AN: My take on Blaine's dependence on hair gel. Small spoilers for 3x19 "Prom-asaurus". I apologize for any mistakes.
Disclaimer: I do not own Glee. Title is from Chuck Palahniuk's "Lullaby".
Blaine knew his obsession with hair gel was unhealthy. Like most things in his life, it was rotten, twisted, and cancerous. But he needed it, almost more than he needed food and water.
See, Blaine didn't use hair gel for the same reasons as all the other teenage boys. Sure, his hair was unruly, and he liked the way it looked slicked back, but the gel wasn't about looking pretty. It was about changing his appearance in order to change who he was. It was about control.
Blaine needed to be in absolute control. His father had taught him that being loud and carefree would earn you a beating. His mother instructed him that being anything other than dapper and polite would be looked upon with disappointment. Dalton taught Blaine that being studious and hard working is the only way to achieve anything. Blaine had been taught to be perfect, and he needed that perfection. The hair gel was simply a means to achieve the desired result.
But it developped into something more than that. The hair gel became a metaphor for his perfection. If the gel could tame the wild curls, then it could hide the doubts and insecurities that filled the emptiness inside him.
Blaine knew he couldn't go to prom with out hair gel. No one had seen the scared little boy with out the walls of gel to protect him, not Wes and David, not even Kurt, and there was no way that Blaine was about to show that vulnerability in a room filled with homophobic students he didn't know.
The hair gel was the only thing holding him together, and Blaine couldn't let anyone see just how cracked and broken he had become.
AN: Let me know what you think. Any thoughts on the new security codes needed to log on to ? When it comes to those things, I suddenly become dyslexic.