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Fic: something borrowed
Title: something borrowed
Fandom: Glee
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Kurt & Blaine, mentions of Karofsky
Warnings: Implicit threats, discussion of stalking
Summary: On his sixth day at Dalton, Kurt receives a package in the mail.
Count: 2327 words
Notes: This came about prior to "Special Education" airing, so it's vaguely AU. Written for this prompt on the angst meme. Transparent writer's feelings are transparent. Final meme catch-up post! I will now stop posting incessantly.
On Kurt's third day at Dalton, Blaine finally convinces him to join the Warblers, and Kurt stares out at the sea of smiling faces -- listening to the accompanying welcoming applause -- and he thinks that Dalton can't be entirely for real.
When Kurt has been wearing the blazer with its heinous red piping for four days, he stops flinching whenever someone slams a locker shut.
On Kurt's sixth day at Dalton, he goes down to the mail room with Ollie after a very long, very tiring Warblers rehearsal. Despite Carole's cheerful threats of sending him cookies and the fact that half of the female New Directions have demanded his address, Kurt doesn't think that he'll actually have any mail yet; it hasn't even been a week, after all, and his dad has made noises about coming to pick him up if he wants to spend the next weekend at home. Ollie is a boarder in Kurt's building, though, and Kurt has promised himself and Blaine (mostly Blaine; he's very nosy and well-meaning, and Kurt wishes it annoyed him more) that he's going to make an effort to prevent himself from pulling into any kind of a shell, and -- well, Ollie is cheerful and funny and is the first straight guy Kurt has ever met who is willing to admit that he knows Bernadette Peters' entire oeuvre.
Ollie wants to check his mail on the way back to their dorm, so Kurt offers to join him. They walk in just as the mail room's solitary staff member is closing up the window; it doesn't take too much convincing to get him to see if Ollie's sister has shipped the favorite scarf that he forgot in Minnesota over Thanksgiving break.
"Hey, look for any packages for Hummel while you're back there, would you?" shouts Ollie, and the staff member's retort is wordless and muffled from behind a stack of shelves, but clearly not intended to be pleasant. "--Please!" Ollie adds.
Kurt leans into the window, too, rolling his eyes at Ollie. He calls, "Please ignore Oliver; he was dropped on his head as a small child and it rattled the part of his brain that deals with all things mannerly."
Ollie laughs and Kurt flicks his fingers at him, feeling his nose start to run in the warmth of the mail room after having been outside. "I told you, there won't be anything for me. I only live two hours away, and I just left," he tells Ollie, which is, of course, when the elderly mail room attendant comes back with three packages in hand.
Kurt thinks that that's quite the windfall for Ollie -- who exclaims, "Sweet! I totally forgot I ordered from Amazon!" as he grabs the two larger boxes -- until the employee pushes the smallest package across the counter at him.
Kurt has a startled half-second to glance at the box and see his name written across the top in an unfamiliar ugly scrawl, and then the employee is shoving a clipboard at him.
"ID's and signatures, gentlemen," says the attendant, and Kurt is kept busy digging out his brand-new student ID and signing his name on the forms with an automatic flourish.
"I told you you should check!" Ollie crows triumphantly, flashing the employee his ID and then nabbing the clipboard from Kurt.
Kurt tugs the package over and lifts it into his hands. Something rolls around inside. Even upon a second study, the handwriting doesn't ping with any kind of familiarity. It's decidedly male, given the messiness and just how hard it looks like someone drove the pen into the box, but it's certainly not from his father and he doesn't think it's from Finn or Mr. Schue, either. Kurt can't exactly imagine Mike or Puck or Artie or Sam mailing him anything.
He glances over his shoulder at the window, but Ollie is engaging the attendant in a spirited discussion of Christmas traditions as he fills out the paperwork for his packages. Kurt turns away, plucks a box cutter off a shelf of flyers and empty boxes, and he neatly slits the packing tape and opens the flaps.
He must make some kind of soft sound, because Ollie is suddenly asking, "Kurt? Is everything okay?" His voice is distant; everything is muffled, like someone has just put a pair of noise-canceling headphones over Kurt's ears or he's underwater.
"I'm fine," Kurt says, and his voice sounds slow and strangled and foreign. "It's fine."
He's barely aware of Ollie and the old man behind the counter exchanging a glance, and then Ollie says quietly, "Don't take this the wrong way, Kurt, but you look like somebody just hit you in the face," and he reaches over very, very slowly and takes the box cutter out of Kurt's nerveless fingers.
The world comes roaring back all at once, too bright and too loud. "It's fine," Kurt snaps, slamming the flaps closed before Ollie can get a glance at the box's contents. His chest is tight; he tells himself to breathe but it's hard. "Can we--" His voice is shrill. He shuts his eyes and swallows and ruthlessly shoves down the panic as best as he can. "Are your packages signed for?"
Ollie hesitates, then nods.
Kurt walks out. When Ollie doesn't follow, his first instinct is to just stalk back to the dormitory by himself, since he would really rather be by himself -- and then he thinks about the icy path waiting outside. He thinks about the patch of woods that it borders and how the slightest sound carries across the snow; the way that the skin on the back of his neck is crawling and he already feels like someone is watching him, here inside the well-lit library basement with plenty of witnesses.
Kurt squares his shoulders, marches back into the mailroom, grabs Ollie by the coat sleeve, and pulls him along.
"Whoa, hey, where are we going?"
Why didn't you tell anybody? Kurt remembers, in his dad's voice.
Courage, he thinks.
And then, of all people, he hears Rachel Berry's voice. I know you're lonely, but you're not alone.
"I received an incredibly creepy package, and I would appreciate it if you accompanied me across the quad so that I can talk to Mr. Mayhew and call my dad," Kurt says with all the matter-of-fact, brisk dignity that he possesses, his heart hammering as he shoves the door open and they step out into the dark wind chill.
And then he isn't hauling a barely-cooperative teenage boy along behind him anymore; Ollie steps right up beside him and he says, "Jesus, what'd somebody send you?" and Kurt has never been so grateful for outdoor lighting and a concerned tone of voice in his entire life.
If someone is knocking on his door, that means they got past the building's locked doors and on-duty desk monitor, Mr. Mayhew and Dalton's head of security in the hall (who are probably still on the phone with Kurt's dad, Kurt thinks), and the two Warblers and one non-Warbler hallmate who have taken up positions outside Kurt's door.
Kurt still just about jumps out of his Gucci slippers.
"Kurt, it's Blaine," says Wes's muffled voice.
Kurt hasn't exactly been doing much since he told Mr. Mayhew that he would be in his room when the adults needed him again. He toed out of his wet shoes and finally took off his jacket and his hat and unwound his scarf from around his neck, and he neatly put everything in its place and hung his blazer on the back of his desk chair. Then he found himself with shaking hands and a decided lack of things to do, so he perched on his bed and has been numbly watching his laptop screensaver sift through photos from his My Pictures folder; Mercedes laughing, his mom having a tea party with Kurt when he was six, Tina and Artie striking a wannabe gangster pose together.
Kurt slides down off the bed. Even before the second syllable of "come in" has made it out of his mouth, his door opens; Blaine is barely inside before he's blocking Kurt's view of the hall (hiding Ollie and Jason, who are leaning on the doorframe outside). Kurt must make some kind of portrait of unhingedness, standing there in the middle of his room wearing most of his uniform with a pair of herringbone slippers, because Blaine immediately steps in and hugs him, hard.
Kurt would have expected himself to flinch away, but instead, he finds himself immediately wrapping his arms around him and holding on tight. Blaine's hair is soaked and plastered to his head and his T-shirt is on backward and inside-out, and he smells like that awful Axe body wash that Kurt pretends -- for the good of their friendship -- that he doesn't know Blaine uses. He's warm, Kurt thinks.
"What is going on?" Blaine's muffled voice asks, from Kurt's shoulder. "I get out of the shower and everyone's gone nuts." He pulls back and regards Kurt with a steady, bewildered look. "Do you realize there's an honor guard on your room?"
Kurt sort of smiles, shaky; he steps back, folding his arms around himself, and he tips his head at the box sitting on his desk. He clears his throat. "Put on gloves before you touch it."
Blaine glances from him to the package, then he takes two decisive steps over, plucks one of Kurt's discarded leather gloves off the desk and pulls it on over his hand, and picks the package up. Kurt hears the contents roll and his throat suddenly feels too tight again; he turns away, which means that he misses Blaine's face when he opens it.
The room is too quiet for too long, and then Blaine's low voice says, "So I'm figuring this is the cake topper that Karofsky took."
The bride and groom's snapped-off heads roll across the bottom of the box again.
"The very same," Kurt says, sounding much more sarcastic and steady than he feels. The flaps rustle, and he hears Blaine suck in a breath.
"Kurt, this is addressed to your room."
Kurt can see that handwriting now even when he shuts his eyes.
kurt hummel
dormitory b, room 21
dalton academy
westerville, oh 43081
"Not the mailroom address; your room."
Kurt's hands curl up so tightly that he's pretty sure there are going to be marks on his arms, even through his shirt sleeves. "I noticed."
"Where the hell," and Blaine's voice is sharp even as it cracks, "did that psychopath get your address?"
Kurt whirls around; he's aware that his door is still wide open and that Ollie and Wes are pretending they can't hear this while Jason doesn't bother to hide the fact that he's listening, and that the boys living on either side of him can hear every word, but Kurt doesn't care. "I don't know, Blaine," he snaps savagely with all the fury he has left in him (which, it turns out, is a lot). "It's not like I posted it on my Facebook page and tagged him in a note that said, 'Dear loverlips, your rampaging cabbage breath and frequent violent outbursts are turn-ons; come and stalk m--' "
Blaine is on him all at once, hauling him into his arms with a kind of desperate recklessness that he never uses around Kurt, and Kurt gives a startled, dismayed wheeze as all the breath is knocked out of him at once. Blaine's arm is slung up Kurt's back with his hand clutching his shoulder tightly, his other arm pulled just as tight around Kurt's waist. They're pressed chest to chest, Blaine's head bowed and his chin hooked over Kurt's shoulder, before Kurt can entirely wrap his mind around what just happened. He stands there, frozen, for several long seconds, and then he imagines that he can almost feel Blaine's heart beat against his chest.
Thumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthump--
Blaine, Kurt slowly realizes, is afraid.
He doesn't know what to do or to say, at first. Part of what got him through the first 10 minutes after he and Ollie had arrived in the dorm was the thought of what he had been sure Blaine would do when he found out about the headless cake topper: sit down, hand Kurt his phone, look at him steadily, and tell him to call his dad.
This isn't very steady. Oh, it's quiet, and he's keeping it between the two of them, but Blaine -- Kurt is pretty sure -- is silently freaking out.
Of course he is, Kurt thinks. This entire situation is absurdly dramatic and Blaine worries about Kurt, and he's a 17-year-old boy with a history of being bullied, not some all-knowing savior who was carved into perfection from marble.
Kurt forgets that, sometimes.
"Ollie was with me," Kurt says, finally. "He walked me back here and I told Mr. Mayhew, and we called my dad; they're calling the police. Someone is going to come out tonight to take my statement and pick up the box to do -- fingerprint tests or handwriting analysis or whatever exactly it is that they do in situations like this." He finishes, shaky and quietly furious, in Blaine's ear: "And then we're going to get a restraining order."
Blaine nods, very faintly, against his shoulder. Kurt thinks that means he approves of the steps that Kurt has taken. It's hard to say who is comforting who.
When the police officer shows up (and Kurt's dad, not long afterward), no one raises an objection about the boy who radiates silent, white-faced fury from his place at Kurt's side, holding his hand while Kurt explains shoves and dumpsters and death threats and a headless cake topper and a kiss.
There are even more benefits to attending a prestigious private school with the sons of influential families than he'd first realized, Kurt thinks, a little wry and a little bitter.
Fandom: Glee
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Kurt & Blaine, mentions of Karofsky
Warnings: Implicit threats, discussion of stalking
Summary: On his sixth day at Dalton, Kurt receives a package in the mail.
Count: 2327 words
Notes: This came about prior to "Special Education" airing, so it's vaguely AU. Written for this prompt on the angst meme. Transparent writer's feelings are transparent. Final meme catch-up post! I will now stop posting incessantly.
On Kurt's third day at Dalton, Blaine finally convinces him to join the Warblers, and Kurt stares out at the sea of smiling faces -- listening to the accompanying welcoming applause -- and he thinks that Dalton can't be entirely for real.
When Kurt has been wearing the blazer with its heinous red piping for four days, he stops flinching whenever someone slams a locker shut.
On Kurt's sixth day at Dalton, he goes down to the mail room with Ollie after a very long, very tiring Warblers rehearsal. Despite Carole's cheerful threats of sending him cookies and the fact that half of the female New Directions have demanded his address, Kurt doesn't think that he'll actually have any mail yet; it hasn't even been a week, after all, and his dad has made noises about coming to pick him up if he wants to spend the next weekend at home. Ollie is a boarder in Kurt's building, though, and Kurt has promised himself and Blaine (mostly Blaine; he's very nosy and well-meaning, and Kurt wishes it annoyed him more) that he's going to make an effort to prevent himself from pulling into any kind of a shell, and -- well, Ollie is cheerful and funny and is the first straight guy Kurt has ever met who is willing to admit that he knows Bernadette Peters' entire oeuvre.
Ollie wants to check his mail on the way back to their dorm, so Kurt offers to join him. They walk in just as the mail room's solitary staff member is closing up the window; it doesn't take too much convincing to get him to see if Ollie's sister has shipped the favorite scarf that he forgot in Minnesota over Thanksgiving break.
"Hey, look for any packages for Hummel while you're back there, would you?" shouts Ollie, and the staff member's retort is wordless and muffled from behind a stack of shelves, but clearly not intended to be pleasant. "--Please!" Ollie adds.
Kurt leans into the window, too, rolling his eyes at Ollie. He calls, "Please ignore Oliver; he was dropped on his head as a small child and it rattled the part of his brain that deals with all things mannerly."
Ollie laughs and Kurt flicks his fingers at him, feeling his nose start to run in the warmth of the mail room after having been outside. "I told you, there won't be anything for me. I only live two hours away, and I just left," he tells Ollie, which is, of course, when the elderly mail room attendant comes back with three packages in hand.
Kurt thinks that that's quite the windfall for Ollie -- who exclaims, "Sweet! I totally forgot I ordered from Amazon!" as he grabs the two larger boxes -- until the employee pushes the smallest package across the counter at him.
Kurt has a startled half-second to glance at the box and see his name written across the top in an unfamiliar ugly scrawl, and then the employee is shoving a clipboard at him.
"ID's and signatures, gentlemen," says the attendant, and Kurt is kept busy digging out his brand-new student ID and signing his name on the forms with an automatic flourish.
"I told you you should check!" Ollie crows triumphantly, flashing the employee his ID and then nabbing the clipboard from Kurt.
Kurt tugs the package over and lifts it into his hands. Something rolls around inside. Even upon a second study, the handwriting doesn't ping with any kind of familiarity. It's decidedly male, given the messiness and just how hard it looks like someone drove the pen into the box, but it's certainly not from his father and he doesn't think it's from Finn or Mr. Schue, either. Kurt can't exactly imagine Mike or Puck or Artie or Sam mailing him anything.
He glances over his shoulder at the window, but Ollie is engaging the attendant in a spirited discussion of Christmas traditions as he fills out the paperwork for his packages. Kurt turns away, plucks a box cutter off a shelf of flyers and empty boxes, and he neatly slits the packing tape and opens the flaps.
He must make some kind of soft sound, because Ollie is suddenly asking, "Kurt? Is everything okay?" His voice is distant; everything is muffled, like someone has just put a pair of noise-canceling headphones over Kurt's ears or he's underwater.
"I'm fine," Kurt says, and his voice sounds slow and strangled and foreign. "It's fine."
He's barely aware of Ollie and the old man behind the counter exchanging a glance, and then Ollie says quietly, "Don't take this the wrong way, Kurt, but you look like somebody just hit you in the face," and he reaches over very, very slowly and takes the box cutter out of Kurt's nerveless fingers.
The world comes roaring back all at once, too bright and too loud. "It's fine," Kurt snaps, slamming the flaps closed before Ollie can get a glance at the box's contents. His chest is tight; he tells himself to breathe but it's hard. "Can we--" His voice is shrill. He shuts his eyes and swallows and ruthlessly shoves down the panic as best as he can. "Are your packages signed for?"
Ollie hesitates, then nods.
Kurt walks out. When Ollie doesn't follow, his first instinct is to just stalk back to the dormitory by himself, since he would really rather be by himself -- and then he thinks about the icy path waiting outside. He thinks about the patch of woods that it borders and how the slightest sound carries across the snow; the way that the skin on the back of his neck is crawling and he already feels like someone is watching him, here inside the well-lit library basement with plenty of witnesses.
Kurt squares his shoulders, marches back into the mailroom, grabs Ollie by the coat sleeve, and pulls him along.
"Whoa, hey, where are we going?"
Why didn't you tell anybody? Kurt remembers, in his dad's voice.
Courage, he thinks.
And then, of all people, he hears Rachel Berry's voice. I know you're lonely, but you're not alone.
"I received an incredibly creepy package, and I would appreciate it if you accompanied me across the quad so that I can talk to Mr. Mayhew and call my dad," Kurt says with all the matter-of-fact, brisk dignity that he possesses, his heart hammering as he shoves the door open and they step out into the dark wind chill.
And then he isn't hauling a barely-cooperative teenage boy along behind him anymore; Ollie steps right up beside him and he says, "Jesus, what'd somebody send you?" and Kurt has never been so grateful for outdoor lighting and a concerned tone of voice in his entire life.
If someone is knocking on his door, that means they got past the building's locked doors and on-duty desk monitor, Mr. Mayhew and Dalton's head of security in the hall (who are probably still on the phone with Kurt's dad, Kurt thinks), and the two Warblers and one non-Warbler hallmate who have taken up positions outside Kurt's door.
Kurt still just about jumps out of his Gucci slippers.
"Kurt, it's Blaine," says Wes's muffled voice.
Kurt hasn't exactly been doing much since he told Mr. Mayhew that he would be in his room when the adults needed him again. He toed out of his wet shoes and finally took off his jacket and his hat and unwound his scarf from around his neck, and he neatly put everything in its place and hung his blazer on the back of his desk chair. Then he found himself with shaking hands and a decided lack of things to do, so he perched on his bed and has been numbly watching his laptop screensaver sift through photos from his My Pictures folder; Mercedes laughing, his mom having a tea party with Kurt when he was six, Tina and Artie striking a wannabe gangster pose together.
Kurt slides down off the bed. Even before the second syllable of "come in" has made it out of his mouth, his door opens; Blaine is barely inside before he's blocking Kurt's view of the hall (hiding Ollie and Jason, who are leaning on the doorframe outside). Kurt must make some kind of portrait of unhingedness, standing there in the middle of his room wearing most of his uniform with a pair of herringbone slippers, because Blaine immediately steps in and hugs him, hard.
Kurt would have expected himself to flinch away, but instead, he finds himself immediately wrapping his arms around him and holding on tight. Blaine's hair is soaked and plastered to his head and his T-shirt is on backward and inside-out, and he smells like that awful Axe body wash that Kurt pretends -- for the good of their friendship -- that he doesn't know Blaine uses. He's warm, Kurt thinks.
"What is going on?" Blaine's muffled voice asks, from Kurt's shoulder. "I get out of the shower and everyone's gone nuts." He pulls back and regards Kurt with a steady, bewildered look. "Do you realize there's an honor guard on your room?"
Kurt sort of smiles, shaky; he steps back, folding his arms around himself, and he tips his head at the box sitting on his desk. He clears his throat. "Put on gloves before you touch it."
Blaine glances from him to the package, then he takes two decisive steps over, plucks one of Kurt's discarded leather gloves off the desk and pulls it on over his hand, and picks the package up. Kurt hears the contents roll and his throat suddenly feels too tight again; he turns away, which means that he misses Blaine's face when he opens it.
The room is too quiet for too long, and then Blaine's low voice says, "So I'm figuring this is the cake topper that Karofsky took."
The bride and groom's snapped-off heads roll across the bottom of the box again.
"The very same," Kurt says, sounding much more sarcastic and steady than he feels. The flaps rustle, and he hears Blaine suck in a breath.
"Kurt, this is addressed to your room."
Kurt can see that handwriting now even when he shuts his eyes.
kurt hummel
dormitory b, room 21
dalton academy
westerville, oh 43081
"Not the mailroom address; your room."
Kurt's hands curl up so tightly that he's pretty sure there are going to be marks on his arms, even through his shirt sleeves. "I noticed."
"Where the hell," and Blaine's voice is sharp even as it cracks, "did that psychopath get your address?"
Kurt whirls around; he's aware that his door is still wide open and that Ollie and Wes are pretending they can't hear this while Jason doesn't bother to hide the fact that he's listening, and that the boys living on either side of him can hear every word, but Kurt doesn't care. "I don't know, Blaine," he snaps savagely with all the fury he has left in him (which, it turns out, is a lot). "It's not like I posted it on my Facebook page and tagged him in a note that said, 'Dear loverlips, your rampaging cabbage breath and frequent violent outbursts are turn-ons; come and stalk m--' "
Blaine is on him all at once, hauling him into his arms with a kind of desperate recklessness that he never uses around Kurt, and Kurt gives a startled, dismayed wheeze as all the breath is knocked out of him at once. Blaine's arm is slung up Kurt's back with his hand clutching his shoulder tightly, his other arm pulled just as tight around Kurt's waist. They're pressed chest to chest, Blaine's head bowed and his chin hooked over Kurt's shoulder, before Kurt can entirely wrap his mind around what just happened. He stands there, frozen, for several long seconds, and then he imagines that he can almost feel Blaine's heart beat against his chest.
Thumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthump--
Blaine, Kurt slowly realizes, is afraid.
He doesn't know what to do or to say, at first. Part of what got him through the first 10 minutes after he and Ollie had arrived in the dorm was the thought of what he had been sure Blaine would do when he found out about the headless cake topper: sit down, hand Kurt his phone, look at him steadily, and tell him to call his dad.
This isn't very steady. Oh, it's quiet, and he's keeping it between the two of them, but Blaine -- Kurt is pretty sure -- is silently freaking out.
Of course he is, Kurt thinks. This entire situation is absurdly dramatic and Blaine worries about Kurt, and he's a 17-year-old boy with a history of being bullied, not some all-knowing savior who was carved into perfection from marble.
Kurt forgets that, sometimes.
"Ollie was with me," Kurt says, finally. "He walked me back here and I told Mr. Mayhew, and we called my dad; they're calling the police. Someone is going to come out tonight to take my statement and pick up the box to do -- fingerprint tests or handwriting analysis or whatever exactly it is that they do in situations like this." He finishes, shaky and quietly furious, in Blaine's ear: "And then we're going to get a restraining order."
Blaine nods, very faintly, against his shoulder. Kurt thinks that means he approves of the steps that Kurt has taken. It's hard to say who is comforting who.
When the police officer shows up (and Kurt's dad, not long afterward), no one raises an objection about the boy who radiates silent, white-faced fury from his place at Kurt's side, holding his hand while Kurt explains shoves and dumpsters and death threats and a headless cake topper and a kiss.
There are even more benefits to attending a prestigious private school with the sons of influential families than he'd first realized, Kurt thinks, a little wry and a little bitter.
no subject
So if you can't tell, I really loved your Blaine, and I loved the 'honor guard' outside Kurt's door, and I loved the little details that make this feel so real (Axe bodywash, the way your hearing goes distant when you're in shock).
I loved it so much I'm not even trying to come up with a synonym for 'love.' I'll stick with what works.
Lovelovelove.
no subject