How It Starts Chapter 10: Break-ups and Duende, a glee fanfic

"That wasn't your fault, Kurt," were the first words out of Rachel's mouth as Kurt wrapped up his story. "The fact that you two broke up was all on Blaine. He needed to make a decision, an important decision, and he couldn't. I don't understand why he thought his past was more important than his present, but that's something that I see as a third-party observer, and your friend." Kurt rolled his eyes at Rachel.

"Rachel, Blaine's been through hell," he argued, "he's allowed to have his limitations on our relationship, and I pushed him too far, too fast."

"No, him pushing you to... be intimate after being together for only three months was too far, too fast." Not for some people, but Kurt let it slide. He would never consider Rachel a normal person.

"Rachel, do you really think that's what we're talking about?" he asked her with a raised eyebrow. Talking to Rachel could be trying.

"Kurt, you did your best with Blaine's 'limitations,'" Kurt was getting the feeling his best friend was mocking him, and he didn't appreciate it, "the fact of the matter is he needed to grow up and see that there's something good in his life now, and maybe he can't handle that, but he screwed up. Not you." Rachel always sounded so sage with her advice, how come she was always so wrong?

"Rachel, you don't understand. I've been through bullying, not nearly as bad as he had, and it haunts me sometimes. I can't even imagine having to live with what Blaine's been through. He gets it from all angles."

"And you don't?" she asked immediately. "You get it at school, I know your whole family gets it at home, the whole town bullies you, Kurt." She really didn't understand.

"I have the Glee club, and my family loves and supports me. Blaine had no one, Rachel."

"That was the past, and now he has you. At least, he did. And he would have had our support, and your family's support, and plenty of support from the Cheerios, who have to love him for their safety." Kurt sighed. He and Rachel had similar lines of thought, but thinking like that was exactly why Blaine had broken up with him.

"I shouldn't have pushed Blaine. I think he would have made his own decision, eventually, but bringing him here and singing to him was too much, especially with everything else that's been going on." That article had started it all, and Kurt could wring Jacob Ben Israel's scrawny neck.

"You guys are really early for practice," Mr. Schue said, breaking into their conversation. His eyes widened a little when he took in their wide eyes, Rachel's expression shocked and Kurt's a little fearful. "Did I hear something I shouldn't have?" He glanced once more at the clock. "Are you guys skipping class?"

Both of them started with the tears at the same time, and under any other circumstances, Mr. Schuester would call them out for crocodile tears and send them back to class, but whatever they had been talking about in quiet tones was obviously serious. One set of tears was probably real, maybe even both. "I'll call your teachers, tell them I pulled you out of class," he promised, retreating to his office and shutting the door tightly. Kids and their drama.

Kurt and Rachel waited until Mr. Schuester had closed his door to continue their conversation. "That was close," Rachel said, brushing away her fake tears, but Kurt had started crying, and now he couldn't seem to stop.

"I messed everything up, Rach." She pulled her distressed friend into her arms, feeling bad that he was so upset.

"It wasn't you, Kurt, it was him." Kurt just shook his head as she patted his back.

"Dude, you look like shit," was the first thing Finn said when he walked through the Hummel-Hudson front door.

"Finn!" Rachel hissed, unimpressed with his blatant, but probably true, statement.

"Where were you guys during practice?" he asked as he put down his book bag, taking in the sight on the couch.

"Here," Kurt mumbled, his throat scratchy. Rachel had dragged him home shortly after he had stopped crying, practically shoving him up the stairs with orders for him to change into comfortable pajamas and wash the products out of his hair. He had made sure to do some moisturizing, and meanwhile, she made quite a racket downstairs. When he came back down, he saw that she had made hot chocolate and barbecue popcorn for the two of them, turned on A Walk to Remember, and was sitting on the couch with blankets, obviously ready to have a pity party with him. He had been more than happy to oblige.

"What's wrong?" Finn asked, his brotherly concern showing as he sat on the couch next to Kurt. Kurt was curled up with Rachel, not caring that they were practically cuddling. "What happened? Who do I have to kill?"

"Blaine dumped me," Kurt replied, and Finn's first reaction was to look fearfully at Rachel, as if Kurt would have said anything in front of her on accident. "She knows, Finn. I told her everything."

"In exquisite detail." Somehow Rachel managed to make that sound perverted, in the way only the clean-minded could. Finn didn't seem to care, wrapping an arm around Kurt and essentially placing him in the middle of a Finchel sandwich. It wasn't entirely an unpleasant or uncomfortable place to be.

"Should I punch him in the face?" Finn asked uncertainly, and for some reason that made Kurt laugh. "Because I totally will, dude. Just say the word."

"No violence," Kurt said firmly, pausing the movie. "Blaine had reasonable cause." Rachel opened her mouth to object, and Kurt cut her off. "It was my fault."

"Dude, it's never really your fault when someone dumps you. Take it from me." Rachel glanced at her boyfriend sternly. "Unless you, like, cheated on him or something..." Finn squirmed a little uncomfortably. "You didn't cheat on him, did you?"

"Oh, Finn, did I neglect to tell you about my torrid affair with Rachel?" Kurt asked sarcastically, making the girl in question laugh and Finn smile.

"Not funny, bro."

"Rachel laughed. I guess that means I'm better than you are." Finn got him back for that comment by ruffling his hair. "Finn!"

"You totally deserved that." Kurt didn't argue. He had. "You okay, bro?" Finn asked as Rachel stroked her hand through Kurt's sloppy hair. She could be very comforting when the mood struck her... but lightning rarely strikes twice.

"No, but I will be." Kurt jumped a bit when Finn kissed him on the forehead. "What-"

"You've totally done that to me, bro. Fair's fair." Kurt couldn't argue with that. "Whatcha watching?" Finn asked, reclining his feet on the coffee table (as Kurt had told him a hundred times not to) and not seeming inclined to move.

"A Walk to Remember," Rachel replied, turning the movie back on. "It's a tear-jerker, which we're essentially using as an excuse to cry."

"Does tears mean you're out?" Kurt asked with a raised eyebrow, and Finn rolled his eyes, a habit he had picked up from the countertenor himself.

"Not a chance, dude. Especially if the deal comes with hot chocolate." Rachel got up to make Finn a mug.

Finn ended up crying more than Kurt and Rachel combined, which was really saying something.

Burt didn't remark on the unusual scene on his couch when he got home, and Carole just smiled at the fact that her two sons were getting along, and had finally stopped arguing about Rachel. However, Kurt still wasn't surprised when he came down the stairs at around eight and Burt was all alone on the couch with two mugs of hot chocolate.

"I considered putting Kahlua in yours, but I didn't think you were that upset," Burt said as his son sat down, curling into his dad without a second thought. "What happened today, kid? It's been a while since I've seen you with puffy red eyes, and I don't like it."

"Blaine and I broke up." Burt sighed, readjusting his baseball cap.

"I hoped we would never have to have this conversation," he said gruffly, and Kurt looked at him in confusion. "Your first broken heart," Burt clarified.

"Nobody finds the perfect person on the first try," Kurt replied, resting his head on his dad's shoulder and feeling immediately better when his dad wrapped an arm around him.

"Yes, but I still hoped you would be doing all the dumping," Burt said with a chuckle, then seemed to think it over. "Not that I want you to have a reason to dump someone... break-ups just suck, kid."

"Who said I got dumped?" Kurt asked with a smile.

"It's written all over your face, kiddo." Kurt sighed. That was probably very true. "It'll be all right, Kurt. He's just one, idiotic boy."

"I know," Kurt said, not bothering to argue, "but he was my one, idiotic boy."

"Ever thought that you're better off without him?" Kurt gave his father a betrayed look. "Too early for that trick, I guess."

"I guess I was kind of dependent on him," Kurt admitted, trying to find the flaws in his relationship with Blaine. "I mean, I hadn't hung out with Mercedes in so long she was mad at me, and Rachel found out about him because he was always on my mind." His dad sighed, rubbing his arm.

"Just ease my mind on one thing. You didn't..." Burt flapped his hand around kind of spastically, a gesture that Kurt could figure out, but was still amusing, making him laugh at his dad's awkwardness, "with the kid, did you?"

"I didn't sleep with Blaine, no," Kurt assured his dad, ignoring the way Burt grimaced at the words.

"Good. Drink your hot chocolate, we'll watch some of those fashion shows you like." Burt always knew how to make his son feel better.

About halfway through the second episode of... some ridiculous show Burt hadn't even caught the name of, Kurt was starting to drift off on his shoulder. Burt didn't have the heart to wake him, even though sleeping like this would give them both aches in the morning. "Love you, Daddy," he murmured as he fell asleep on Burt's shoulder.

"Love you too, kid," his dad replied, kissing Kurt's head.

"Jacob Ben Israel," Blaine's voice practically boomed out across the hall. "I have a story for your crummy blog, but I think everyone wants to hear this." Ben Israel immediately rushed up to Blaine with his tape recorder, his hair bobbing as he ran. "I am the Cheerio who has been breaking the status quo." Everyone gasped, even though the news really wasn't that surprising to anyone intelligent.

"Does he have to do this while you're here?" Rachel asked, leaning against the locker next to Kurt's and speaking his mind. Kurt ignored her (and Blaine), pulling books out of his locker and trying to act thoroughly uninterested.

"It doesn't matter, Rachel." The pity party with Finn and Rachel, and the comfort he had received from his father had made Kurt feel much better, and he was trying not to think about their break-up too much. He had a feeling that was about to become a very difficult task.

"That relationship, the one that made all you ignorant toads fear for your paramount 'normal,'" Blaine continued coldly, "is now over. We are broken up, and it is no longer your business. So get lost." Blaine finished by snapping Ben Israel's tap recorder seemingly effortlessly, though Kurt could see the muscles in his arms move and flex.

"Who's the loser?" Mindy Crawford yelled out. She was one of the girls pretty enough to be popular without being a Cheerio.

"Or rather, who was the loser?" a friend of hers asked, making everyone laugh. Blaine silenced the hallway with a glare, a particular talent of his.

"What's your name, Abigail Adams?" Blaine asked coolly.

"Abigail Adams?" someone asked, quiet enough that they thought Blaine wouldn't hear them. Big mistake.

"Isn't the resemblance striking?" Blaine asked, smirking, and the girl flushed as people laughed. Kurt saw the lights of several phones as people Googled her to figure out the joke. Abigail Adams wasn't known for being particularly pretty.

"Kelly Johnson," the poor girl replied.

"Tell me, Kelly Johnson, are you dating anyone?" The girl shook her head furiously. "Not surprising." A few people snickered, including Mindy. "Well, Kelly Johnson, if you can ever tell me the name of the boy you dated for almost three months, I'll tell you the same. Deal?" The girl's eyes were watery, and she didn't bother to answer. "Any more questions?" Blaine asked the rest of the hall.

"Would it upset the status quo even more if we knew who the mystery man was?" asked another worker for Jacob Ben Israel's blog. Unfortunately, he had hired even more creepy snitches to help feed the school's gossip center.

"Can you tell me, anonymous paparazzi whose name I don't care to learn, exactly what the words 'status quo' mean?" Blaine asked, staring the suddenly nervous snitch down. People were snickering.

"Not... exactly."

"The phrase 'status quo,' popularized by a Pakistani politician Imran Khan, though more commonly known from the atrocity High School Musical, comes from the Latin words 'statu quo' meaning 'the state in which.' The term 'status quo' tends to mean the current state of affairs. The fact that this man's name is unknown, and shall remain unknown, is part of the current state of affairs, which means it is technically you who is upsetting the 'status quo,'" Blaine informed him mercilessly, using air quotes to further belittle him. The reporter just looked embarrassed at this point, the red blush on his cheeks contrasting horribly with his complexion. "Any follow-up questions?" Blaine asked insistently, to which he shook his head. "Excellent. Anyone else?"

"Who's the closeted homo?" Karofsky asked with a snort.

"You mean, besides you?" Kurt gasped, he couldn't help it. Karofsky looked equally as shocked. "Don't look so surprised, someone was eventually bound to notice the way you ogle Evans' admittedly fine ass." Sam, also part of the crowd Blaine had gathered, looked mortified when Blaine pointed to him. "Seriously, some discretion would have done you well." Karofsky was still staring at him like he couldn't believe what he was hearing. "Oh, I'm sorry, is the word 'discretion' beyond the limited range of your vocabulary? It means you're the most obvious closet-case I've ever met, and believe me, that's saying something." Karofsky was still staring. "What? Am I a part of your spank-bank now?" Blaine asked, and Karofsky turned and fled. Blaine, thankfully, also turned and left, still hounded by the reporters from Ben Israel's blog that hadn't been torn to shreds yet. Kelly Johnson was crying and the reporter who had been mercilessly torn apart looked ready to faint. No one had gone after Karofsky.

"Wow. What an asshole," Kurt said as Blaine turned the corner, and Rachel looked at him disbelievingly.

"Really? That's what you're going with?" she asked.

"He just made a girl cry, almost made a nerd faint, and outed a football player. I'd say that's pretty bad." Kurt was trying to ignore the lump in his throat. Blaine was doing all of this, in his own way, to protect the two of them. He had probably even outed Karofsky to protect Kurt.

"You don't seem particularly surprised about Karofsky," Rachel said suspiciously, but she let it go just as fast. "Kurt, somewhere inside that deeply entrenched in denial brain of yours, you know that his attitude was unusually vitriolic, even for him. Santana would have been crushed under that onslaught. Do you seriously not see what's going on here?"

"He's cruel and vicious and I should be glad we're over?" Kurt asked, trying really hard not to think the way he knew Rachel was. It was the optimistic way, but not the realistic way.

"He's upset, and more importantly, he's upset about losing you. Some people get sad, others get angry, and some channel whatever emotions they're feeling into something else. Blaine channeled his feelings into tearing apart all of the people that are his reasons that you two broke up. How can you not see that?"

"Rachel, I would love to live in your world. I bet it's sparkly," he said coldly, shutting his locker.

"Kurt, I'm serious!" she said, following him down the hallway. For someone with short legs, she could walk pretty fast.

"Maybe we should talk about this in lower tones," Kurt suggested. "I wouldn't want all of Blaine's hard work hiding me away to be for nothing."

"Kurt, you know that's not what he's doing. He's upset, and he took it out on the people he sees as obstacles between you and him. I mean, it was horrible to witness, but it was bizarrely sweet, don't you think?"

"Under no circumstances would that have been sweet. That was awful, Rachel, and the fact that he can so ruthlessly tear people down kind of makes me glad we're over... though I do have to wonder what he's saying about me behind my back, if he can say all those things to and about people he's never even interacted with." Kurt was flat-out lying now. He knew Blaine would never badmouth him, if only for the sake of not arousing suspicion.

"Probably that he misses you and that he loves you." Kurt stopped sharply, turning to look at his best friend.

"Blaine Anderson is not in love with me. If he was, he would have been able to look past all of those things that haunt him and move forward with our relationship, but he couldn't. We never talked about love, and I certainly don't want to talk about it now." Kurt slipped away before Rachel could follow him.

Kurt watched through Mercedes' performance of Don't Wanna Lose You. Gloria Estefan, or as Mr. Martinez called her, Gloria María Milagrosa Fajardo García de Estefan, was a great choice for this week's assignment, and he knew she was thinking about Sam as she sang out in Spanish. It was a problem they both shared, having boys floating around in their heads. Kurt made an executive decision as Mercedes finished up her song.

"Mr. Martinez," he said as he raised his hand. "I have something I would like to perform."

"Bueno." Mr. Martinez had far too much fun inserting Spanish into everyday conversation. "Go right ahead, Kurt."

"This week's lesson, while encouraging our knowledge of Spanish, is all about duende, or passion, and I'm sorry I'm talking like Rachel before a solo, I promise my spiel will be over shortly." That had everyone laughing and Rachel looking unimpressed with her best friend. "Anyway, passion doesn't have to be big, dramatic, or charismatic. As someone with diva-like tendencies-"

"Hell to the yeah," Mercedes said, making everyone chuckle.

"I'm aware that passion can be much deeper, much more personal, and as Mr. Martinez said, passion can make you cry too. This song kind of breaks the rules, as it not Latin and the person who sang it has no Latin descent to speak of, but I translated some of it into my own clumsy Spanish, so I guess I'm mildly bilingual for the day," Kurt shrugged, and Mr. Martinez just nodded to him.

Kurt sat at the piano, took a deep breath, and almost changed his mind... until he caught a glimpse of a red and white uniform ducking quickly out of sight. Blaine. Kurt started to play.

Reborn and shivering
Spat out on new terrain
Unsure, unconvincing
This faint and shaky hour

Blaine obviously knew he had been spotted, because he didn't try to hide again, locking eyes with Kurt as the countertenor continued to sing out Alanis Morissette's grief over Ryan Reynolds as his own over Blaine. Kurt didn't turn to look at the audience, or even pretend that he wasn't staring at Blaine. He wasn't sure if his ex-boyfriend could hear, but it still meant the same thing if he couldn't.

Day one, day one
Empezar todo otra vez
Step one, step one
Apenas puedo ni pensar
Y ahora estoy fingiendo
'Til I'm pseudo-making it
Desde cero, comenzar de nuevo
Pero esta vez como yo
Y no como we

Singing the Spanish was a little harder than Kurt had expected, even though he had memorized it religiously, but he kept his eyes locked with Blaine's. He could tell now that Blaine could hear, because his forehead had creased in confusion when Kurt started to sing in Spanish. He was going to get wrinkles if he kept doing that.

Gun shy and quivering
Timid without a hand
Feign brave with steel intent
Little and hardly here

Eyes wet toward
Wide open frayed
Si dios esta tomando bandos
Te rezo el busca para perder

This Spanish didn't fit the tune particularly well, and Kurt had to let go of their eye contact to look at the keys, fumbling briefly with the chords for the bridge along with the unfamiliar words rolling off of his tongue. When he looked back up, Blaine was gone, and his song became more mournful than accusatory. Even though he hadn't really intended it as an accusation.

There was hesitant clapping as he finished, letting his fingers slip off the keys but not standing up. "Well, damn, white boy, all the hair's standing up on my arms," Mercedes said, and there were murmurings of general consensus. "You blew me out of the water."

"Now, that's what I call passion," Mr. Martinez said with a grin, obviously not picking up on the mood in the room.

"And bad Spanish," Santana muttered.

"It was you, wasn't it?" Tina asked before Kurt got the chance to respond to their temporary co-director. "You dated Blaine." Kurt wasn't sure if anyone else had seen the Cheerio in the window. He really didn't care.

"Yes. I'm the loser." No one commented on the terminology.

"I'm gonna kill Ben Israel," Puck declared, and Finn seemed to return the sentiment with a fist bump. "Seriously, not cool."

"Why didn't you tell us?" Quinn asked. "We all talked about it, we would have been supportive."

"We are supportive," Mercedes corrected her, and Kurt knew without looking up that she got a lot of strange looks. "What? Whatever's going on, it's obviously not over."

"It's over, Mercedes." Kurt sighed. "I wrecked everything."

"I-"

"Rach," Finn stopped her, putting a hand on his girlfriend's wrist and managing to control her for the first time in their relationship, rather than the other way around.

"Come on, white boy," Mercedes said, walking over to him. "We're going over to my house, and we're gonna watch crappy movies, and we're gonna talk about how much boys that aren't you suck." It wasn't a question, Mercedes didn't give him an option.

"Mr. Martinez, may we be dismissed?" Rachel asked, lumping herself with Kurt and Mercedes. Kurt knew that Mercy hadn't planned to ask, simply to leave, but Rachel was always so obsessive about Glee club.

"Sure, but I expect a passionate performance from you at some point, Rachel," Mr. Martinez said with a smile, and everyone groaned.

"Has she ever given a performance that isn't ridiculously passionate?" Artie asked, and a few people chuckled.

"Maybe you could learn from her," Tina said coldly, making the whole room 'ooh'. Rachel and Mercedes were too busy dragging him out of rehearsal to care.

Rachel paraphrased his story for Mercedes, Kurt too worn out to tell her the whole saga again. He just wanted to curl up and go to bed, but he knew the girls wouldn't let him do that. Rachel put in Much Ado About Nothing, something funny to cheer them up, and they sat side by side in their pajamas, eating popcorn from their own separate bowls and occasionally switching.

"You don't get to choose when it comes to true love," Rachel said after a while, watching Claudio's face fall as he's convinced Don Pedro wants Hero for himself.

"Preaching to the choir," Mercedes said, and Kurt had to remember to ask her what was going on in her man-life. Whatever it was, it was serious. This wasn't cheering-Kurt-up talk, this was the kind of talk he was expecting in about two weeks.

"Amen," Kurt added with a sigh.

"Can you guys keep a secret?" Rachel asked, pausing the movie at the beginning of Benedict's soliloquy. "Finn proposed," she admitted shyly, pulling out an engagement ring on a chain.

"Rachel, have you lost your damn mind?" Mercedes asked, and Kurt... wasn't completely sure he agreed.

"Well, it's possible to combine romance with your dreams," Kurt said, gaining a disbelieving stare from Mercedes. "As long as the wedding's a long way off."

"What the hell has this boy done to you?" Mercedes asked with a stern expression. "Am I the only sane one left in the room?" she demanded of no one, popping a handful of Kurt's popcorn in her mouth.

"Mercedes, I love Finn, and in all of my dreams, he's there, struggling alongside me to make ends meet in a New York apartment we can barely afford that I'll eventually talk about on the Jimmy Kimmel show."

"I can't believe you're saying this," Mercedes exclaimed, mouth full of popcorn.

"We want to get married in a few months. Do you promise not to tell anyone?" Rachel asked, fingering her engagement ring.

"Excuse me, I have to go yell at my crazy brother, because I have no idea where he came up with this plan, but that's beyond my realm of sanity. You're going to hitch your life to Finn's before he's even decided whether or not he's going to New York?" Kurt asked, and Rachel's smile faltered for a second.

"What would you do if Blaine burst in that door right now and asked you to marry him, diamond in his hand and tears in his eyes?" Rachel asked, pointing to her bedroom door with a dramatic flourish, and Kurt had a very excellent answer to that.

"Kick him in the nuts and tell him to go find one of his old, sucker boyfriends, because I'm not interested." That was unfair, and untrue, and both Kurt and Rachel knew that, but Rachel didn't comment.

"I don't want to lose Finn, like you sang to Sam today," she said to Mercedes. "I know I have the right person, as scary as that is to face."

"I'm in love with him," Kurt said before he could stop himself. "Blaine. I love him." Rachel's expression of craziness softened as she leaned forward to hug Kurt, knocking her popcorn onto the ground and not caring.

"We know, sweetie," Mercedes consoled through a mouthful of popcorn, rubbing his back.

"What do I do?" Kurt asked, feeling a little bit helpless. Somehow, he had become the only person in the room who knew nothing about love.

"You have to tell him that," Rachel said, still holding him close. "And if he's enough of a moron to push you away after that, he doesn't even deserve to look at you, much less date you, but he won't, because I'm willing to bet that he loves you too. The ones who are hardest to love are usually the ones who need it the most."

"Did you just quote Peaceful Warrior at me?" Kurt asked with a sniff.

"I'm going to have to go with crazy on this one," Mercedes agreed. "Honesty is the best policy when it comes to love."

"Then why haven't you broken up with Shane yet?" Rachel asked, and the two girls got involved in an argument Kurt wasn't quite sure he understood, but he was safe and warm between the two of them, and he quickly fell asleep.

A/N: Don't you worry too much about Kurt and Blaine. They'll be fine.

Songs used/mentioned:
'Don't Wanna Lose You' by Gloria Estefan (mentioned)
'Not as We' o 'No Como Nosotros' by Alanis Morrisette

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