Back in 2012...

"What are you looking at?" a deep voice snapped, breaking Kurt out of his daydream. Gym class junior year was like walking through a mine field, he shouldn't have let his guard down.

"Nothing," he mumbled as he left the locker room and walked quickly to his car to gather supplies, not bothering to look back and identify the face that belonged to the basketball jersey. He was careful that no one followed him as he went into the art room and locked the door. He took a deep breath, poised his pencil above the sketch pad, and let the story consume him.

Kurt was the anonymous artist behind the school newspaper's weekly comic strip, and prided himself on keeping the secret. Nobody knew, not the glee club, or his parents. Only the advisor suspected it was him, but kindly kept up the pretense of his anonymous submissions. Last week's comic had been especially controversial, highlighting the obesity epidemic in high schools with a fist fight between an anthropomorphized crinkle cut French fry and a bathroom scale. He chuckled to himself, remembering. Kurt was never quite sure what ideas would come to him or when, he preferred to go with the flow when drawing. This technique had worked extremely well for him, that is until this afternoon.

Slowly ascending out of a creative daze, he took stock of today's comic drafts. Rolling the RPG dice to see which unintentionally racist slur he would hear at school the next day...no, that probably wouldn't be published. Angry birds pooping on cars in the student parking lot, cheered on by the teachers...he might be able to work with that one. The third one he looked at was a little odd, he honestly didn't remember drawing it. A character who looked like a fifties heart-throb on a motorcycle, with a leather jacket and over-gelled dark hair, looked down at his cartoon hands with a worried expression. The comic had four frames, but all the character did was shift his sitting position a little bit. Kurt didn't see anything funny about that one, but was intrigued by the new character so he set the draft aside for later while focusing on the pooping angry birds for this week's comic.

School, glee club, and putting in hours at his father's garage kept him very busy for the next few weeks. The bullying hadn't been as bad lately, just a few random threats in the hallways. He was almost considering wearing nice clothes again when it happened. Out of nowhere, when he was changing after gym class, Karofsky came up to him and punched his face, hard. There was no warning. One second he was in a starting contest with the larger boy and the next he heard a sickening cracking sound and was crumpled on the floor in pain. As he sat there waiting for the bleeding to stop and trying to catch his breath, for some reason he thought of the character with the dark hair. He thought he heard Karofsky mumble something about "too pretty" as he walked out.

Karofsky was suspended which was all well and good, but that wasn't very comforting with a broken nose. The doctor had said it would heal on its own, but otherwise was not especially helpful. At least now he had an excuse to get out of gym class. The next night he was sitting alone in his room, feeling especially out of touch with the rest of the world and wishing high school would be over already, when he got out his pencils and a sketch pad. He drew so quickly that it seemed as if the image of the boy on the motorcycle just appeared on the page. Except this time there was no motorcycle and no leather jacket. His hair was still gelled but he wore a sweater vest and a bow tie, and...what is it that his arms are doing in that position? After 6 frames Kurt realized what he had drawn. The character started a bit far away, looking down shyly with his open palm resting on his cheek. Then he came closer, slowly looking up, until the last frame when he had a tentative smile and his arms were held out like he expected a hug. Kurt giggled. He couldn't help it, what a ridiculous thing to have drawn. Just for fun he drew him again, adding a character who looked a bit like himself to the picture, then he drew them hugging with their eyes closed. He fell asleep at his desk, and dreamt about the character. He woke up with the name on the tip of his tongue. Blake? Ben? It faded away too quickly, but Kurt wrote down his ideas.

Blake/Ben slowly made his way into the published comic strips as a student in the background, watching wide-eyed when a cheerleader turned into a monster and laughing with the crowd when the lunch meat tried to defend its right not to be eaten. His drawings of Blake/Ben at home had taken on a decidedly less family friendly tone. Though he hadn't been brave enough to use himself as a character in these comics, Blake/Ben was having a wild time with various good-looking male cartoon partners. Kurt mused that these drawings were kind of like porn and he should probably destroy them, but he couldn't quite bring himself to do it. So he hid them between his mattress and box spring because he had seen a kid in a movie do that with stolen candy. He woke up a week later with a sigh and a name that he easily said aloud. "Blaine."

Now that his unhealthy obsession had a name, it was even harder to ignore it. He started doodling Blaine on his notes in class. In American history, instead of listening to the teacher's lecture he drew Blaine looking bored and playing with his hair, which was curly and un-gelled that day. Immediately he felt compelled to draw another, the facial expression conveying annoyance and holding out a bottle of thick pomade labeled "gel-helmet." Kurt snorted. The teacher gave him an odd look, and asked him to answer a question about the material. Luckily he had read ahead so he got it right, but he was more careful for the rest of that day. His dreams had also become quite a bit more graphic. Sometimes he was on top, sometimes on the bottom, and sometimes they were just together, nude, gazing at each other, like –no. Kurt stopped himself. This was getting too weird, he needed to be thinking about his real life friends instead of his imaginary boyfriend. Rachel was having a party this weekend while her parents were away. Perfect.