in his memory, the slushie and the decision to throw it and meeting Blaine—he's mulled it all over so many times that the memories probably don't even match up with reality anymore.
All he remembers crystal clear is that last day in an ice-cold room; him, his parents, Blaine's parents, their lawyers—and the shadow of a boy sitting small and broken in a black leather chair. He knew his life would never be the same again, he'd have this image of Blaine burned into his retinas forever.
It's the last time he ever saw Blaine.
And Blaine hadn't looked at him once.
"I can't be loved!" he shouts at his soft-spoken boyfriend when his arms wind around him, because if there's one thing he's perfected over the years it's his guilt and his right to feel it, a dark stone inside his chest he carries with him always and everywhere, always there to remind him, to make sure he doesn't forget—another conditioned response.
But then Connor's there with his 'baby' and his warm hands and his lips, and his 'your past doesn't matter to me' and next thing he knows he's fucking his boyfriend up against the wall.
The past may be creeping tight around the corner, but he'll be damned if he doesn't keep running for just a little while longer.
"You're wrong, you know," Connor whispers to him later, his head on his chest. "I love you."
He drags a hand through Connor's thick black hair and closes his eyes. If he tries long and hard enough he can imagine a world where that's true, where he's able to feel the same, where he's worthy of Connor's love.
But it never lasts long.
.
He doesn't see Blaine the next day.
.
Or the day after that.
.
Or the next.
.
He convinces himself that maybe it wasn't real after all, he'd made it all up, or maybe Blaine was vacationing, driving through and whatever cruelty fate still thought he deserved had brought Blaine to the one coffee shop he'd been frequenting for years.
"See," Connor says after a whole week has gone by. "You're worried over nothing."
"I cost him his eye," he says coldly, finishing his fourth glass of wine on an empty stomach. "It's not nothing."
Connor sighs and pries the glass from his hands, straddles his lap and kisses him deep, lets him fuck him into oblivion until they're both completely spent, and then Sebastian lets him whisper loving nonsense to him all night.
He doesn't sleep.
.
It's another Monday when it happens again. This time he's just coming out of the restroom when Blaine pushes through the door, guitar strapped to his back. He feels bile make its way up his throat, panic crawling up his spine, but he controls himself this time—
In the end he just stands there in the corner like an idiot, sagged against the wall, blinking against the sharp sting of tears.
All that's still there is the boulder, keeping him from breathing properly.
He settles down at a table without looking away, hands flat on the surface, breathing in short painful gasps and a word, one single word glued to his tongue that shouldn't be there but lies in wait anyway.
He sits there for what must be hours, long after Blaine is gone, eyes out of focus, phone vibrating in his jacket pocket, but he can't move. He's paralyzed with the realization that Blaine is here, in San Francisco, maybe even permanently, his past is here within reach and there's absolutely nothing he can do to pull it back to where it had previously taken root.
Of course that's not true. He could change coffee houses or come at another hour, hell, he could move to another state to avoid seeing Blaine every morning. But he doesn't want to.
He can't keep running forever.
.
On Tuesday he gets up earlier than usual, the anticipation of seeing Blaine again runs through his veins like fire—pain and guilt kick-starting him into a game he knows could be dangerous, but whatever had kept him at a distance before now only pulls him closer, questions he'd like an answer to and words he wants to hear exchanged between them.
It's the guitar, he thinks, Blaine had been carrying a guitar. Did that mean he still performed? Is that why he was here in San Francisco?
And one question that presses down on him harder than any other, weightier than his guilty conscious, the fabric of the boulder keeping him from breathing. One question. The question.
But no Blaine on Tuesday.
.
No Blaine on Wednesday.
.
No Blaine for the rest of the week.
.
On Saturday he makes up some sad excuse to get out of dinner with Connor's parents just so he can spend the evening surfing the net. Googling the name Blaine Anderson proves too general. Not only does that get him about a million hits, it gets him Blaine Andersons he has absolutely no care for.
He tries to narrow his search to San Francisco, and he even tries New York, but it's no use. Besides a Facebook account he lost access to years ago and a twitter account he doesn't dare add he doesn't find any explanation for why Blaine would be in San Francisco, or why he was lugging around a guitar. It's crazy how strong his need to know has become in only two weeks time. But he has to know, he's been living with the weight of this mistake for the past ten years and now that it's here facing him he needs to find out—Is Blaine happy?
But how can he figure that out without talking to him?
"What's the matter?" Connor asks once he's home again and finds him spread eagle on the couch, the TV background static to his own scattered train of thought.
"Nothing." He shrugs, and from the sigh that sounds behind him he gathers Connor sees no reason to turn this into an argument. So he decides he should at least pretend he's not sulking. "What did your mom insist you take home?" he asks, because Connor's mom is the characteristic cookie-cutter housewife, always baking, always talking, always looking out for her baby. And by extension her baby's boyfriend.
"Pecan pie," Connor answers while he trots to the kitchen. "That boyfriend o' yours is too skinny," Connor mimics his mother's voice and Sebastian feels a smile pull at the corners of his mouth beyond his control.
He gets up from the couch and follows Connor into the kitchen, studying his ass as he puts the pie in the fridge. Connor's been good for him—the realization hits him for the first time in the three years they've been together—he makes him laugh and the sex is great and even though he can be a bit of a drama queen sometimes, Connor never fails to make him feel better. It's his own subconscious that always drags him down.
He's right behind Connor when he turns around; he forces his boyfriend back against the fridge, body pliant against his and Sebastian kisses him deep, letting his tongue linger longer than it has to, longer than it has before.
Connor smiles against his lips, "Qu'est-ce qui se passe?" he asks, giving Sebastian enough indication his indifference has been forgiven.
"Maybe I missed you."
He lies. What he really misses is a time not too long ago when all of this made sense, the working, the fucking, the laughing—funny how fast his life got turned upside down. All because the boy in his mind – small and frail and not looking up at him – had gone to that confident sexy man walking into the coffee shop.
.
And then Monday comes around again.
He's at the coffee shop half an hour earlier than usual, the shop overflowing with parents that dropped their children off at the preschool next door. It's noisy and too unpleasant to enjoy his coffee, but that's not why he comes here anymore. No, he's gotten used to drinking the awful coffee at work, the bitter aftertaste of the sediment hardly registering.
All the noise gets cancelled out the moment he catches sight of those curls outside the window, his breath hitches in his throat and those goddamn tears are prickling in the corners of his eyes again. It's the anticipation that brings him here now, the moments before he sees Blaine and his heart beats faster and what he took from Blaine hasn't bled through to his conscious mind yet.
The moment's short and sweet and intense, but not as intense as the guilt that follows every single time, avalanches through him, hard and all at once and he knows this is how his punishment should have felt all these years—not San Francisco and Connor and a great job.
No, the past ten years should have been this torture: Blaine just out of reach, because he might come here to see Blaine every day and that selfish word might continually choke him up—he knows his distance, his absence, is the only thing that keeps Blaine coming back.
Monday is the day he learns that nostalgia also has a dark sense of humor.
Blaine wafts in the way he used to at the Lima Bean, a warm smile and a wink reserved for the barista, orders a cookie that's too big for him to eat alone but there's no one there to share it with him.
Where's Kurt?
The thought strikes him like lightning.
Are Blaine and Kurt still together?
.
Another week goes by and Sebastian wonders if Blaine really goes six whole days without caffeine, or if he just works very irregular hours. Or maybe he's only in the neighborhood on Mondays.
.
The days start blurring together, much like his memory already has. He works, he comes home, he tells Connor things he wants to hear, does things they both want from each other, but he feels detached from it all, like he's living on automatic pilot. Like somehow the only day that matters is Monday, when he sees Blaine again, those mornings when he's faced with his mistake but he can see for himself that what he did hadn't stopped Blaine short, hadn't broken him down or took his ability to smile.
He spends a lot of his time at home on the computer, typing in every search term he can think of. Until one day he decides to look up old Dalton pictures. They never went to Dalton at the same time, but Blaine's picture would be on file. He remembers looking up Blaine years ago, before he'd stumbled into the common room during The Warblers' performance of Uptown Girl.
God, what he wouldn't give to relive that moment.
The first time. Bowtie and hair gel and an enthusiasm for performing that was infectious. A song and dance and coffee after.
The Blaine that attended Dalton was not the same boy he met that day, the uniform making him look dapper and dashing, smile confident and mysterious, and he finds himself wishing he'd known that Blaine, wishes he could've known Blaine without Kurt.
But that's a different world where he never threw that slushie, where Blaine didn't lose his eye and he didn't lose—everything, he thinks selfishly. But he realized long ago he might've stolen from Blaine, that he was the villain of the story, but he's the one that gained something.
"Who's that?" Connor asks, appearing from the living room, and settles down on his lap. Then his eyes catch the name beneath the picture. "That's—" Connor looks at him, bright baby blues reflecting concern and something that he can only describe as pity. "Sweetie, what are you doing?" he asks, knowing full well Sebastian doesn't like being called 'sweetie'.
"Are you—" Connor starts, eyes fearful now. "Are you still in love with him?"
There's a weight to the question that hasn't left him for the past ten years either. A question he doesn't know the answer to. "I was never in love with him," he says nonetheless, because he knows Connor and knows what he needs to hear.
Connor takes his face in hands. "This is going too far, Sebastian," he says. "At some point you'll have to forgive yourself."
Connor shows him wisdom Sebastian never knew he possessed.
But it's wisdom he's not strong enough to take into account.
Once Connor has gone to bed he types in a name he never thought he would: Kurt Hummel. His search links him to several articles, but what it boils down to is this: Kurt's working for Vogue in New York, lives there with his partner, where they manage the magazine's creative department as a team.
But the name of that partner isn't Blaine Anderson.
Is that why Blaine came to San Francisco? Because he was running from Kurt? Did he even go to New York in the first place?
The stone in his stomach pulls down, a sour taste in his mouth.
What if Blaine's alone and it's because of what he did?
.
But the Monday after that he learns that's not true.
On Monday, Blaine isn't alone.
Behind him follows a rather impressively built guy with sandy brown hair, bright blue eyes and a goofy smile. Blaine's smile seems more genuine and he imagines his eyes—Sebastian swallows hard—his eye sparkles behind the dark-tinted glasses. They're touchy-feely and physical, arms thrown around each other's waist, Blaine's other hand on his friend's chest while they wait for their orders, fingers playing with the buttons of his shirt.
Is this Blaine's boyfriend? Someone physically opposite to Kurt and him? He thinks back to what Connor asked him just this weekend—had he been in love with Blaine? Was the slushie nothing more but an extremely poor expression of his jealousy? Had it been more than a physical attraction?
But what scares him most is that it could be more than a physical attraction right now and if he keeps going like this it might turn into an obsession.
Maybe it already has.
But then Blaine and his boyfriend kiss in the crowded coffee shop in front of everyone and he recalls how Blaine and Kurt never did that, how he might never even have done that at seventeen, and it has to mean something. Blaine looks happy. Because he's in love? Because he moved to this city and found new love?
Was he running from something?
.
On Tuesday he's proven wrong again.
Blaine's accompanied by his boyfriend again, and they're both laughing as they enter the coffee shop—it's an hour earlier than usual and the main crowd hasn't hit yet, so he cringes back in a corner, just barely getting a proper view of the happy couple.
But that's not what grabs his attention.
Blaine and his boyfriend aren't alone.
What grabs his attention is the boy balancing on Blaine's partner's arm. A young boy that's giggling and clapping his hands and trying to reach for Blaine's guitar. The boy can't be more than two years old, his eyes a bright hazel, his hair a mess of tiny black curls…
And it's unmistakable. He can tell right away.
This boy can't be anyone but Blaine's son.
A son—the word echoes through him, Blaine has a son.
Blaine's looking up at the little man and then the boy leans forward, small hands covering Blaine's cheeks. They eskimo kiss and the boy's squealing, but all he hears – underneath the childlike laughter – he hears Blaine's low chuckle, and it's filled with—
He can't describe it any other way but love.
Blaine sounds in love.
.
It soon becomes clear that Blaine spent the past few weeks settling in, because now he's showing up daily and he and his partner have fallen into a routine, though sometimes they get coffee before dropping the boy off at school, sometimes they get coffee after.
One thing never changes.
Him.
Watching.
It's been seven weeks since Blaine walked back into his life, since his past dropped in and announced itself as something he can't ignore any longer, can't push back or forget. Or forgive. He's been successful at it for ten years, one decade of keeping this monster at bay, of living in denial of this huge part of him. Now he's accepted it into his life.
Now, he's started chasing after it, obsessing over every single smile, every single frown, every sound he manages to catch from Blaine.
Seven weeks.
And Connor leaves.
It's not like he hadn't seen it coming, he'd had fair warning and while he watches Connor pack an overnight bag so he can stay over at his mother's house, Sebastian lets him do all the talking. There's nothing he can say to Connor now that would convince him he hasn't fallen in love with Blaine.
So Connor talks, about how he's no longer the guy he fell in love with and he's right—he's not the man Connor fell in love with, that man knew how to organize his life, knew how to prioritize and only let his guilt eat at him when he allowed, managed a disguise for all his self-loathing.
Blaine coming back in his life has cut him wide open, left him bleeding out and showed parts of him he never knew he had. He's always known he was capable of obsessing, but keeping his distance, no, that was never him. Only is it a distance when he goes back every time, even the day after Connor leaves, adds to his torture willingly, continues to tell himself that he's in love with this Blaine rather than the broken boy from his memory.
.
It happens on a Thursday.
It's more crowded than usual that morning, so he's at a table in the middle of the floor, just to make sure he'll be able to catch a glimpse of Blaine.
And everything happens like it always happens, like it's been happening for the past eight weeks; Blaine walks in, waits in line until it's his turn, places his order and pays for his drink. Today, however, he grabs something out of his shoulder bag and hands it to the barista—a single page, a flyer maybe?
He's trying to make it out for too long because he's lost track of what's actually going on, he's meant to be hiding, staying out of sight, laying low, but when he looks at Blaine again he's turning his head and he swears it happens in slow-motion, his own realization coming too late. Blaine's casual glance across the room passes him first, as if not actively registering all the faces, but Blaine's head jerks to a halt.
His heart just about jumps out of his chest.
He can tell that for two or three seconds Blaine's brain lags behind while he tries to place his face, tries to rhyme the seventeen-year-old boy from his memory with the—the man?— in front of him today.
It's his own two-second reaction to avert his eyes, look down at the table and grant Blaine the respect of—of what? He hasn't been respecting Blaine's anything these past few weeks.
And he hears. He hears it so clearly over the chatter of the crowd. The skid of a pair of shoes on the floor, and the ring the bell above the door makes when someone enters or leaves.
When he looks up again Blaine is gone.
.
Blaine doesn't show up at the coffee shop for three weeks straight.
Neither does his partner with or without his son.
Instead of blurring his time starts unraveling, fraying at the seams. Morning starts lasting forever, days stretching out longer and longer until he finds himself sitting home alone night after night and there's something decidedly missing. He doesn't know if it's Connor or just someone, but he hasn't been that seventeen-year-old cocky brat for years.
So he begs Connor to come back.
He tells Connor he's sorry, that he never meant for it to get this far, that he doesn't know what's happening to him, why chasing after Blaine has started filling a lack of something Blaine's presence has made him very much aware of. But he knows what he believes was missing all these years: his pain, feeling the pain he put Blaine through for himself, this self-torture. He never allowed himself to feel sorry.
He's losing control and his head keeps spinning: Blaine ran, after just one glance he got out of that coffee shop and hasn't been back since. And he knows it's him, he's the problem.
He can't—how can he forgive himself?
And Connor tells him to let go, Blaine has a new life and he has a life to be proud of, a job he likes and most important, he has people that love him. Turns out Connor forgives easier than he does. But he knows first and foremost that Connor comes back to him out of some sense of loyalty, perhaps even security. And Connor's too insecure to go looking for something else.
He takes Connor home with him that same night, they're kissing out on the street and in the car and attacking each other in the elevator, down the hallway until finally they make it into their apartment. They don't make it to the bedroom, fuelled by an somewhat dissimilar need: Connor loves him and wants him like this all the time, wants him open and vulnerable and exposed. Sebastian needs to prove to himself that he's not that guy anymore, he doesn't hurt people anymore.
"Baby, tell me—oh f-fuck," Connor chokes out, legs swung over Sebastian's shoulders, and his eyes beg him for something he's granted his boyfriend on such few occasions. "Sebastian, baby, please, just tell me—"
"I do, Con," he breathes, buried balls deep inside his boyfriend's ass. He dives down for a kiss, Connor moaning into his mouth. Connor gives himself so completely to this every time, so willingly, so desperately just because he saw something worthwhile to love. "I do," he repeats, and he thinks that somewhere deep down he does mean it. Somewhere deep down he's a changed man. "I love you."
.
It's Connor who finds the flyer. He hadn't given it any thought since that day Blaine disappeared again, but Connor holds it out to him, and he's not sure he puts two and two together.
Not before it's too late anyway.
It's a black and blue flyer for an open mic night at a bar they've been to before, so when Connor asks him "You want to go?" he's fairly certain he can still use the points by acquiescing every single one of Connor's wishes. Plus, some extra points could come in handy should he screw up again.
He kisses Connor's hair the way he knows he likes, and he secretly loves too, and says, "Yeah, sure, babe," stopping himself before he can say 'whatever you want', because Connor might like this redemptive mode he's in, but even he has his limit. In his sweet Connor's eyes he still needs to forgive himself, but he doesn't think he can—at the very least not until he knows for sure.
Is Blaine happy?
They have dinner at their favorite restaurant first, get a few drinks in, have a few laughs, and he thinks he can do this. He can be who he was before, albeit a little more bruised, but he has a great life here and he shouldn't take it for granted the way he did when he was a teenager.
"You'll have to suck up to my mom, you know," Connor says, tucked safely in the crook of his arm as they walk to the bar.
"Maybe I should finally take you two to Paris," he says. "That should get me back in her good graces, right?"
"Don't even joke about that!" Connor exclaims, and Sebastian laughs. He and Connor met when a mutual friend invited them to hear him talk about his trip to Paris—he still suspects it was the first time he was properly set up, but it sort of worked out. "Paris is our thing," Connor says. "I don't want my mother there."
"Well, then I'll just take you and make you really happy," he says, and kisses Connor's temple.
Connor's still giggling as they enter the bar and it has him distracted again; they sway against each other and they bump into the person in front of them and of course it's him, of course it should be—
"Blaine." The name's out so easy, so fast, and he hasn't said it in so long.
A disquiet shock runs across Blaine's face, his head stutters with a jerk, he glances from him to Connor and their hands locked together.
And maybe he should've known, should've realized that the first words out of Blaine's mouth wouldn't have been kind.
"Get out," Blaine says.
He stands there, blinking, for what seems like hours. In reality, it only takes him a second before he's stumbling backwards out the door, knees shaking, heart pounding, and he's struggling for air. He leans his hands down on his knees, the night air not helping him breathe at all.
"Baby, I'm sorry, I had no idea." Connor pushes through the door behind him. "Sebastian?" he asks, his hand at the small of his back. "Baby, are you okay?"
He stands up and shakes his head, unable to speak, but he looks at Connor and his eyes beg – please don't leave me, please be patient, please don't see the evil in me – and maybe Connor finally does see, the panic readily in his eyes, because they don't argue, he doesn't utter another word about their encounter. Connor just makes sure he holds the pieces of him together—they're out there on display for the first time ever and he's never been more grateful for Connor.
Later he can't decide if he knew he'd be running into Blaine when Connor showed him the flyer, or if he'd willfully forgotten about it.
.
His first real exchange with Blaine in over ten years doesn't happen at all the way he imagined it would. It's a Monday morning, the Monday after their encounter at the bar and suddenly Blaine's there, right in front of him, eyes barely visible through the dark-tinted glasses.
"Stop stalking me," Blaine blurts out before he gets to say it, what he's been meaning to say all this time, for four months, all he's wanted to say was 'hi'. A selfish word, a stupid word, and in what world would he get to say it?
"I wasn't," he says and casts down his eyes, afraid to look at Blaine. It's everything he's wanted for four months, talk to Blaine, ask his questions. But now there's nothing.
"I want you out of my life, S—" Blaine doesn't say his name, but there's an anger pulsing through him that's showing just below the surface. That was there long before they even met, only now it's directed at him. "You shouldn't—"
"I'll go," he interrupts, and there's only a small part of him that thinks he can't mean he's going to move again. He'll move across the world if it means making Blaine feel safe. "I'll disappear. Just—I know this can never change anything, but for what it's worth," he takes a deep breath, not sure he'll be able to say it at all. He's not allowed to feel this. "I'm sorry."
Blaine averts his eyes and gives the words time to settle, to linger, to grow in meaning.
Sebastian wonders if he's the one who taught Blaine this torture.
"You have no idea how little that means to me," Blaine says, his voice eerily calm. Blaine grants him one final glance, filled with anger and disdain and other ugliness that has no place on a face that beautiful. And then Blaine turns, undecided at first, as if there are still things he needs to say, but he walks away nonetheless, out of his life once more.
And he surrenders.
He doesn't know how he makes it to a table, let alone how he manages to sit down without tripping over his own feet. This is it, he thinks, Blaine will never forgive him and he'll never forgive himself, he'll be caught in this endless loop of uncertainty forever. He'll go back to what it was before, the working, the fucking, the laughing—knowing that somewhere, out there, Blaine's doing the same.
"I liked you," a voice sounds.
Sebastian's eyes shoot up; Blaine is standing at his table. "What?" he asks, because he's only aware that Blaine has taken off his glasses, the dead eye in the right socket a poor replacement for the one he stole. He's no less handsome, but the eye just sits there, unmoving, staring him down.
"I liked you," Blaine repeats, hands balled into fists by his sides.
The words settle somewhere alongside his guilt, the could-have-dones and should-have-beens.
I liked you too.
"I had feelings for you." He lets Blaine talk; it's the least he can do after all this time. "But I was with Kurt and I was young, and those feelings terrified me."
Doesn't bother me if it doesn't bother you. His overconfident self. No, Sebastian, I really care about him. Dismissive of every single one of Blaine's words. One-track mind.
"You ruined it, Sebastian."
The room's ice-cold. Black leather seats and a boy, he only has eyes for the boy he destroyed not too long ago.
"You destroyed everything."
Blaine cuts him open, leaves him bleeding, and it's everything he deserves. There's so many things he wants to say, so many things he shouldn't have gotten, like his life here in San Francisco, Connor, but mostly the salvation that slushie had granted him.
Because if it'd hit Kurt like it was supposed to he wouldn't have stopped, he'd have kept chasing after Blaine even if Kurt had lost an eye instead, might've even ended up in jail if he'd kept living his life that way.
Blaine saved him. And if at all possible there's even more selfish words threatening to escape him. Thank you.
"Dada!" a high-pitched voice sounds from somewhere behind Blaine, and he can see the toddler wobbling towards them before Blaine has turned around.
"Josh," Blaine says, reaching for the toddler at his feet on instinct. "Where's your daddy?" Blaine asks, bouncing his son up in his arms, unbuttoning his coat. And that's when Sebastian sees. It's the first time Blaine's been close enough for him to notice: a golden wedding band around his left ring finger.
"You're married," Sebastian says, the words out beyond his control, but with them comes a sudden relief. Blaine's married, his son has two daddies, and that has to mean something. It has to mean he's been in a committed relationship for at least a few years even if Josh looks like Blaine's entirely. No, he realizes, Blaine is happy.
"Dada," Josh mumbles and points towards the counter to show Blaine where his other daddy's standing.
"Does he know?" Sebastian asks. He's not asking if his husband knows his eye got taken from him by someone; he means does he know he's talking to the man that destroyed everything, that they're living in the same city, that they've been getting coffee from the same place for weeks.
"No."
He looks up at Blaine carefully. "Why not?"
Blaine puts Josh down on the ground, not releasing his hand. When Blaine looks down at him there's a harshness to his gaze that's unrelenting, that's hard despite the prosthetic eye and something that never used to be there. Did he do that?
"He'd kill you," Blaine answers.
The reply has a strange effect on him, there's a huge chunk of him that's relieved to know that Blaine has someone looking out for him, protecting him, someone that might even jump in front of a slushie, catch him when he falls.
"At the bar—" Blaine swallows hard. "You were with someone."
"Connor." He looks down. "My boyfriend."
"Does he make you happy?"
He doesn't know why Blaine's the one who needs to know. Does Blaine want him unhappy?
"I make him happy," Sebastian answers. It's not a yes or a no, maybe because he wants himself unhappy. He doesn't know.
Ten years. It's been too long, any 'sorry' comes too late and any 'hi' has no room between them anymore. There's just one word. One word left to say.
"Goodbye, Sebastian," Blaine says.
Blaine turns around and hurries after Josh when the boy rushes over to his other daddy and he resigns himself to it: Blaine will never forgive him and he'll never forgive himself, instead they've fitted themselves into a new life that can't account for each other's presence. And maybe that's okay. It has to be okay.
At least Blaine seems happy.
.
.
.
But Sebastian can't know.
He can't know that after Blaine heals up from his surgery the pain doesn't stop, that for the first few weeks it keeps him up at night, making sure he knows exactly what Sebastian took. And after those few weeks the pain never leaves him again, it becomes his constant companion. But what really surprises him is the pain much lower in his chest, showing him where his care for Sebastian was previously located. He never knew he cared this much before losing his eye.
They burn, both hurts, and it isn't long, months really, before people start to notice, how he's hearing but never listening, singing but never performing, watching but never seeing.
Sebastian takes much more than just his eye.
He's out of school for weeks, Kurt drops by every day with other people's notes and urges him to do his homework. He doesn't help Kurt realize that he's done this before, years ago after a Sadie Hawkins dance he got bruised and broken and to this day he knows it's Dalton that saved him.
But Sebastian took that from him too.
He clings to Kurt like a lifeline, makes him skip Valentine's Day in favor of spending the night curled up on the couch together, and when Kurt thanks him for the Valentine's Day gifts he sent him at school, all he does is nod and smile and kiss his boyfriend, taking credit from Kurt's secret admirer.
For Regionals he finally ventures out again, three painkillers nestled somewhere in his back pocket with his wallet and phone. Sebastian got banned from competing so he doesn't have to worry about running into him, and the Warblers forfeited out of some late sense of loyalty. He watches as the New Directions takes the trophy easily, songs dedicated to a cause that works for the prevention of school violence. His missing eye keeps throbbing in its socket, his phantoms haunting him even here. He pops one painkiller after the competition, and two before going to bed.
His brother visits and it's the same as usual, everyone stares at Cooper wide-eyed and in wonder, smiling, taking in his every word. They don't perform together, not once during his entire stay, the eye patch has made him dark and broody and resigned to stay that way for a long while to come. Kurt's insistence that he's still one of the most good-looking boys he knows falls short of achieving its full meaning with Cooper around.
He doesn't ask Kurt about this Chandler guy he keeps texting, because he's afraid Kurt will tell him what he's been thinking: he's not a whole boy anymore. Kurt's got a bright future ahead of him in New York, why would he want to drag his one-eyed boyfriend with him? But he doesn't say anything. He wants to keep Kurt closer for a little while longer.
He doesn't go to prom, even though Brittany told him she'd make an exception to her 'no hair gel' rule. But he just can't anymore. He can't face the crowds, he can't take the headaches loud music causes him now, and he certainly can't take how this feels like the end. Soon Kurt will be gone.
He still spends more days out of school than in school, spends full days and nights wide awake, just lying on top of the sheets of his bed, opening and closing his one good eye, hoping that somehow, magically, his other one will return.
He competes with New Directions at Nationals because, well, everyone tells him to. And he doesn't want to disappoint them any more than he already has. At the after party the painkillers make way for vast amounts of alcohol, and he almost ends up making out with Brittany and Sugar, but both Santana and Kurt dial him back. They forgive him. Actually, they don't even blame him in the first place. He gets away with it guilt-free.
Kurt doesn't get into NYADA but he decides to head for New York anyway, leaving him behind to fend for himself. There's a part of him that wants Kurt to go, to follow his dreams and reach for the stars. But that's a part getting less and less attention in favor of putting himself back together again.
It doesn't work like he wants it to.
Senior year isn't anything like he thought it would be. He gets pushed around by a new batch of popular kids, and even though Artie and Sam and Brittany manage to stave off the blunt of the bullying, he can find himself shrinking smaller and smaller, stops looking people in the eye, walks around with his head down.
There's one week he spends in bed entirely, and he can't stop himself from crying – the tears come at the smallest word now; Dalton, Sebastian, slushie, watch where you're going Cyclops, and he knows there's something wrong with him.
There's something really really wrong.
It's eight months after he loses his eye when his counselor suggests he starts taking anti-depressants. The painkillers aren't doing the job anymore and talking about his feelings isn't helping either, so he gets labeled the depressed kid. If there was one thing worse than walking around school with an eye patch, it's having Principal Figgins tell all the teachers to go easy on him.
But these pills do things for him the painkillers didn't. The pain medication made sure he felt like his old self again, brief moments he got to glimpse and he lived for that, the reason he took the pills in the first place. The anti-depressants make him experience his new shattered self at a distance, disconnected, detached from everyone and everything around him and for a while it's utter bliss. It's still a struggle but somehow the pills make it bearable, alleviate some of the burden and he can breathe. It's also easier to ignore people.
He neglects his relationship with Kurt, even more than Kurt does, caught in a haze of medication, self-loathing and phantom pain. He cheats on Kurt, part of his downward spiral into the darkness he'll only be able to climb out of years later. Kurt cries and blames him. But Kurt forgives him. Everyone forgives him. Sebastian takes his eye and he's absolved of any guilt.
But Sebastian can't know that.
Sebastian doesn't know he didn't get into NYADA, didn't get his dreams, new dreams, until much later in life. He drops out his first year of community college, the anti-depressants long replaced by Vicodin and Oxy and any other pain drug he can get his hands on.
He follows Cooper to LA, far enough from Ohio to leave the past behind, but close enough to run back to should things go wrong. It isn't long before he's partying every night, sunglasses covering up his eye in the daytime, drugs removing any inhibitions at night. He bartends all over town, works a bunch of crappy jobs just to pay for his addiction, because he's asked the people in his life too many favors already.
He's long run out of excuses too.
And everyone knows. But everyone forgives.
Because they understand.
Or so they say.
There are a few guys. There's Patrick the struggling artist, with his poetry and sophomoric ideals. He's soft and sweet while being skin over bone and all angles and he tells himself he's dating Patrick because he reminds him of Kurt. But he knows that this new Blaine could never date a guy like Kurt again.
Then there's Paul, and all they do for weeks at a time is fuck each other senseless.
It's Stuart who gets him into the harder stuff, only a small step up from the chemicals he's already been abusing his body with, but from the moment he snorts his first strip of coke, he knows it's only a matter of time before he hits rock bottom.
He lasts like this until his twenty-first birthday – two years of running from his past, hiding from his loss, denying to himself what's really happening – two years before he finds himself broken and bruised in an ER room again, beaten up by a group of guys outside a night club who just decided they didn't like the look of him. Sam and Cooper are the first to show up and when they see him they decide that it's been enough. He's suffered long enough.
They don't blame him. They understand. But enough's enough.
He's still in the hospital when the withdrawal kicks in, his head burns and his muscles ache and he feels like he's going to vomit his own insides—There's strong arms that hold him and work him through it, first Cooper's, but once Cooper loses his patience he makes sure he gets assigned a counselor.
His name is Rick. He's a volunteer at the rehab clinic he'll be moving to once he's mobile again, and Blaine hates him. He kicks and screams, says things he doesn't mean at all but what is these people's fucking problem? This is his life and he gets to choose how to live it and he doesn't want to kick his addiction.
And Blaine doesn't like Rick because he's not Cooper. He's not Sam or Kurt or Brittany. They know him, he can manipulate them, he's still good enough of an actor to convince them of things that aren't true.
But Rick's not easily fooled.
Rick doesn't understand. He refuses to understand.
So he says, anyway.
For some reason Rick sees what he refuses to see: that he's a man who's perfectly complete even with an eye missing and all he's really afraid of is accounting for that loss. Rick sees what no one else sees: he's furious. Underneath his skin a silent rage had been building years before losing his eye, but the direct result of Sebastian's assault was his surrender to that kind of abuse. He accepted that it was his fate and tried to escape it by doing drugs. Sebastian turned him into a defeatist.
Rick doesn't forgive. Rick never forgets. He doesn't take his self-pity and he stays calm whenever he's about to burst, works him through two relapses and he's always just a phone call away when things get bad again. Rick sees him at his worst and he doesn't leave, he never leaves, he shows him patience and kindness yet a firm hand when he needs it.
Rick's his salvation, even though he'll never accept that title.
He picks up boxing again to get back into shape, he goes to open mic nights to get back into the groove of a gift he's been neglecting.
The first time Rick's in the audience to hear him sing is the day he falls in love.
But Rick still battles his own demons, his called 'alcohol', but after everything Rick has done for him over the past eighteen months he repays his patience with his own. He feels complete again and it feels good to be something for someone else again. It takes them a year to see it, to realize their movie nights are code for 'date' and their intense squash games satisfy more than just their need for friendship.
There's things he never wants Sebastian to know.
That he and Rick got married in that silly little church back in Ohio, where Kurt's dad got remarried, that the New Directions were there and a few of the Warblers. That it's been five years of Rick and two of those have been Joshua, their beautiful baby boy. That the boy is his and he loves Joshua more than anything, more than he thought he could ever love anyone. But sometimes it all still threatens to slip away from him.
Like when he decides to get a prosthetic eye—the baby will be here soon and Rick tells him the boy won't care what he looks like as long as he's a daddy, but he knows it makes other people uncomfortable too. Only the hospital brings back so many bad memories (which will only partially get erased when he sees Joshua born) and he refuses pain medication after the surgery and he suffers.
He hurts more than he's hurt in years and he's tempted. But he doesn't.
Like when Rick breaks his arm and he's prescribed medication to manage the pain, and he finds himself home alone with Joshua one night, staring at the half-empty pill bottle and the little devil inside whispers maybe just one, one won't hurt, one won't matter. But then the baby starts crying and he thinks about how Joshua needs him to be his daddy, needs him more than anyone else because he's the most vulnerable thing in the world right now.
He's tempted. But he doesn't.
Like when he wakes up screaming the night after his eyes cross Sebastian's in the crowd, shoots up straight in bed with a pain in his missing eye that hasn't been this bad in years. He can't breathe, panic claws at him, and it takes Rick hours and hours and days upon days to get him in any sort of state again.
He's told Rick everything. He tells Rick everything, because they have a relationship built on trust and an understanding of each other's phantoms that possibly runs even deeper than their love.
Sebastian takes everything.
He was never the same again after that slushie. But he makes it through and pulls himself together again, albeit in a slightly different arrangement. He liked Sebastian. He could've loved Sebastian. But Sebastian's the one who changed things.
"Goodbye, Sebastian," he says, and as soon as the words leave his mouth he feels as if he's finally closing a chapter of his life he's been so desperate to ignore. Maybe now he can start forgiving. But never to Sebastian's face.
He lets go of Joshua's hand and his little boy skips over to Rick immediately.
"Is that him?" Rick asks, picking Joshua up, staring at Sebastian over his shoulder.
Blaine nods. "Yeah."
"Are you okay?"
"Dada," Joshua says again; he learned the word two days ago and it's the only thing out of him since then.
Blaine smiles softly and looks at Rick. "Yeah," he breathes.
#
if you can, please let me know what you think!