Chapter Thirteen: Courage
Takes place during: Never Been Kissed

Blaine woke up in the morning having dreamt a lot of confusing things. He'd been at Sadie Hawkins, but Kurt had been his date, but Jeremiah showed up in his car and saved them. It took a few minutes for him to remember that everything was fine. He was at Dalton. There were no bullies here.

But Kurt still had bullies. Blaine wanted to do something. He had to. He wouldn't let Kurt be the next Tyler. That meant that he had to find a way to help his new friend get away from the bullies. Not everyone could afford Dalton. In fact, Blaine was starting to wonder how Cooper had managed to afford half of Blaine's tuition anyway.

The problem was he didn't know where to start.

So he started by looking up LGBT groups in the area, because wherever he started he knew he couldn't change the world by himself. To his great satisfaction, there was one that met at a community center about a block from the mall just before he had to work. So he showed up and, to his great horror, Jeremiah was there and the topic was trans* awareness.

Could he pass as just gay here? Would they know he'd been born the way he had? What if Jeremiah hated Blaine after he found out?

Except Jeremiah was one of the first to speak, and he was talking about his boyfriend. Or was it his ex-boyfriend? Blaine couldn't tell. He never said "ex-boyfriend," but he kept using the past tense.

He couldn't help it. His hopes were soaring. Here was someone in the world who had dated someone like him, and was gay, and didn't seem to mind that his boyfriend had the wrong parts. He was practically screaming in his mind for Jeremiah to say they'd broken up, but no such luck.

It all turned south when someone asked, "So why didn't he just stay straight?"

"Because he wasn't straight," Blaine cut in before he knew he was going to speak. Everyone turned to look at him, and he grew extremely self-conscious. "I mean..." He glanced helplessly at Jeremiah and, once again, the older boy came to his rescue.

"Because," Jeremiah explained, a lot more patiently than Blaine had, "one is who you are, and the other is who you love. Asking why a gay trans* person didn't just 'stay straight' is like asking why a gay cis person doesn't just 'turn straight.' You can't change who you are any more than you can change who you love. One of the things he told me was that he never even experienced sexual attraction until he realized he was transgender. He had all of this discomfort and hatred for his own body that he just didn't understand, and so he ignored it. He ignored his body entirely because he wanted nothing to do with the parts of him that felt like they didn't belong. But once he started to accept the disconnect between his body and mind..."

"But he could've just kept those thoughts to himself," the same person argued. "If accepting the disconnect allowed him to experience attraction, why couldn't he have just known for himself and moved on? Society doesn't accept trans* people, and I doubt it ever fully will. His life could be so much easier if he just kept living as a straight female."

"Acceptance isn't the same thing as being okay," Blaine said as Jeremiah said, "But he wasn't female."

Jeremiah looked up at Blaine and the eyes in the room followed his example.

Well, here goes.

"Accepting that you're trans* doesn't mean you're okay," Blaine repeated. "It just means that now you know why. If anything, knowing why makes it worse because you start to overanalyze every little thing. It gains a focus. You do everything you can to change what's bothering you because now you know why and you know what will make it better. When I came out-" Blaine stopped speaking abruptly. He hadn't meant to say that. But no one was judging him. No one looked like they were about to beat him up, so he continued, "I started binding way too tight. My sides would get rubbed raw and sometimes it would feel like my ribs were being smashed into my spine. But I preferred that pain to the antsy feeling I got when I wasn't binding. I'd sink in on myself. I never talked. I just wanted people to stop looking at me. I wanted to go home and lock myself in my room. Crawl under a rock and never come out again. When I first came out, I got shoved into a locker, and I was so thrilled to be myself, to think that they wouldn't have shoved a girl like that... My friend thought I was high on something. I can take the prejudice and misunderstanding. I can't take pretending to be something I'm not. It takes too much effort."

"Thank you for sharing that," the group leader said sincerely and Blaine felt his face heat up. "You're new, aren't you?"

Blaine nodded. Social niceties forced him to introduce himself and tell (an extremely altered, watered down version of) his story. Once the focus was off him, he felt a lot better. It was really weird sitting in a room full of people who knew. No one was treating him differently. No one was singling him out. After the initial anxiety wore off, he realized he really liked it. He liked knowing that he was sitting in a room with a bunch of people who knew his outside didn't conform to the traditional definition of male, and that they were willing to accept him that way. No ifs, ands, or buts.

Jeremiah asked Blaine if he wanted to get coffee after the meeting, and Blaine confessed he had to work. So the older boy walked him to the mall and they talked a bit about nothing.

Just as Blaine was about to say goodbye to walk in to work, Jeremiah stopped him.

"This is my number," Jeremiah said, scribbling on the back of a receipt. He passed it to Blaine. "If you ever want to talk, you can call me. Any time."

"Thanks," Blaine said.

He must have looked confused because Jeremiah went on, "I know that, no matter how supportive everyone is... It's tough. It was for Blake."

"It got better?" Blaine guessed.

"It ended," Jeremiah replied. "He killed himself last year. So... I mean it. If you're ever feeling low or alone or you just need to yell at someone... you can call me. I know how much courage it had to take to come out. I also know it takes just as much if not more courage to ignore the haters and keep on going."

Blaine smiled. "So, are you my wizard of Oz?" he joked. "Just handing out courage?"

Jeremiah grinned. "Sorry I couldn't afford a nice medal," he threw back. "I don't want to make you late to work."

Blaine glanced at his phone- he had about five minutes. "Thanks," he said again and bade Jeremiah farewell. Just before he put his phone away, a thought occurred to him. He opened up a new text message, typed one word, and hit send.

He wondered if he could be the wizard that chased away Kurt's bullies. It would take more than words, but a simple "Courage" seemed like a good start.