Does not belong to me, but I like playing with it anyway.
Tina likes Blaine. Of course she does, everyone does. They don't have a problem with each other. It's just that she's always felt like he was half lying to them. She's never known what it is exactly, and Mike always just chuckled and told her she was being paranoid, Kurt could take care of himself. But it isn't about protecting Kurt anymore, he's not there. Blaine is.
The feeling is worse than ever, even though Blaine is just as nice as he alway has been. She can't shake the thought that he is hiding something, something huge. She really hopes she is being paranoid, or at least that whatever Blaine is hiding isn't going to turn out to be sociopathic tendencies because she is pretty sure he has noticed her suspicious (obsessive) staring and she would totally be the first to go if he ever did go on a killing spree.
Whenever Mike had commented on her interest in Blaine she had been able to shrug it off and usually move on to something else. Now though, when she doesn't have a boyfriend and endless drama to grab her attention away she finds herself spending more and more time trying to find...something. There is just something so wrong about him.
He doesn't seem like the kind of person to be hiding things. His heart has made a permanent home on his unseasonably short sleeves and from what she understands he had barely had time to stop for a change of clothes on his way to the airport in his rush to confess his sins to Kurt. He is so open about everything and there is still a huge piece of him that is just absent.
No one else seems to agree with this assessment and she's long stopped voicing her theories. She doesn't stop looking though, can't stop. She knows it's getting out of hand, has known this since she noticed that Blaine's left hand tenses and flexes every time someone speaks to him. She considers that he might be reaching for Kurt, just a reflex that he's training away, now that he has no use for it anymore.
She accepts that she is becoming more obsessed than is healthy when she goes back over old rehearsal clips and notices the tense and flex that was there last year as well.
Blaine is curling in on himself even more and Tina wonders when he is going to forgive himself for cheating. It was awful, but it was like it was the only thing he'd ever done wrong, like he wasn't capable of digesting this failure. She brushes a hand across his shoulders and wonders if anyone else at McKinley has realised how much he feeds off touch. She wonders if Kurt knows.
There is something beautiful in the way she can watch his shoulder muscles contract and then relax, the slow tremor leading down into his arms as he falls into her touch. People don't hug Blaine enough.
Tina stops herself from following Blaine home one day when he looks just too sad for words because no matter how much she may admit to herself that he's becoming an obsession, she's not ready for it to escalate to actual stalking just yet. She sees him at her uncle's restaurant later, picking up an order that's clearly too big for one, and he's all smiles, right down to where his probably Italian leather shoes are tapping merrily at the old linoleum flooring. He grins and waves at her when he sees her staring from her table and Tina feels a little offended, but can't quite place why.
As the annoying bell signals his exit she realises that either the smile or the frowns were a lie and she's not sure which she would prefer. She wants to hope that the smile is real, and it looks so real it's still burned into her retinas fifteen minutes later, but she hates the implications of that. If the smile is real, then he's been lying to her for so long and she doesn't know why. Everyone had been telling him to cheer up for weeks so he had no reason to feign unhappiness. If he was clinging to unhappiness in the hopes of garnering sympathy then...well he had succeeded.
If Blaine had been faking his anguish and Tina had just fallen for it then the Blaine she'd been studying so closely didn't exist. The Blaine who was perfect in almost every way was gone. More than that he had smiled at her now. His smile hadn't even wavered. If he was hiding from everyone and he couldn't even be bothered to force a trembling lip when he saw her then she must not even register with him. She must really be so insignificant that she wasn't worth lying to.
She hoped he was unhappy. She felt horrible for wishing that on anyone, especially on him, but she did truly hope that the smile was his mask. The Blaine she knew, her Blaine, he would paste on a smile to go out in public, use it as armor against the crowds. He hadn't managed a smile that genuine since before the break up, but he was away from school, away from any memory of Kurt so maybe...
The next day she sees Blaine, shoulders hunched, huddled over a book before class. Her mind tries to reconcile him with the smiling boy from the restaurant and she realises they look nothing alike. They do obviously, she tells herself sternly, they're the same person. At the same time though, Smiling-Blaine had been wearing glasses, his hair had been...well not ungelled, but less gelled at least. She tries to stop staring but finds herself playing spot the difference.
She feels insane again when she realises that the glasses are the only really un-Blaine thing about Smiling-Blaine, and for all she knows Blaine wears contacts to school. The hair had been less glued to his head, but it had been close to ten PM. The clothes were different from his usual school outfits, but not enough that she couldn't see him wearing them to a party or a date. Her mind hissed at the second alternative. There had been a blazer that managed to be both colorful and stylish (impressive considering it was plaid), well-tailored slacks and very classy shoes, sans socks. It is the most Blaine outfit she's seen on anyone other than Blaine but her mind refuses to accept it as Blaine.
She follows Blaine home one day. She second guesses herself a million times, but she still pulls out of the McKinley parking lot behind him. Blaine lives farther from McKinley than anyone, he's not even in the right district. Tina knows she would have pulled over halfway there and demanded to know why someone was following her, but Blaine isn't paranoid. He pulls up to a house that is much bigger than she's imagined, even with Kurt and Rachel's descriptions.
She sits in the driveway for almost a minute before she pulls herself out of her car and walks up to the imposing house. The door has massive brass knockers but she settles for pushing the doorbell and waits. Smiling-Blaine opens it. He's not wearing a blazer today. He's also not wearing what Blaine was wearing a minute ago.
He looks confused and Tina allows her mind to leap to the conclusion that this is some other boy before regaining it back in and allowing for the possibility that he is just shocked that someone has followed him home. "Oh, hey, did we have plans?" His smile is warm and welcoming, and he's already stepped aside to allow her entrance, reaching for her jacket mutely.
She looks at him, trying to figure out what she's been missing all these months. "You're not Blaine." The words are out of her mouth before she can stop them and she bites her tongue to keep herself from elaborating on her insane theory.
"No. He's not." The response is from the stairs. Blaine, her Blaine, has shed his cardigan and his bowtie is untied. Smiling-Blaine isn't smiling anymore. He's frowning, but he doesn't look sad. He looks wary and he's looking at Blaine as though he isn't sure what to do and Blaine has all the answers. "This is Adam."
Blaine has a brother. Actually, Blaine has two brothers. Blaine has a twin. They're so identical that even standing next to each other she can't see anything about them that's not exactly the same. She looks for all the things people always say about twins. One is a little taller, one has freckles, one has different eyes (and wouldn't that be a tragedy). There is nothing. They look exactly alike and yet...Adam looks nothing like Blaine.
"You have a twin." Adam shifts closer to Blaine and they fold into each other. Blaine looks at her but doesn't respond. "That's what you're always hiding."
Blaine frowns, just for a second. "Adam is what you're always looking for." Adam tucks his head into Blaine's neck.
It's proof that he's been hiding from them. It's even proof that he knew she was looking but never finding.
"Why are you hiding a twin? Why would you hide him?" There was no reason she could think of why anyone would lie about something like that, why Blaine, who valued honesty so highly, would keep something like this from her.
There is no answer but Blaine reaches out for her and she steps forward and allows him to draw her in. His right hand traces across her cheek and settles on her neck, his left is still resting around his brother. Another hand comes out to sweep down her arm and take her hand. "Please don't tell them." She doesn't understand at all. Blaine let her see. He could have easily stayed upstairs, let Adam get rid of her and she would have convinced herself it was always Blaine. Why would he have let her see if no one could know? Her mind drifts back to the restaurant and the voice in the back of her mind telling her there can only be one reason he's not hiding from her is coming back.
She can't look Blaine in the eyes so she looks at Adam instead. He has the same hazel eyes with the same pleading expression, but they're not her eyes. She tried to ignore the repetitive chant of 'not even enough to hide from, not even a blip on his radar'. There is still one hand resting on the junction between her neck and shoulder, and one cradling her hand and she feels herself move into the touch. She allows herself to imagine that he let her see because she matters more than all the others (more than Kurt her mind supplies), but the voice doesn't go away.
"Why?" It doesn't sound as broken coming out as she expects it to and she thinks for a second that they will let it pass, let it be about why they don't want anyone to know. The hands start pulling and she finds herself all wrapped up in warm and solid and she wants to pull away, to say she doesn't even know him, but she wraps an arm around a neck and the other around a waist and she's much too comfortable to move.
Adam offers her a drink but doesn't release his hold on either of them. Tina declines and steps away, promising she won't say anything and she's in her car before her brain begins to function normally again.