This Love Is Not A Victory March

One

Life is like a hurricane: it sweeps people up and spins them through time, relentless and fast, until it clears and sets them down as if the eye of a storm never even passed over them, leaving them disoriented as life settles and brightens around them. Unfortunately for Blaine, he's still caught up in the eye of the storm, spinning faster and faster as chaos swirls with him.

It's hectic, to say the least. After his volatile break-up, he throws himself into everything without pausing to look before he leaps, quickly rising through the ranks to take over Superhero club, paying particular attention to his duties as glee club lead and senior class president, never allowing himself a moment alone to wallow in his burning-hot guilt.

It's obvious, then, that all the stress and the mounting number of responsibilities he keeps piling on himself is the reason he's been so sick lately. It seems as if even his sense of smell has gotten more sensitive, because the slightest whiff of cooking meat from the cafeteria sends him careening out of class or out of their extra glee club rehearsals to the nearest bathroom. He takes to stowing mouthwash in his locker, keeping gum with him at all times, taking every measure possible to try and keep his stomach settled, and yet nothing works.

And no one seems to notice. They don't offer help or chase after him when he runs from carefully organised formations and dance practices, and the only time anyone even acknowledges his return is Brittany offering him a lollipop, whispering that Quinn always said it helps with morning sickness.

Blaine scoffs at that. Even if he was pregnant, which he's not, because every boy has to have an examination at fourteen and his own diagnosis for the Hicksenburg Mutation returned to his parents negative, very much to their and his relief, then sucking lollipops doesn't help him at all and this is not morning sickness, but rather illness that strikes at the most inopportune of times.

The afternoon he finds a pamphlet emblazoned with MEN CAN GET PREGNANT TOO: ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE HICKSENBURG MUTATION tucked into his locket is the day it's gone too far. He storms along to Ms. Pilsbury's office and knocks loudly on the door. "I'm not pregnant," he says immediately when she looks curiously up at him. "It's a stress-related illness, once I've got less on my plate it'll stop."

"Blaine, I've been watching you over these past few weeks, and from my point of view it appears that it's rather likely you could be pregnant," Ms. Pilsbury says with a sweetly sad smile at him. "Clearly, you weren't aware you're a carrier for the mutation, and those tests are still being tried and tested and improved, they're not infallible yet and people make mistakes. When was the last time you had sex without protection?"

"Only a few weeks ago, I don't think there'd be symptoms yet if I was pregnant, which I'm not," Blaine says, crossing his arm belligerently over his chest. "Can I go? I really should get home, I promised I wouldn't be late tonight."

"Blaine, this is serious, you need to take a test or see a doctor," Ms. Pilsbury says, her eyes steely. "If you are pregnant, which I am almost certain you are, then your entire life is going to change. As a senior, this is unfortunate timing for you. If you're going home, at least buy yourself a home pregnancy test and take it, then come back and see me tomorrow. I can give you the number of a clinic I know specialising in male pregnancies."

Blaine ends up locked in the bathroom an hour later, after a dinner thick with tension, his foot tapping dully against the tiles as he waits out the requisite two minutes for the life-changing white stick to confirm that the guidance counsellor is over-reacting and he is most certainly not pregnant.

When he's counted slowly to one hundred and twenty, then another thirty just to make sure, he takes the test from its carefully balanced spot on the edge of the sink, blinking hard and looking down.

No.

No…he's not.

God, yes he is.

He's pregnant.

When Blaine goes back to Dalton, there's only one thing that really, truly hurts.

The blazer, the thing that used to symbolise him, his home, a person who was the leader of a choir, admired and praised and held up as a role model, doesn't fit him.

He knows he's pregnant, knows it's almost two months now and he can see in the mirror that he's starting to show, but this is the first evidence that things aren't always going to fit him. His body is changing, when he doesn't want it to, and he can't do anything to stop it.

Everyone knows. He told his parents himself, expecting them to turn to cold hostility and ignore him. Instead, his mother hugged him warmly, and his father laid a comforting hand on his shoulder, both of them promising to support him no matter the decisions he made regarding his child. Cooper and Natalie were both so shocked, but excited to be an uncle and auntie, not to mention that Natalie has dropped her façade of annoying younger sister to help him out with telling everyone else.

The school found out quickly, the first day someone saw him leaving Ms. Pilsbury's office with a pamphlet for the local clinic for male pregnancy clutched in his hand, and it spread quickly thanks to Jacob Ben Israel's blog and the school newspaper. He still stands with his head held high, no matter who titters at him in the corridors, who pokes whispered fun behind him in the lunch queue or the number of notes reading slut he finds slipped onto his desk, into his locker, tucked just inside his satchel.

Kitty confronts him one day in an empty classroom, where he's found himself some privacy to work on choreography for Regionals, squinting to read the intricate swirls of Brittany's notes to help him out. "So who's the father of your baby, preggers?" she asks, a smirk twisting her lips.

"You know who he is, Kitty," he says, a little abrupt with her. He looks up as she slides into the seat opposite him, still smirking horribly.

"See, I don't think Kurt can actually be the daddy," Kitty says. "Because I happen to know that he left for New York in mid-September, and you didn't know you were pregnant until the end of October. And you would've last had sex with him in September, and you're not due until July. Unless you were super overdue, Kurt can't be the father, that would make you due in June."

Blaine blinks up at her, wondering where she learnt all this from, and he's thinking quickly, realising that what she says is the truth. The realisation floods over him, icy and awful and composed of regret and self-loathing: Eli got him pregnant.

"Oh God," he moans, collapsing onto the table and blinking back the tears burning fiercely behind his eyes. He hears Kitty make some vaguely concerned noise and she pats his shoulder as she leaves.

"Sorry, but someone had to figure it out, because you're obviously not going to admit it to yourself," she says, almost gently, as he listens to the soft sound of her footsteps leaving the room.

He gets home that night, head still reeling, heart still pounding and eyes still prickling with tears, to find that his mobile has been ringing in the depths of his bag for close to an hour. When he answers without checking caller ID, he hears Kurt's voice, breathless and high with excitement: "Blaine, Santana just showed me an article on Jacob's blog! Why didn't you tell me you're pregnant? You could've told me you're having my baby!"

Blaine brushes his hair back from his face, and he can't fight the tears coming now. "Kurt, I…you don't know everything. I have to tell you something."

Kurt won't speak to him. Won't reply to his texts. Won't email him. Vanishes when he logs onto Skype. Won't message him on Facebook or tweet him or reblog his posts on Tumblr. He's cut off all forms of communication and it hurts.

He gets a text after a week of desperate calls, pleas for Kurt to just listen in pixellated letters on a tiny screen, tweets and posts growing ever more obvious, begging for Kurt to just get in touch with him: Stop trying to reach me.

It's the last straw, and he hurls his phone across the room, hearing the crack and the shattering glass as it hits the wall with all the force he put behind the throw, seeing the pieces of what once held a hundred or more happy memories fall to the carpet without a sound, chest aching with heartbreak as he presses the pillow over his face and screams into it.

It reaches the Warblers next. Apparently it's not just McKinley that's buzzing with the news, and not even the whole town, but the entire state. Sebastian drops by, smug and smirking, telling Blaine, "The blogs are all a-buzzing with the word that you're in trouble," before Natalie forces him out with any number of dire threats. Trent is quieter when he arrives, voice soft and reassuring as he sits in almost silence, letting Blaine babble and cry and rant to him and nodding when it's appropriate for him to do so.

Blaine doesn't want the past to catch up with him. He wants to move on, adjust himself to fit the circumstance of a teenage boy pregnant with a child that is not his ex-boyfriend's, alter his clothes to match his changing physique and stand tall with a smile on his face.

Alas, we cannot evade our past, even to start our future, for mistakes we have made and demons we have smothered will always catch up to us.

On his birthday, early in December with the Christmas lights shining proud in every store window and ice paving the streets, making it so just popping out for a pint of milk is a challenge worthy of an Olympian, Tina and Sugar make it their job to give him a great time and take him out for the famed Lima Bean Christmas drinks, plying him with iced gingerbread and refusing to let the conversation stray to sad topic, keeping it as cheery and bright as the decorations dangling above them, swirling slowly over every table.

"Blaine? Blaine Anderson?" Blaine looks up, expecting to see someone else who's heard of his plight and wants to insult him or ask him a question he can't answer or touch his stomach for luck. Instead he sees a boy who's regretfully familiar, who he never wanted to see again, who is, for him, tangled with betrayal and self-loathing and absolute rock-bottom misery. "I heard about what you're going through."

"It's none of your business what he's going through," Tina snaps up at Eli, putting a comforting hand on Blaine's back. "Just leave us alone, we are trying to have one nice night out for his birthday."

"Tina, it's okay, it is his business," Blaine assures her softly, batting her hand away and looking into Eli's eyes, seeing the realization dawning there. "This is the man I regret ever even speaking to. He's the father."

Silence reigns over them, thick with tension as Blaine stares into the depths of his decaffeinated coffee, watching it swirl around the cup, the only sound his breathing and Eli's periodic sighs. Tina and Sugar left with awkward smiles to Eli and comforting touches to Blaine's shoulders and back, and since then neither of them has known what to say.

"So, um…do you want help from me?" Eli asks after a long moment of him quietly drumming his nails against the table. "I have a job, and it pays decently for what it is, I can give you money if that's what you want."

"I don't want anything from you," Blaine snaps, a little more venomously than he meant to. "No, I didn't mean it like that, I just…this is something I want to do alone. I have to do it alone. What happened between us was a mistake, and I was stupid and I broke my boyfriend's heart. I still love him, and I want him back, and having you around won't make that possible."

"You're not lying to him about being pregnant, or who the father is, are you?" Eli asks doubtfully, and Blaine sees him, seeing that he is a good person, and the regret swirls in his stomach, rising like bile in his throat. "I don't want to be a part of something like that."

"I didn't tell him I'm pregnant, at first, but he found out from this blog that someone who goes to my school runs that the graduates who I used to be friends with still follow to keep up with us, and when he called to scold me for not telling him about 'our' baby, I told him he's not the father," Blaine says, feeling the tears hot at the corners of her eyes, trying to escape. "He's furious with me. It's worse than when I told him I'd cheated. He won't talk to me, he won't respond to my emails, and he just texted me to tell me to stop trying to contact him at all. If only it was his, it could help to get him back to me, we could try and mend for his or her sake-"

"A kid would never fix it," Eli says, something unreadable in his eyes. "The only way to mend broken relationships is to talk it over. Maybe you just need to wait for him to make the first move back to you."

"Maybe," Blaine muses. He looks up and sees how sad Eli looks, eyes dim, and guilt floods molten hot into the pit of his stomach. "I'm so sorry for dragging you into this, Eli. It wasn't supposed to be anything more than one night. I didn't know this could happen, or I would've told you. I guess it was just sheer dumb luck that I never got pregnant before now."

Blaine checks his watch and stands abruptly, nearly sending the cold dregs of his drink flying. "I have to go home, or I'll miss curfew and my parents will murder me, they're so much more neurotic with the roads like this and me being pregnant," he says by way of explanation, pulling the coat as close around him as it will go and looping the scarf Kurt left behind for him around his neck. "It was nice to…talk with you, Eli. We should make this a regular thing. Here, I'll give you my number."

"I have you on Facebook, your mobile's on there," Eli says with a smile, and Blaine's heart wrenches in his chest, thinking of that familiar blue and white page he hasn't visited since that night, can't see over a friend's shoulders without feeling physically sick. "Blaine, before you go…I want you to take this." He unfurls a few ten dollar bills from his pocket and presses them into Blaine's hand. "Don't refuse to take it. I want you to have it, to help you and Kurt with the baby, and buy yourself some decent maternity clothes, or at least a way to alter the clothes you do have."

Blaine smiles uncertainly, and slips the money into the pocket of his coat, burying his hands in them as he leaves, breath hanging like sparkling cobwebs on the air before him as he slides and stumbles over the ice back to his car, and back home for the night, to lie in bed and let regret and longing take hold of him, not give in to the urge to call Kurt and try not to let too many tears seep into the cotton of his pillow case.