“Who’s that?” Blaine asks the girl who sits next to him, Tina Cohen-Chang, almost unconsciously, his breath caught in his chest. She glances back at the boy now slouching in his chair. Her face falls a bit, “That’s Kurt Hummel.”

“Oh.” He’s trying to read her expression, continuing hesitantly, “Do you know him...?” Tina just gives a small, sad nod, her gaze trained on her hands in her lap. Blaine puts a gentle hand on her shoulder as she turns back to face him, giving him a half-smile.

“He was in glee,” she explains quietly. “Until this year began. He just…didn’t show up, at glee, around school, until one day Finn finally spilled that Kurt had joined the Skanks.”

Finn Hudson, Blaine reminds himself, is the quarterback of the football team, as well as the male lead in McKinley’s glee club, a group which Blaine had quickly sought out after his transfer. At Dalton Academy, the all-boys private school that Blaine had previously attended, it had been Blaine who was the lead vocalist of the Dalton Warblers, but the shift to backup singer was coming easier to him than he had originally anticipated.

“Wait, how did Finn know that Kurt had joined the, was it, ‘Skanks’?”
Tina nods, “The Skanks are sort of a gang, I suppose, but they don’t really cause much noise; They all just seem kind of sad to me… Anyway, Finn knew because Kurt’s dad married Finn’s mom this spring, so they’re step-brothers.” Blaine’s eyebrows shoot up. “Wow, that must be rough on the family.”

“Yeah, we try not talk about it around Finn; This whole thing has him pretty messed up.”
Blaine nods understandingly and gently rubs Tina’s shoulder as the teacher begins her lesson.

***

The bell rings, signaling the students’ respite for the day. As his classmates file out, Blaine gathers his things, placing them in his bag in an orderly and practiced fashion.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Tina says warmly as she walks away. “And don’t forget that we have rehearsal tomorrow, too!”

“You know I wouldn’t forget!” Blaine calls as she waves from the door.

“Mr. Anderson?” The teacher addresses him. “Would you come up here for a moment? And you too, Mr. Hummel,” she adds a little more loudly to Kurt who is quietly trying to slip out the door without the teacher noticing. He huffs shortly through his nose and comes over to her desk where she and Blaine are standing.

“Blaine,” the teacher turns to him. “I know you’ve only been here a few weeks, but you’re test scores are the highest in the class.” Blaine smiles brightly at this surprising bit of news. “Kurt here hasn’t been to class since the first week of the semester,” she looks at him pointedly and he turns his head away. “And I would like to ask you if you would be willing to tutor him because he will fail and risk not graduating if he does not pass my class.” She punctuates the last part of her sentence, directing it at Kurt who’s jaw is tight. Blaine stutters, looking between the two of them.

“I – I’d be happy to, of course, if you’d be willing, Kurt.” He takes in the perfectly pert shape of his nose, his flawlessly pale skin, and the blue-green eye peering suspiciously at him through feathery lashes. Too bad such a pretty face doesn’t seem to come with a friendly attitude.

“Fine.”

His voice is high and clear, not at all what Blaine had been expecting. Then again, he had no idea what to expect from this boy.

“When would you like to start?” Blaine asks hesitantly with what he hoped was a friendly smile spread on his face.

“Today works,” he sniffs. “May as well get this started so that we can get it done with.”

Blaine nods quietly.

“Is that all?” He asks the teacher, clearly annoyed. The teacher tilts her head, and Kurt turns on his heel and out the door. Blaine waves and smiles to the teacher before hurrying after Kurt.

“Kurt, wait! Kurt!”

Kurt doesn’t stop, but he pauses momentarily in his stride, just long enough for Blaine to catch up to him.

“Hey, I just wanted to say that it was really uncool of her to treat you that way. She was being really condescending and you did’t deserve that,” he offers apologetically. A look that might have been shock or surprise flits across Kurt’s face, but it’s gone before Blaine can decipher it.

Kurt shrugs. “It doesn’t matter. She’s just another stupid cow in the global heard of morons.” Blaine is startled by the harsh bitterness of his tone, but before he can try and make peace, Kurt rounds on him.

“Also, you don’t know what I do or don’t deserve. You don’t know anything about me, so don’t pretend to. I don’t want your pity or pretension.”

Blaine is almost stunned to a standstill, watching Kurt march toward the double-door entrance, but manages to catch him once again just outside.

“Wait, where are we going?” Blaine yells as Kurt leaves him, again, striding down the steps.

“I’m going home,” he calls. “I don’t know or care where you’re going.”

“But I thought we were going to work on this calculus today.” Blaine’s feeling a bit at the end of his rope now with the Kurt’s flippant attitude. Kurt barks out a mirthless laugh.

“I only said that to get her off my back. You can run off and eat that textbook for all I care.”

“But she said –”

“Yeah, she said, you said, whatever. Now I’m saying that I’m not going to sit around with some nerd who probably traps flies in his hair with the amount of gel he uses and pretend to care about numbers and formulas!”

“But she asked me to tutor you. I don’t want to go against what she said!”

Kurt stares at him, a disbelieving smirk twisting the pretty shape of his face.

“Why do you care?”

Blaine stammers, wants to say something, a comeback, witty and stinging, but the noise dies in his throat. Kurt shakes his head and scoffs before wheeling around and leaving Blaine staggering with nothing but the sound of retreating boot-thump steps.

***

“Hey, helmet head!” Blaine turns around to see Kurt walking up to him from the back of the calculus room just after the last bell rings. “Yes, you.”

“My name is Blaine,” he says shortly, adjusting his bag on his shoulder.

“Whatever. Are we doing this thing, or what?”

“What thing?”

“The tutoring thing,” he says, crossing his arms uncomfortably.

“I thought you didn’t care,” Blaine remarks bitingly.

“I don’t.” Kurt barks back. “I just…I want to get out of this school some time, and if that means passing this stupid class, then so be it.”

Blaine stares at him. He stares because he doesn’t understand why Kurt doesn’t just drop out if he wants to leave that badly, why he doesn’t just take an exit exam and graduate that way. But, on some level, he does understand. Some part of him gets that Kurt is not just some delinquent. He can tell because he knows that, at the very least, he used to be in glee, surrounded by ambitious, happy people, and now there’s just something sad about Kurt. His defenses aren’t there just to block out the world and wallow in apathy, but more to protect himself. Blaine’s not sure how he knows this, but he can feel that it’s true.

“OK.”

Kurt’s eyebrows jump a bit, but he maintains an otherwise impassive fa�ade. “Good,” he says. “Let’s go.” He makes to head out the door, but Blaine stops him.

“I can’t, not today anyway.” Kurt squints at him. “I have glee practice,” Blaine explains. Kurt’s face goes stony.

“Oh.” His voice is hard and cold.

“But we could meet after for a bit, if you like. It only goes until 4:30, so we could study until 5:30-ish.”

The other boy nods curtly and turns before Blaine can say another word. Blaine sighs and rubs the back of his neck. How on earth was this going to work out?

***

“Hey Blaine, you wanna come by for a bit, play some Fear 3 with me?” Mike Chang, a tall, handsome Asian senior, asks after glee has finished. Blaine smiles apologetically, “I can’t, I have to go tutor someone in calculus.”

“Ooh!” Tina chirps, coming over and linking her arm with Mike’s. “Who are you tutoring.”

“Er –” Blaine scans the room to see where Finn and his beautiful but loud-mouthed girlfriend, Rachel Berry, were. He continues in a hush, “Kurt Hummel.”

Mike and Tina’s jaws drop in sync; “Are you serious –”

“He actually agreed to that? He let you talk to him?”

“He doesn’t talk to any of us anymore –”

“Not even Finn very much, from what I’ve heard.”

“Then again, he never knew you from before the summer –”

“But still… Wow.”

They both fall silent and Blaine’s not sure if their more shocked by what he’d said or the fact that they are so well-matched.

“Well, uh, I need to get going, but we should hang out this weekend, or something.”
Mike nods and Tina waves as Blaine hurries out of the room, not looking forward to what Kurt might say if he’s late, especially since he’s coming from glee club.

He spots Kurt almost instantly as he enters the library; The bright pink hair is hard to miss. His jaw is working rhythmically, chewing on something, and Blaine finds his eyes tracking the movements of his muscles and the contours of his bones. He notices how perfectly chestnut his natural hair colour is, doesn’t miss the way some strands turn slightly blonde when the sun hits them. Blaine sits with a quiet breath, his heart fluttering like a bird’s.

“What took you?” Kurt asks bluntly.

“Sorry, I was just…at glee.” He tries to mumble the last words enough so that Kurt won’t pay attention to them, but he can see by the way his features fall flat that he heard. He tilts his head back stiffly, looking down his nose, in a sort of half-nod.

“So, shall we get started?” Blaine tries to clear the air, pulling out his textbook. Kurt shrugs, “Might as well.” Blaine smiles softly and opens to the homework set. He may not fully understand Kurt, but he understands this. He explains to Kurt the basics of what the problems are about, asks him about whether or not he remembers these rules and essentials, generally gaining subtle nods from the other boy.

“Alright, why don’t you try this one?” He offers after running through an example problem, sliding the book closer to Kurt, whom he had moved to sit next to, still maintaining a comfortable distance between them. Kurt’s shapely hands come up to take the book with a gentleness that Blaine had not anticipated. They sit in silence as Kurt works through it, writing with deliberate strokes. Blaine watches his face quietly, taking in the crease between his immaculately shaped eyebrows, the way his eyes flick between the words, quick blinks testifying to the sharpness of his mind. He counts eight piercings: A thin black loop in his left nostril, a silver barbel in his right eyebrow, two silver loops in the cartilage rim of his left ear, a plain bar marking an industrial piercing on his right ear above a conch piercing lower down; Small, black plugs filled both of his lobes. Blaine wonders if they’d hurt. He wonders when he got them, how much all that metal had cost, but mostly he wonders why. He knows that some people feel like a piece of them is missing without their piercings, but is that why Kurt had made so many changes? Had he felt so incomplete? Does he still?

In his wonderment, Blaine had failed to notice that Kurt was finished with the problem.

“Are you done ogling me?” He cuts in. Blaine shakes himself back to the present, straightening up abruptly.

“I–I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to stare, I was just really intrigued by all your piercings.”

Something snaps in Kurt. “I’m not just some freak at the circus that you can gawk at, I’m a person!”

Kurt’s eyes blaze with defiance, anger, pain, his lips twisted and tight. It absolutely crushes Blaine.

“Kurt,” he breathes, eyes wide. “Of course you’re a person. Why on earth would I ever think otherwise?”

Blaine fights the urge to reach out and touch the beauty in flames before him, hold his hand, stroke his hair, whisper in his ear and tell him that he’ll never hurt again. But even just thinking about it is awkward and too much, and would probably be unwelcome in any case. So Blaine settles for the space between them, hoping that his eyes can convey the comfort that his body can’t. Kurt’s been watching him, like an animal backed into the corner of a poacher’s cage, hackles raised and bristling, but now something in him visibly softens. There’s still a tightness in his shoulders, a firmness in the set of his mouth, but it’s as though something gentle breathes through him and he looks at Blaine with true vision.

“I really am sorry, Kurt, I didn’t mean to upset you.” Blaine is quiet and almost painfully earnest. Kurt’s mouth opens, like he’s going to say something, but closes it instead and shrugs.

“Whatever.”

Blaine smiles with relief and sighs. He turns back to the book, “Shall we do one more and then call it a day?” Kurt nods and picks up his pencil again. Blaine might have missed it, might have left today cursing his wandering gaze and curious mind, but he sees it clearly from the corner of his eye: Kurt’s glowing face, and the small, shy smile playing on his lips.