It starts in eighth grade.

Every day he is assaulted with insults and shoves and instructions to go kill himself.

Every day he can’t help but cry, and like sharks to blood they taunt him even more, sensing his weakness.

In middle school, though, the teachers care. They break up the teasing, punish the bullies, and tell Blaine’s parents. It’s not like telling his parents does anything but make it worse, but at least the school cared.

In high school, that’s not the case. He’s beaten down daily mentally and physically, and no teacher gives a crap about it.

The first time it happens he’s in algebra.

“Fag,” the guy behind him coughs, and kicks his desk.
Blaine tries not to let the bully see how it was affecting him. He jots down notes furiously, refusing to turn around.

“Fag.”

“Cock-sucking fag.”

There’s a particularly big kick with that cough, and a hiss of surprise escapes Blaine’s lips.

“You gonna cry, faggot?”

Tears start to prickle behind Blaine’s eyes, and no, this is just going to make it worse…

No.

Before he realizes what he’s doing Blaine is pressing his sharpened pencil into the back of his thumb, using it to ground himself, to stop from crying.

And it works.

“Fag,” the bully hisses one more time (honestly, can’t he think of anything better to say?), and Blaine whirls around.

“Fuck off,” he whispers forcefully, and shoves his chair back, smashing the bully’s fingers between it and the desk.

The guy lets out a howl of pain and when Blaine turns back around, a smile is tugging at the corners of his mouth.

From then on, Blaine’s pencils are sharp and always in his hand. For every insult spat at him, he has a small red dot on his body. They fade after a few days, but the courage they give Blaine sticks around for much longer than that.

Blaine is not a cutter. He is not. But just in case he ever wants to be, he pulls apart his razor and takes the blades out. He keeps them in the rear of his bathroom sink, behind his hair gel.

He tests one out on his thumb one day, just because he is curious. It stings like a bitch. He never picks them up again, not even to throw away.

So, no, Blaine is not a cutter.

At Dalton, though, he almost wishes he was. This school is weird and unfamiliar, and Blaine just can’t get over the fact that no one has beat him up yet. He hasn’t heard the f-word in months.

Maybe, he starts to think, they’re saying it behind his back.

They must be.

He starts to sharpen his pencils again, and anytime anyone talks to him, there’s a dot.

“Can I see your notes?”

They don’t like you, they only want help on the test. Dot.
“Great job with that presentation today, Blaine.”

They must be making fun of you. Dot.

Blazer sleeves are marvelous. Blaine starts to wear his uniform everywhere, even when he’s home on weekends.

“Blaine, Wes said he heard you singing in the shower last night. He said you were really good. We were thinking, maybe you’d like to try out for the Warblers? You don’t have to if you don’t want to, of course, but we’d love it if you’d give it a try.”

This one throws Blaine off. He can’t find anything in there malicious, anything insincere. He shoves his pencil into his wrist anyway, relishing the relief it gives him before giving David a small smile and responding, “Sure.”

Blaine is not a cutter, he is a dotter, but the night before his audition he uses his nails to dig long, red grooves in the skin of his thigh, not deep enough to break the skin, but deep enough to sting the next day if he walks around as he’s singing.

His audition goes great, and before he knows it, he doesn’t worry what his classmates are thinking anymore.

These guys are his friends.

The dotting stops after a few weeks, but Blaine starts a tradition. Every night before a performance, he digs long, deep grooves into upper thighs.

Nothing’s wrong with it. Every great performer has their quirks.

At McKinley, the dotting starts again. Every time Finn cuts him off, every time a member of the glee club glares when he talks, there’s a dot to be added. He doesn’t do it on his limbs any more. He sticks to his stomach, and he doesn’t do it when he’s with Kurt. Kurt’s observant; he’s bound to notice something like that.

No, Blaine waits until he’s in the bathroom between classes to mark up his skin.

Courage, he used to tell Kurt. Kurt has courage, but Blaine can’t take it. He can’t stand up to people that should be his friends. How is he going to cope when these infamous slushies start?

He’s pathetic. He’s obnoxious. Everyone hates him, and sooner or later Kurt will, too.

It shows it’s signs when Kurt brings up sex.

He wants it. He mentions it twice in two days. Artie calls him out on it, too. The play will be horrible if Blaine can’t truly tap into his character.

He’ll fail. If he doesn’t have sex with Kurt, he’ll be a failure.

He has to do this.

Blaine doesn’t remember Scandals very well. He remembers being nervous. He remembers drinking a lot, trying a bit of liquid courage, as they say. He remembers dancing with Sebastian.

It’s not until five a.m. as he’s vomiting into a trash can beside his bed that he remembers what he almost did to Kurt. How angry Kurt was. How he wasn’t good enough for Kurt.

Dotting isn’t harsh enough for what he’s done. He needs to really hurt himself, punish himself for what he did to Kurt. Punish himself for not being good enough.

Most of all, though, Blaine needs to distract himself, to make himself feel anything than this terrible, crushing sense of guilt that’s making him retch into the trash again, tears streaming down his face.

A can of ginger ale sits on his bedside table. He breaks the tab off, tries to see if it hurts more than a pencil does.

He barely feels anything. He breaks it in half, leaving two sharp points.

Before he knows it, he’s in the shower, washing away vomit and tears and snot, cleaning off all the reminders of the night before.

Blaine is not a cutter, but he drags the soda can tab across the skin of his stomach, feeling the tiniest bit of relief and hope at the sensation.

The pain is sharp, sharper than anything he’s done to himself before, and he bleeds a little, not enough to be noticeable, but leaving tiny wells of blood every couple of inches.

Within five minutes, his chest is covered in red stripes. He looks like he’s fallen in a bed of thorns or something, but that’s okay.

The cuts still sting, but he has a performance tonight and force of habit makes him dig his nails in his thighs as well.

He can do this, he thinks as his whole body stings. He can face this day.

In the end, it all turns out okay. No one glares in glee club, and even though he messes up his dancing during one bit of the performance, Rachel still hugs him afterwards and Artie says good job and Kurt is proud of him.

They have sex.

Blaine does not have words for their sex, for the intimacy and the rightness of it all. Sure, they’re shaky and uncertain and neither has any experience with this kind of interaction, but it’s still perfect to him.

The look in Kurt’s eyes afterwards makes Blaine think that maybe, just maybe, it was perfect for him, too.

But as the euphoria wears off, and Blaine starts to drift off to sleep, he hears a gasp.

“Blaine, what is that?”

And then his shirt is being tugged off, and Blaine does nothing to stop it, and Kurt is staring, just staring, and suddenly Blaine knows.

He and Kurt have just given themselves to each other. They’ve shared parts of themselves, of their bodies and their souls, with each other, parts that they’ve never shared with anyone else.

They’re given themselves to each other, not partially, but completely. That means Kurt has to get this from Blaine as well.

So he tells.

It’s very important to him that Kurt knows he’s not a cutter.

But maybe Blaine does have a problem.