Riona (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rionaleonhart) wrote2011-02-21 01:42 pm
rionaleonhart) wrote2011-02-21 01:42 pm
Entry tags:
Fanfiction: Focus (Glee, Kurt/Blaine)
Yet another ridiculous Kurt/Blaine AU. I can't stop! (It is so good to be writing again.)
Title: Focus
Fandom: Glee
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Kurt/Blaine
Wordcount: 6,000
Summary: AU for 'Never Been Kissed'. The students of Dalton Academy are impressive singers, yes, but Kurt is more interested by the fact that he can hear their thoughts.
Notes: The concept of Noise is borrowed from Patrick Ness's novel The Knife of Never Letting Go, with a couple of alterations. That's the only connection between this fic and that book, though, so there's absolutely no need to have read it in order to understand this; it works as a perfectly normal story about telepathic gay schoolboys.
Somehow, given its décor and reputation, Kurt would have expected Dalton Academy to be... quieter. More controlled. But it actually feels noisier than McKinley, boys keeping up a constant stream of chatter as they go from class to class, talking over each other.
A lot of the talk he overhears seems to be about him, which is probably a sign that he’s not blending in as well as he’d hoped. Curiously, fewer of the comments than he would have expected are about his stylish but admittedly not exact facsimile of the Dalton uniform; a couple of times he does hear what’s he wearing?, but by far the word he hears directed at him most often as he walks through the school is quiet. He doesn’t think he’s ever been described as quiet before. He’s walking on his own, so the fact that he’s not talking much shouldn’t really be raising any eyebrows; then again, more than once he’s passed single students who appear to be talking incessantly to themselves, so perhaps Dalton just has different standards. Bizarre standards, yes, but it seems to make sense as an explanation.
He’s distracted from his musings when he notices that the movement of people around him has shifted; everyone seems to be heading in one direction. He hears a few snatches of conversation as people go by, and the one thing he seems to be hearing over and over is Warblers.
Well, if he’s going to infiltrate the opposing school, might as well do some actual spying.
-
For a moment, Kurt thinks he must have walked into the wrong room. What looks like half the school is gathered there, and they all seem to be honestly excited about hearing the glee club sing. Rachel would literally kill someone to have an audience this enthusiastic every time New Directions performed.
It is the right room, however, as quickly becomes apparent when the Warblers launch into an acapella rendition of ‘Teenage Dream’.
It’s a wonderful arrangement, beautifully sung, but the frustrating thing is that the gathered audience don’t stop talking. It’s not out of disrespect, as it might be at McKinley; they genuinely seem to be enjoying the performance. They’re dancing along; they’re whooping; most of the things they’re saying sound like positive comments on the song. It’s just that apparently everyone at Dalton Academy is clinically incapable of shutting up.
Kurt is so busy being irritated by all the chatter that it takes him a full minute to realise the Warblers are somehow singing without opening their mouths.
He blinks.
They’re miming. They must be. The world’s worst miming, done by people who haven’t yet realised that singing generally involves some sort of mouth movement. Or maybe he’s got this performance all wrong; maybe it’s about dancing, not singing, even though the choreography isn’t exactly spectacular. Or maybe they’re an entire choir of ventriloquists.
Now that he’s paying attention, though, he comes to see that nobody in this room is moving their mouth, despite the huge amount of talking. There’s a lot of enthusiastic shouting coming, Kurt swears, from the guy pumping his fist next to him, but he doesn’t look like he’s shouting; he’s just grinning like a crazy person as he rocks out to the music.
Let’s run away and don’t ever look back, the Warblers somehow sing. Kurt is tempted to do exactly that. This is more than a little creepy.
-
As the song comes to an end and the assembled students break into applause, Kurt is torn. On the one hand, he wants to run far, far away from this horror-movie-opening of a school. On the other... well, he can’t say he doesn’t want to find out what’s going on here. When he watches horror movies, he always makes fun of the girl who goes down to check out what’s making that noise in the basement; right now, he knows exactly how she’s feeling.
The problem is that he doesn’t know where to start. Can he just go up to someone and ask ‘hey, I noticed you can talk without actually speaking, what’s up with that’? Will they kill him if they know he’s not one of them? It’d probably be better just to run.
The room is beginning to clear, and Kurt takes a step back from the door so he won’t be caught in the rush. There’s no rush, though; the students wait their turn and file out, calmly and neatly. After Kurt’s experience of McKinley, that’s almost as weird as the possibly-telepathy thing.
Have I seen him before? Kurt hears suddenly, layered over the same voice asking, louder, “Hello?”
Kurt turns around to find the lead singer of the Warblers coming toward him, or at least the guy who seemed to be the focus of the performance; it gets tricky to identify the lead singer when a song is apparently performed entirely in psychic acapella. As soon as he sees Kurt’s face, the singer’s ‘voice’ splits, saying about fifty things at once in an incoherent mess. Kurt can only catch fragments: eyes and careful and don’t freak him out.
“Uh,” Kurt says, “hello.”
No noise, the lead singer says without opening his mouth, looking Kurt up and down. It’s disconcerting on several levels. Could be new. No jacket, though. Oh, nice try.
“I’m guessing you heard that,” he says aloud before Kurt can ask what the hell is going on, “so, fun though it would be to pretend I’m fooled, it looks like I’ve already missed my chance.” He holds out a hand. “I’m Blaine. What brings you here?”
“Kurt,” Kurt says, taking his hand and shaking it after a brief hesitation. “I, uh.” What has he just been asked? He’s already forgotten. It’s difficult to concentrate when Blaine is looking at him, smiling, his voice saying someone’s brother? someone’s boyfriend? maybe there’s a reason he came to hear the Warblers perform even though he clearly isn’t using it.
Wow, he looks really confused. “Are you okay?”
“Fine,” Kurt says. “It’s just... okay, there’s a very high chance I’m just hallucinating, in which case this is going to sound completely crazy, but I swear I can hear your thoughts.”
That would explain it. “Ah,” Blaine says. “Yeah, it can be a little confusing the first time.”
“I hope you’re not just playing along, because I don’t actually want to be crazy.”
Blaine shrugs. “I’d love to just be playing along, because having everyone hear whatever you’re thinking really doesn’t make things easy, but I guess one of us has to lose.”
Kurt hadn’t actually thought about how annoying this would be for the students at this weird psychic school, beyond ‘how can anyone concentrate here?’. He tries to imagine going through life with no way of hiding the contents of his mind. Do they have to put everyone in separate rooms when they have tests?
Wait.
“Can you hear my thoughts?” Kurt asks. Oh, crap, what if Blaine can hear his thoughts? What would he be hearing? Kurt needs to keep his thoughts as innocuous as possible. It wasn’t at the front of his mind before, but suddenly it is really, really difficult not to think about how good-looking Blaine is.
“You’re safe,” Blaine says, with a grin. “This is strictly one-sided. We call it noise.” Of course we call it noise, Kurt hears. It’s noise. That sounds really stupid. “With a capital N, I mean.”
Noise. Okay. It’s still a ridiculous, impossible thing, but now that it’s a ridiculous impossible thing with a name it somehow seems less threatening.
“So,” Kurt says, “is there a reason everyone at Dalton is broadcasting their thoughts for the world to hear?”
Curse, Blaine’s Noise says, and weapon, and, bizarrely, Vocal Adrenaline. “We don’t know, exactly,” he says. “The official line is that a Chemistry class went very wrong.”
“So it was something that happened here? It’s not a school set up for one-sided telepaths?”
Blaine shakes his head. “It happened a couple months after I transferred here. You’re not going to catch it or anything, if you’re worried about that.” His Noise takes on a darker tone as he says ‘transferred’, and he sighs as he catches Kurt’s quizzical look. “Okay, I wasn’t going to talk about it, because it’s kind of depressing, but I’m thinking about it now, so you’re going to hear it anyway. I was being bullied at my last school.”
The word faggot is coming through strongly in his Noise, and Kurt tenses, automatically defensive, before realising that it’s probably what the bullies called Blaine. He forgets immediately about wondering why people here might or might not be sort of psychic; right now, this is much more important. “And you could get away from that here?”
Blaine smiles. “Zero-tolerance bullying policy. Plus being able to hear each other’s thoughts kind of fosters understanding.” His Noise changes, then, forms somehow into a picture in Kurt’s mind, and it takes Kurt a moment to realise that what he’s seeing is the ‘Teenage Dream’ performance from Blaine’s perspective. “A gay kid can do pretty well for himself here.”
Blaine is gay, and he’s happy and confident and the lead singer of a glee club that everyone loves and he doesn’t have to wake up to bruises from yesterday’s locker-assault every morning. Kurt tries to speak and finds himself unable to.
Blaine tilts his head, frowning. Is he okay?
Kurt looks away, tries to keep his breathing steady.
Something’s wrong, Blaine is thinking, and should have noticed and he doesn’t have Noise, it’s so much harder—
“It’s fine,” Kurt says, quickly. “I’m fine. It’s not your problem.”
“No,” Blaine says, watching him with concern that would be obvious even if it weren’t written all over his Noise, “but it’s obviously a problem. Do you want to talk about it?”
Kurt glances around. Everyone else has left; they’re alone in the room. Maybe it would be good to talk to someone who might be able to relate. He takes in a shaking breath.
“I’m the only person out of the closet at my school,” (oh? Blaine’s Noise asks, slightly disconcertingly; Kurt loses his train of thought for a moment), “and... and I try to stay strong about it, but there’s this Neanderthal who’s made it his mission to make my life a living hell.”
An image hits him, then: a younger Blaine, curled up on a desk and choking down sobs of frustration. He looks sharply up at the real Blaine, who is looking deeply embarrassed.
“Uh,” Blaine says. Well, this is awkward, mutters his Noise. “Sorry; it just – it brings back memories. You didn’t need to see that.” You can’t help him if you can’t hold yourself together. Oh, he doesn’t like that.
“I didn’t come here to ask for help,” Kurt says, bristling, because, no, he doesn’t like that, as it happens. “I can look after myself.”
“Okay,” Blaine says, holding up his hands placatingly. “Just, if you do ever decide you want some help, let me know. There’s no shame in it. Do you want my number?”
Kurt hesitates for a moment, but Blaine seems okay. Kurt doesn’t have the impression that he’s plotting anything evil, and, as Kurt can hear his thoughts, that means it’s probably safe. Plus he’s a really good singer, even if he doesn’t technically use his voice, and Kurt is... kind of intrigued by him, if he’s honest with himself. He hands over his iPhone.
“I won’t ask you for yours,” Blaine says as he registers his number. “That way, if you decide you want to, you can contact me, and if you don’t you don’t ever have to hear from me again.”
Kurt takes his phone back and has to suppress a quick smile at seeing that Blaine has entered his own name as ‘Interfering Dalton Guy’. “Okay. Thanks.”
-
Kurt was planning to go back to Lima, but Blaine insists on buying him coffee – “it’s a tradition with newcomers to Dalton,” he says, very seriously, even though it’s clear from his Noise both that it isn’t and that he knows Kurt can hear it isn’t – and Dalton is considerably less terrifying now that he understands a little more about what’s actually going on here, so Kurt acquiesces.
As they walk through the ornamented corridors of Dalton Academy, Kurt notices that there’s a difference between Blaine’s Noise and the Noise of most of the boys they pass. Most of the Noise they hear consists of half-formed ideas, stray words, layer upon layer upon layer of thoughts that would probably be incomprehensible even if they weren’t already packed tightly enough together to make picking out any single line of thought impossible. Blaine’s Noise, on the other hand, is much more controlled, rarely talking over itself, frequently formed of full sentences.
A boy glances at them as he walks past. Kurt hears Blaine and boyfriend? and feels himself flush a little. He sneaks a glance at Blaine to see his reaction. Blaine is wearing a very slight smile, nothing in his Noise but a little humming tune.
“How do you keep your Noise under control like that?” Kurt asks.
“A lot of practice,” Blaine says, with a grin. “We use it to sing, so all the Warblers need to be able to control their Noise. We’re not going to get through Sectionals if the judges can hear us all thinking about what we had for lunch.” He pauses, with a slight, embarrassed cough. “I used to use the picture-the-audience-in-their-underwear trick when I was nervous about performing in public, before the Noise. I definitely can’t do that any more.”
Kurt takes a moment to marvel at the fact that Blaine ever felt nervous about performing in public – he seemed so confident fronting the Warblers – but he is distracted by a sudden explosion of DON’T THINK ABOUT THAT DON’T THINK ABOUT IT DON’T THINK ABOUT IT from outside. Blaine bursts out laughing.
“If you can’t control your Noise,” he explains, “you have to do that.”
Kurt peeks through the window to see a Dalton boy standing uncomfortably opposite someone who Kurt assumes to be his girlfriend. She looks unimpressed. Kurt is tempted to linger and see how this unfolds, but Blaine puts a hand on his back and guides him away from the glass, tutting exaggeratedly in his head.
“So the key is not thinking?” Kurt asks, as Blaine holds a door open for him. “Because, if that’s the case, I know some excellent potential candidates for the Warblers.”
“I’m not totally sure I like what you’re implying,” Blaine says, “but yes. I am very, very good at not thinking.”
-
“You said your name was Kurt,” Blaine says, setting down a mug in front of him. “Would that be Kurt Hummel, by any chance?”
Ah. In all the weirdness, Kurt had sort of forgotten he actually came here as a spy. All he can feel from Blaine’s Noise is amusement, though, so it doesn’t seem that he’s about to get beaten up.
“Yes,” he says, and then, after a brief hesitation, “Sorry.”
“It’s fine,” Blaine says, as he drops into the chair opposite. “We came to see you at Regionals, anyway, so you’re just levelling the playing field. You guys are really good.”
“Not good enough, evidently,” Kurt mutters, staring down into his coffee.
“Good enough to have us worried,” Blaine says. His Noise still makes Kurt a little uneasy – it’s weird to hear someone constantly reacting to you as you speak – but right now Kurt appreciates it, because he can hear from it that Blaine isn’t just saying that; he was genuinely impressed by their performance.
“You’re probably going to win, anyway,” Kurt says. “You’re singing with your minds; that has to be worth extra points.”
Blaine grins. “We’ll see. Bribe me enough and I might go in with our worst songs.”
Kurt is jerked immediately out of the flow of interaction. Is Blaine flirting with him? He scrutinises Blaine’s Noise for any sign that it might be a come-on, but as far as he can tell it’s just a joke, and he settles back in his seat with something that’s not entirely relief.
Oh, no. He can’t do this again. He really needs to stop falling for anyone who’s remotely nice to him.
“Go on,” he says, trying to cover up, because he’s been silent for a moment too long and question marks are starting to pop up in Blaine’s Noise; “tell me what your worst songs are.”
“Oh, you really don’t want to ask me that,” Blaine says, laughing.
It really was a mistake to ask, it turns out, because Blaine now has the Pokémon theme stuck in his head and his Noise keeps humming it intermittently throughout the ensuing conversation. It’s a little maddening, but Kurt is prepared to endure it, because he enjoys speaking to Blaine, and because Blaine seems from the feel of his thoughts to enjoy speaking to him. There’s never any need to wonder whether Blaine is only pretending to be interested in what Kurt has to say. It’s immensely gratifying.
Crap, Blaine thinks suddenly, just when Kurt is beginning to wonder what time it is, class started five minutes ago.
That’s probably Kurt’s cue to leave. He downs the last of his coffee, wincing – it’s gone cold in the time they’ve been talking – and stands, swinging his bag over his shoulder. “Well, you’ve been very hospitable, but I should probably get going.”
“Okay,” Blaine says. He stands as well, claps a hand on Kurt’s shoulder. “It was nice to meet you. Call me if you need anything.”
Kurt is very glad he doesn’t have Noise, because it would be going berserk every time Blaine casually touched him. Guys don’t touch him. They know he’s gay, and they act as if he’ll be overcome with desire and pounce on them at the slightest hint of physical contact. Given how contact-starved he is, he can’t even be sure they’re not right.
Now that he thinks about it, Karofsky is more or less the only guy at his school who willingly touches him, and that’s pretty much the most depressing thought he’s ever had.
God, he doesn’t want to go back.
“Kurt?” Blaine asks, and Kurt can feel the concern in his Noise.
“I’m fine,” Kurt says. It wavers and cracks and is overall probably the least convincing thing that anyone has ever heard.
“Is this about that bully?”
He doesn’t answer, which, again, isn’t the most convincing denial.
“Okay,” Blaine says. “I’m going to offer you some advice now, and I know you might not want that, so you can feel totally free to punch me in the face if you feel I’m overstepping my boundaries here.”
Kurt manages to smile a little at that. “I hope you realise I’m going to hold you to that offer.”
“The way I see it, you’ve got two options,” Blaine says. “I mean, I’d love to tell you to just come enrol here, and the cost of tuition’s come down a lot since the Noise incident, but, on the other hand, Noise.”
Kurt nods. Noise and an enforced dress code. He’d lose his mind within a week.
“Or,” Blaine says, “you can confront him. Call him out. Force him to really think about what he’s doing.”
“I’m pretty sure he knows what he’s doing,” Kurt says. “I can’t imagine it’d be easy to do accidentally.”
“You have the opportunity to make him see that you’re a human being. All he sees right now is your sexuality, and an abstract idea is a lot easier to bully than a person.”
Blaine’s Noise is beginning to fill with numbers and calculations as he speaks, and Kurt listens, perplexed, before realising that he’s working out how long it would take to get to Lima. Is he...?
“Are you thinking about coming with me?” Kurt asks.
Blaine looks a little abashed. “Well, only if you want me to. I know you said you could take care of yourself, but, uh, if you want some support...”
Kurt wouldn’t mind some support. He’s not sure he wants to say that. He needs to learn to face these things on his own; he can’t always carry a private-school boy around in his pocket for strength (even if Blaine might actually fit, he thinks, noticing for the first time that Blaine is shorter than him). But he doesn’t know how Karofsky might react to being called out, and it might be good to have someone around to... call an ambulance or something.
Blaine takes out a pocket watch and glances at it. “I’m guessing you won’t get back before the end of the school day, but maybe you could talk to him tomorrow,” he says. “Seriously, call me if you decide you want someone there.”
“I will,” Kurt says. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” Blaine says, and then there’s a very awkward moment where Kurt hears Blaine considering whether to give him a hug and then hears Blaine realising that Kurt will have heard him considering whether to give him a hug and then hears Blaine beginning to hum in his head, presumably to cover up any more awkward thoughts, while he offers Kurt an apologetic smile.
Kurt departs unhugged. He’s not sure he wants to analyse the disappointment he feels at that.
-
Kurt almost doesn’t contact Blaine again, almost lets the whole confrontation idea go, but in the end he steels himself and makes the call, and so here they are. The students of McKinley are talking and laughing and generally being far too loud around them, but at least they have the decency to do it with their mouths open, like normal people.
The anticipation of confronting Karofsky is setting Kurt on edge, but Blaine is next to him, and the constant stream of his internal narration is a strangely comforting sound. Kurt has to suppress his laughter at the increasingly incredulous tone of Blaine’s Noise as he reads through the list of requirements for Cheerios applicants on the noticeboard: all three A4 sides of it.
“And I thought Dalton was weird,” Blaine says, finally.
“We don’t have any reverse-mindreading here,” Kurt says. “I think we’re still the more normal school.”
“Your cheerleading squad has elbow measurement requirements. To the nearest millimetre.”
“You can’t hold Sue Sylvester against us. That’s hardly fair.”
“Wait, the Sue Sylvester?” Blaine asks, but someone comes into the corridor at that moment and Kurt goes very still.
“Kurt?” Blaine asks, and then, when Kurt fails to reply, he turns to look at the corner Kurt is facing. The corner around which Karofsky has just walked, heading in their direction.
Is that him? Blaine looks from Karofsky to Kurt and back again. That must be him.
Okay. Confront him. Kurt can do this.
Maybe I should talk to him? Blaine is thinking. Kurt shoots him a sharp look, and he immediately mentally backs off. Okay, no, Kurt definitely needs to do this on his own, I get it, sorry.
Kurt closes his eyes for a moment, mentally preparing himself, and then he walks briskly down the corridor toward Karofsky, gripping the strap of his bag as if it could actually somehow offer him some physical support. Lockers loom threateningly to his left and right. They’re filthy, he knows; he’s occasionally entertained the idea of wearing less expensive sweaters, now that he seems to be having violent locker encounters almost every day, but being unfashionable would be a far greater sacrifice.
Karofsky notices him almost immediately. Kurt can see him setting his jaw.
Kurt can do this. Kurt can do this. He maintains eye contact with Karofsky as they approach each other, ignoring the instincts screaming at him to run and hide. He’s going to go right up to him and – and –
shit, he has no idea what he’s going to say.
And then it’s too late and he’s already hurtling into the lockers. One of the locks catches his arm with a wrenching pain and he falls to the floor, gritting his teeth to keep himself from crying out loud.
“What?” demand Blaine’s Noise and his voice simultaneously.
Don’t get involved, don’t get involved, Kurt is thinking desperately, but of course it’s no use; this Noise thing only goes one way.
Is he hurt? Blaine’s Noise is asking. I can’t believe— “You can’t just push people around like that!”
“Oh, yeah?” Karofsky asks, looking away from Kurt to size Blaine up.
I told you not to get involved, Kurt thinks in despair, although of course technically he didn’t. He tries to catch his breath and regain the full use of his muscles as quickly as he can, because he needs to drag Blaine out of here before the idiot gets them both seriously injured.
But said idiot is actually walking toward Karofsky, so it may already be too late for that.
Karofsky slams Blaine bodily into the lockers next to him and Kurt feels a sudden spike of terror – for Blaine, but also from Blaine, the sudden emotion so strong that Kurt can feel it through his Noise. It’s obvious that Karofsky feels it as well; his expression changes from anger to fear to confusion to fury almost faster than Kurt can follow it.
“You his boyfriend?” Karofsky asks, gripping the front of Blaine’s uniform jacket and getting up in his face.
Kurt can hear Blaine’s Noise becoming controlled and focused again after the instant of shock. So this is the bully. Needs to intimidate people to feel he has any worth as a person. It’s sad, really.
“What the hell, shut up,” Karofsky growls. “How are you even doing that?”
How am I speaking without moving my mouth, you mean? Blaine asks, pleasantly. I’m not. You’re hearing my thoughts.
Karofsky scowls. “Yeah, that’s what’s happening. You’re throwing your voice or something.”
Well, I must be very good at it if I can do this, Blaine thinks, and he must have opened his mental floodgates because they’re suddenly hit with the full flow of his Noise, rambling over itself as if there are thirty Blaines talking at once. Karofsky actually lets go of Blaine’s lapel and stumbles back, like Blaine’s thoughts are an actual physical force.
“What the fuck?” Karofsky demands.
“Oh,” Blaine says aloud, over his own stream of consciousness, “to answer your question, yes, I can hear your thoughts as well.”
Karofsky looks freaked. Like, seriously freaked. Possibly even more than your average holy-crap-this-guy-is-psychic level of freaked. He takes two steps back and then takes off down the corridor.
Kurt stares after him. Karofsky just ran away from a guy who didn’t even touch him. He did it in front of Kurt. Maybe... it seems too much to hope for, but maybe Karofsky will be so humiliated by this that he’ll avoid Kurt for a while. Maybe he’ll leave Kurt alone.
When Kurt looks back, Blaine is dusting his jacket down and bringing his Noise back under control, tucking away scraps like physical, didn’t realise and thought he was gonna before Kurt has the chance to have a real look at the unmoderated contents of Blaine’s mind. Kurt feels more frustrated than he probably should, given that hearing any thoughts at all is a lot more access than he gets with most people.
Speaking of looking at minds...
“You... can’t really hear other people’s thoughts, can you?” Kurt asks, just to make sure. There are some things he definitely needs not to be thinking about if that’s the case.
“No,” Blaine says, grinning, “I can’t. It’s easy enough to guess what someone’s going to be thinking in that situation, though.” He pauses, with a thoughtful glance in the direction in which Karofsky ran. “Interesting reaction. That’s a person with something to hide.”
-
Things change for Kurt after Blaine’s visit to McKinley. Not only has Karofsky stopped checking him into lockers, but he seems to be going out of his way to avoid even being seen anywhere near Kurt. No insults, no slushies, nothing more serious than the occasional instant of immediately-broken-off eye contact. Kurt wishes Blaine really had been able to hear his thoughts; what the hell does Karofsky think he knows?
He never thought he’d feel grateful for being treated like a leper, but, whatever it is that has Karofsky acting like merely being in Kurt’s presence will fry his internal organs, Kurt is clearly in Blaine’s debt. Two days after the confrontation, he sends him a text message.
Thanks for your help with Karofsky. I owe you. Kurt x
He spends longer than he’ll ever admit to considering whether he should include the ‘x’, but eventually he gives up and hits ‘send’. The message looks too impersonal without it, and Kurt has come to recognise that the majority of people aren’t given to overthinking tiny gestures quite as much as he is.
The reply comes twenty minutes later:
You don’t owe me anything, but wouldn’t say no to being bought coffee. xx
Kurt is going to put himself through a lot of overthinking about this, he knows, but he still breaks into a smile as he taps out When and where?
-
They see a lot of each other over the next couple of months. They grab coffee together; they go to the theatre. Kurt meets Blaine’s Dalton friends and privately thinks they’re a little stuffy. Blaine meets Kurt’s friends and thinks Rachel is a little terrifying, but of course it can’t be private and it takes weeks of effort to get her on good terms with him again.
One thing Kurt doesn’t think he’ll ever get tired of is the flash of honest pleasure in Blaine’s Noise whenever they meet. It’s not Rachel and Jesse; Blaine really does just want to spend time with him. Kurt has evidence. There are no ulterior motives here.
Well, none on Blaine’s side, anyway.
Because it’s also not Rachel and Jesse in the fact that Kurt and Blaine are not dating, and Kurt wouldn’t actually object to becoming a little more like Rachel and Jesse in that respect. The more time he spends with Blaine, the more he wants to handcuff himself to him just so he can spend all his time with him forever. He would even put up with the constant Noise. That’s the dictionary definition of being in love, he thinks, or at least it should be.
The thing is, Kurt can hear Blaine’s thoughts. If Blaine were romantically interested in him, he would presumably hear it in Blaine’s thoughts. But he hasn’t. And some part of him feels he should just be satisfied with knowing for a fact that someone doesn’t want him, rather than eternally tormenting himself with wondering, but, honestly, it’s really not that satisfying.
So here he is, only half-listening to the talk of his fellow students around him, doodling ‘Kurt Anderson’ in his notebook like he’s a thirteen-year-old girl (called Kurt). His life is pathetic.
And then he sees the heart-enclosed ‘Blaine + Kurt’ he’s drawing and practically dies on the spot, because he’s not seeing it with his eyes. He’s seeing it from a point just behind his shoulder. He’s seeing it in someone’s Noise, and there’s only one person with Noise he can imagine approaching him in a corridor at McKinley.
Kurt slams the notebook shut, even though it’s already too late, and jumps out of the chair and turns around, praying that Wes or David or anyone else who isn’t Blaine has inexplicably decided to come all the way here for, he doesn’t know, fashion advice.
It’s Blaine. Of course. His Noise is going crazy, and Kurt tries to listen to it for some sign of whether he should run away now or try to pass it off as a joke or – or kiss him, or something, but all he can make out is oh God Blaine Anderson you are an idiot, which isn’t actually that enlightening.
“Um,” Kurt says. It comes out about an octave above his usual pitch, which is no small feat. “Hi, Blaine.”
Blaine takes a deep breath, his Noise going ohgodohgodohgod in the background. “Okay, Kurt,” he says. “I’m not very good at... I mean, if you spend most of your time in a place where you can hear everyone’s thoughts, you kind of get used to it.” He hesitates. “I’m not very good at... reading people. So, uh... I need to ask. That.” He nods towards the notebook, which Kurt is hugging to his chest as if it can somehow protect him despite betraying him seconds ago. “Was that just a joke?”
This is amazing. Kurt is being offered a free ticket out of this horrible situation. But... but, although he’s getting pounded with a lot of emotions from Blaine’s Noise right now, disgust doesn’t seem to be one of them. Maybe he can lay out his heart right now, maturely, and Blaine can step on it, hopefully as gently as he can, and they can move past this and be friends.
“Yes,” Kurt says. “I mean, no. I don’t mean it was a joke. Yes, I am a little bit completely in love with you.” He hesitates. “Is that okay?”
“It’s fine,” Blaine says. He looks a little stunned. “Kurt, I’m really sorry.”
This doesn’t sound like a good start. Kurt averts his eyes.
“I haven’t...” Blaine begins, and then he makes a face and starts again. “I’ve been trying so hard not to think about it, because you’d hear and I didn’t want to freak you out. I couldn’t let myself fall in love with you. I couldn’t even consider it. It just wasn’t an option.”
His Noise is still more incoherent than Kurt has ever heard it, but Kurt manages to catch a could be an option now?
“So you never thought of me in that way?” Kurt asks.
“I couldn’t. Kurt, you don’t know how many friends I lost because they couldn’t handle hearing my thoughts about them.”
Kurt has been wondering for a long time whether falling in love with someone who isn’t straight for once would be too much to ask; he clearly needs to revise his requirements to ‘neither straight nor completely screwed up by involuntary telepathy’.
Still. It’s not a ‘no’. Well, all right, it’s a ‘no’, but it’s not a ‘never’. And Blaine hasn’t actually run away yet.
Kurt swallows. His throat feels dry. “Consider it,” he says. “I give you my permission.”
Blaine’s Noise becomes even louder and more frantic. There’s a wide empty space around them in the corridor; people have obviously started to avoid the guy who sounds like he has a crowd of invisible clones following him around. “I really, really can’t do that while you’re here,” he says, desperately.
“Why not?” Kurt asks. “I’ve been honest with you; can’t you be honest with me?”
“It’s not that,” Blaine says, discomfort radiating through in every line of his stance and every syllable of his Noise. “It’s just – it’s going to be really awkward if I start picturing anything.”
Ah. Yes, Kurt can understand that.
“I need to think about this for a while.” Blaine puts a hand on Kurt’s arm. His Noise immediately becomes a little calmer, weirdly. “But I want you to know I really, really care about you, Kurt. And if the answer’s no and you decide you’d prefer not to see me again, I’ll understand, but also that would really suck.”
Kurt gives him a small smile and feels a sudden twinge of something longing and hopeful and complicated.
It’s gone too quickly for him to know whether it’s his own reaction or whether it’s coming through Blaine’s Noise.
Title: Focus
Fandom: Glee
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Kurt/Blaine
Wordcount: 6,000
Summary: AU for 'Never Been Kissed'. The students of Dalton Academy are impressive singers, yes, but Kurt is more interested by the fact that he can hear their thoughts.
Notes: The concept of Noise is borrowed from Patrick Ness's novel The Knife of Never Letting Go, with a couple of alterations. That's the only connection between this fic and that book, though, so there's absolutely no need to have read it in order to understand this; it works as a perfectly normal story about telepathic gay schoolboys.
Somehow, given its décor and reputation, Kurt would have expected Dalton Academy to be... quieter. More controlled. But it actually feels noisier than McKinley, boys keeping up a constant stream of chatter as they go from class to class, talking over each other.
A lot of the talk he overhears seems to be about him, which is probably a sign that he’s not blending in as well as he’d hoped. Curiously, fewer of the comments than he would have expected are about his stylish but admittedly not exact facsimile of the Dalton uniform; a couple of times he does hear what’s he wearing?, but by far the word he hears directed at him most often as he walks through the school is quiet. He doesn’t think he’s ever been described as quiet before. He’s walking on his own, so the fact that he’s not talking much shouldn’t really be raising any eyebrows; then again, more than once he’s passed single students who appear to be talking incessantly to themselves, so perhaps Dalton just has different standards. Bizarre standards, yes, but it seems to make sense as an explanation.
He’s distracted from his musings when he notices that the movement of people around him has shifted; everyone seems to be heading in one direction. He hears a few snatches of conversation as people go by, and the one thing he seems to be hearing over and over is Warblers.
Well, if he’s going to infiltrate the opposing school, might as well do some actual spying.
For a moment, Kurt thinks he must have walked into the wrong room. What looks like half the school is gathered there, and they all seem to be honestly excited about hearing the glee club sing. Rachel would literally kill someone to have an audience this enthusiastic every time New Directions performed.
It is the right room, however, as quickly becomes apparent when the Warblers launch into an acapella rendition of ‘Teenage Dream’.
It’s a wonderful arrangement, beautifully sung, but the frustrating thing is that the gathered audience don’t stop talking. It’s not out of disrespect, as it might be at McKinley; they genuinely seem to be enjoying the performance. They’re dancing along; they’re whooping; most of the things they’re saying sound like positive comments on the song. It’s just that apparently everyone at Dalton Academy is clinically incapable of shutting up.
Kurt is so busy being irritated by all the chatter that it takes him a full minute to realise the Warblers are somehow singing without opening their mouths.
He blinks.
They’re miming. They must be. The world’s worst miming, done by people who haven’t yet realised that singing generally involves some sort of mouth movement. Or maybe he’s got this performance all wrong; maybe it’s about dancing, not singing, even though the choreography isn’t exactly spectacular. Or maybe they’re an entire choir of ventriloquists.
Now that he’s paying attention, though, he comes to see that nobody in this room is moving their mouth, despite the huge amount of talking. There’s a lot of enthusiastic shouting coming, Kurt swears, from the guy pumping his fist next to him, but he doesn’t look like he’s shouting; he’s just grinning like a crazy person as he rocks out to the music.
Let’s run away and don’t ever look back, the Warblers somehow sing. Kurt is tempted to do exactly that. This is more than a little creepy.
As the song comes to an end and the assembled students break into applause, Kurt is torn. On the one hand, he wants to run far, far away from this horror-movie-opening of a school. On the other... well, he can’t say he doesn’t want to find out what’s going on here. When he watches horror movies, he always makes fun of the girl who goes down to check out what’s making that noise in the basement; right now, he knows exactly how she’s feeling.
The problem is that he doesn’t know where to start. Can he just go up to someone and ask ‘hey, I noticed you can talk without actually speaking, what’s up with that’? Will they kill him if they know he’s not one of them? It’d probably be better just to run.
The room is beginning to clear, and Kurt takes a step back from the door so he won’t be caught in the rush. There’s no rush, though; the students wait their turn and file out, calmly and neatly. After Kurt’s experience of McKinley, that’s almost as weird as the possibly-telepathy thing.
Have I seen him before? Kurt hears suddenly, layered over the same voice asking, louder, “Hello?”
Kurt turns around to find the lead singer of the Warblers coming toward him, or at least the guy who seemed to be the focus of the performance; it gets tricky to identify the lead singer when a song is apparently performed entirely in psychic acapella. As soon as he sees Kurt’s face, the singer’s ‘voice’ splits, saying about fifty things at once in an incoherent mess. Kurt can only catch fragments: eyes and careful and don’t freak him out.
“Uh,” Kurt says, “hello.”
No noise, the lead singer says without opening his mouth, looking Kurt up and down. It’s disconcerting on several levels. Could be new. No jacket, though. Oh, nice try.
“I’m guessing you heard that,” he says aloud before Kurt can ask what the hell is going on, “so, fun though it would be to pretend I’m fooled, it looks like I’ve already missed my chance.” He holds out a hand. “I’m Blaine. What brings you here?”
“Kurt,” Kurt says, taking his hand and shaking it after a brief hesitation. “I, uh.” What has he just been asked? He’s already forgotten. It’s difficult to concentrate when Blaine is looking at him, smiling, his voice saying someone’s brother? someone’s boyfriend? maybe there’s a reason he came to hear the Warblers perform even though he clearly isn’t using it.
Wow, he looks really confused. “Are you okay?”
“Fine,” Kurt says. “It’s just... okay, there’s a very high chance I’m just hallucinating, in which case this is going to sound completely crazy, but I swear I can hear your thoughts.”
That would explain it. “Ah,” Blaine says. “Yeah, it can be a little confusing the first time.”
“I hope you’re not just playing along, because I don’t actually want to be crazy.”
Blaine shrugs. “I’d love to just be playing along, because having everyone hear whatever you’re thinking really doesn’t make things easy, but I guess one of us has to lose.”
Kurt hadn’t actually thought about how annoying this would be for the students at this weird psychic school, beyond ‘how can anyone concentrate here?’. He tries to imagine going through life with no way of hiding the contents of his mind. Do they have to put everyone in separate rooms when they have tests?
Wait.
“Can you hear my thoughts?” Kurt asks. Oh, crap, what if Blaine can hear his thoughts? What would he be hearing? Kurt needs to keep his thoughts as innocuous as possible. It wasn’t at the front of his mind before, but suddenly it is really, really difficult not to think about how good-looking Blaine is.
“You’re safe,” Blaine says, with a grin. “This is strictly one-sided. We call it noise.” Of course we call it noise, Kurt hears. It’s noise. That sounds really stupid. “With a capital N, I mean.”
Noise. Okay. It’s still a ridiculous, impossible thing, but now that it’s a ridiculous impossible thing with a name it somehow seems less threatening.
“So,” Kurt says, “is there a reason everyone at Dalton is broadcasting their thoughts for the world to hear?”
Curse, Blaine’s Noise says, and weapon, and, bizarrely, Vocal Adrenaline. “We don’t know, exactly,” he says. “The official line is that a Chemistry class went very wrong.”
“So it was something that happened here? It’s not a school set up for one-sided telepaths?”
Blaine shakes his head. “It happened a couple months after I transferred here. You’re not going to catch it or anything, if you’re worried about that.” His Noise takes on a darker tone as he says ‘transferred’, and he sighs as he catches Kurt’s quizzical look. “Okay, I wasn’t going to talk about it, because it’s kind of depressing, but I’m thinking about it now, so you’re going to hear it anyway. I was being bullied at my last school.”
The word faggot is coming through strongly in his Noise, and Kurt tenses, automatically defensive, before realising that it’s probably what the bullies called Blaine. He forgets immediately about wondering why people here might or might not be sort of psychic; right now, this is much more important. “And you could get away from that here?”
Blaine smiles. “Zero-tolerance bullying policy. Plus being able to hear each other’s thoughts kind of fosters understanding.” His Noise changes, then, forms somehow into a picture in Kurt’s mind, and it takes Kurt a moment to realise that what he’s seeing is the ‘Teenage Dream’ performance from Blaine’s perspective. “A gay kid can do pretty well for himself here.”
Blaine is gay, and he’s happy and confident and the lead singer of a glee club that everyone loves and he doesn’t have to wake up to bruises from yesterday’s locker-assault every morning. Kurt tries to speak and finds himself unable to.
Blaine tilts his head, frowning. Is he okay?
Kurt looks away, tries to keep his breathing steady.
Something’s wrong, Blaine is thinking, and should have noticed and he doesn’t have Noise, it’s so much harder—
“It’s fine,” Kurt says, quickly. “I’m fine. It’s not your problem.”
“No,” Blaine says, watching him with concern that would be obvious even if it weren’t written all over his Noise, “but it’s obviously a problem. Do you want to talk about it?”
Kurt glances around. Everyone else has left; they’re alone in the room. Maybe it would be good to talk to someone who might be able to relate. He takes in a shaking breath.
“I’m the only person out of the closet at my school,” (oh? Blaine’s Noise asks, slightly disconcertingly; Kurt loses his train of thought for a moment), “and... and I try to stay strong about it, but there’s this Neanderthal who’s made it his mission to make my life a living hell.”
An image hits him, then: a younger Blaine, curled up on a desk and choking down sobs of frustration. He looks sharply up at the real Blaine, who is looking deeply embarrassed.
“Uh,” Blaine says. Well, this is awkward, mutters his Noise. “Sorry; it just – it brings back memories. You didn’t need to see that.” You can’t help him if you can’t hold yourself together. Oh, he doesn’t like that.
“I didn’t come here to ask for help,” Kurt says, bristling, because, no, he doesn’t like that, as it happens. “I can look after myself.”
“Okay,” Blaine says, holding up his hands placatingly. “Just, if you do ever decide you want some help, let me know. There’s no shame in it. Do you want my number?”
Kurt hesitates for a moment, but Blaine seems okay. Kurt doesn’t have the impression that he’s plotting anything evil, and, as Kurt can hear his thoughts, that means it’s probably safe. Plus he’s a really good singer, even if he doesn’t technically use his voice, and Kurt is... kind of intrigued by him, if he’s honest with himself. He hands over his iPhone.
“I won’t ask you for yours,” Blaine says as he registers his number. “That way, if you decide you want to, you can contact me, and if you don’t you don’t ever have to hear from me again.”
Kurt takes his phone back and has to suppress a quick smile at seeing that Blaine has entered his own name as ‘Interfering Dalton Guy’. “Okay. Thanks.”
Kurt was planning to go back to Lima, but Blaine insists on buying him coffee – “it’s a tradition with newcomers to Dalton,” he says, very seriously, even though it’s clear from his Noise both that it isn’t and that he knows Kurt can hear it isn’t – and Dalton is considerably less terrifying now that he understands a little more about what’s actually going on here, so Kurt acquiesces.
As they walk through the ornamented corridors of Dalton Academy, Kurt notices that there’s a difference between Blaine’s Noise and the Noise of most of the boys they pass. Most of the Noise they hear consists of half-formed ideas, stray words, layer upon layer upon layer of thoughts that would probably be incomprehensible even if they weren’t already packed tightly enough together to make picking out any single line of thought impossible. Blaine’s Noise, on the other hand, is much more controlled, rarely talking over itself, frequently formed of full sentences.
A boy glances at them as he walks past. Kurt hears Blaine and boyfriend? and feels himself flush a little. He sneaks a glance at Blaine to see his reaction. Blaine is wearing a very slight smile, nothing in his Noise but a little humming tune.
“How do you keep your Noise under control like that?” Kurt asks.
“A lot of practice,” Blaine says, with a grin. “We use it to sing, so all the Warblers need to be able to control their Noise. We’re not going to get through Sectionals if the judges can hear us all thinking about what we had for lunch.” He pauses, with a slight, embarrassed cough. “I used to use the picture-the-audience-in-their-underwear trick when I was nervous about performing in public, before the Noise. I definitely can’t do that any more.”
Kurt takes a moment to marvel at the fact that Blaine ever felt nervous about performing in public – he seemed so confident fronting the Warblers – but he is distracted by a sudden explosion of DON’T THINK ABOUT THAT DON’T THINK ABOUT IT DON’T THINK ABOUT IT from outside. Blaine bursts out laughing.
“If you can’t control your Noise,” he explains, “you have to do that.”
Kurt peeks through the window to see a Dalton boy standing uncomfortably opposite someone who Kurt assumes to be his girlfriend. She looks unimpressed. Kurt is tempted to linger and see how this unfolds, but Blaine puts a hand on his back and guides him away from the glass, tutting exaggeratedly in his head.
“So the key is not thinking?” Kurt asks, as Blaine holds a door open for him. “Because, if that’s the case, I know some excellent potential candidates for the Warblers.”
“I’m not totally sure I like what you’re implying,” Blaine says, “but yes. I am very, very good at not thinking.”
“You said your name was Kurt,” Blaine says, setting down a mug in front of him. “Would that be Kurt Hummel, by any chance?”
Ah. In all the weirdness, Kurt had sort of forgotten he actually came here as a spy. All he can feel from Blaine’s Noise is amusement, though, so it doesn’t seem that he’s about to get beaten up.
“Yes,” he says, and then, after a brief hesitation, “Sorry.”
“It’s fine,” Blaine says, as he drops into the chair opposite. “We came to see you at Regionals, anyway, so you’re just levelling the playing field. You guys are really good.”
“Not good enough, evidently,” Kurt mutters, staring down into his coffee.
“Good enough to have us worried,” Blaine says. His Noise still makes Kurt a little uneasy – it’s weird to hear someone constantly reacting to you as you speak – but right now Kurt appreciates it, because he can hear from it that Blaine isn’t just saying that; he was genuinely impressed by their performance.
“You’re probably going to win, anyway,” Kurt says. “You’re singing with your minds; that has to be worth extra points.”
Blaine grins. “We’ll see. Bribe me enough and I might go in with our worst songs.”
Kurt is jerked immediately out of the flow of interaction. Is Blaine flirting with him? He scrutinises Blaine’s Noise for any sign that it might be a come-on, but as far as he can tell it’s just a joke, and he settles back in his seat with something that’s not entirely relief.
Oh, no. He can’t do this again. He really needs to stop falling for anyone who’s remotely nice to him.
“Go on,” he says, trying to cover up, because he’s been silent for a moment too long and question marks are starting to pop up in Blaine’s Noise; “tell me what your worst songs are.”
“Oh, you really don’t want to ask me that,” Blaine says, laughing.
It really was a mistake to ask, it turns out, because Blaine now has the Pokémon theme stuck in his head and his Noise keeps humming it intermittently throughout the ensuing conversation. It’s a little maddening, but Kurt is prepared to endure it, because he enjoys speaking to Blaine, and because Blaine seems from the feel of his thoughts to enjoy speaking to him. There’s never any need to wonder whether Blaine is only pretending to be interested in what Kurt has to say. It’s immensely gratifying.
Crap, Blaine thinks suddenly, just when Kurt is beginning to wonder what time it is, class started five minutes ago.
That’s probably Kurt’s cue to leave. He downs the last of his coffee, wincing – it’s gone cold in the time they’ve been talking – and stands, swinging his bag over his shoulder. “Well, you’ve been very hospitable, but I should probably get going.”
“Okay,” Blaine says. He stands as well, claps a hand on Kurt’s shoulder. “It was nice to meet you. Call me if you need anything.”
Kurt is very glad he doesn’t have Noise, because it would be going berserk every time Blaine casually touched him. Guys don’t touch him. They know he’s gay, and they act as if he’ll be overcome with desire and pounce on them at the slightest hint of physical contact. Given how contact-starved he is, he can’t even be sure they’re not right.
Now that he thinks about it, Karofsky is more or less the only guy at his school who willingly touches him, and that’s pretty much the most depressing thought he’s ever had.
God, he doesn’t want to go back.
“Kurt?” Blaine asks, and Kurt can feel the concern in his Noise.
“I’m fine,” Kurt says. It wavers and cracks and is overall probably the least convincing thing that anyone has ever heard.
“Is this about that bully?”
He doesn’t answer, which, again, isn’t the most convincing denial.
“Okay,” Blaine says. “I’m going to offer you some advice now, and I know you might not want that, so you can feel totally free to punch me in the face if you feel I’m overstepping my boundaries here.”
Kurt manages to smile a little at that. “I hope you realise I’m going to hold you to that offer.”
“The way I see it, you’ve got two options,” Blaine says. “I mean, I’d love to tell you to just come enrol here, and the cost of tuition’s come down a lot since the Noise incident, but, on the other hand, Noise.”
Kurt nods. Noise and an enforced dress code. He’d lose his mind within a week.
“Or,” Blaine says, “you can confront him. Call him out. Force him to really think about what he’s doing.”
“I’m pretty sure he knows what he’s doing,” Kurt says. “I can’t imagine it’d be easy to do accidentally.”
“You have the opportunity to make him see that you’re a human being. All he sees right now is your sexuality, and an abstract idea is a lot easier to bully than a person.”
Blaine’s Noise is beginning to fill with numbers and calculations as he speaks, and Kurt listens, perplexed, before realising that he’s working out how long it would take to get to Lima. Is he...?
“Are you thinking about coming with me?” Kurt asks.
Blaine looks a little abashed. “Well, only if you want me to. I know you said you could take care of yourself, but, uh, if you want some support...”
Kurt wouldn’t mind some support. He’s not sure he wants to say that. He needs to learn to face these things on his own; he can’t always carry a private-school boy around in his pocket for strength (even if Blaine might actually fit, he thinks, noticing for the first time that Blaine is shorter than him). But he doesn’t know how Karofsky might react to being called out, and it might be good to have someone around to... call an ambulance or something.
Blaine takes out a pocket watch and glances at it. “I’m guessing you won’t get back before the end of the school day, but maybe you could talk to him tomorrow,” he says. “Seriously, call me if you decide you want someone there.”
“I will,” Kurt says. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” Blaine says, and then there’s a very awkward moment where Kurt hears Blaine considering whether to give him a hug and then hears Blaine realising that Kurt will have heard him considering whether to give him a hug and then hears Blaine beginning to hum in his head, presumably to cover up any more awkward thoughts, while he offers Kurt an apologetic smile.
Kurt departs unhugged. He’s not sure he wants to analyse the disappointment he feels at that.
Kurt almost doesn’t contact Blaine again, almost lets the whole confrontation idea go, but in the end he steels himself and makes the call, and so here they are. The students of McKinley are talking and laughing and generally being far too loud around them, but at least they have the decency to do it with their mouths open, like normal people.
The anticipation of confronting Karofsky is setting Kurt on edge, but Blaine is next to him, and the constant stream of his internal narration is a strangely comforting sound. Kurt has to suppress his laughter at the increasingly incredulous tone of Blaine’s Noise as he reads through the list of requirements for Cheerios applicants on the noticeboard: all three A4 sides of it.
“And I thought Dalton was weird,” Blaine says, finally.
“We don’t have any reverse-mindreading here,” Kurt says. “I think we’re still the more normal school.”
“Your cheerleading squad has elbow measurement requirements. To the nearest millimetre.”
“You can’t hold Sue Sylvester against us. That’s hardly fair.”
“Wait, the Sue Sylvester?” Blaine asks, but someone comes into the corridor at that moment and Kurt goes very still.
“Kurt?” Blaine asks, and then, when Kurt fails to reply, he turns to look at the corner Kurt is facing. The corner around which Karofsky has just walked, heading in their direction.
Is that him? Blaine looks from Karofsky to Kurt and back again. That must be him.
Okay. Confront him. Kurt can do this.
Maybe I should talk to him? Blaine is thinking. Kurt shoots him a sharp look, and he immediately mentally backs off. Okay, no, Kurt definitely needs to do this on his own, I get it, sorry.
Kurt closes his eyes for a moment, mentally preparing himself, and then he walks briskly down the corridor toward Karofsky, gripping the strap of his bag as if it could actually somehow offer him some physical support. Lockers loom threateningly to his left and right. They’re filthy, he knows; he’s occasionally entertained the idea of wearing less expensive sweaters, now that he seems to be having violent locker encounters almost every day, but being unfashionable would be a far greater sacrifice.
Karofsky notices him almost immediately. Kurt can see him setting his jaw.
Kurt can do this. Kurt can do this. He maintains eye contact with Karofsky as they approach each other, ignoring the instincts screaming at him to run and hide. He’s going to go right up to him and – and –
shit, he has no idea what he’s going to say.
And then it’s too late and he’s already hurtling into the lockers. One of the locks catches his arm with a wrenching pain and he falls to the floor, gritting his teeth to keep himself from crying out loud.
“What?” demand Blaine’s Noise and his voice simultaneously.
Don’t get involved, don’t get involved, Kurt is thinking desperately, but of course it’s no use; this Noise thing only goes one way.
Is he hurt? Blaine’s Noise is asking. I can’t believe— “You can’t just push people around like that!”
“Oh, yeah?” Karofsky asks, looking away from Kurt to size Blaine up.
I told you not to get involved, Kurt thinks in despair, although of course technically he didn’t. He tries to catch his breath and regain the full use of his muscles as quickly as he can, because he needs to drag Blaine out of here before the idiot gets them both seriously injured.
But said idiot is actually walking toward Karofsky, so it may already be too late for that.
Karofsky slams Blaine bodily into the lockers next to him and Kurt feels a sudden spike of terror – for Blaine, but also from Blaine, the sudden emotion so strong that Kurt can feel it through his Noise. It’s obvious that Karofsky feels it as well; his expression changes from anger to fear to confusion to fury almost faster than Kurt can follow it.
“You his boyfriend?” Karofsky asks, gripping the front of Blaine’s uniform jacket and getting up in his face.
Kurt can hear Blaine’s Noise becoming controlled and focused again after the instant of shock. So this is the bully. Needs to intimidate people to feel he has any worth as a person. It’s sad, really.
“What the hell, shut up,” Karofsky growls. “How are you even doing that?”
How am I speaking without moving my mouth, you mean? Blaine asks, pleasantly. I’m not. You’re hearing my thoughts.
Karofsky scowls. “Yeah, that’s what’s happening. You’re throwing your voice or something.”
Well, I must be very good at it if I can do this, Blaine thinks, and he must have opened his mental floodgates because they’re suddenly hit with the full flow of his Noise, rambling over itself as if there are thirty Blaines talking at once. Karofsky actually lets go of Blaine’s lapel and stumbles back, like Blaine’s thoughts are an actual physical force.
“What the fuck?” Karofsky demands.
“Oh,” Blaine says aloud, over his own stream of consciousness, “to answer your question, yes, I can hear your thoughts as well.”
Karofsky looks freaked. Like, seriously freaked. Possibly even more than your average holy-crap-this-guy-is-psychic level of freaked. He takes two steps back and then takes off down the corridor.
Kurt stares after him. Karofsky just ran away from a guy who didn’t even touch him. He did it in front of Kurt. Maybe... it seems too much to hope for, but maybe Karofsky will be so humiliated by this that he’ll avoid Kurt for a while. Maybe he’ll leave Kurt alone.
When Kurt looks back, Blaine is dusting his jacket down and bringing his Noise back under control, tucking away scraps like physical, didn’t realise and thought he was gonna before Kurt has the chance to have a real look at the unmoderated contents of Blaine’s mind. Kurt feels more frustrated than he probably should, given that hearing any thoughts at all is a lot more access than he gets with most people.
Speaking of looking at minds...
“You... can’t really hear other people’s thoughts, can you?” Kurt asks, just to make sure. There are some things he definitely needs not to be thinking about if that’s the case.
“No,” Blaine says, grinning, “I can’t. It’s easy enough to guess what someone’s going to be thinking in that situation, though.” He pauses, with a thoughtful glance in the direction in which Karofsky ran. “Interesting reaction. That’s a person with something to hide.”
Things change for Kurt after Blaine’s visit to McKinley. Not only has Karofsky stopped checking him into lockers, but he seems to be going out of his way to avoid even being seen anywhere near Kurt. No insults, no slushies, nothing more serious than the occasional instant of immediately-broken-off eye contact. Kurt wishes Blaine really had been able to hear his thoughts; what the hell does Karofsky think he knows?
He never thought he’d feel grateful for being treated like a leper, but, whatever it is that has Karofsky acting like merely being in Kurt’s presence will fry his internal organs, Kurt is clearly in Blaine’s debt. Two days after the confrontation, he sends him a text message.
Thanks for your help with Karofsky. I owe you. Kurt x
He spends longer than he’ll ever admit to considering whether he should include the ‘x’, but eventually he gives up and hits ‘send’. The message looks too impersonal without it, and Kurt has come to recognise that the majority of people aren’t given to overthinking tiny gestures quite as much as he is.
The reply comes twenty minutes later:
You don’t owe me anything, but wouldn’t say no to being bought coffee. xx
Kurt is going to put himself through a lot of overthinking about this, he knows, but he still breaks into a smile as he taps out When and where?
They see a lot of each other over the next couple of months. They grab coffee together; they go to the theatre. Kurt meets Blaine’s Dalton friends and privately thinks they’re a little stuffy. Blaine meets Kurt’s friends and thinks Rachel is a little terrifying, but of course it can’t be private and it takes weeks of effort to get her on good terms with him again.
One thing Kurt doesn’t think he’ll ever get tired of is the flash of honest pleasure in Blaine’s Noise whenever they meet. It’s not Rachel and Jesse; Blaine really does just want to spend time with him. Kurt has evidence. There are no ulterior motives here.
Well, none on Blaine’s side, anyway.
Because it’s also not Rachel and Jesse in the fact that Kurt and Blaine are not dating, and Kurt wouldn’t actually object to becoming a little more like Rachel and Jesse in that respect. The more time he spends with Blaine, the more he wants to handcuff himself to him just so he can spend all his time with him forever. He would even put up with the constant Noise. That’s the dictionary definition of being in love, he thinks, or at least it should be.
The thing is, Kurt can hear Blaine’s thoughts. If Blaine were romantically interested in him, he would presumably hear it in Blaine’s thoughts. But he hasn’t. And some part of him feels he should just be satisfied with knowing for a fact that someone doesn’t want him, rather than eternally tormenting himself with wondering, but, honestly, it’s really not that satisfying.
So here he is, only half-listening to the talk of his fellow students around him, doodling ‘Kurt Anderson’ in his notebook like he’s a thirteen-year-old girl (called Kurt). His life is pathetic.
And then he sees the heart-enclosed ‘Blaine + Kurt’ he’s drawing and practically dies on the spot, because he’s not seeing it with his eyes. He’s seeing it from a point just behind his shoulder. He’s seeing it in someone’s Noise, and there’s only one person with Noise he can imagine approaching him in a corridor at McKinley.
Kurt slams the notebook shut, even though it’s already too late, and jumps out of the chair and turns around, praying that Wes or David or anyone else who isn’t Blaine has inexplicably decided to come all the way here for, he doesn’t know, fashion advice.
It’s Blaine. Of course. His Noise is going crazy, and Kurt tries to listen to it for some sign of whether he should run away now or try to pass it off as a joke or – or kiss him, or something, but all he can make out is oh God Blaine Anderson you are an idiot, which isn’t actually that enlightening.
“Um,” Kurt says. It comes out about an octave above his usual pitch, which is no small feat. “Hi, Blaine.”
Blaine takes a deep breath, his Noise going ohgodohgodohgod in the background. “Okay, Kurt,” he says. “I’m not very good at... I mean, if you spend most of your time in a place where you can hear everyone’s thoughts, you kind of get used to it.” He hesitates. “I’m not very good at... reading people. So, uh... I need to ask. That.” He nods towards the notebook, which Kurt is hugging to his chest as if it can somehow protect him despite betraying him seconds ago. “Was that just a joke?”
This is amazing. Kurt is being offered a free ticket out of this horrible situation. But... but, although he’s getting pounded with a lot of emotions from Blaine’s Noise right now, disgust doesn’t seem to be one of them. Maybe he can lay out his heart right now, maturely, and Blaine can step on it, hopefully as gently as he can, and they can move past this and be friends.
“Yes,” Kurt says. “I mean, no. I don’t mean it was a joke. Yes, I am a little bit completely in love with you.” He hesitates. “Is that okay?”
“It’s fine,” Blaine says. He looks a little stunned. “Kurt, I’m really sorry.”
This doesn’t sound like a good start. Kurt averts his eyes.
“I haven’t...” Blaine begins, and then he makes a face and starts again. “I’ve been trying so hard not to think about it, because you’d hear and I didn’t want to freak you out. I couldn’t let myself fall in love with you. I couldn’t even consider it. It just wasn’t an option.”
His Noise is still more incoherent than Kurt has ever heard it, but Kurt manages to catch a could be an option now?
“So you never thought of me in that way?” Kurt asks.
“I couldn’t. Kurt, you don’t know how many friends I lost because they couldn’t handle hearing my thoughts about them.”
Kurt has been wondering for a long time whether falling in love with someone who isn’t straight for once would be too much to ask; he clearly needs to revise his requirements to ‘neither straight nor completely screwed up by involuntary telepathy’.
Still. It’s not a ‘no’. Well, all right, it’s a ‘no’, but it’s not a ‘never’. And Blaine hasn’t actually run away yet.
Kurt swallows. His throat feels dry. “Consider it,” he says. “I give you my permission.”
Blaine’s Noise becomes even louder and more frantic. There’s a wide empty space around them in the corridor; people have obviously started to avoid the guy who sounds like he has a crowd of invisible clones following him around. “I really, really can’t do that while you’re here,” he says, desperately.
“Why not?” Kurt asks. “I’ve been honest with you; can’t you be honest with me?”
“It’s not that,” Blaine says, discomfort radiating through in every line of his stance and every syllable of his Noise. “It’s just – it’s going to be really awkward if I start picturing anything.”
Ah. Yes, Kurt can understand that.
“I need to think about this for a while.” Blaine puts a hand on Kurt’s arm. His Noise immediately becomes a little calmer, weirdly. “But I want you to know I really, really care about you, Kurt. And if the answer’s no and you decide you’d prefer not to see me again, I’ll understand, but also that would really suck.”
Kurt gives him a small smile and feels a sudden twinge of something longing and hopeful and complicated.
It’s gone too quickly for him to know whether it’s his own reaction or whether it’s coming through Blaine’s Noise.
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