Worried and scared, Kurt surveyed the dark bruise along his boyfriend's side.  He rested a gentle hand on Blaine's waist, and adjusted himself on the bed to look him in the eye, or at least try to.  Blaine was looking down, tracing the pattern on Kurt's bedspread with his eyes.

"Blaine," he said in a hushed voice, "is your father abusive?"

It was a tricky question, but Blaine would definitely say that, no, his father wasn't abusive.  Sure, he'd hit him a few times, but something in the back of his head always nagged at him, telling him it was his own fault for provoking him.  Even when his dad did hit him, it wasn't anything serious.  He'd just get upset and throw him around a bit.  It was his fault for being too weak to properly fight back.

One night, back when Blaine was fourteen years old, he'd been sitting on the couch at home, strumming his guitar softly, trying to work out a song he needed to have written for music class the next day.  His mother was upstairs taking a nap, she was giving him space to work on the music, knowing he was on a time limit.  She didn't have him do any of his usual chores that day, asking him to just put all of his laundry in a pile near the door for her to do later.

He was making great progress, until his dad got home.  It was clear he'd been at another work function, because he got home hours after when his working day ended.  He worked in an office, and made good money, but it was because he took his work very seriously.  Blaine wasn't even sure exactly what he did, though.  It had something to do with accounting, he knew.  He knew his father was higher up in the company, and that he always attended work functions, got to know people, and tried to make his way even higher up in his line of work.

Blaine also knew that his dad did not like work functions, and they always left him in a bad mood.  He took a break from playing his music, not wanting the noise to disturb his father, and rested his hand against the cool wood of the guitar.  Glancing down at the paper he was writing the notes to his compisition out on, he chewed his lip in concentration, reading the notes off in his head.

"That damn guitar again," his father muttered, walking through the room Blaine was in to the adjacent kitchen.  He went to pour himself a glass of scotch, when he saw Blaine's clothes lying on the floor.

"Blaine!  Pick your fucking clothes up,  I don't work all day just so I can come home to a mess."

Blaine closed his eyes and gritted his teeth, before replying "I'm kind of busy," and gesturing to his guitar and the papers laid out around him.  By now he was used to his dad nagging at him the second he got home, and he learned to ignore him, and deflect with short answers.

"Don't get smart with me," his father snapped back, heading down into the room Blaine was in.

"I'm not.  I'm just busy.  Mom is going to do my laundry, so I left it for her."

"I am telling you to pick it up right now, Blaine Anderson," his father snapped back, stomping over toward him and grabbing his guitar, "that is an order!"

"And I'm telling you I'm busy, and I need my guitar!" Blaine snapped back, jumping to his feet.

That's when his father dropped his guitar to to the ground, and fisted his hand into Blaine's hair, "Pick up your damn clothes!"

Blaine tried to shove his dad off of him, but a short fourteen year old boy against a 6'2" man wasn't a very fair fight.  Instead, it made him angrier, and he shoved Blaine to the pile of laundry.  Stumbling, he grabbed onto the wall to steady himself, his heart pounding in fear.  His father hadn't laid a hand on him before.

"Greg?" Blaine heard his mother ask as she descended the stairs, "Is that you?  What's going on down there?"

"Your kid is being lazy and making a mess," he said, heading back to the kitchen to get his drink.

Blaine didn't listen to what his parents were saying to each other after that, he just slipped past them to head up to his bedroom, music class be damned.  He considering telling his mom about how his dad shoved him, but he quickly reassured himself he was making a big deal out of nothing.  It was his own fault for not being strong enough to fight back.  Besides, he know his mother would overreact, and without his dad there they wouldn't have any money.  His mother didn't even have a paying job.

Instead, he decided to take up boxing.  He hated feeling powerless like that, and he wanted to be better prepared to fight back if anything like that happened again, not that it would.

...except it did.  Numerous times over the next few years, his father would shove him around when he got angry.  Blaine would fight back, but even though he tried to improve his technique and build up muscle he was no match for his father, who towered over him.  He knew he just had to keep boxing, though.  Every time he want to bed with a sore wrist, or a throbbing head from where his dad yanked at his hair, he knew he just needed to fight back harder.

Blaine kept practicing boxing to better defend himself.  He started gelling his hair, too.

He didn't bruise easily, he found, so luckily he almost never had marks to explain to anyone.  On the couple of occasions that he did, he deflected with a nonchelont "I got in a fight,"  before moving onto a new subject matter.

It was the truth.  He just got in fights.  Nobody needed to know they were with his father.

It wasn't healthy or a good relationship, he knew, but if his mother found out she would overreact.  She would call it "abuse."  It wasn't abuse, though, because Blaine fought back.  She wouldn't understand that, though, and Blaine knew his mother would leave his father over it.  He knew she didn't have the money for it, so he kept it to himself.  It wasn't too big of a problem for him to handle by himself, and it wasn't like he kept it all bottled in.  He told friends when he got into fights with his father, he just didn't say they were physical, and his friends didn't ask.

Kurt knew Blaine's father wasn't very nice to him, and he knew they got into fights.  More recently, the fights had been over Kurt.  Blaine made sure Kurt didn't know that, along with making sure he thought the fights were only verbal.

The other night, though, had been a particularly bad one.  A coworker of his father's had stumbled upon Blaine's facebook page, where he found a photo of Blaine kissing Kurt on the cheek.  Said coworker decided to show the photo to Blaine's father, which was what lead him to blow up at Blaine that night.

His mother was out of town.

His father stormed in the house, yelling at him right off the bat.  Blaine had been on the phone with Kurt, he quickly said his goodbyes and hung up before Kurt could hear what his dad was saying.

Blaine wasn't even sure what his dad was saying, tuning him out was a skill Blaine had perfected over the years.  He tended to cry out of anger at some of the hurtful things his dad would say, and Blaine didn't want to give him the satisfaction of seeing that.

However, somewhere along the line, after being backhanded across the face, having his wrist dug into by his father's firm grip, being shoved across the room, and hit over and over, Blaine couldn't help but listen to what he was saying.

He wished he hadn't.

His father was screaming at him, furious, blaming Blaine for ruining his chance of a promotion, hell, for ruining his entire career.  He told Blaine he would probably lose his job, now, because who wants a worker with a fag for a son, and really, Blaine, why would you openly post an explicit photo of you with that slut?

Within seconds Blaine was fighting back, as hard as he could, shoving him backwards, grabbing at his shirt, trying to twist away from him and get at least one good hit in.  His father didn't get to say shit about Kurt, that's why he made sure to keep Kurt from being known as Kurt.  There was some mention of a boy who might be a boyfriend, but it was vague.  He always made sure Kurt could only come over when his dad was out of town.  This, this asshole found out about Kurt anyway, and he had the audactiy to insult the one good thing in Blaine's life?

Blaine's fighting back only did more to anger his dad, and he gave Blaine one final shove.  Blaine's side slammed into the countertop, knocking the wind out of him.  He fell to the floor, struggling to get his breath back, and crying, because fuck, that hurt.

"Fuck you!  I'm done with you!  You're not my son!" His dad shouted, spit flying from his mouth with his words, "I just want you out of my fucking house!"

Blaine was a seventeen year old kid, though, and his father knew this, so instead of trying to make Blaine leave, he stormed out, not wanting to be near his son anymore.  He found a hotel room that night, not wanting to be at home with Blaine.

It took Blaine a good half hour to get himself up of the floor.  His head was pounding from where it had hit the floor, and his throat ached from him wheezing, trying to get catch his breath.  His side hurt, his cheek was throbbing, and blood was pouring from his nose.

He took another hour to get himself cleaned up.  Luckily his bloody nose stopped bleeding fairly quickly, and his cheek didn't look swollen.  The only problem was the large bruise on his side.  Blaine almost never had to deal with bruises, it took a lot to bruise him.  He hadn't even had a mark on him the day his father threw a full glass bottle at him and hit him in the eye.

While Blaine was used to the ache of being shoved around, he wasn't used to the pain of a bruise.  He wanted nothing more than to curl up in bed and go to sleep, but even that was painful.  It took him several hours of laying there until exhaustion finally got the better of him, and he fell asleep.

The other aspect of bruising that Blaine wasn't used to was the fact that it was obvious.  He had a huge black, purple, and green mark taking up a large portion of his left side.

Which is what Kurt noticed when they were in bed together, after Blaine told him he and his father got into another fight, and it was bad, and fuck, he loves Kurt and he just needed him.  

He forgot there was a mark.

Kurt saw, wondered, and asked.

Blaine fought back.  Blaine wasn't helpless.  Blaine's father didn't abuse him.

"No," he said with a small smile, meeting Kurt's eye, "I slammed into the counter and got this bruise.  My dad's not abusive, we just fight."

Still wary, Kurt hesitated before leaning into Blaine and kissing him softly on the lips.

"I love you," he whispered.

"I love you, too."