Author's Note: Thank you so much for the reviews! I really loved hearing what you guys think and I'm kind of shocked that some of you hated Blaine so much! Haha may have to give a back story for him :)
Anyways, sorry it's been awhile since I've updated. If you guys could just let me know what you think again, that would be great!
Disclaimer: I do not own Glee or any of the characters. Kurt Hummel/Chris Colfer and Blaine Anderson/Darren Criss are not mine (unfortunately). (I do own Hunter Birdell).
Summary: "There's a knock at the door and Kurt opens it to see a drenched Blaine Anderson looking lost and defeated." Blaine tells his parents about Kurt with disastrous consequences.
Genre: Romance, Hurt/Comfort, Angst, Drama
Warnings: Possible language, abuse
Rating: Upped to M (just to be safe)
Pairings: Kurt/Blaine (Klaine)
COURAGE
Kurt never knew that it was possible for things as badly as they had when he lost his mom. Well, some subconscious part of him knew it was possible, but he never thought it would happen to him again. He goes to school and sits through classes, but he never knows what has been covered. He attends Glee Club practices and sings, but Mr. Schue calls him out several times for lacking depth. He loafs around his house until his father tries to get him to help out with the cars or Carole asks him to help her prep dinner, or Finn asks him for help on PreCalculus. He shops with Mercedes, but he picks up clothes listlessly, the expensive materials no longer meaningful or important to him. Kurt always agrees, but his heart is never really in it.
Life without Blaine feels like no life at all.
Kurt knows he's being immature and he's being stupid because he's seventeen and he has the rest of his life to live, but the very unfairness of getting Blaine—someone so perfect—and then losing him is more than he can bear. A huge part of him always thought that he and Blaine would be together forever, and he knows he's being childish and stupid, but he wants Blaine back so badly.
He never told anybody other than Finn about the break-up but either Finn told everyone or they were just smart enough to figure it out. Burt doesn't say anything, but claps a large, comforting hand on Kurt's shoulder, his eyes downcast and tired-looking. Carole circles around Kurt like she's walking on eggshells, and Finn asks him regularly if he needs anything or if he needs to talk.
School is even more awkward. Mercedes gives him a huge, supportive hug when he goes to school, the expression in her eyes speaking volumes when his gaze meets hers. Kurt notices there's a greater sensitivity among his friends concerning their relationships—Finn and Rachel break their adoring gazes at each other when Kurt walks into the room, Mike and Tina exchange guilty looks as though they're responsible for the fact that Kurt is single when they are still crazily in love with each other, even Puck and Lauren manage to keep quiet (and their hands off of each other) for Kurt's sake.
But Kurt doesn't want his friends to have to change for him. Sure, it sucks that he's newly single, but he can get through this, right? Brittany's single and she's okay... wait, she sleeps with everyone and everything, so scratch that. Quinn is single and she's... wait, she's been following boys around and stooping to even freshmen, begging someone to ask her out, so she's definitely not fine. Artie is single and... hopelessly following Brittany around. Mr. Schue is...
Okay, perhaps the Glee Club isn't the best example, since everyone is either with someone or ridiculously unhappy and dissatisfied with life, but this doesn't need to be Kurt. Kurt is fine without a boyfriend, thank you very much, but Kurt knows it's not the truth at all.
Kurt is fine without a boyfriend, but he's not fine without Blaine.
He misses the late night conversations, he misses having someone to confide in (other than Mercedes), he misses having a boy he can call his best friend (because although Finn is a great brother, sometimes he's incapable of talking about the latest Marc Jacobs collection and about what it's like to be a gay teenager in a conservative society). He misses Blaine's expressive eyebrows, his hearty laugh, his antics, his voice. Even before Kurt was dating Blaine, Blaine was his support, Blaine offered courage and advice and wisdom, and without him, Kurt feels lost.
He doesn't know who he is without Blaine. Blaine has been such an integral, pivotal part of his life that Blaine has left a void in his heart that no one can replace. Blaine has battered a hole through him, leaving him raw and bleeding, and Kurt doesn't know how to fix this.
"Kurt, this has gone on long enough."
Kurt is sitting miserably in the library, trying desperately to concentrate on The Heart of Darkness, when a voice breaks through his thoughts. He turns numbly, his eyes barely registering Mercedes standing above him, arms crossed.
"Sweetheart, you're torturing yourself over this," Mercedes says, her eyes softening when she takes in Kurt's broken, pale-faced expression. "This is Blaine's fault—you did nothing wrong here. He's too stupid to see how good you are for him and he's just scared, so until he's smart enough to get his head out of his ass, you need to pick yourself up and put yourself together."
Kurt stares at her, his expression unwavering, but his lip trembling slightly. He wills himself not to cry.
"Kurt, you gotta get yourself back out there. You don't need him," Mercedes tells him gently, her confidence radiating through her voice. "Come on." She holds out her firm, warm hand and gives him a toothy smile. "We're getting you out of here."
Kurt pauses, staring hard at her, but with a sigh of exhaustion, he gives in. He takes her hand.
Mercedes takes Kurt to the Lima Bean, where they meet Mike and Tina. Mike and Tina look pretty happy to see him—Mike gives him an easy, casual smile and Tina hugs him nearly to death exclaiming how it's been so long since she's hung out with Kurt outside of school, and for a second, Kurt doesn't think about Blaine. But when he sees Tina slip her hand easily into Mike's and Mike squeeze hers and give her an eskimo kiss in return, it feels like his heart is being wrenched and he wills himself not to cry while waiting in line to get coffee.
Mike and Tina order first and go off to get them a table. Kurt and Mercedes are in line, and once they've ordered, Mike rushes back to them line and says, rather breathlessly, "It'd be nice to, you know, get coffee and go eat somewhere else, huh? Outside, maybe? What do you say?"
There's something off about the look in his eyes and the guilty tilt of his head, and the fact that Mike Chang is speaking at all (because don't get him wrong, Mike is a really nice guy, but he doesn't say much), and suspicions flutter in Kurt's stomach.
"I'd like to eat here," Kurt says, his voice clipped with finality, and he watches the alarm jump into Mike's brown eyes. Mike's eyebrows raise high into his forehead, and his mouth gapes open slightly and Kurt doesn't miss the invisible no signal he sends to Mercedes.
Mercedes is grabbing his arm, and telling him, "Come on boo, we can go somewhere else," but Kurt shakes her off and starts walking towards the tables and chairs in the Lima Bean.
Kurt sees Tina first—Tina, who is waving frantically at Mike and Mercedes to pull Kurt back. She is standing, blocking Kurt's view of something behind her, but Kurt roughly pushes Tina out of the way (ignoring Mike's cry of protest), but Kurt doesn't care because then he sees...
them.
And it's like he's been punched hard in the stomach. Kurt feels his throat close up and his chest constrict, and he turns around without a sound. Kurt pushes past Mercedes, Mike, and Tina, trying to make sure he doesn't crumple like a dead leaf.
The click of the door sounds behind him as he steps out of the Lima Bean and onto the sidewalk, walking numbly to his car. The keys in the ignition, the start of the engine. Kurt leaves.
Kurt replays the image of Blaine—his Blaine—with his tongue down some blonde girl's throat, his hand cupped around her ass. Blaine, with his eyes closed and dark lashes prominent against his creamy skin. Blaine, his eyebrows raised and arched, Blaine, his pink lips pressed against the lips of some girl's—lips that aren't Kurt's.
He's gripping the steering wheel so hard that his knuckles are white and with a distressed noise in his throat, he pulls over to the side of the road, trying hard not to remember that the last time he sat in his car like this was with Blaine, when Blaine was talking about his relationship with his father... before Kurt's life went to hell.
Kurt's sobbing now, trying so hard to erase the image of Blaine's slender fingers tangled through the girl's long, golden hair, trying to forget the breathy moans of Blaine under the girl, the moans that Kurt thought only Blaine only made when he was with him
—Kurt and tries to forget the way he felt when he was in the girl's place.
When Kurt gets home, he marches straight to his room, ignoring his father's and Carole's greetings. He reaches under his bed and pulls out a box—a simple one with a black and white striped pattern—and opens it. And it's them.
Kurt has never told anybody about his Collection-of-Cute-Things-from-Blaine-Anderson because a) he would basically die of embarrassment if Puck or his dad (or Blaine) ever found out and because b) he feels like a teenage girl and wants to hoard his secrets and because c) this is his private collection, his private stash of everything Blaine of everything with him and Blaine, with everything that is—was—them.
He empties it out onto the floor, sifting through the old mementos. Kurt's Dalton's Academy pin, a note written by Wes that says, "Dear Kurt, Please stop staring adoringly into Blaine's eyes because I will probably puke if Blaine professes his endearment and undying love for you one more time," Blaine's old scarf that he lent to Kurt one time, a collection of notes that Blaine left over the course of their relationship, their picture from McKinley's prom, an old polaroid picture that Tina snapped of them at a party...
With a disgusted noise in his throat, Kurt throws all of the tidbits haphazardly back into the box and empties all of it into his trashcan. When that doesn't feel like enough, he takes his trashcan outside. His heart beating in his hears, he walks numbly and forcefully throws everything in his trashcan into the dumpster down the street.
There.
Kurt Hummel is over this.
Kurt Hummel was fine without Blaine Anderson once, and he will be fine now. He doesn't need Blaine. Blaine can have that loose, clingy blonde whore, and Kurt will succeed, go further than cowardly, closeted Blaine, and find someone better.
There's a new student at McKinley. The hype is that he's just moved in from California, and that he can surf and he's met a laundry list of celebrities. Rumors fly around that the California kid lives in a mansion and he's just in Lima because his family decided to try a more modest environment, and his father got a job offer in Lima where he'll make quadruple the amount of money that he made in California, so they'll be even richer. The new kid was in a band at his old school, and the new kid is oh, so hot and tan and muscular and every girl is lining up to be with him.
Kurt listens to the Glee girls talk mindlessly, their words drifting over him and failing to affect him. Santana has an idea that, Forget Karofsky, I'm gonna bang him, and Brittany says that she talked to him and he smells good. Even Rachel wants to talk to the new kid, to see if he can maybe put in a good word for her to Celine Dion, and the jocks want the new kid in their circle to boost their popularity points.
Through all of this, Kurt stays silent. He doesn't care about the new kid, he doesn't care about the fact that he's from California. Kurt has decided in his plan to prove that Kurt Hummel doesn't need Blaine Anderson, the first thing he needs to do is focus on himself. Forget about the rumors flying around McKinley, forget about the Glee Club drama, forget about the bullies and the homophobia—focus on classes, fashion, and Glee, focus on doing what he loves, and focus on himself for once.
That's probably why Kurt doesn't meet the new McKinley celebrity until he's cleaning a slushy out of his eyes one day. He knows that Finn, Mike, Sam, and Puck are off beating the crap out of Azimio for doing it, and Kurt loves them for protecting him, but he's a bit tired of people walking around him like he's going to break, and he can take care of himself. Sighing, he slips the blue crystals and corn syrup out of his hair, and wipes his face with some moist towelettes he has stored in his bag. The sweet, cold taste of slurpee is still in his mouth, and his face is numb, but he's got this.
And there's a concerned gasp from next to him. "Are you okay?"
Kurt turns and oh my God, why hasn't he ever seen this kid before?
The boy with the bronzed body of a Greek God, tanned skin, hazel eyes flecked with gold, and a shock of thick, coppery hair. His lips are full and his cheekbones are high and marked with several freckles, and his t-shirt clings to him in all the right places.
"I... uh..." stammers Kurt, nervously.
The boy seems even more antsy than Kurt as he reaches behind him and hands Kurt some paper towels. Kurt notices that his hands are slightly trembling.
"What happened?" he asks, his voice full of genuine care. "Are you alright?"
"I'm fine but thank you," Kurt says, accepting the towels even though he has his towelettes which work so much better. "Slurpee Wars, I presume you haven't heard of them yet? You're the new kid, right?"
"Yeah," the boy gives Kurt a full smile, his teeth brilliantly white. "I'm Hunter. Hunter Birdell." He extends his hand, without the slightest flicker of hate or fear, and Kurt is so surprised that he nearly drops all of the paper towels he's holding.
"Kurt," Kurt answers, his hand closing around the boy's firmly. "Kurt Hummel."
"It's nice to meet you," Hunter gives him a gentle, lopsided grin that tugs up at the corner of his mouth. His eyebrows arch and his eyes shine. "I'll see you around, Kurt Hummel."
And the first time since the breakup with Blaine, Kurt smiles.
Kurt knows something that the other McKinley kids don't.
The new kid?
That's right, he's gay.
Kurt finds himself spending more and more time with Hunter. The funny thing is that though Hunter spends time with the kid who straddles the bottom of McKinley's social pyramid, he doesn't lose his charm or his popularity. Kurt attributes this to the fact that he's from California and has a radiating, starlike glamour—something no other person at McKinley can even claim to have (not even Rachel Berry), and since nobody in Lima has anything on Hunter, everybody leaves him alone (and still wants to be his friend, ever since he let it drop that he hung out with Megan Fox one weekend).
Kurt is pretty sure that his intuition was right. He knows that he should be cautious because he read all of Sam's signs wrong (even though Sam's hair begged otherwise, Kurt has decided that Sam's as straight as an arrow), but he's pretty sure that Hunter swings for his team.
When Kurt invites Hunter over for the first time, Hunter is well-spoken, though slightly reserved. Finn begins hurling questions about California and about the beach and if the water is salty and if he knows how to surf, until Kurt grabs an overwhelmed, stammering Hunter by the hand and pulls him to his room. They sit and talk lazily, and Kurt finds out that Hunter is the youngest of four (two older sisters and one older brother), that he loves dogs, that he surfs (but is nowhere as good as the kids at McKinley say), that he wants to be a pediatrician because he likes working with kids, that his favorite flavor of ice cream is mint chocolate chip, that he doesn't know how he really feels about Lima so far but that he's met a lot of cool people and the coolest one so far has been Kurt.
The last revelation leaves Kurt flushing scarlet and a big, unsettling feeling in his stomach, but it's not a bad one at all.
He thinks he could get to like Hunter Birdell.
The next week, Hunter asks Kurt if he'd like to check out the latest horror flick at the movie theater. Kurt hesitates for a moment, remembering the last cheesy, romantic movie that he'd seen with Blaine, when Blaine ended up with popcorn kernels in his thick, chocolate hair and he recalls the taste of popcorn butter on Blaine's lips, but that's all it takes for him to block the memories out of his mind and accept Hunter's offer.
Hunter smiles brightly and hugs Kurt quickly, before flushing pink himself and scrambling off to class.
Kurt leans against the lockers, his heart hammering, and for the first time in awhile, he's excited.
The firs time they hold hands is in the dark black corner of the movie theater.
The movie is God-awful and disgusting and horrifying and vivid all at the same time, and Kurt scoffs at the pictures. He's never been one for horror movies, but Hunter seems to be. With each suspenseful build-up, Hunter's eyes screw close and he latches his hand onto Kurt's, and as Kurt squeezes his hand in return, he thinks that he might be able to get used to this.
The first kiss happens in Hunter's Bentley on the drive back to Kurt's house from the mall.
Kurt is telling Hunter about Blaine, and though he's being unfair and cruel in burdening Hunter with the dramatic story of his last break-up, Hunter listens, attentive and wide-eyed through it all, his eyes softening with unspoken sympathy.
"—And he just decided that he had to save his parents' fucked up marriage, and the sacrifice was me, I suppose. And the next week I see him in the Lima Bean, making out with some... girl," Kurt spits the word out like it's dirty, and Hunter laughs lightly, "and it... I don't know, I just decided that I didn't need him anymore."
There's silence, but then Hunter speaks quietly. "It sounds like he's just scared. He obviously was very important to you, and I know from my experience coming out to my parents and my friends, I was scared shitless—as you probably were," (Oh, Kurt thinks, so there's the admission), "but he was good for you, Kurt, at least for how long it lasted. I'm sorry he didn't understand how special you were," and then there's a tanned hand over Kurt's, and golden-hazel eyes staring into his eyes, and then, oh, soft lips pressed against his, and fingers stroking his hair.
Kurt closes his eyes, and doesn't pull away. He deepens the kiss, thinking this may be exactly what he needs.
Author's Note: Eeep! So what do you think? I know it's a little unbelievable that some new gay kid shows up right when Blaine drops out of Kurt's life, but I think our favorite boy deserves some loving, right? Hunter is a completely made up character (that I've actually used in some original stories haha), and he is an OC but I thought it would be easier to use him than some other boy (I know Sam is used a lot, but I'm pretty sure Sam is straight and I don't like Karofsky), so I decided to create him for my uses.
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