Chapter Text
High school relationships didn’t last.
That was something Kurt had been told a thousand times in a thousand different ways. There were the intense monologues Rachel would tell anyone who she could force to listen about putting stardom over love. Then there was the way Coach Sylvester had rolled her eyes and made a snide joke about mail order brides after she had spotted him wearing Blaine’s candy wrapper ring at practice. Or even the way his dad cleared his throat awkwardly on Christmas Eve in New York as he measured the silence between the two figures either side of him on the couch. Probably the worst was the pamphlet guidance-counsellor-in-need-of-counselling Emma Pillsbury had slid across the table to him four years earlier.
It had ‘Help! My virginity pact college boyfriend is too busy screwing a nose-pierced, Proust-reading girl to answer my skype calls!’ in comic sans font across the front.
Of course, back then he had just stared in confusion at both her and the depressing, heterosexual, and weirdly specific cartoon in front of him.
None of it made any sense. It was senior year and he and Blaine had a limitless, perfectly planned out summer ahead of them. He finally had a chance to understand why people claimed High School was the best years of their lives, and he wouldn’t be giving up on it. So, he put his rose-tinted glasses (yes, literal rose-tinted glasses, complete with thick hipster frames; it was 2012 after all) on firmly and smiled politely at the ginger pseudo-therapist. Why was she looking at him with pity?
“…I’m sorry Miss Pillsbury but I’m not sure this one really applies.”
Emma nodded before selecting a black fineliner from a very organised spectrum of colours in her desk drawer. Then, she reached for the shiny paper, crossed out the ‘girl’ and replaced it with ‘boy’. That didn’t make him any less confused.
“Look, Blaine and I are good now. The couples counselling worked; there are no more moisturiser fights, and we make out spontaneously every Friday at 6PM. I don’t need your help. We don’t need your help.”
After pushing it aside and dramatically storming out, he had meticulously planned the heat of the moment adventure he was going to take Blaine on that weekend while his dad was away… it involved a Golden Girls marathon and a spirited debate over Ke$ha’s best song. He knew from experience that the key to a successful relationship was to steer clear of the Lady Gaga vs Katy Perry conversation.
That wasn’t the point though. The point was that it wasn’t like he hadn’t been warned.
But he was never the type to care much about what others said. Only up until now he had thought that was a good thing, but watching Blaine walk into their shared flat and refuse to meet his eyes, he thought that-just this once- everyone else may have been right. Because as he stood there, six years later, in the cold loft, their usual fight had arrived- right on cue- at 7:14PM.
This time was different. This time he actually admitted to himself what Blaine had done, scribbled all over him in cheap cologne and hickeys barely hidden by a loosened, tacky bowtie. It was a familiar crime in familiar writing.
How he had managed to miss it the past hundred times, he didn’t know.
“Kurt.”
The dinner was cold on the table, and he could hear Blaine’s soft voice, all wrapped up in a concern that never matched his actions. It matched the withering flowers in his arms. Kurt knew without even seeing them that they were red and yellow roses. The apology flowers always were.
“Look… it… this just isn’t working.”
“Really? I hadn’t noticed.”
Kurt turned to face him, his voice dripping with sarcasm and his fork gripped dangerously tight.
In fairness to Blaine, he didn’t just leave it there with a half-assed excuse. He told the whole story… or at least more than enough of the story to make Kurt nearly vomit over the poor neglected Fettucine Alfredo.
He said Sebastian had just been a fling at first. A chance meeting in a coffee shop between two old friends. Innocent. That implied he wasn’t a fling now, he was more- now it was the one thing Kurt had been more afraid of than anything. Because of course it had to be Sebastian. And according to Blaine it was Kurt’s fault that it was Sebastian; what with all the early mornings and late nights he had spent working to get the Vogue September issue ready after his promotion.
Damn. It must have been really hard on Blaine to step out of the spotlight for five fucking minutes. The poor thing.
“You understand, right?”
Blaine looked at him with those maddening puppy dog eyes. What wasn’t there to understand? The dinner was cold, the flowers were red and yellow, Blaine had cheated. What else was there to say? So, he nodded, sick of dealing with the consequences. He was too tired to fight it.
But then Blaine smiled, and for a second, he looked exactly like he had when they had first met on the Dalton staircase. The same spark in his warm brown eyes, that good old fashioned lover boy charm. And for that second, Kurt remembered why he had loved him in the first place. For a second, he wanted to forgive and forget. It wasn’t like he hadn’t done it before.
Except Blaine wasn’t smiling for him; he was smiling because he was finally rid of him. It was relief, not love. Relief that he didn’t have to be the bad guy anymore, that he was free to screw whoever he wanted now. It was then Kurt knew he wouldn’t get a loving kind of smile from Blaine ever again. They were reserved for the person he hated most in the world, now.
Blaine was saying something about the apartment, something about needing space, but Kurt tuned him out. Instead, he thought about Pavarotti’s corpse on that bright blue May Day when everything had begun. Fitting really. Their relationship was dead before it had even begun, and this was just the funeral.
He kept thinking as the clock on the wall ticked on, even as Blaine shrugged and left to find the brown boxes to pack his stuff up in. You know, the flatpack kind that lurked at the back of your closet for your naïve, unsuspecting boyfriend to find when he went searching for his favourite Valentino scarf you had ‘borrowed’?
Like he said, it wasn’t like he hadn’t been warned.
Anyway, Blaine had left, absolved of his sins. And as always, Kurt was there to clean up the mess. It was hard not to be bitter.
It wasn’t May anymore, and the memories were fading. Outside, it had begun raining. The biting kind of rain that only comes in February, the kind that stung the skin until it was numb.
‘I know how to act it out in song… but as you and about 20 mortified shoppers saw, I’m not very good at romance.’
Well at least there was one thing Blaine hadn’t lied about.
Kurt stared at the peeling cellophane flowers, left on the hardwood floor with the yellow discount sticker still on. Then he looked to the table, where there was a red envelope Blaine hadn’t bothered to open. Signed on it like a suicide note was his own familiar cursive writing, the dot of the eye turned into a heart. Inside it was a cheesy card which would never be read, with ‘Will you brie my Valentine?’ embossed across the front.
Unable to cry, he simply looked from the litter of his relationship on the barren floor, searching for the shattered pieces of his heart. When he found nothing there, he finally admitted that High School relationships didn’t last.