Miss Holliday Goes To Dalton

I liked Holly Holliday, and I love the Warblers, and I thought it would be deeply amusing to put the two together following the events of "Night of Neglect." I don't really have any idea what I'm doing. I know I don't own Glee, I know I am going to be both pulling from and bucking canon (In my universe, Westerville is still nearly two hours from Lima, thank you, I AM a boring stickler for geography), and really I just had to get this out of my head so I could sleep at night without my brain automatically heading to Dalton and creating preposterous scenarios.

Also, I love Klaine, seriously adore that ship, but for all that there's not a lot of Kurt in this. I wanted to explore something different. There's lots of seriously gorgeous Klaine focused fics out there, and I wasn't feeling up to messing with romantic entanglements!...much.

This is an entirely ludicrous thing. I know that. I just hope it's also readable. Spoilers through "Born This Way," I keep the language generally clean, I can't write sex scenes without making myself choke laughing, and this first bit is only short because we're setting the scene, folks.

Sorry if you get a story alert on this. Despite repeatedly telling myself to NOT put Columbus as Blaine's hometown...I put Columbus. So I had to fix it because the only way Blaine could not reasonably commute from Columbus to Westerville is if his legs are broken. I'll put poor adorable Blaine through a lot for the sake of the narrative, but I'm not breaking his legs, so I had to fix. Apologies!

Prologue – Letters

Holly Holliday stared in bemused amusement at the letter in her hand.

Thick, creamy paper that she knew was expensive; she could see the individual threads in it. Black ink scribed out a message in perfect textbook copperplate. An actual honest-to-goodness red wax seal had secured the envelope and a heraldic letter "D" was stamped precisely in the center of the blob.

All in all, she reflected, it was a highly unorthodox method of asking someone to substitute teach at their school. She had to admit, though, she found the unorthodox appealing, and her French teaching gig having ended unexpectedly early - she supposed that it hadn't been a good idea to have the kids read "Les Liaisons Dangereuses," but she had achieved the highest vocabulary test scores for that class in years - she found herself rather at loose ends.

Not to mention the thinning pocketbook.

Tucking a lock of blonde hair behind her ear, she bent her head over the letter again. Two months worth of geography subbing at an elite boy's preparatory school in Westerville, right at the end of the year, it was both a good and a bad offer. Good, because she liked geography, even if it didn't offer the costume opportunities that history did. Bad, because she'd be in charge of year-end exams, and who liked exams? Hopefully the regular teacher had left a good lesson plan behind that she could riff off of. She thought the odds of that might be good, assuming she was correct in expecting that a prep school would have fairly high standards for its faculty.

Holly did not dwell on the fleeting thought that she would almost certainly not measure up to those standards. Holly Holliday did not believe in dwelling. "If you can't make it, fake it," she announced to her empty matchbox of a living room. She ignored the slightly silly feeling that had called up.

Casting a glance back up at the letterhead made her furrow her brows in thought. Dalton Academy...why did that sound familiar? It seemed like she'd heard about it recently - oh yes. At the McKinley High Night of Neglect benefit. Pushing aside the more depressing memories of that evening, she picked out the remembrance of two neatly dressed, well-mannered young men. Kurt Hummel she remembered from her first stint at McKinley High. He'd evidently transferred to Dalton, where he'd met the boy he'd brought as his date. They had come to support Kurt's friends in New Directions.

Well. That would be nice. Familiar faces and all.

If she accepted the position.

"Which you will," she sighed to herself. "A girl's got to eat." But she didn't put the letter down. Didn't pick up her phone to immediately call and accept the job. She wanted to think about it. Which was odd.

Holly was usually impulsive and a little reckless and definitely open to teaching any subject at any school in pretty much any way she saw fit, but she thought maybe this time she might get a little more information before actually accepting the job. She wasn't sure what was stopping her. Maybe it was that it really was weird to be offered a temporary teaching job via formal letter complete with signet seal. Who does that?

Or maybe it was that it was an all boys private school, a completely foreign concept to her from a teaching standpoint. They'd be stodgy and traditional, like in "Dead Poets Society," and she was stodgy and traditional's worst nightmare. It would be oil and water. Coffee and cayenne. White phosphorus and open air.

But she needed a job. More to the point, she needed something to distract her from the nagging feeling that she could have possibly maybe very slightly blown a good thing in Lima. She did not care for the feeling of second-guessing her decisions. She liked challenges. She would probably have to restrain herself a little in order to get by at this Dalton Academy. That would be a challenge. That would be distracting. Annoying, of course, but ultimately challenging and distracting.

Definitely a good idea to know what she was walking into, she concluded. Two months before summer break and the subsequent lack of teaching jobs unless you wanted to help wrangle summer school (she didn't), it would be good if she could manage to not blow this one. Prior knowledge would surely be an asset in that regard.

God, she was already thinking in some sort of bizarre formal mode of speech. If she didn't watch it, she'd end up sipping cups of weak tea with her pinky held out, declaiming things to be "fraitfully noice."

That...might have been slightly judgmental, she decided.

Okay. Maybe just have a look see and a chat with the headmaster. Yes. That never harmed anyone, and it didn't oblige her to take the job. She picked up her phone and punched in the number from the letter.

"Hello, my name is Holly Holliday, and I've received a letter about a substitute teaching position..."

Blaine Anderson was having one hell of a bad week.

"I do not believe this," he muttered.

Nick looked up from his calculus homework. "Believe what?"

Blaine said nothing. He fiddled with a piece of heavy, cream colored stationery for a moment before tossing it on his roommate's desk. Curious and welcoming any break from the detested mathematics, Nick picked it up.

It only took a minute or two for him to discern the very, very bad news.

"No way."

"I assure you, Nick. Way."

"But...they can't do this."

Blaine spread his hands out and felt his mouth curl up in a sardonic smirk. "And yet here we are, they having done it." He thought his sentence might be syntactically awkward...never mind. He had bigger things he needed to worry about.

"But, dude! They're kicking you out of the dorm!"

"Technically, they're just asking me to not return to the dorm next year - I can finish the year here." He began to pace, shoving his hand through his hair and pulling a little in agitation. "But that effectively expels me. I can't reasonably commute here from Toledo."

Nick leaped up from his seat, scattering textbooks and paper everywhere. "No way. No way! You're our lead Warbler! We need you to get us back to Regionals next year, especially since we lost Hummel to McKinley!"

At that, Blaine had to turn away for a moment. He was really, really having a bad week. Starting with his boyfriend's decision to return to the public school he'd come from, to the farewell party at Newport Hall that got entirely out of hand, and now the letter politely asking him to, at the end of the semester, pack his things and get the hell out. It was a wonder he hadn't ground all of his molars down to stumps, his jaw was clenched so tight.

A hand clapped down on his shoulder, startling him out of the roiling clouds of his thoughts, and he turned to see Nick staring worriedly at him. "Sorry, man. Didn't mean to zone out there. I'm just trying to..."

"Work it all out. I know. Sorry I brought up Kurt leaving."

"S'all right." Except it wasn't. He already missed Kurt. They'd just found each other, for crying out loud, and Kurt just decides to up and leave?

Not that he wasn't supportive. God no. He was proud of his boyfriend, actually. It was just...maybe he felt slightly abandoned. And envious. He didn't think he could be strong enough to go back to the cesspit of his own former high school, and here was Kurt, taking his by storm. "Courage," Blaine had texted him. Now he had to laugh; Kurt was the bravest person he knew. Talk about projecting your issues.

He sighed. Nick clapped him on the shoulder again and sighed too. "There's got to be a way to work this out, Blaine."

"I don't know. Maybe." He looked up at his roommate. "I'd better tell the others though. Get them prepared."

"We have practice this afternoon."

Blaine shook his head, causing his usually aggressively tidy hair - shifted loose by his aggravated rumpling - to fall forward over his forehead. "No. Too soon. I'm still processing. But this week for sure. I have to work out how to tell them." He glanced at his friend, who had returned to his homework. "Listen, Nick...don't say anything yet, okay? Not even to Jeff."

"Of course not." Nick actually looked offended, and Blaine looked down in guilt for assuming. "Well, not if you help me with this calculus. Since Kurt left, I haven't had anyone to copy off of."

Blaine felt less guilty then, so much less guilty that he didn't feel even the slightest twinge of remorse when the pillow he hurled across the room caught Nick off-guard and off-balance, toppling him right out of his chair.

To be continued...