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Fic: to boldly go [1/2]
Title: to boldly go [1/2]
Fandom: Glee/Star Trek
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Blaine Anderson/Kurt Hummel; blink-and-you'll-miss-them cameos from various Warblers, Rachel Berry, Santana Lopez, and Jacob Ben Israel
Summary: Blaine Anderson is in the Starfleet Academy command track when he meets fellow cadet Kurt Hummel.
Count: ~12,260 words total; 5770 in this part
Notes:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
preromantics put out the call on Tumblr for Blaine in a cadet uniform. I started writing a drabble and this ... happened! Basically it is all Tumblr's fault.
* * *
If there’s anyone in the current crop of Starfleet Academy cadets who’s infamous, it’s Kurt Hummel.
Blaine has never shared an astrophysics lab with him or even laid eyes on him, but after all the stories that have gone around the academy (Cadet Hummel stared down Captain Kam’har over a question of Federation Treaty history; Cadet Hummel’s ingenious jerry-rig after the simulator engines were disabled helped bring his captain’s crew the closest to defeating the Kobayashi Maru scenario that anyone has managed in three years; ice runs in Cadet Hummel’s veins, possibly literally; Cadet Hummel once got into a bar fight with 16 Klingon warriors and a sehlat, and won), Blaine is picturing a larger than life figure.
So he gapes at the slender figure sitting at a table by himself and slowly eating some kind of salad as he peruses material on his PADD. He has elfin features and long fingers, and he looks like he spends a lot more time on his hair than Blaine ever would have imagined.
“That’s Kurt Hummel,” Blaine says dubiously.
“You’ve got ears; I know you heard what I said,” says Trent, with attitude, and Blaine vaguely swats at him without looking away from where Kurt Hummel is lightly tapping his own ear with a stylus.
“Nobody ever mentioned he was…” Blaine ignores Trent and all of his irritated attempts to smack Blaine’s hand away, his eyebrows furrowing as he tries to come up with the right words, “so…”
Across the galley, Hummel’s head rises sharply. There are enough tables and people between them that he can’t possibly have heard any of this conversation, but his head turns and he looks unerringly, straight as an arrow, directly at Blaine. His eyes have narrowed but Blaine can see even from here that they’re dark but also a strange, remarkable, changeable color; even as they make eye contact for all of four seconds, Blaine decides that they’re ringed blue, then he changes his mind to green, then gray.
Hummel glances away again, his expression unchanging; he snaps his PADD case shut and rises with his tray. He is broad in the shoulders and trim in the waist, clearly taller than Blaine, and as he walks toward the replicator, Blaine notes that he moves with remarkable self-assurance and grace.
“I don’t want anything to do with this,” Trent comments, but it’s said placidly as he chews on a mouthful of some Denobulan delicacy that smells like fish that’s been sitting out on the wharf for days.
“Anything to do with what,” Blaine asks dumbly, watching Hummel go.
“None of it,” Trent reiterates.
Trent is full of empty threats; after Blaine asks very nicely, he introduces Blaine to the cadet who shared an astrophysics lab with Cadet Hummel last year.
Blaine doesn’t learn very much from the conversation, except that Kurt Hummel keeps to himself, rarely smiles, and seriously knows his stuff.
Blaine also learns that the cadet who Trent introduces him to takes a nervewracking amount of joy in discussing his peers. After he says something about a weekly broadcast, Blaine extricates himself from the conversation as quickly and diplomatically as possible.
Despite Blaine’s newfound interest in Cadet Hummel, their next run-in is both literal and very, very accidental.
Scrambling down the broad staircase, Blaine doesn’t watch where he’s going as he struggles to settle the cuffs of his uniform jacket sleeves to make sure they’re in regulation order, and he collides with something warm and solid that yelps. By the time he’s fully aware of what’s happening, he’s sprawled on the stairs staring up into Kurt Hummel’s face. Cadet Hummel looks momentarily stunned, hunched over with his hand in an iron-grip on the balustrade. A sea of cadets in red uniform stream past all around them, late stragglers headed for the assembly.
Blaine becomes aware that his mouth is hanging open. He shuts it, then promptly opens it again so he can say, “Wow, I am so sorry. Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” says Cadet Hummel. He actually sounds breathless, like Blaine knocked the wind out of him; his voice is improbably high and fluting. And — oh.
His irises are enormous and (and Blaine doesn’t know how he missed this, even from across the galley) almost completely black, ringed in the same striking glasz color that he had noticed before. Blaine has never seen anything like it.
Up close, he’s even more attractive than he’d looked from a distance. His lips are parted slightly as he stares at Blaine.
And then an instructor shouts from down below, the doors giving the telltale hiss that someone has given the order to close them, and Blaine lunges up and instinctively grabs Cadet Hummel’s hand. It’s warm and smooth and dry, and his long fingers spasm, presumably with surprise, as Blaine pulls him along. They dash through the doors seconds before closing and Blaine flings himself into the nearest seat, just in time to escape censure. Cadet Hummel yanks his hand away like he’s been burned, but drops into the empty seat beside him very, very quickly.
They sit through the mandatory lecture on the Prime Directive in silence. Blaine takes copious notes, flicking through screens on his PADD as fast as he can, but when he glances sideways at Hummel, he finds him sitting perfectly straight, one leg crossed over the other and his hands clasped over his knee, giving every appearance of listening intently.
Afterward, they maneuver the exiting crowds side by side. “I’m really sorry about running you over, by the way,” Blaine says, glancing sideways at the other cadet. Hummel nods without even looking at him; he honestly seems bored by the entire interaction. “I’m Blaine. Blaine Anderson.” He extends a hand, smiling.
Hummel flicks his eyes very faintly sideways and politely pretends that he doesn’t see the gesture. After several seconds, Blaine hesitantly pulls his hand in. He’s beginning to think that this was a bad idea; it’s hard not to feel stupid and embarrassed. Sometimes, he thinks he can make it through the command track by smiling and faking confidence when he doesn’t actually feel it and being diplomatic and friendly and highly competent, but that’s just not the way that it works. He needs to be able to read a situation, too; he needs to demonstrate actual leadership.
Something flickers in Hummel’s face, something that would be a twitch on anyone else but Blaine thinks has to be significant, and then he softly says, “Kurt Hummel,” and presses his thumb into Blaine’s palm in the faintest of handshakes before letting go.
The crush of other cadets separates them within seconds, but Blaine would swear that he can feel a phantom hand brushing his for the rest of the day.
Blaine may have taken to haunting the galley at off-hours.
Trent and David and Nick tease him about it, because he’s apparently the most transparent guy on the entire west coast of the United States, but they leave him be; Blaine privately thinks that they’ve probably decided that this is a healthier interest than the time he decided that the active-duty advisor in his astronav course was dreamy.
His hunch pays off when he takes an obscure Klingon dialect recording for some studying and a late night snack, and he finds a solitary figure hunched over a table.
Blaine tips his head from side to side, working the kinks out of his neck, and he shakes his fingers out in a burst of nerves. Before he can even approach, Hummel’s back stiffens and he turns around. Their eyes meet, and they look at each other, and Cadet Hummel turns back to face the table, which Blaine takes as a tacit invitation. He crosses the galley to the other side of the table.
“Hi,” Blaine says, tray carefully balanced. “Mind if I join you?”
Hummel takes a look around at all of the other empty tables, and then he says, “It’s a free federation.”
“Do you get some of your best thinking done in the galley?” Blaine asks, sitting down, and he’s rewarded by an immediate glance that makes him feel like Hummel A) has no idea what he’s talking about, and B) is silently judging him. “I’ve seen you here a couple times,” he clarifies; “mostly late at night.”
“My roommate is Aquellian,” Cadet Hummel says, and Blaine nods understandingly.
“They’re really diurnal, right?”
For about two seconds, Kurt looks mildly impressed. “He swears that if so much as one ray of light strikes his eye-stalks between the hours of 2200 and 0430, whether I have a life-changing exam to study for or not, he’ll shrivel up and melt,” he says, dry. And then, much to Blaine’s surprise, he adds, “He’s a drama queen, and I know from drama.”
Blaine laughs, delighted. “Really? Because—” He wrestles with it for a quick beat, then asks, “Can I be honest with you?”
Kurt studies him through those dark eyes for several long seconds, clearly assessing, and then he says, “Yes, you can.”
“I kind of spent weeks trying to figure out if you had Vulcan ears.” Kurt stares blankly at him. “You’re a little intense. Not in a bad way; just in a … logical way.”
There is a pause, and then one side of Kurt’s mouth tips faintly upward and he turns the side of his head toward Blaine, and he lifts the wing of hair that is covering the very tip of his ear. It’s smooth and pink and perfectly rounded. “Now you know,” Kurt says.
It takes Blaine two hours of casual but surprisingly light conversation to realize that he has started thinking of him as Kurt in his head.
It only takes the first ten minutes to realize that he wants to make Kurt smile all the time.
Kurt is funny; that’s the thing. A lot of people seem to think that he’s humorless or has some kind of a stick up his ass, but it’s not true. He has a fantastic — if dark — sense of humor, and he waxes endearingly, amazingly poetic over the sound of a perfectly calibrated warp core.
They start out with careful conversations over class notes, but they end up wandering farther afield and exploring adventurous dining options both on and off the Starfleet campus. They sprawl across the lawn on a sunny San Francisco afternoon, and Kurt starts coming to Blaine and Trent’s room at night when he doesn’t want to hole up surrounded by darkness and his roommate’s snores.
David presses tickets to this experimental Andorian theater piece into Blaine’s hands, after the girlfriend who wanted to go dumps him, and Blaine spends three very confusing hours in a dark theater listening to actors shout in a language that he doesn’t understand, but it turns out okay in the end because Kurt watches rapt at his side and then loudly argues about the production’s subtextual meanings for the entire trip back to the academy dormitories.
Blaine finds out little tidbits about Kurt’s life in flashes here and there. He’s from a small town somewhere in the midwest and doesn’t seem to have been happy or felt particularly welcome there, but he speaks warmly, if hesitantly and rarely, of his father. He never mentions his mother or any friends from home; Blaine suspects that he never had any of the latter. And that’s a shame, that’s wrong, because Kurt is confident and hilarious and steely and passionate and honest and sarcastic and thoughtful and absurdly, stunningly sweet. Sometimes, Blaine thinks that Kurt can figure out what he’s thinking even before Blaine himself does. He’s a little stiff when first getting to know people, but Blaine gets to introduce him to all of his friends and watch him slowly begin to unfurl, and it’s like some old-world idea of magic.
The first day that Blaine sees Kurt walking in the halls and he isn’t alone (he’s with a petite, laughing Orion girl; his mouth is twisted in good-natured distaste as he makes a doubtless perfectly cutting remark), Blaine smiles stupidly after his back until Cadet Lopez demands to know what the hell is wrong with him and how she can avoid catching it.
Blaine doesn’t know why Kurt went inward as far as he did (he has vague ideas sometimes, maybe, of Kurt needing to focus on classes and his commission in order to make his father proud, but then Blaine thinks that he’s probably just projecting), and he doesn’t have an inflated enough sense of self-worth to think that the obvious changes in Kurt are taking place because of Blaine.
But he likes to think that their friendship is helping.
Blaine finally figures it out when Kurt drops by after Trent’s grandmother passes away.
The death wasn’t totally unexpected, from what Trent has said, but from other things that Trent has shared over the two years that they’ve been rooming together, Blaine knows that he was really, really close to the grandmother who raised him. Trent pulls it together and says he needs some air before he starts getting the necessary permissions to go home for the funeral. He says that he wants space, which Blaine can respect, even if it worries him. He feels better after he hears David greet Trent in the hall just outside their door, and two pairs of feet walk away together.
When the door chimes 20 seconds later, Blaine doesn’t glance up from the performance schedule that he’s checking. “I think he’s going to be o—” he calls, and then the door chimes again. Blaine blinks and rolls out of his bed.
At the door, he’s treated to about a half a second of Kurt’s smug smile before his expression shifts like somebody has punched him in the stomach. He lurches and Blaine grabs his elbow, trying to steady him.
“Kurt,” he begins, feeling panic spike up, and Kurt flings himself away from him.
“Don’t touch me,” Kurt orders, sharp and a little shrill, and they face off just inside Blaine and Trent’s room.
Kurt’s mouth and hands are shaking minutely, Blaine notices; his eyes are wide and wet-looking and Blaine knows that he has issues with people getting physically close to him (it’s been impossible to miss, over the last two months), but this is dramatic beyond anything he has ever witnessed.
The door quietly hisses shut.
“What happened?” Kurt hisses. Blaine stares at him, silent and not understanding. “In — here,” he clarifies, his eyes looking a little distant for a half a second. “It happened here; what are you — are you okay?” He looks and sounds utterly desperate, like he’s reading Blaine’s clear panic right on his face and feeding off of it.
“I’m,” Blaine starts, and then he tries again. “Trent’s grandmother died; he’s upset, but I’m okay Kurt.” He doesn’t bother to finish one sentence before beginning the next. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t — I probably should have told you,” Kurt says, and he sounds a little choked, but he draws his shoulders up very, very tightly, one hand on his hip. It’s a defensive posture that Blaine recognizes very well. “My mother was Betazoid.”
Blaine can feel the bottom drop right out of his stomach.
From the immediate shift in Kurt’s attempt at a brave face, he strongly suspects that Kurt can feel it as well.
“You’re a telepath?” Blaine asks, stunned, and all that he can think is: are you reading my mind right now?
“No,” Kurt says emphatically, his arms folded. “I can’t read anyone’s thoughts or talk without opening my mouth. As I believe I mentioned, I’m only half Betazoid.”
Blaine must pull some kind of astonished expression, because Kurt shoots a bitchy face right back at him and says, “Oh please; the first thing everyone does when they find out is start thinking about whether I can hear them.”
He blinks, and then — he laughs. It just bursts out of him; he wasn’t planning on it, and honestly, if he’d realized it was threatening to erupt, he would have done his level best to suppress it. But now it’s out there, no matter how fast he stifles it, and Kurt’s expressive face shifts from fear to anger to something that looks very much like hurt. “I’m sorry,” Blaine manages; “I’m sorry; it was just a surprise, and then you—”
Kurt doesn’t look impressed. “I’m empathic,” he says fiercely, one hand balled into a fist and tucked beneath his other arm, which is wrapped around himself. “It means that I can sense or feel people’s emotions, if they’re strong enough. Walking in here was like getting hit in the face with a brick. That’s what’s going on.” He looks stiff and brave and very pale, standing several meters from Blaine; like he’s being marched to his execution.
Blaine thinks about it for a half a second, and then he carefully says, “Okay” and takes a step toward the door.
“What are you doing?” Kurt demands, and it’s a snap, but Blaine can hear the fear.
“Trent’s grandmother died,” Blaine says, trying to keep as calm and as level as he can, “and he was really upset, so I thought we could go talk somewhere that doesn’t make you feel like someone’s hitting you.”
He stares for several long seconds, and then he nods jerkily and lets Blaine lead the way.
They walk down three corridors and step into the turbolift before Kurt says, “Is Trent okay?”
“He’s out talking to David.” It’s not a real answer to the question, but it’s the first thing that comes to mind as they stand side by side and he hears the faint thrum of the lift’s thrust. “He’s sad.” God, that was such a stupid thing to say. “Obviously. But she’s been sick for a while; his family knew it was coming.”
Kurt slowly, quietly nods; like he’s giving this a lot of thought. “Tell him I’m sorry,” he says, a little hesitant, and Blaine tells him that he will.
The turbolift doors open on the hydrobotanical gardens under the dorms. It’s like hitting a wall of thick, wet heat rolling into the lift; everything as far as the eye can see is green and damp, mostly gigantic unfamiliar leaves and bushes.
Kurt is looking at Blaine like he has totally lost it.
“I like it down here,” Blaine says. “It’s mostly for the Axanar and Chaldonian cadets, but it’s warm and quiet.”
“You can say that again,” Kurt mutters, and he pokes his head out of the turbolift and waits for Blaine to disembark before he finally steps out onto the packed-dirt floor.
Blaine’s instinct is to take his hand, but he’s well aware that that’s a bad instinct. He holds back and leads Kurt through the thick foliage, away from the hum of machinery and deeper into the rustle of leaves and the sound of distant running water and the quiet clicks and chirps of little bugs. There’s a bench only 20 or 30 meters from the turbolift; it’s clearly been built for members of a very tall species who have a sharply curved back, but Blaine sits down anyway. The heat is heavy, like it’s pressing down on them; it’s more the way that heat has felt on the couple of occasions that he has visited his mother’s family in Manila than it feels in California.
Kurt elects to remain standing, his arms folded and his fingers tightly wrinkling his jacket over his biceps. His face isn’t giving away much, which is a little frightening, given how expressive Blaine has found out that he really is. He looks like he’s closing himself off as tightly as he had when they first met.
“Why didn’t you say anything?” Blaine asks, as gently and non-judgmentally as he can. He’s fighting not to feel hurt; to remind himself that this is about Kurt, not about him, and that Kurt can probably feel it — and won’t appreciate it — if he takes this personally.
“You don’t understand what it is like,” Kurt says, his voice wound way too tight, “to be around thousands of people all day, every day, and to feel what they feel.”
Blaine has a suddenly improved understanding of why Kurt used to be alone all the time; why he ate meals at odd times and kept to himself, and why he pulls away when touched.
“I don’t want to,” he continues, but then he stops, and for the first time since they left the room, he looks right at Blaine. “Let me be clear: I am proud of my differences. They elevated me above the small-minded philistines in that town and helped me get into Starfleet, and this particular ability is from my mother, but if I had the choice—” He doesn’t finish the sentence, apparently unwilling to say it out loud. His hand clenches and unclenches on his upper arm. “People at home were threatened by me,” he says matter of factly. “They looked at me like I was some kind of predator.” He sniffs. “As if I wanted to share in their pedestrian disappointment when Bessie the cow calved a runt.” That sounds more like the Kurt that Blaine knows, and he smiles faintly. He hopes it’s an encouraging expression.
“They were wrong,” Blaine says, firm and trying not to be too angry; trying not to picture whispers or worse and a younger Kurt proudly hunching up. That will only get him off track. “But this is Starfleet. There’s a guy in my psychology lecture who doesn’t even have a mouth.” He tries to catch Kurt’s gaze. “You’re not the only person here who can do what you do.”
“I know,” Kurt says, his eyes flicking away, and Blaine watches him painfully stand there in the muggy, oppressive silence for a few seconds.
“What are you getting from me right now?” he asks.
“Oh,” says Kurt, faintly. “I don’t…”
Blaine watches him steadily, and he doesn’t say anything.
“It’s not that easy.” Kurt’s fingers are tightening and loosening again; he looks so tense that it has to hurt. “I can’t just—” He waves a hand in a sharp gesture. “—Wiggle my nose and tell you what you’re thinking; it’s not like I’m hearing sentences or words. It’s — feelings, and only the stronger ones.”
“Okay,” he says easily. “Then what would you call those feelings?”
“Concern,” Kurt finally answers, looking wary; like this is some kind of a trap. “Calm. Confusion. Some conflict.”
“Nice alliteration,” replies Blaine, and Kurt laughs, looking startled. Blaine leans forward over his knees. “Kurt, I’m not afraid of you.” Kurt draws in a silent breath that looks shaky. “Don't get me wrong, it’s a shock,” and he laughs a little, because he has to, “but I’m not scared that you can tell how I’m feeling. We’ve always been honest with each other; is this really that different?”
Kurt isn’t moving at all now. He’s just watching Blaine, listening, silent. Blaine doesn’t have to be empathic (empathic!) to realize that Kurt has become resigned to the idea that if Blaine found out about his abilities, they wouldn’t be friends any more.
“This is part of who you are, and I like who you are.” Please understand, Blaine pleads, even though he knows Kurt can’t hear him. I really mean it. “You’re my best friend. You are so, so important to me.”
Kurt stares at him. “You can hug me now,” he says, quiet and sudden, and Blaine rises up off the bench and pulls him into a firm hug. Kurt is warm and solid and he holds on to Blaine tightly, arms wrapped around his waist. He’s slouching so that he can tuck his face into Blaine’s collar. Blaine thinks about surrounding him with caring and positive emotion; cocooning him in how badly Blaine wants everything to be okay.
“Please don’t do that,” Kurt says, muffled against his shoulder, and Blaine jerks and guiltily tries to go as blank as he can.
“It’s okay,” Kurt assures him, without lifting his head; “it’s not bad, it’s just—” He sucks in a breath. “It’s overwhelming.” He sounds overwhelmed. Blaine thinks that he probably doesn’t touch people like this on a regular basis, much less have them exploding feelings at him while their chests press together.
Blaine tries to step back, but Kurt doesn’t let go of his fierce grip on the back of Blaine’s cadet uniform jacket, and they stand there for a long time.
Blaine, predictably, spends a lot of time researching telepathy.
It feels a little weird, like he’s prying, but Kurt willingly told him about his mom and what it’s like for him, and this is all freely available scientific information. Betazoids’ brains apparently have a lobe devoted specifically to telepathy; they can communicate telepathically with other Betazoids and some members of other species, mostly in special circumstances. There’s some stuff about something called imzadi, which gets confusing and Blaine skips for the time being, because the next paragraph informs him that the only way to physically tell Betazoids apart from humans is the fact that their irises are entirely black.
It’s all freely available scientific information, and it’s not particularly helpful.
Blaine does his own independent research, quietly asking around and staring at people’s irises enough that half of the command track probably thinks he has some kind of eye fetish, but it doesn’t get him very far.
Speaking to a few specific classmates, sketching scenarios in carefully-broad hypotheticals, proves marginally more successful.
“It's apparently called the paracortex,” Blaine says, lying on his stomach on Kurt's bed, squeezed in almost shoulder to shoulder with him.
Kurt rolls his eyes, stylus tucked neatly behind his ear as he uses his fingers to scroll through his reading. The last time that Blaine glanced over his shoulder, there were more mathematical equations than he even knew what to do with. “I know.”
“You know?”
“One, I’ve obviously done my own research over the years, and two, I reread the most easily searchable sources last week, since I wanted to see what you’d be learning.” Blaine stares at him. “It’s not an empathic thing; you’re just predictable,” Kurt says dismissively.
Blaine laughs, shaking his head, and Kurt cracks a tiny smile.
“I'm supposed to be able to talk telepathically to full Betazoids, but I've never actually met any. Starfleet apparently isn't a popular career choice,” Kurt says, dry.
“What about your mom?”
“Telepathic abilities don’t kick in until puberty. My mother had been dead for years by the time I would have been able to talk to her like that.” He says it casually, offhand; almost lightly. Blaine apparently projects more surprise than he’d realized, because without looking at him, Kurt adds, “She died when I was eight, Blaine; I miss her, but I’m not crying into my scarf collection every night.” Within a split second, he seems to realize what he just implied, and his head quickly comes up.
“It's okay,” Blaine says, before he can say anything. “Kurt, I want you to say stuff like that. I know that you can sense what I'm feeling; there's no point in pretending you can't, especially when I'm fine with it.” Kurt watches him warily. “Really,” Blaine promises, letting his mouth curve into a fond, faintly wry smile, and he very gently nudges Kurt's shoulder with his. “I promise.”
Kurt slowly begins to smile back.
“I did some other research, too,” Blaine admits, and Kurt lifts a perfect eyebrow at him.
“Oh? Do tell.”
“I asked around – very discreetly, I promise. I was the picture of sneakiness.”
“Uh huh,” says Kurt, clearly unconvinced.
“--And there don’t seem to be any Betazoid instructors or cadets at the academy, but the Betazed embassy has a small branch here, in San Francisco.”
“And why would I care about the Betazed embassy?” he asks, all too casual.
“I knew your mom died when you were young and you couldn't have had a lot of contact with Betazoids in Lima--”
“Try none,” Kurt says, wry, his wary eyes on Blaine.
“--so I thought you might just want to know where you could talk to someone.”
He doesn’t say anything. He just studies Blaine through narrowed eyes, and then asks suspiciously, “What else did you do?”
It’s one of the first times since Kurt’s revelation that Blaine has really, really wished that Kurt wasn’t able to read his emotions.
“I talked to Coldara’a,” he says, reluctant, because he really was going to try to ease into this one, “from my psych lecture – I actually used female pronouns in order to make it harder to guess that I was talking about you, so you’d probably have to correct zir on that; zie has some struggles when it comes to understanding humanoid gender identity – but my point is: zie is telepathic and would be willing to try to teach you some basic mental shielding and stuff, if … you ever wanted to do that.”
Kurt's expression is inscrutable, which is pretty tough to manage, considering how closely they're sprawled together. “That was presumptuous.”
“I know,” Blaine says steadily. “It seemed like you didn't want to deal with it.”
“So you dealt with it for me,” he says, with more than a hint of an edge.
“No,” says Blaine, immediate. “I researched some options. That's it. It's completely up to you to decide if you want to use them.”
“But you'll judge me if I don't.”
Blaine groans his name, frustrated, and Kurt closes the cover on his PADD and starts to roll off the bed. Blaine catches his sleeve, stopping him in his tracks. “I would never judge you,” he says. “It’s your life and it’s not my place. I would just – I’d be a little sad if you didn’t at least think about it. It seems like this is really overwhelming for you, Kurt. I just want to help.”
“Well,” Kurt says, all too crisply, “you can't. I think it's time for you to leave.”
Blaine can't help the surge of surprised hurt that rises in him, and Kurt flinches back like he's been struck.
“Please leave.”
Blaine gathers his things and goes.
His communicator chirps three days later, while Blaine is busily trying to pretend that he doesn’t have a gaping, awful Kurt-sized hole in his life; while he’s doing a piss-poor job of convincing himself that he should really be focusing all of his energy on his studies and not cultivating relationships or having friends.
(It's an exam period; it's stressful.)
“Please,” Kurt's voice says briskly, and Blaine tries not to make his relieved exhale too obvious, “don't take this as any kind of concession that you were right or that you weren't intrusive, because you weren't and you were, in that precise order, but if I wanted to contact this Coldara'a … how would I go about it?”
“How do you do it?” Blaine asks, throwing his stylus down in frustration as the general library hubbub reaches a dull roar.
Kurt raises a cool eyebrow at him. “How do I do what?”
“Sit here, surrounded by all of these people and their feelings, and not totally lose it.” He waves a hand around them, signaling table after table filled with studying, chattering cadets. “They’re driving me out of my mind, and I’m not even an empath.”
“Well,” Kurt says, slowly. “I used to concentrate. I always had coursework with me, and if I focused intensely on engineering equations, I wasn't paying attention to the girl having a psychotic break at the next table. I stayed away from the galley during regular hours and I didn't come near this place just before exams, and I didn't talk to people.” He seems to be seriously thinking about this. “The Kobayashi Maru was the worst,” he admits. “The fear, adrenaline rush, and pure body odor of 12 nervous people crammed into one small space was overwhelming.”
And still, Blaine thinks, Kurt managed to pull off a now-legendary rerouting of power from the nacelles to the proton torpedo bays. He asks, “How do you do it now?”
“I concentrate,” Kurt says, but this time, his eyes flick over and linger on Blaine for a couple seconds. He blinks and glances away again. “—And I’ve been using some of the techniques that Coldara’a is teaching me. He—”
“Zie,” Blaine corrects gently. “Gender neutral species, Kurt.”
“—is really, really good at shutting people out.”
Kurt is pretty good at that, too, when he wants to be, Blaine thinks, and then he’s glad that Kurt can’t read specific thoughts.
Part 2
Fandom: Glee/Star Trek
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Blaine Anderson/Kurt Hummel; blink-and-you'll-miss-them cameos from various Warblers, Rachel Berry, Santana Lopez, and Jacob Ben Israel
Summary: Blaine Anderson is in the Starfleet Academy command track when he meets fellow cadet Kurt Hummel.
Count: ~12,260 words total; 5770 in this part
Notes:
preromantics put out the call on Tumblr for Blaine in a cadet uniform. I started writing a drabble and this ... happened! Basically it is all Tumblr's fault.* * *
If there’s anyone in the current crop of Starfleet Academy cadets who’s infamous, it’s Kurt Hummel.
Blaine has never shared an astrophysics lab with him or even laid eyes on him, but after all the stories that have gone around the academy (Cadet Hummel stared down Captain Kam’har over a question of Federation Treaty history; Cadet Hummel’s ingenious jerry-rig after the simulator engines were disabled helped bring his captain’s crew the closest to defeating the Kobayashi Maru scenario that anyone has managed in three years; ice runs in Cadet Hummel’s veins, possibly literally; Cadet Hummel once got into a bar fight with 16 Klingon warriors and a sehlat, and won), Blaine is picturing a larger than life figure.
So he gapes at the slender figure sitting at a table by himself and slowly eating some kind of salad as he peruses material on his PADD. He has elfin features and long fingers, and he looks like he spends a lot more time on his hair than Blaine ever would have imagined.
“That’s Kurt Hummel,” Blaine says dubiously.
“You’ve got ears; I know you heard what I said,” says Trent, with attitude, and Blaine vaguely swats at him without looking away from where Kurt Hummel is lightly tapping his own ear with a stylus.
“Nobody ever mentioned he was…” Blaine ignores Trent and all of his irritated attempts to smack Blaine’s hand away, his eyebrows furrowing as he tries to come up with the right words, “so…”
Across the galley, Hummel’s head rises sharply. There are enough tables and people between them that he can’t possibly have heard any of this conversation, but his head turns and he looks unerringly, straight as an arrow, directly at Blaine. His eyes have narrowed but Blaine can see even from here that they’re dark but also a strange, remarkable, changeable color; even as they make eye contact for all of four seconds, Blaine decides that they’re ringed blue, then he changes his mind to green, then gray.
Hummel glances away again, his expression unchanging; he snaps his PADD case shut and rises with his tray. He is broad in the shoulders and trim in the waist, clearly taller than Blaine, and as he walks toward the replicator, Blaine notes that he moves with remarkable self-assurance and grace.
“I don’t want anything to do with this,” Trent comments, but it’s said placidly as he chews on a mouthful of some Denobulan delicacy that smells like fish that’s been sitting out on the wharf for days.
“Anything to do with what,” Blaine asks dumbly, watching Hummel go.
“None of it,” Trent reiterates.
Trent is full of empty threats; after Blaine asks very nicely, he introduces Blaine to the cadet who shared an astrophysics lab with Cadet Hummel last year.
Blaine doesn’t learn very much from the conversation, except that Kurt Hummel keeps to himself, rarely smiles, and seriously knows his stuff.
Blaine also learns that the cadet who Trent introduces him to takes a nervewracking amount of joy in discussing his peers. After he says something about a weekly broadcast, Blaine extricates himself from the conversation as quickly and diplomatically as possible.
Despite Blaine’s newfound interest in Cadet Hummel, their next run-in is both literal and very, very accidental.
Scrambling down the broad staircase, Blaine doesn’t watch where he’s going as he struggles to settle the cuffs of his uniform jacket sleeves to make sure they’re in regulation order, and he collides with something warm and solid that yelps. By the time he’s fully aware of what’s happening, he’s sprawled on the stairs staring up into Kurt Hummel’s face. Cadet Hummel looks momentarily stunned, hunched over with his hand in an iron-grip on the balustrade. A sea of cadets in red uniform stream past all around them, late stragglers headed for the assembly.
Blaine becomes aware that his mouth is hanging open. He shuts it, then promptly opens it again so he can say, “Wow, I am so sorry. Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” says Cadet Hummel. He actually sounds breathless, like Blaine knocked the wind out of him; his voice is improbably high and fluting. And — oh.
His irises are enormous and (and Blaine doesn’t know how he missed this, even from across the galley) almost completely black, ringed in the same striking glasz color that he had noticed before. Blaine has never seen anything like it.
Up close, he’s even more attractive than he’d looked from a distance. His lips are parted slightly as he stares at Blaine.
And then an instructor shouts from down below, the doors giving the telltale hiss that someone has given the order to close them, and Blaine lunges up and instinctively grabs Cadet Hummel’s hand. It’s warm and smooth and dry, and his long fingers spasm, presumably with surprise, as Blaine pulls him along. They dash through the doors seconds before closing and Blaine flings himself into the nearest seat, just in time to escape censure. Cadet Hummel yanks his hand away like he’s been burned, but drops into the empty seat beside him very, very quickly.
They sit through the mandatory lecture on the Prime Directive in silence. Blaine takes copious notes, flicking through screens on his PADD as fast as he can, but when he glances sideways at Hummel, he finds him sitting perfectly straight, one leg crossed over the other and his hands clasped over his knee, giving every appearance of listening intently.
Afterward, they maneuver the exiting crowds side by side. “I’m really sorry about running you over, by the way,” Blaine says, glancing sideways at the other cadet. Hummel nods without even looking at him; he honestly seems bored by the entire interaction. “I’m Blaine. Blaine Anderson.” He extends a hand, smiling.
Hummel flicks his eyes very faintly sideways and politely pretends that he doesn’t see the gesture. After several seconds, Blaine hesitantly pulls his hand in. He’s beginning to think that this was a bad idea; it’s hard not to feel stupid and embarrassed. Sometimes, he thinks he can make it through the command track by smiling and faking confidence when he doesn’t actually feel it and being diplomatic and friendly and highly competent, but that’s just not the way that it works. He needs to be able to read a situation, too; he needs to demonstrate actual leadership.
Something flickers in Hummel’s face, something that would be a twitch on anyone else but Blaine thinks has to be significant, and then he softly says, “Kurt Hummel,” and presses his thumb into Blaine’s palm in the faintest of handshakes before letting go.
The crush of other cadets separates them within seconds, but Blaine would swear that he can feel a phantom hand brushing his for the rest of the day.
Blaine may have taken to haunting the galley at off-hours.
Trent and David and Nick tease him about it, because he’s apparently the most transparent guy on the entire west coast of the United States, but they leave him be; Blaine privately thinks that they’ve probably decided that this is a healthier interest than the time he decided that the active-duty advisor in his astronav course was dreamy.
His hunch pays off when he takes an obscure Klingon dialect recording for some studying and a late night snack, and he finds a solitary figure hunched over a table.
Blaine tips his head from side to side, working the kinks out of his neck, and he shakes his fingers out in a burst of nerves. Before he can even approach, Hummel’s back stiffens and he turns around. Their eyes meet, and they look at each other, and Cadet Hummel turns back to face the table, which Blaine takes as a tacit invitation. He crosses the galley to the other side of the table.
“Hi,” Blaine says, tray carefully balanced. “Mind if I join you?”
Hummel takes a look around at all of the other empty tables, and then he says, “It’s a free federation.”
“Do you get some of your best thinking done in the galley?” Blaine asks, sitting down, and he’s rewarded by an immediate glance that makes him feel like Hummel A) has no idea what he’s talking about, and B) is silently judging him. “I’ve seen you here a couple times,” he clarifies; “mostly late at night.”
“My roommate is Aquellian,” Cadet Hummel says, and Blaine nods understandingly.
“They’re really diurnal, right?”
For about two seconds, Kurt looks mildly impressed. “He swears that if so much as one ray of light strikes his eye-stalks between the hours of 2200 and 0430, whether I have a life-changing exam to study for or not, he’ll shrivel up and melt,” he says, dry. And then, much to Blaine’s surprise, he adds, “He’s a drama queen, and I know from drama.”
Blaine laughs, delighted. “Really? Because—” He wrestles with it for a quick beat, then asks, “Can I be honest with you?”
Kurt studies him through those dark eyes for several long seconds, clearly assessing, and then he says, “Yes, you can.”
“I kind of spent weeks trying to figure out if you had Vulcan ears.” Kurt stares blankly at him. “You’re a little intense. Not in a bad way; just in a … logical way.”
There is a pause, and then one side of Kurt’s mouth tips faintly upward and he turns the side of his head toward Blaine, and he lifts the wing of hair that is covering the very tip of his ear. It’s smooth and pink and perfectly rounded. “Now you know,” Kurt says.
It takes Blaine two hours of casual but surprisingly light conversation to realize that he has started thinking of him as Kurt in his head.
It only takes the first ten minutes to realize that he wants to make Kurt smile all the time.
Kurt is funny; that’s the thing. A lot of people seem to think that he’s humorless or has some kind of a stick up his ass, but it’s not true. He has a fantastic — if dark — sense of humor, and he waxes endearingly, amazingly poetic over the sound of a perfectly calibrated warp core.
They start out with careful conversations over class notes, but they end up wandering farther afield and exploring adventurous dining options both on and off the Starfleet campus. They sprawl across the lawn on a sunny San Francisco afternoon, and Kurt starts coming to Blaine and Trent’s room at night when he doesn’t want to hole up surrounded by darkness and his roommate’s snores.
David presses tickets to this experimental Andorian theater piece into Blaine’s hands, after the girlfriend who wanted to go dumps him, and Blaine spends three very confusing hours in a dark theater listening to actors shout in a language that he doesn’t understand, but it turns out okay in the end because Kurt watches rapt at his side and then loudly argues about the production’s subtextual meanings for the entire trip back to the academy dormitories.
Blaine finds out little tidbits about Kurt’s life in flashes here and there. He’s from a small town somewhere in the midwest and doesn’t seem to have been happy or felt particularly welcome there, but he speaks warmly, if hesitantly and rarely, of his father. He never mentions his mother or any friends from home; Blaine suspects that he never had any of the latter. And that’s a shame, that’s wrong, because Kurt is confident and hilarious and steely and passionate and honest and sarcastic and thoughtful and absurdly, stunningly sweet. Sometimes, Blaine thinks that Kurt can figure out what he’s thinking even before Blaine himself does. He’s a little stiff when first getting to know people, but Blaine gets to introduce him to all of his friends and watch him slowly begin to unfurl, and it’s like some old-world idea of magic.
The first day that Blaine sees Kurt walking in the halls and he isn’t alone (he’s with a petite, laughing Orion girl; his mouth is twisted in good-natured distaste as he makes a doubtless perfectly cutting remark), Blaine smiles stupidly after his back until Cadet Lopez demands to know what the hell is wrong with him and how she can avoid catching it.
Blaine doesn’t know why Kurt went inward as far as he did (he has vague ideas sometimes, maybe, of Kurt needing to focus on classes and his commission in order to make his father proud, but then Blaine thinks that he’s probably just projecting), and he doesn’t have an inflated enough sense of self-worth to think that the obvious changes in Kurt are taking place because of Blaine.
But he likes to think that their friendship is helping.
Blaine finally figures it out when Kurt drops by after Trent’s grandmother passes away.
The death wasn’t totally unexpected, from what Trent has said, but from other things that Trent has shared over the two years that they’ve been rooming together, Blaine knows that he was really, really close to the grandmother who raised him. Trent pulls it together and says he needs some air before he starts getting the necessary permissions to go home for the funeral. He says that he wants space, which Blaine can respect, even if it worries him. He feels better after he hears David greet Trent in the hall just outside their door, and two pairs of feet walk away together.
When the door chimes 20 seconds later, Blaine doesn’t glance up from the performance schedule that he’s checking. “I think he’s going to be o—” he calls, and then the door chimes again. Blaine blinks and rolls out of his bed.
At the door, he’s treated to about a half a second of Kurt’s smug smile before his expression shifts like somebody has punched him in the stomach. He lurches and Blaine grabs his elbow, trying to steady him.
“Kurt,” he begins, feeling panic spike up, and Kurt flings himself away from him.
“Don’t touch me,” Kurt orders, sharp and a little shrill, and they face off just inside Blaine and Trent’s room.
Kurt’s mouth and hands are shaking minutely, Blaine notices; his eyes are wide and wet-looking and Blaine knows that he has issues with people getting physically close to him (it’s been impossible to miss, over the last two months), but this is dramatic beyond anything he has ever witnessed.
The door quietly hisses shut.
“What happened?” Kurt hisses. Blaine stares at him, silent and not understanding. “In — here,” he clarifies, his eyes looking a little distant for a half a second. “It happened here; what are you — are you okay?” He looks and sounds utterly desperate, like he’s reading Blaine’s clear panic right on his face and feeding off of it.
“I’m,” Blaine starts, and then he tries again. “Trent’s grandmother died; he’s upset, but I’m okay Kurt.” He doesn’t bother to finish one sentence before beginning the next. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t — I probably should have told you,” Kurt says, and he sounds a little choked, but he draws his shoulders up very, very tightly, one hand on his hip. It’s a defensive posture that Blaine recognizes very well. “My mother was Betazoid.”
Blaine can feel the bottom drop right out of his stomach.
From the immediate shift in Kurt’s attempt at a brave face, he strongly suspects that Kurt can feel it as well.
“You’re a telepath?” Blaine asks, stunned, and all that he can think is: are you reading my mind right now?
“No,” Kurt says emphatically, his arms folded. “I can’t read anyone’s thoughts or talk without opening my mouth. As I believe I mentioned, I’m only half Betazoid.”
Blaine must pull some kind of astonished expression, because Kurt shoots a bitchy face right back at him and says, “Oh please; the first thing everyone does when they find out is start thinking about whether I can hear them.”
He blinks, and then — he laughs. It just bursts out of him; he wasn’t planning on it, and honestly, if he’d realized it was threatening to erupt, he would have done his level best to suppress it. But now it’s out there, no matter how fast he stifles it, and Kurt’s expressive face shifts from fear to anger to something that looks very much like hurt. “I’m sorry,” Blaine manages; “I’m sorry; it was just a surprise, and then you—”
Kurt doesn’t look impressed. “I’m empathic,” he says fiercely, one hand balled into a fist and tucked beneath his other arm, which is wrapped around himself. “It means that I can sense or feel people’s emotions, if they’re strong enough. Walking in here was like getting hit in the face with a brick. That’s what’s going on.” He looks stiff and brave and very pale, standing several meters from Blaine; like he’s being marched to his execution.
Blaine thinks about it for a half a second, and then he carefully says, “Okay” and takes a step toward the door.
“What are you doing?” Kurt demands, and it’s a snap, but Blaine can hear the fear.
“Trent’s grandmother died,” Blaine says, trying to keep as calm and as level as he can, “and he was really upset, so I thought we could go talk somewhere that doesn’t make you feel like someone’s hitting you.”
He stares for several long seconds, and then he nods jerkily and lets Blaine lead the way.
They walk down three corridors and step into the turbolift before Kurt says, “Is Trent okay?”
“He’s out talking to David.” It’s not a real answer to the question, but it’s the first thing that comes to mind as they stand side by side and he hears the faint thrum of the lift’s thrust. “He’s sad.” God, that was such a stupid thing to say. “Obviously. But she’s been sick for a while; his family knew it was coming.”
Kurt slowly, quietly nods; like he’s giving this a lot of thought. “Tell him I’m sorry,” he says, a little hesitant, and Blaine tells him that he will.
The turbolift doors open on the hydrobotanical gardens under the dorms. It’s like hitting a wall of thick, wet heat rolling into the lift; everything as far as the eye can see is green and damp, mostly gigantic unfamiliar leaves and bushes.
Kurt is looking at Blaine like he has totally lost it.
“I like it down here,” Blaine says. “It’s mostly for the Axanar and Chaldonian cadets, but it’s warm and quiet.”
“You can say that again,” Kurt mutters, and he pokes his head out of the turbolift and waits for Blaine to disembark before he finally steps out onto the packed-dirt floor.
Blaine’s instinct is to take his hand, but he’s well aware that that’s a bad instinct. He holds back and leads Kurt through the thick foliage, away from the hum of machinery and deeper into the rustle of leaves and the sound of distant running water and the quiet clicks and chirps of little bugs. There’s a bench only 20 or 30 meters from the turbolift; it’s clearly been built for members of a very tall species who have a sharply curved back, but Blaine sits down anyway. The heat is heavy, like it’s pressing down on them; it’s more the way that heat has felt on the couple of occasions that he has visited his mother’s family in Manila than it feels in California.
Kurt elects to remain standing, his arms folded and his fingers tightly wrinkling his jacket over his biceps. His face isn’t giving away much, which is a little frightening, given how expressive Blaine has found out that he really is. He looks like he’s closing himself off as tightly as he had when they first met.
“Why didn’t you say anything?” Blaine asks, as gently and non-judgmentally as he can. He’s fighting not to feel hurt; to remind himself that this is about Kurt, not about him, and that Kurt can probably feel it — and won’t appreciate it — if he takes this personally.
“You don’t understand what it is like,” Kurt says, his voice wound way too tight, “to be around thousands of people all day, every day, and to feel what they feel.”
Blaine has a suddenly improved understanding of why Kurt used to be alone all the time; why he ate meals at odd times and kept to himself, and why he pulls away when touched.
“I don’t want to,” he continues, but then he stops, and for the first time since they left the room, he looks right at Blaine. “Let me be clear: I am proud of my differences. They elevated me above the small-minded philistines in that town and helped me get into Starfleet, and this particular ability is from my mother, but if I had the choice—” He doesn’t finish the sentence, apparently unwilling to say it out loud. His hand clenches and unclenches on his upper arm. “People at home were threatened by me,” he says matter of factly. “They looked at me like I was some kind of predator.” He sniffs. “As if I wanted to share in their pedestrian disappointment when Bessie the cow calved a runt.” That sounds more like the Kurt that Blaine knows, and he smiles faintly. He hopes it’s an encouraging expression.
“They were wrong,” Blaine says, firm and trying not to be too angry; trying not to picture whispers or worse and a younger Kurt proudly hunching up. That will only get him off track. “But this is Starfleet. There’s a guy in my psychology lecture who doesn’t even have a mouth.” He tries to catch Kurt’s gaze. “You’re not the only person here who can do what you do.”
“I know,” Kurt says, his eyes flicking away, and Blaine watches him painfully stand there in the muggy, oppressive silence for a few seconds.
“What are you getting from me right now?” he asks.
“Oh,” says Kurt, faintly. “I don’t…”
Blaine watches him steadily, and he doesn’t say anything.
“It’s not that easy.” Kurt’s fingers are tightening and loosening again; he looks so tense that it has to hurt. “I can’t just—” He waves a hand in a sharp gesture. “—Wiggle my nose and tell you what you’re thinking; it’s not like I’m hearing sentences or words. It’s — feelings, and only the stronger ones.”
“Okay,” he says easily. “Then what would you call those feelings?”
“Concern,” Kurt finally answers, looking wary; like this is some kind of a trap. “Calm. Confusion. Some conflict.”
“Nice alliteration,” replies Blaine, and Kurt laughs, looking startled. Blaine leans forward over his knees. “Kurt, I’m not afraid of you.” Kurt draws in a silent breath that looks shaky. “Don't get me wrong, it’s a shock,” and he laughs a little, because he has to, “but I’m not scared that you can tell how I’m feeling. We’ve always been honest with each other; is this really that different?”
Kurt isn’t moving at all now. He’s just watching Blaine, listening, silent. Blaine doesn’t have to be empathic (empathic!) to realize that Kurt has become resigned to the idea that if Blaine found out about his abilities, they wouldn’t be friends any more.
“This is part of who you are, and I like who you are.” Please understand, Blaine pleads, even though he knows Kurt can’t hear him. I really mean it. “You’re my best friend. You are so, so important to me.”
Kurt stares at him. “You can hug me now,” he says, quiet and sudden, and Blaine rises up off the bench and pulls him into a firm hug. Kurt is warm and solid and he holds on to Blaine tightly, arms wrapped around his waist. He’s slouching so that he can tuck his face into Blaine’s collar. Blaine thinks about surrounding him with caring and positive emotion; cocooning him in how badly Blaine wants everything to be okay.
“Please don’t do that,” Kurt says, muffled against his shoulder, and Blaine jerks and guiltily tries to go as blank as he can.
“It’s okay,” Kurt assures him, without lifting his head; “it’s not bad, it’s just—” He sucks in a breath. “It’s overwhelming.” He sounds overwhelmed. Blaine thinks that he probably doesn’t touch people like this on a regular basis, much less have them exploding feelings at him while their chests press together.
Blaine tries to step back, but Kurt doesn’t let go of his fierce grip on the back of Blaine’s cadet uniform jacket, and they stand there for a long time.
Blaine, predictably, spends a lot of time researching telepathy.
It feels a little weird, like he’s prying, but Kurt willingly told him about his mom and what it’s like for him, and this is all freely available scientific information. Betazoids’ brains apparently have a lobe devoted specifically to telepathy; they can communicate telepathically with other Betazoids and some members of other species, mostly in special circumstances. There’s some stuff about something called imzadi, which gets confusing and Blaine skips for the time being, because the next paragraph informs him that the only way to physically tell Betazoids apart from humans is the fact that their irises are entirely black.
It’s all freely available scientific information, and it’s not particularly helpful.
Blaine does his own independent research, quietly asking around and staring at people’s irises enough that half of the command track probably thinks he has some kind of eye fetish, but it doesn’t get him very far.
Speaking to a few specific classmates, sketching scenarios in carefully-broad hypotheticals, proves marginally more successful.
“It's apparently called the paracortex,” Blaine says, lying on his stomach on Kurt's bed, squeezed in almost shoulder to shoulder with him.
Kurt rolls his eyes, stylus tucked neatly behind his ear as he uses his fingers to scroll through his reading. The last time that Blaine glanced over his shoulder, there were more mathematical equations than he even knew what to do with. “I know.”
“You know?”
“One, I’ve obviously done my own research over the years, and two, I reread the most easily searchable sources last week, since I wanted to see what you’d be learning.” Blaine stares at him. “It’s not an empathic thing; you’re just predictable,” Kurt says dismissively.
Blaine laughs, shaking his head, and Kurt cracks a tiny smile.
“I'm supposed to be able to talk telepathically to full Betazoids, but I've never actually met any. Starfleet apparently isn't a popular career choice,” Kurt says, dry.
“What about your mom?”
“Telepathic abilities don’t kick in until puberty. My mother had been dead for years by the time I would have been able to talk to her like that.” He says it casually, offhand; almost lightly. Blaine apparently projects more surprise than he’d realized, because without looking at him, Kurt adds, “She died when I was eight, Blaine; I miss her, but I’m not crying into my scarf collection every night.” Within a split second, he seems to realize what he just implied, and his head quickly comes up.
“It's okay,” Blaine says, before he can say anything. “Kurt, I want you to say stuff like that. I know that you can sense what I'm feeling; there's no point in pretending you can't, especially when I'm fine with it.” Kurt watches him warily. “Really,” Blaine promises, letting his mouth curve into a fond, faintly wry smile, and he very gently nudges Kurt's shoulder with his. “I promise.”
Kurt slowly begins to smile back.
“I did some other research, too,” Blaine admits, and Kurt lifts a perfect eyebrow at him.
“Oh? Do tell.”
“I asked around – very discreetly, I promise. I was the picture of sneakiness.”
“Uh huh,” says Kurt, clearly unconvinced.
“--And there don’t seem to be any Betazoid instructors or cadets at the academy, but the Betazed embassy has a small branch here, in San Francisco.”
“And why would I care about the Betazed embassy?” he asks, all too casual.
“I knew your mom died when you were young and you couldn't have had a lot of contact with Betazoids in Lima--”
“Try none,” Kurt says, wry, his wary eyes on Blaine.
“--so I thought you might just want to know where you could talk to someone.”
He doesn’t say anything. He just studies Blaine through narrowed eyes, and then asks suspiciously, “What else did you do?”
It’s one of the first times since Kurt’s revelation that Blaine has really, really wished that Kurt wasn’t able to read his emotions.
“I talked to Coldara’a,” he says, reluctant, because he really was going to try to ease into this one, “from my psych lecture – I actually used female pronouns in order to make it harder to guess that I was talking about you, so you’d probably have to correct zir on that; zie has some struggles when it comes to understanding humanoid gender identity – but my point is: zie is telepathic and would be willing to try to teach you some basic mental shielding and stuff, if … you ever wanted to do that.”
Kurt's expression is inscrutable, which is pretty tough to manage, considering how closely they're sprawled together. “That was presumptuous.”
“I know,” Blaine says steadily. “It seemed like you didn't want to deal with it.”
“So you dealt with it for me,” he says, with more than a hint of an edge.
“No,” says Blaine, immediate. “I researched some options. That's it. It's completely up to you to decide if you want to use them.”
“But you'll judge me if I don't.”
Blaine groans his name, frustrated, and Kurt closes the cover on his PADD and starts to roll off the bed. Blaine catches his sleeve, stopping him in his tracks. “I would never judge you,” he says. “It’s your life and it’s not my place. I would just – I’d be a little sad if you didn’t at least think about it. It seems like this is really overwhelming for you, Kurt. I just want to help.”
“Well,” Kurt says, all too crisply, “you can't. I think it's time for you to leave.”
Blaine can't help the surge of surprised hurt that rises in him, and Kurt flinches back like he's been struck.
“Please leave.”
Blaine gathers his things and goes.
His communicator chirps three days later, while Blaine is busily trying to pretend that he doesn’t have a gaping, awful Kurt-sized hole in his life; while he’s doing a piss-poor job of convincing himself that he should really be focusing all of his energy on his studies and not cultivating relationships or having friends.
(It's an exam period; it's stressful.)
“Please,” Kurt's voice says briskly, and Blaine tries not to make his relieved exhale too obvious, “don't take this as any kind of concession that you were right or that you weren't intrusive, because you weren't and you were, in that precise order, but if I wanted to contact this Coldara'a … how would I go about it?”
“How do you do it?” Blaine asks, throwing his stylus down in frustration as the general library hubbub reaches a dull roar.
Kurt raises a cool eyebrow at him. “How do I do what?”
“Sit here, surrounded by all of these people and their feelings, and not totally lose it.” He waves a hand around them, signaling table after table filled with studying, chattering cadets. “They’re driving me out of my mind, and I’m not even an empath.”
“Well,” Kurt says, slowly. “I used to concentrate. I always had coursework with me, and if I focused intensely on engineering equations, I wasn't paying attention to the girl having a psychotic break at the next table. I stayed away from the galley during regular hours and I didn't come near this place just before exams, and I didn't talk to people.” He seems to be seriously thinking about this. “The Kobayashi Maru was the worst,” he admits. “The fear, adrenaline rush, and pure body odor of 12 nervous people crammed into one small space was overwhelming.”
And still, Blaine thinks, Kurt managed to pull off a now-legendary rerouting of power from the nacelles to the proton torpedo bays. He asks, “How do you do it now?”
“I concentrate,” Kurt says, but this time, his eyes flick over and linger on Blaine for a couple seconds. He blinks and glances away again. “—And I’ve been using some of the techniques that Coldara’a is teaching me. He—”
“Zie,” Blaine corrects gently. “Gender neutral species, Kurt.”
“—is really, really good at shutting people out.”
Kurt is pretty good at that, too, when he wants to be, Blaine thinks, and then he’s glad that Kurt can’t read specific thoughts.
Part 2
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(although, not that GNPs are the most standardized thing in the history of ever, but I'm pretty sure zie/zir and zie/hir both have an objective case that is not "zie".)
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/grammar geek
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*salutes*
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I will read this later.
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<33
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i sense pain
This story makes me think of how immature and spazzy Troi was in the first season -- she was pretty young, she must have felt a lot like Kurt. She had more training than he does in the empathy skills, but she still came from a sheltered environment.
It's uncanny how well Kurt's issues fold into the Betazoid angst you write out. This could so so happen.
Re: i sense pain
Re: i sense pain
Kurt's a scientist studying inertial dampeners (geddit? he studies how much stress something can take until it cracks), Blaine is command track but Something Went Down that's stuck him in drydock until he Works Out His Problem and Can Focus Fully on His Career. (Imagine an admiral saying that during a modern, Earthy, non-blamey, terrifying tribunal.)
They're def my own version of Cdts Anderson and Hummel, but I'm so inspired by your use of the big wide Trek world, paired with modern, complex characters.
Oh, and there will be Karaoke.
Re: i sense pain
Re: i sense pain
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This was utterly genius and I'm a bit (a lot) in love with you now. :D I love the canon parallels and it's just well-written and amazing and a bit hilarious.
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Starfleet fics are always my favorite (Kirk/Bones ftw) and this is just too perfect. I wanna marry this story. :D
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I think I love you