Author's Note: This chapter was actually pretty hard to write. Distractions aside (and trust me, there were plenty), I didn't really know what I wanted to happen or how to write it. I hope I succeeded in giving you a good chapter. That said, things are not resolved in this chapter. Expect to be left wondering what the hell is going through their minds.
-SQ
Disclaimer: Own Glee I do not.
Chapter Twenty-Nine: What Now?
"Kurt! Kurt, what happened? !" Finn pounded down the stairs after his stepbrother.
The sobbing boy hurtled down the staircase, through the living room, and out of the house, throwing open the car door.
"Drive," he said, as soon as a very confused Finn had climbed into the driver's seat. "Just drive."
"Kurt," said Finn, making no move to start the car, "what happened?"
Kurt shook his head. "Please, Finn," he said, his voice choked and hoarse, "please just take me home."
Finn almost refused. He almost crossed his arms and said that he wouldn't budge until Kurt told him what had happened. He almost did, but he didn't. Instead he pulled his key out of his pocket, stuck it in the ignition, and backed out of the driveway, casting sideways glances at Kurt all the while.
He continued to glance at his brother the entire way home. Kurt could feel Finn's questioning, worried gaze, but he ignored it, his own eyes fixed unseeingly ahead, completely silent except for the occasional sniffle.
When they finally arrived home Kurt was out of the car before Finn had taken the key out of the ignition and up the stairs to his room before Finn had passed through the front door.
"Finn? Kurt? Is that you?" Carole's voice called from somewhere within the house. "I thought you weren't going to be home for dinner."
"Change of plans," said Finn, hanging up his coat and following his mother's voice and the smell of her cooking to the kitchen. "Kurt's not feeling well. I think he had a fight with Blaine."
"Oh?" said Carole, looking up from the salad she was preparing. "What about? Nothing serious I hope."
Finn shrugged. "I dunno. Kurt wouldn't tell me. He seemed pretty upset, though."
"Well, give him some time to cool off," said Carole, handing Finn the bowl of salad to put on the table. You know how he gets."
Finn nodded, hoping that his mother was right and this would all blow over in a day or two. The memory of the looks on Kurt's and Blaine's faces in the seconds before Kurt had fled the room, however, said otherwise.
Kurt didn't come down to dinner that night. When Burt went upstairs to tell him it was ready he said that he had a stomachache, and when Finn went up to bed later that night Kurt's light was off.
*****BB*****
Finn opened his eyes to the dark ceiling and thought, Why am I awake?
Then he heard a tapping on his door and it creaked open, casting a thin shaft of light across the hardwood floor.
"Finn?" said a soft voice "Are you awake?"
"I am now," Finn whispered back. "What is it?"
The door opened further and Kurt slipped into the room, shutting it behind him so that the sliver of light widened and then disappeared. Finn heard him pad over to the bed and then felt the mattress sink as he sat down on the edge.
"Can we talk?"
"Yeah, dude, of course," said Finn, not pointing out that he had tried to talk earlier and had been rebuffed. Instead he sat up and scooted over to make room for Kurt on the bed. "What's up?"
"He lied to me," said Kurt, drawing his knees up to his chest. "He lied to me, and I'm so mad I could punch him."
Even Finn didn't have to ask who 'he' was. "What did he lie to you about?"
"Everything!"
Now Finn did have to ask. "Can you be, uh, a little more specific?"
"He had a boyfriend before me! Who hurt him, but he still stayed with him. He…he did things with him. He did things to himself too! It wasn't just his boyfriend and his dad who hurt him! And I don't know where this boyfriend went or anything!"
"Well, maybe—"
"No!" said Kurt. "I don't want to hear it! How could he just not tell me? What else hasn't he told me? ! He tried to kill himself, Finn! How could he do that? !"
Finn didn't know what to say. He had suspected that something was going on with Blaine, even that the other boy had once used to hurt himself, but trying to kill himself? Where had Kurt gotten that anyway? Finn didn't even know what to think.
"So…you're pissed?"
"Hell yes, I'm pissed!" Kurt glowered into the darkness. "I'm so pissed I don't know what to do!"
Well, that makes two of us, thought Finn.
"You could talk to—"
"Definitely not!" shouted Kurt before Finn could even finish his sentence, making the larger flinch and glance toward the door in case their parents had woken up. I am not talking to Rachel, I am not talking to Mercedes, I am not talking to your mom or my dad or Wes or David. And I am certainly not talking to Blaine!"
In the mood Kurt was in, anything Finn said would be construed as an attack, so instead he opted for a silent hand on Kurt's shoulder.
The smaller boy sniffled but didn't shrug off the contact. They sat there for several minutes in silence. Finally Kurt slid off the bed and returned to his own bedroom, but neither brother got very much sleep that night.
*****BB*****
By Monday morning Kurt still didn't know what he was going to do when saw Blaine at school that day. But when he walked into first period Blaine wasn't there. Kurt's initial stab of worry was almost immediately replaced by relief and then a wave of anger. Blaine was avoiding him now? Oh, real mature. Of course it did make things somewhat easier, but it still made Kurt mad.
"Kurt," said Wes, he and David falling into step beside the younger boy, "do you know where Blaine is today?"
"No," said Kurt shortly.
Wes and David exchanged a look; they had heard that tone of voice before.
"Did you two have a fight?"
"How should I know?" snapped Kurt. "Why don't you ask him, see if he'll tell you anything."
"Uh…Kurt, are we missing something here?"
"Not any more than I'm missing, apparently."
"Kurt—"
"Did you know? Did he tell you?"
"Did he tell us what?" said David.
"Oh nothing, anything, everything!" exploded Kurt, throwing his hands up into the air.
"Kurt!" snapped David, losing his patience. "What in the world are you talking about?"
"Blaine!" shouted Kurt. "Blaine and the fact that he can't trust his own fucking boyfriend with what's going on his life! Tell me, does he make a habit of hurting himself, or does he usually let his dad and Brian take care of that? No, forget it," he said before Wes or David could respond. "I don't want to hear another word about it!"
Kurt turned around and stormed back up the hallway toward his next class. David and Wes looked at each other.
"Oh shit," said Wes quietly, his eyes very wide.
David nodded, completely agreeing with the sentiment, and then added one of his own: "We have to talk to Blaine."
*****BB*****
Blaine hadn't intended not to go to school on Monday, but when his alarm went off that morning he simply couldn't bring himself to make the effort. He had almost forgotten what it was like to feel this way, to have nothing to look forward to but more misery and loneliness.
How stupid could he have been—not to mention how cliché—keeping that stuff in a shoebox in his closet? He should have burned it all ages ago, or flushed it down the toilet, or…or something! Anything but keeping it in the back of his closet where any nosy someone could find it. Not that Kurt had any right to be snooping around in the back of his closet, but he might as well have been asking for Kurt to find the thing.
Had he wanted Kurt to find it?
No! Never!
But Kurt had found it, and he had reacted as badly as Blaine had been afraid he would. How could he not? Blaine had allowed Kurt to build him up into the god, this superhero. And he had tried to live up to it, he had tried, but he just wasn't good enough. For Kurt, for Brian, for his mom, for his dad… He would never be good enough. Maybe eventually that would stop hurting.
"Blaine? Your friends are here. They've brought you your homework."
Blaine jumped and shoved his left wrist behind his back, tucking the razorblade out of sight with his other hand. His bedroom door opened and his mother's face appeared.
"Tell them I'm not feeling well enough to visitors," he said, trying to look pathetic. Truthfully it wasn't very difficult. "Have them leave my homework in the living room."
The door closed again and he heard his mother's muffled voice telling Wes and David that she was very sorry, but Blaine was too sick to see them right now and that she'd have him call later as soon as he was feeling up to it.
Blaine let his head sag against his pillows, watching the blood clot sluggishly on the inside of his arm. He had almost managed to drift off when a clatter against the pane of his bedroom window jerked him awake.
Huh? He looked up as the sound came again. A handful of pebbles had struck the glass of his windowpane and were now falling away to the driveway below. Someone was throwing rocks at his window?
Blaine's heart leapt and he scrambled up from his bed to the window. This was exactly the kind of thing Kurt would— Blaine's face and heart fell back down toward his shoes. It wasn't Kurt standing underneath his window looking up at him, his fist full of pebbles; it was Wes, David, and Finn.
"I'm sick," he grunted, opening the window just far enough for his voice to carry to the figures standing below.
"Oh no you don't," said Wes. "We know what happened, or some of it, and we've come to find out the rest. We won't leave until you let us in."
"Have fun spending the night out there, then," said Blaine, starting to shut the window once more.
"If you don't let us in we'll scale the walls," said Wes, and to Blaine's horror, and apparently David's and Finn's as well, he braced his foot against the side of the house and grasped the awning with both hands, looking for all the world like he was about to attempt to climb up the side of the three-story house. If it had been anyone else Blaine would have called his bluff, but Wes was actually crazy enough to do it.
"Alright, alright, I'm coming down. Just give me a minute." Blaine shut the window and shoved the former contents of the incriminating shoebox under his mattress. Five minutes later all four boys were seated on Blaine's bed and Blaine was crying unabashedly into David's shoulder.
"What exactly happened?" asked Wes once Blaine had finally cried himself out.
In a stuffy voice Blaine told them how he had come upstairs to find Kurt sitting on his bed, the contents of the previously hidden and nearly forgotten shoebox spread out around him.
"What was in there?" asked David. "What did he see?"
"Everything," said Blaine miserably. "My journal, the pictures, the razor, the pill bottle, my suicide song…"
"Suicide song?" said Finn.
Blaine nodded. "'Leave out All the Rest' by Linkin Park. A bit dramatic, I'll grant you, but quite appropriate for what I was feeling at the time."
"So you really did…?"
"Try to kill myself?" said Blaine. "Yes. I downed half a bottle of Aspirin and then slit my arms from wrist to elbow." Vaguely he wondered at the fact that it was so easy to talk about now, when telling Wes and David just last year had been so hard. Maybe he just didn't care enough anymore. After all, Kurt knew, what harm was there in telling Finn?
The boy in question looked distinctly green. "Why…?"
"Because my life sucked," said Blaine bluntly.
There was an awkward silence.
"What are you going to do now?" said Wes finally.
Blaine shrugged. "What can I do? Kurt hates me."
"He doesn't hate you."
"You could have fooled me."
"He's just upset," said David. Well, that's an understatement, thought Finn. "And to be fair, he shouldn't have gone through your stuff."
"No," said Blaine, "he shouldn't have. But he did."
"And his expectations of you weren't very realistic," said Wes.
Finn nodded in agreement.
"And what did I ever do to discourage them?"
None of the other boys had an answer to that.
"You should come back to school," said David finally. "Try to talk to him."
"And why in the world would he want to talk to me?" said Blaine.
"I could try to—"
"No, Finn," said Blaine. "Don't ruin your relationship with your brother because of me."
"Blaine," said Wes suddenly. "Let me see your arms. Now."
"What?" said Blaine, thrown by the sudden change of topic.
"Arms."
Reluctantly, Blaine extended his arms toward his friend.
Finn's eyes widened and Wes's and David's narrowed as they took in the fresh horizontal cut across the tanned skin. Finn drew his breath in sharply.
"Blaine," said David, "you promised."
"I know, I just—"
"No 'just,' Blaine, you promised."
"It was right there. I couldn't help it."
"We told you if you didn't stop we'd take you to a therapist," said Wes. "We mean it, we'll tell someone. Get you help."
"No!" said Blaine. "No. I did stop. It won't happen again. I swear."
"It had better not," said David.
Blaine starred helplessly at his three friends and echoed Wes's question back at them. "What am I supposed to do now?"
"You could start by telling us who Brian is," said David quietly, holding up a photo Blaine had missed in his hasty cleanup.
Blaine's face lost its color so fast the other three were afraid he would faint. Brian. His last secret. His deepest shame. The thing even Wes and David didn't know about. He looked at the three faces watching him—he was stuck between a rock and a hard place. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Blaine bit his lip so hard it bled, the pain clearing his head slightly from the onset of panic, and made a split-second decision. After all, what more did he have to lose?
AN: As I said, confusion. I know what's going through their minds right now (even if they don't even quite know it yet), and you will know eventually, but right now there is kind of general angst and confusion. No, Mama Carole is not going to step in and intervene on this one. They're going to have to figure it out more or less on their own. Everything has kind of been leading up to this conflict, so…
I will be working at camp with very limited computer & internet access for the next 8 weeks, but I will try my very hardest to keep up with my fics. It might even be somewhat easier because, though I will have a lot less free time, I will have fewer distractions during that free time. But don't count on that. In any case, know that I am trying, and have not forgotten about any of my fics. Thanks for your dedication and your patience, guys. And for your reviews, always for those ;)
-SQ
