AN: I am so happy that Chris Colfer was in a vlogbrothers video! I just watched the video that was posted on their channel recently and I screamed when I saw Chris's name in the title. John Green and Chris are my two biggest inspirations. Also, this chapter was inspired by the song 'The A-Team' by Ed Sheeran. I saw the lyrics to this song written on the board one day in class and I thought it would be a perfect song for Blaine at this point.

It was almost midnight by the time Blaine got home. He never carried around a house key with him, but it wasn't like it mattered. The back door to his small house in the ratty neighborhood was never unlocked, anyway. There was a wooden gate that separated Blaine's backyard from the front of the house, and usually that required a key as well, but instead, Blaine would just slip through the large crack dented into the door.

The back door opened with a creak, the screen door close to falling off if something wasn't done about it. It wasn't a beautiful house, that was true. By most standards, it was pretty squalid, but it managed to stand on it's structure.

Blaine unlaced his shoes, leaving them at the door. The house was mostly dark, but he knew for a fact that the living room light would still be on when he made his way up the stairs. He slung his jacket over his shoulder, his eyes blood-shot red. If one knew Blaine ANderson, it wasn't difficult to know where he was at night. Probably spending time with another one of his friends with benefits, smoking a joint and drinking shot after shot.

Lying on the sofa in the living room was a tall, lanky woman dressed in a bath robe. Her eyes appeared to be closed, her hair matted in a giant knot. Her arm dangled from her sofa, her hand clutched at a glass filled with dark liquid. Ice cubes clinked inside the glass, and when she heard Blaine coming up the stairs, the woman opened her tired eyes.

"Where were you?" asked the woman, her voice hoarse and clearly, she was drunk.

"Where do you think I was?" Blaine shot back.

The woman took a long swallow of her drink, consuming almost half of the drink in one gulp. She rolled her eyes at Blaine. Anyone who walked by could clearly see that this woman was addicted to drinking, but probably not a lot of people could identify that she was also Blaine's mother. Sure, they did the same old habits, but not much resembled in terms of looks. Blaine had the same messy curls from his mother, and the same eye color, but the similarities stopped there. This woman's face was sunken in, her skin quite pale, unlike her son's, and her hair starting to sprout streaks of grey.

"No need to get snappy," she retorted. "Don't think you should talk to your own mother like that. Remember who's paying rent?"

"Certainly not you, Angela," Blaine sighed. "Since when was the last time you went to work? Or would you rather suck on the tit of a whiskey producing machine and just wish for the damn bills to pay themselves?"

"Shut the hell up, you little brat," Angela said, her voice cracking from all the alcohol she'd had in the past couple of hours. "Get a job if you want money so badly. Get your ass to bed."

Blaine left the living room without saying anything else, without feeling angry or upset. It was regular that he and his mother fought, so often that it really had no effect on Blaine anymore. Angela wasn't a terrible person. It wasn't like she beat her son or locked him in his room. But even worse that that: she just didn't seem to care about anything. Like mother, like son. Not an expression heard of very often...but for Blaine and Angela, it was an exception.

Blaine's room was nothing like what people thought it would be. People usually imagined torn walls, broken glass bottles scattered across the carpet, hidden weapons under the bed, and dirty clothes thrown around. But in fact, it was quite the contrary. The floor of Blaine's room was clear enough to see the cream colored carpet. There wasn't much to his room: a bed, a desk with a few papers lying on it, a dresser containing all of his clothes, and a closet. Blaine's room was probably the cleanest, most normal part of his whole house. And since he had a window in his room, it didn't smell like ashes whenever he smoked inside the house.

Shedding his clothes, Blaine chucked his t-shirt and jeans into his hamper so he could wash them later on, along with his mother's clothes since she never seemed to do anything but sleep and drink. Blaine stepped into his bathroom, turning on the water to the hottest he could make it go. He hissed when the water spilled into his naked back, but relaxed as he got more used to it.

Blaine let the water wash over his hair, face, torso, arms and legs. The burning of the water would usually bother some people, but Blaine felt nothing, nothing at all.

It was at times like this, when Blaine was alone again, when he would start to sing. It was odd seeing someone like Blaine sing, especially after all the crude things that came out of his mouth, but Blaine had to admit: he liked it. He would sing anything, from old lullabies, to old music from the fifties, to current pop ballads. He had a beautiful voice, but of course, he'd never sing for anyone in hell. The vibrations from his voice reverberated off the shower walls.

After his shower, Blaine threw on a pair of sweatpants sloppily before climbing to sit on his window sill. He grabbed his cigarette carton and fished out a long, white, thin cylinder that he proceeded to light up. He cranked open his window and began to blow out smoke towards the slightly chilly October night. Blaine lived in a noisy neighborhood. The young couple next door always fought, the husband usually storming out of the house while the wife screamed after him. The crazy old woman across the street obsessively watered her garden, occasionally muttering things to herself while she did so. Blaine remembered one time when he was walking by her house, and he stopped to stare at the old woman, who was reciting some sort of poem with a deranged gleam in her eyes as she planted in a patch of lilies. She looked up at him, her face wild, as she screamed, "What are you looking at, faggot?" Needless to say, Blaine left immediately.

Blaine watched the people in his neighborhood often on nights like this. He observed how sad and small their lives were, with the teenage girls that rebelled against their parents and had sex in the back of abandoned buildings with men years older than them, couples who pretended like they were in love in front of their friends when really they said nothing to each other when the night came, and the drunks and the druggies who never went to school.

Blaine's eyes scanned across the black night (well, morning) sky as he flicked his cigarette out the window. The world was just so full of shit and lies. A perfect place for a guy like him. Guys like Blaine, who tried to cover up their old lives and start again so that no one would bother him. Just looking at one sad little neighborhood in Ohio proved how there was no such thing as love, or dreams, or hope. Whatever it was that they lied to you about in middle school. It wasn't real.

Life was a struggle. Blaine was pretty much the support system for his mother, only at eighteen. Paying for the house and still going to school at the same time seemed like it was too much for everything at this point. Blaine looked down at his arms, where there were two, tiny scars in the shape of horizontal lines. They were from his cutting days, but he stopped after he'd discovered the joys of drinking, sex, and smoking. It was a lot easier than cutting, and less painful, too.

Eventually, Blaine sighed and climbed into his bed, crossing his arms behind his head and closing his eyes, not sleeping. It would be a waste to pray for a better kind of life, since praying, Blaine believed, was for desperate assholes who were too lazy to fight for what they wanted. Then again, so was Blaine.

Sleep took Blaine by the hand later on, just as the sky turned a dark blue, preparing for the sun to rise in just a few hours. Another day Blaine didn't need to see, but another one he had to face.