A.N.: This story is a response to my never-ending frustration with the amount of badly written, over-the-top, or just plain untasteful use of French in Klaine fanfiction, but mostly it's just something that I felt like writing for fun. So I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it :)
Disclaimer: I do not own any of the characters in this story.
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"Kurt! Kurt, wait up," Blaine called out as he ran after his friend, making his way through the crowd of students coming out from their classes and into Dalton's main hallway. The taller boy turned around to find Blaine out-of-breath and scrambling to tuck his books back into his shoulder-bag.
"Hey Blaine," he said, smiling as he did every time he saw the boy he was hopelessly in love with. "What's going on?"
"Hey. Hi." Blaine said, still trying to catch his breath.
"I was just heading to the library… did you need something?"
"Yeah, I have a favour to ask you, actually. I have this huge test coming up in French. I thought you could help, you know, since you're fluent."
"I am. But wait… how do you know that?" Kurt asked, raising one of his perfectly trimmed eyebrows in a manner which, Blaine thought, was entirely too attractive to be considered legal.
"Oh, um, Wes showed me a video of your Céline Dion medley with the Cheerios a while ago."
"Oh God," Kurt muttered under his breath, pressing a hand to his forehead and feeling his cheeks flush as he remembered the tight red uniform which, in his opinion, was much too revealing and not particularly flattering. Similar images flashed through Blaine's mind as he remembered the video, except, in his opinion, that outfit was very, very flattering, and showed off just enough of Kurt's arms and toned silhouette. In fact, this train of thought made Blaine so distracted that he momentarily forget why he was talking to Kurt in the first place.
"You were really amazing, Kurt. Your voice, and that choreography…" he trailed off, staring absently at the hall beyond Kurt, his mind too preoccupied with the images it was supplying.
"Um, Blaine?" Kurt asked, thinking it best to stop Blaine there before his blush could spread even more.
"Yes?" he said, shaking himself out of his daydreams and staring at Kurt again.
"Your French test?"
"Oh! Right! Right."
Kurt eyed Blaine suspiciously but said nothing and waited for him to continue.
"Could you help me study for that?"
"Yeah, no problem."
Fifteen minutes later, the boys were sitting down at a small circular table in the library, both leaning over Blaine's notebook and papers. "Well this looks simple enough," Kurt said as he looked at the practice test in front of them. There were a dozen short-answer questions asking to describe one's house, family, favourite past-times, and other mundane subjects.
"Easy? Kurt, I've never taken French before. I can barely write one sentence in French, let alone all this!" Blaine said, visibly worried.
"Come on, Blaine, you're being dramatic," Kurt replied, not able to suppress a roll of his eyes. "Surely you can write j'adore chanter et regarder le football." [I love singing and watching football]
"See, I don't even know what you said just now."
"Okay…" the taller boy said cautiously, his eyes widening slightly in surprise. "I see we're going to have some serious work to do."
"When is this test, then?" he asked again after a few moments.
"Two weeks from now."
After that first meeting with Blaine, Kurt had quickly come up with a plan d'attaque. Over the following week, he tried to build up Blaine's vocabulary, printing out lists of words for him and making him memorize them. Kurt also took the habit of carrying his stack of cue cards with him everywhere, and made use of every minute he spent with Blaine to quiz him.
It was then that Blaine realized just how brilliant an idea it had been to ask Kurt for help. Had it been anyone else, the near-constant cue-card attacks (as Blaine referred to them privately) would have been enough to make him avoid the person altogether. But as it was, he couldn't resist spending time with Kurt, even if he knew it would entirely consist of studying.
Even in class, they sat next to each other as they always did, and whenever they weren't taking notes, Kurt slid cue-cards across the table and expected Blaine to pass them back with the correct translation written down.
The more ridiculous Blaine's answers were, the more aggressive Kurt became. After a particularly draining history class when Blaine had had the misfortune of writing "purple mouse?" underneath Kurt's neatly calligraphed "pamplemousse," [grapefruit] he was physically dragged back to his own dorm room and was currently sitting on his bed, half aroused and half terrified as he listened to a passionate diatribe delivered in a jumble of French and English.
"Blaine, tell me how on earth do you expect to pass this test, not to mention your whole French class when you're putting so little effort into it? And how could you not want to learn French? It's the most beautiful language in the world! La langue de Molière, le langage de l'amour! And I'm not even asking you to read Molière, Blaine, bon sang, it's just the word pamplemousse!" [the tongue of Molière, the language of love… good grief]
By this point, Blaine was already completely lost. And he still had no idea what on earth a pamplemousse was, but by god did Kurt make it sound amazing when those "p" and "s" sounds rolled off his tongue.
"How do you even order a vol-au-vent in a restaurant?" Kurt went on, barely taking a second to breathe. "Oh god, you probably don't even know what a vol-au-vent is," he added with a look of genuine sorrow and pity. "Or a bouillabaisse, a coq-au-vin, even a simple crème brulée."
"Come on, Kurt, please don't get mad-"
"I'm not mad!" he screeched. "Just frustrated," he added more softly, realizing that he was close to screaming and that, really, Blaine probably didn't deserve it. "Look, Blaine," Kurt went on, "if you're really serious about this, we're going to have to put more time into it."
"Yeah, absolutely," Blaine immediately agreed, nodding for good measure.
"Ok, so from now on, everyday after class, we'll meet at my house and study for an hour."
Blaine swallowed uneasily at the thought of so many hours of French, but nodded nonetheless.
"At my house because all my books and dictionaries are there," Kurt added, and if he had any ulterior motives for wanting Blaine to come over, he kept them to himself.
That same afternoon, they drove to Lima together and had their first study session. Of course, Kurt had been right; Blaine desperately needed more preparation for his test, but carrying out this plan was going to be more difficult than expected. If Blaine had found it hard to concentrate on French before, it was nothing compared to the sheer torture of laying down besides Kurt on his bed - shoulders and forearms grazing, the smell of the other boy all around him - while trying to conjugate the passé composé. To make things worse, Kurt was making him work twice as hard since the pamplemousse incident.
"Ugh, this is so boring."
"Blaine!" Kurt said exasperatedly. "You're not helping."
"Can we at least skip to the next question?" he asked. Because Blaine was sure his head would explode if he had to write a single more sentence about his front lawn or the shape of his house. And if the next question happened to be "describe your best friend," well that was just an added bonus.
"Give me at least one decent sentence about your house, and then we can move on."
"Ok..." Blaine thought about it for a moment, then quickly scribbled a sentence on the sheet in front of him, feeling rather proud of himself for remembering all of those complicated words.
"Hmm, not bad," Kurt said. "I'm almost impressed."
"Almost?" Blaine exclaimed, putting a hand over his chest and pretending to be wounded. "You're hurting my feelings Kurt," he said with a pout, making Kurt smile one of his gorgeous (and all too rare) full-teeth smiles.
"Alright, fine, I'm impressed," he said, rolling his eyes at Blaine but smiling nonetheless.
"Next question then?" Blaine asked eagerly.
"Next question."
"I love this one," Blaine said.
"Well, your best friend," Kurt said, clearing his throat and trying his best to keep his voice casual. "That'd be Wes, right?"
"No, silly, it's you!" Blaine immediately said, laughing at the sheer absurdity of the question.
"Oh. Right. So um, what do you want to say?"
"Ok, well first of all, he's awesome and funny and really good-loo—um, good at French," Blaine quickly corrected himself, feeling his cheeks immediately burn off. God, how on earth could he have let that slip? Yeah, go ahead and tell your best friend how good-looking you think he is. Because that won't make things awkward at all, he mentally admonished himself.
"Um…" was the only thing Kurt managed to say before quickly grabbing his dictionary and busying himself with it to keep from having to speak. "I'm not sure how exactly to translate awesome," he said at last, when he was sure his voice wouldn't come out stupid, shaking and breathy again.
Blaine read out loud the suggested translation from the dictionary: "Fantastique? Somehow that doesn't seem right. Isn't there, like, a stronger word?"
Wow, what was wrong with him, Blaine thought immediately after he said it. He just couldn't stop saying stupid things today. "I mean, um, like a closer translation, you know?" he tried to back-track, but Kurt still looked so uncomfortable that Blaine began thinking he had really screwed up beyond repair.
In the meantime, however, Kurt had already convinced himself that he was just imagining things and that he needed to get a grip.
"No, you're right. Let me look at some synonyms," he said, and began leafing through his thesaurus. "Merveilleux?"
"That's more like wonderful, right?" Blaine asked.
"Well, am I not wonderful?" Kurt countered, making them both laugh and thankfully diffusing some of the tension in the room.
"That you are," Blaine said truthfully, still a little breathless from laughing.
They spent the rest of the day in the same manner, laughing and working, and making a surprising amount of progress in between the occasional blushing ("He sings beautifully" "You can't say that, Blaine, there's no adverb for beautiful in French."), the teasing ("He can get really bossy." "Il peut être vraiment – what? I am so not bossy!) and the gentle scolding ("Ugh, Blaine! For the last time, meilleur takes two l's!")
When Blaine finally left, Kurt walked with him to the front of the house to see him off. And as he watched his car disappear down the street, and remembered that Blaine had promised to come over the following day too, and the day after that, and every weekday until his test, he simply couldn't stop the smile that was tugging at his lips. Really, this French business was going to work out well after all, he could just feel it.
To be continued.