Kurt was drunk when he left the bar – of course he was drunk, how could be stay sober after seeing Blaine for the second time in one days after seven years and then have to listen to him sing those songs? – but not nearly as drunk as Blaine thought he was. When Kurt had said “Take me home,” he knew Blaine had just heard “Take me home so we can fuck.” It was a little insulting that Blaine thought Kurt was that easy, but really, in ordinary circumstances, Kurt usually was. It was a hold over from the whole thing with Blaine, he supposed. In either case, Kurt wasn’t going to sleep with Blaine. He was far too angry, (and not quite drunk enough) for that. But he knew it would get Blaine to leave the bar with him, and Kurt was actually sort of relieved he didn’t have to go through his tirade in front of the entire bar.
And there was a tirade. There was going to be crying and swearing and Kurt was going to launch all of the feelings he had been bottling for ten years at Blaine all at once and he just wanted Blaine to feel as fucking heartbroken as Kurt did that night.
Hell hath no fury like a Kurt Hummel scorned.
He giggled to himself a little bit and Blaine turned at smiled at him while trying to unlock his door. Well, Kurt supposed, the random gigging would help Blaine believe that Kurt was still drunk.
They stumbled in the door way, and Blaine went at sat on his bed.
“Kurt,” he said, patting the bed next to him.
Kurt stood by the door and coolly said, “So, Blaine, still fucking women?”
There was a pure vindictive pleasure that Kurt got at the look of surprise on Blaine’s face. He was completely lost.
“Uhhhh, no. Only men. You know that though.” Blaine still looked a lot blindsided by Kurt’s question and the angry tone he asked it in, but the manners that were bred into him seemed to overweigh that.
It kind of hurt Kurt to have the reminder of the fight that had, for all intents and purposes, broken them up. And the point wasn’t to hurt himself, it was to inflict the same pain Kurt had felt for years bit by bit, using words as knives.
“No, I wouldn’t know that, would I? Last I knew, you were dating girls. There was that matter of snogging me up against a bookshelf, but I guess I wouldn’t know about that either, Blaine.”
Wince. There was a very satisfying wince from Blaine at that. A wince and a shuffle, like he was deeply uncomfortable in his skin.
Good. He deserves to know how it feels to not want to be yourself anymore.
They looked at each other in silence and Blaine slowly stood up. Kurt arched a brow at him as Blaine stepped forward and softly spoke.
“You told me ten years ago that you know me better than anyone else, Kurt, and you would accept anything I told you. That is what I mean. You know I don’t still sleep with women, Kurt. You knew I was gay before I did. You knew that I loved you…”
Blaine’s hand had moved to caress Kurt’s cheek as he was talking, but the second Blaine said the L word, Kurt whirled away, all anger and pale limbs.
“No! You do not get to do this to me again, Blaine Anderson. You don’t just get to walk back into my life with your smile and that hair and sing me songs and just make it all better! You do not get to do that after what you did to me. Why are you here?”
He was pacing and Blaine had sat back on the bed again, sighing with resignation. Like he knew that this what they were reduced to now, Blaine on the bed silent while Kurt raged at him. “I live here. I’ve lived here for seven years now. I work at a record store and I play at that bar every single week. You walked into my life, Kurt, not the other way around. You are the one who found me this time.”
“Oh my god, fuck that! I saw you this morning Blaine! Standing on a street corner. Just when I thought my life was getting back into order again. And there you were, and you broke my heart all over again, Blaine. Like you always have. You know what? I’m going to show you.”
And he started unbuttoning his shirt. And taking off his pants. And socks. And shoes. And scarf.
Blaine sat there, slightly horrified at the sudden semi-nudity.
“Here,” Kurt said, thrusting out his arm at Blaine, “You remember this?”
He pointed to the scar he had made that night, thick and knotted. Ugly. The one that had been the symbol of all the things that had never begun, and the symbol of the pain that never stopped.
Blaine sucked in a hiss.
“That’s ten years old. I know you remember.”
He pointed to a scar on his left hipbone now.
“This one is nine years old. It’s from the first year at McKinley.”
Right thigh.
“Eight years.”
Left wrist, under the watch.
“Seven years. I moved to New York.”
“Six.”
“Five.”
“Four years old.”
“Three.”
“Two years.”
He pointed to them all in quick succession, slowing as he showed the final one, a thin red line still healing on his stomach.
“A couple of weeks old.”
He pulled his shirt and jeans back on, avoiding Blaine’s gaze. “Ten. One for each year that you’ve been breaking my heart, Blaine. Nine all made on my birthday, the day it all started. You wanna know why I do them, Blaine? Do you? As always, I’m gonna take your silence as a yes, because it’s been too long since you actually spoke to me like a rational human being. I do them because they make me ugly. I see them, and all I can feel is how ugly I am. And that feels right, because I’ve felt ugly and unloved for ten fucking years, Blaine. I do them because you didn’t want me, and now no one else will, and I don’t want them to want me if you never could.”
He finally looked at Blaine now, his shirt left unbuttoned.
Blaine was sitting on the edge of his bed, staring at the healing cut and weeping.
Not crying. Weeping.
Tears were falling down Blaine’s cheeks like raindrops Kurt used to race on windowpanes. Except the rain had never looked as perfect and as terrible as Blaine’s tears did. Perfect because even now, everything Blaine did was perfect to Kurt, and terrible because he felt no sense of revenge or justification seeing Blaine cry. He just felt like shit.
And just a tiny part of him, the tiniest and quietest part of him, believed that maybe Blaine did love him after all.
And that part, the crazy masochistic part that Kurt thought he’d let die, didn’t want Blaine to keep looking so broken.
“I lied,” Kurt whispered, falling to his knees in front of Blaine, “I lied. I don’t do these because I want to feel ugly. I mean, I still do, but I don’t do them for that. I do them to remember. Because I only realised I loved you right before our entire world went to shit, and I can’t even remember that. I just remember pain when I think of you. And just when my heart stopped aching and I finally felt like I could breathe, I got scared. Because loving you hurt me, and if it didn’t hurt then maybe I wasn’t loving you anymore. I don’t know how to do that yet, not love you, and I definitely didn’t then, so I’d make them. And then I had the scar, the reminder. And I had the pain. That pain that was because I loved you, and that it hurt. When I grew up, I stopped loving you, I think. Or well, at least I started hating you. But I couldn’t stop the pain. And now, I don’t know if I want to. It’s all I have left.”
And then suddenly, Kurt was crying and this was not what he was planning back at the bar, but the sobs kept forcing themselves out of his throat, barking and raw. He felt like his entire body was trying to turn itself inside out from the aching, like air had suddenly become poisonous.
This was the point of the cutting. It was supposed to control this. He wasn’t supposed to feel like he was dying.
Not now.
Not now that Blaine was here and Kurt was the one in pain, again.
He sobbed until he felt he couldn’t anymore, and he was just on the floor, hiccupping, his eyes screwed tight against the world that insisted on breaking him at every turn.
A kiss was pressed to the strip of his stomach that was still bare from his earlier exhibition.
“Stand up.”
Kurt let himself be pulled up by Blaine, who knelt in front of him and placed a tender kiss on the cut on his stomach.
He worked his way backwards through the scars.
“Each.”
Kiss.
“Scar.”
Kiss.
“Is.”
Kiss.
“Beautiful.”
Kiss.
“They.”
Kiss.
“Are.”
Kiss.
“Part.”
Kiss.
“Of.”
Kiss.
“You.”
He paused for a moment at the first scar, and looked up at Kurt. “And I love you.”
He finally kissed it and somehow managed to catch Kurt as he fell forward into him, sobbing again.
Kurt felt himself being pulled towards the bed and let himself fall into Blaine again. Just like he had planned to never do again.
But just like that little part of him always knew he would.