FIC: You're Making Me Shake (1/2)
Title: You're Making Me Shake
Fill request for: switch842
Prompt: "AU where Kurt & Blaine meet over some sort of social network site (twitter or tumblr, etc)"
Rating: just barely R/NSFW, and not really till the end, but eh
"Warnings"/Spoilers: Tumblr! And Chandler. Way, way more Chandler than anyone ever planned on. Also, the elements of canon I've ended up using vs. the ones I threw out all kind of function together in a weird-ass way, please just roll with it lmao.
Word Count: Somewhere in the neighborhood of 16k?? I K R
Summary: Blaine's Dumb Friend Chandler opens up the world of Tumblr to him. Then Tumblr user kurtrageous opens up the whole damn world. (Blaine-Chandler and Blaine-Sam friendship, blink-and-you'll-miss-it/implied past!Blaine/Sebastian)
I. #about me
It's Blaine's Dumb Friend Chandler that finally persuades him into creating a Tumblr account.
Blaine's always maintained a kind of active presence online - but with the emphasis on "kind of." It's mostly been occasional Facebook and Twitter updates and a small but dedicated role in a couple of smaller forums designed to help teens that are struggling with coming out and other LGBT issues. Blaine's prided himself on the latter extraordinarily; that's actually where he met his Dumb Friend Chandler in the first place, though since he moved to New York he and Chandler have connected a bunch "IRL" too. (Blaine should really stop calling him his Dumb Friend Chandler, but the title just seems to have stuck. Blaine loves Chandler, but he really can be so dumb. Endearingly so, but still.)
Chandler, meanwhile, adores Tumblr. Chandler adores quite a number of things, and a disconcertingly high percentage of those things are connected to his ever-present smartphone. He tweets and tumbls and Facebooks almost constantly, and he's got a Pinterest and two separate Instagram accounts, one of which is dedicated solely to pictures of himself and the food he is about to eat. He tells Blaine that Blaine simply must create a Tumblr account, that he's living in the past and has no idea what he's missing, and so eventually rather than put up a fight with his somewhat exhausting pal, Blaine caves. He signs up with his personal email to make sure his professional school account doesn't get cluttered with weird stuff, and picks a lyric from his favorite Roxy Music song as his username because it's got less of a chance of being taken already, and pokes at one of the free generic layouts until it looks kind of nice, and there you have it:
Blaine Anderson is on Tumblr.
And, just like his Dumb Friend Chandler pretty much warned him by example, he gets kind of addicted.
~
At first, because he doesn't really know anyone or anything else, Chandler's the only person Blaine is following. Although with the sheer volume of his posts, and the frequency with which his userpic and URL change - always some variant of a pun off his last name, either "feeling" into "kiehling" or "killing" into "kiehling," and oh how upset he'd been when he found out "yourekiehlingmesmalls" was being hoarded (though for Halloween, he does switch it up a bit to "mschanandlerkohl" and change his icon to Matthew Perry from Friends) - it really does feel like he's following two or three people, at least. But there's only so long Blaine can take the cutesy selfies of Chandler and his boyfriend, gifs of the white and purple My Little Pony, and endless Polyvore designs without a little bit of a break, so he cautiously ventures into one of the parts of Tumblr he finds most frightening - "the tags."
Fortunately for Blaine, it ends up not being so bad. The Katy Perry tag is wonderful and has so many cute pictures of her - there's a blog solely for pictures of her with little kids and animals, which he follows almost instantly - and the Brooks Brothers tag is riddled with some weird kids called the Janoskians but he still manages to strike gold here and there. Slowly but surely he finds other "real people," too, and that's the part that Blaine loves the most - that friendship stretching across miles, and knowing that he can be there for people who may not have found anyone in their immediate physical vicinity who'll care about them that much.
Blaine has been that person. It's not exactly a barrel of fun.
He's been an active blogger for about two months now, and as he lolls on his stomach across his dorm room bed, mindlessly tumbling as a procrastination method for a theatre history paper he really, really doesn't want to write, it occurs to Blaine that this is probably exactly how one is meant to use Tumblr. He posts a cool fanart he found of Cyclops and Wolverine and tags it with #me and Sam :( and then clicks back to his dashboard proper, and sure enough, the top post on his dash is from his Dumb Friend Chandler. It's a video, the thumbnail just a blurry black screen with some people on it that look a fair distance away. He reads Chandler's commentary first and is surprised to see that all it says is
ohwhatakiehling:
Blainers!!!!
Curious, Blaine studies on it further. The original poster is a user with the URL "kurtrageous" - it's not a user Blaine has ever seen around, he doesn't even think Chandler has reblogged from them before - and the text of his post says I can't believe I found this on YouTube. YouTube! Who other than my dad was taking video of this?! but then in another paragraph by itself just the two words Sigh... Nostalgia.
Now Blaine's even more curious. So finally, he clicks "play" on the embedded video, and the sharp laugh and "oh my GOD" is out of his throat before he can stop himself.
Who was taking video of this and putting it on YouTube? Who on Earth cared that much about the American National High School Show Choir Concert TOUR!, especially from almost four years ago? He remembers this venue, remembers how ridiculous it was to be playing in someplace so large when there was barely anyone in the seats - it had by far been the largest place they'd played on the piddly 8-stop tour. And just like that, the nostalgia is washing over him: the memory-ingrained choreography for Raise Your Glass that he could probably still do in his sleep till this day, his improv'd duets with Nick or Jon backstage that he was so sad could never feature in the actual concert lineup, that all-girls' school that had been on the tour with them whose members had probably slept with fifty percent of the Warblers and vice-versa, how sad he'd been that Wes and David and the other seniors couldn't come with them because of college, his penpal Sam from that Louisiana choir who had fallen out of touch since they started college and it was breaking Blaine's hea--
Wait. Tumblr user kurtrageous said "nostalgia" too. Snapping back to reality, Blaine actually manages to focus on the video before him - and it's of that Louisiana choir. It's the big group number they did to Don't Stop Believin', which had easily been the highlight of the show according to all the newspaper coverage the tour got (though Blaine's Teenage Dream earned a fair amount of praise also, he remembers smugly); it isn't the whole song, but it's enough to see the impressive light show the number had included and to hear the (Blaine's not too proud to admit it) even more impressive vocals it featured.
Blaine scans the lineup of high schoolers flouncing around the stage. One of them is the one who posted this video. He spots Sam and he aches a little, but there's no way the OP is him. There's that incredible black soloist, super-tall guy, dancers, pushy lead girl, scary Latina... Blaine barely remembers most of them. He has no idea who this could be.
He dives into the "related videos" on YouTube but there aren't any of the Warblers, just another one of the Louisiana group (McKinley, the video says, he remembers that now) doing Lady Gaga's Born This Way with their cheesy-cute T-shirts. This one, Blaine does remember one stand-out from: the slim brown-haired boy whose shirt had garishly proclaimed "LIKES BOYS." Blaine remembers thinking how tacky that was, and being a little bummed out that the one openly-gay kid on the tour who wasn't from Dalton needed to broadcast it so intensely. It definitely put him off the group - the whole number did.
He also remembers Pushy Lead Girl more clearly once he sees her "NOSE" tee, and that's what finally makes him reblog the video off Chandler and add his own comments.
jumpupbubbleup:
Oh my gosh, are you from this McKinley group? Our whole choir HATED you guys! :P
Blaine chuckles to himself, adds #except for Sam :( in the tags, and then catches sight of the clock at the bottom of his desktop and swears softly. This paper is due tomorrow and he's barely even halfway done. Banishing the weird show choir reminiscing from his mind - though swearing he's going to call Jeff tomorrow, he knows he's in New York too and they connect so much less often than they really should - Blaine makes himself sit up and haul a couple of his reference texts into his lap, skimming half-heartedly for please, just one more good quote...
He lasts about twenty minutes and writes, like, half a paragraph before his open Tumblr tab sucks him back in, informing him he has 8 new posts. Six of them are Chandler. One is another mind-blowing work of art from this adorable lesbian painter from Maryland he started following last week, and one is a hipster Instagram of a really sweet pair of brogues that Blaine is suddenly coveting (he one-clicks it to his queue).
And buried in the notes of people liking that stupid video he posted a few days ago of his brother in that free credit commercial, there's a reblog from "kurtrageous," with some more text added on below the Don't Stop Believin' video.
Blaine clicks to the blog almost immediately to read the full thing -
kurtrageous:
WHAT? Were you on this tour??? Oh my god, are you from that prep school from - Iowa (Ohio? Indiana? What is geography)...wait, why did you hate us??
Blaine laughs, casting a cursory glance over the soft, minimalistic chicness of kurtrageous's custom blog theme and then drifting up to reblog almost instantly.
jumpupbubbleup:
LMAO. Ohio! But yeah, the thing was that my friend Jeff (the super-blond guy from our group) had a HUGE thing for that girl in your choir with the "NOSE" shirt, but then the one time he tried to make a move on her, that really, really tall kid turned out to be her boyfriend, and he scared the crap out of Jeff and made him feel like a loser. Because I guess he was on the football team, or something? And said some not-nice things about boys from private schools (we are NOT a "prep" school, FYI!), and IDK, I guess hurt Jeff's feelings. So we all decided to stand in solidarity with Jeff and hate you guys a lot, haha. Plus, since you guys went to Nationals that year and we didn't, you kind of hogged all the stage time from the rest of us....
Once he's done reblogging, Tumblr loops him back to kurtrageous's blog automatically, and Blaine finally decides he's going to check it out. The chicness pervades everything, the whole theme and even some of the post content clearly focused on aesthetics: black and white photographs, no two posts of too much similarity back-to-back with one another, a clear eye for fashion and the visual, no extraneous design elements. Blaine ends up going pages and pages back before he even realizes it, and catches at least one nice men's ensemble that he himself reblogged, as well as some audio posts from some of his very favorite musicals. They've clearly taken different approaches to blogging, but considering their mutual interests and their shared pasts in embarrassing-but-fun high school show choir, he and this guy (and Blaine thinks it's a guy, he's just got a hunch, though the post content is all incredibly gender-neutral) are not at all dissimilar people.
He finally gets to a post tagged #here you go it's my face #enjoy it while you can this won't be happening again any time soon. The image is taking a while to load, but when it finally does, Blaine gasps "oh my god" abruptly for the second time that evening.
It's that kid. That "LIKES BOYS" kid with the brown wispy hair and the nice countertenor. (Okay, maybe Blaine remembers a little bit more about everything than he really cares to admit.) It's a professional-grade photograph, not an over-filtered Instagram or a webcam snap or anything, and it's caught him in three-fourths profile with his bangs swept artful-casual up back from his forehead and his neck craned just-so that a glimpse of throat is visible overtop of the fabulous scarf he's wearing. Compositionally it's stunning.
Boy-wise it's not so bad either.
Blaine's having a hard time reconciling this sleek aesthete with the show-choir kid of the past, but his curiosity is so piqued that he almost can't make himself pop back to the dashboard to see if the guy has re-reblogged back. But he has -
kurtrageous:
SNORTING IRL. The "really, really tall kid" is my stepbrother and if you truly know him he is about as intimidating as a gerbil. I am so sorry that he ruined us for you. Please, please forget anything he ever said. As for "NOSE" girl, I'll have to ask her if she remembers this Jeff of yours ;) And as for us hogging the stage time...sorry I'm not sorry!
There's also a note on his dash that Blaine finds even more fascinating: kurtrageous started following you.
His face stretching in a tiny glimmer of a smirk despite himself, Blaine goes back to his blog and follows him back.
(And then, by god, he makes himself finish this horrible paper.)
II. #meme
So Kurt's probably Blaine's favorite person he's found on Tumblr yet.
Once he started following him, Blaine realized he and Kurt have even more in common than he anticipated. Their appreciation for fashion is mutual and with a lot of overlap (though Kurt tends much more toward the avant-garde and envelope-pushing; Blaine supposes he's not calling himself "outrageous" for nothing), their music taste is even more compatible (Blaine's a little more pop, Kurt's a little more showtunes, but they never hate any of each other's guilty pleasure stuff), and they even share a love for trashy reality television. Blaine stops being surprised when Kurt is #1 on his Tumblr "crushes" week after week, or when Kurt will reblog something Blaine never would have expected and yet can seamlessly fit into his understanding of Kurt's favorite things. For the first time in a while - and definitely for the first time exclusively on Tumblr - Blaine feels like he's making a genuine online friend and not just a casual pal he can talk to about collegiate a cappella or the woes of extra-curly hair.
One Friday near the start of the spring semester, Blaine has blissfully knocked out all of his film studies homework and is allowing himself a full weekend of veg-out relaxation to do literally nothing, so naturally his first order of business is to throw himself onto his bed and plop his laptop on his stomach to check Tumblr. His addiction has bordered on dangerous a couple of times, but he's managed to keep on top of his studies, something Blaine is proud of to a kind of pathetic degree. He hasn't been on since mid-day yesterday and he's excited to space out into catching up on his dash, drop a couple things in his queue, and talk to Kurt and Chandler.
jumpupbubbleup:
In the immortal words of one Ms. R. Black: It's Friday!! And I am most certainly looking forward to the weekend, weekend.
He contemplates uploading the song, but decides to just make it as a text post. When it kicks him back to his dashboard, the first thing Blaine spots is an alert about a new message in his askbox. It's from Kurt, and it takes Blaine a few seconds to figure out what it's in response to, before he remembers reblogging an audio of Rio by Duran Duran from Kurt's blog and adding some cryptic tags about his brother....
kurtrageous asked you:
You say you have stories to tell and then you DON'T TELL THEM?? For shame, Mr. Anderson. Please share with the class. Especially with that 'cooper!' tag on there I MUST KNOW
Blaine laughs, rubbing a hand across his face, and answers privately: Both us Andersons were performers from an early age, as I'm sure you've deduced.... We may have choreographed a performance to a Rio/Hungry Like the Wolf mashup of our own creation as children that Cooper may have demanded we re-perform as adults to a classroom full of my peers my junior year at Dalton. No, before your ask, there are no videos of this performance. And if there were, I'm sure my face would be so red that it would throw off the color balance of the whole thing and render it unwatchable.
(There is a video, but there's no way Blaine is telling Kurt that.)
The response he gets is just the single word CUTE.... and he doesn't feel the need to answer that with any further extrapolation (though he's laughing in earnest now, and trying not to think about how gaga some of his Warbler buddies had gotten over his "famous" brother), so Blaine returns to his dashboard and starts checking stuff out. He scrolls and scrolls and scrolls, past a fit of dress-up doll posts from Chandler and a YouTube video of the Yale Whiffenpoofs (Kurt told him that one of his girlfriends from high school is actually dating a Whiffenpoof and Blaine swooned from jealousy) and all sorts of other things, and slowly Blaine can feel his brain begin to unwind from his hectic week of classes that he's still not quite familiar with, the tension of New York in early February evaporating out of his body as his old Dalton sweatshirt and new sherpa blanket and laptop warm him up on the outside and the happy feelings of having great friends on the internet warm him up on the inside.
Blaine finally gives up on his endless scrolling and clicks his arrow to zoom back up to the top, looking in his drafts to see if there's anything he wants to post and scoping out a few individual blogs to make sure he didn't miss anything he might have really wanted to see. By the time he's back on his regular dashboard it's almost half an hour later, and he's got a few new posts to catch up on; several of them are from Kurt, who appears to be indulging in Friday-night tumbling as well, and one of them....
kurtrageous reblogged thewizardandi-dina
Ask me that one question you've always wanted to know the answer to but you've been scared to ask.
The tags say #go ahead I'm bored and clicking the link goes straight to Kurt's ask box.
Blaine's trying to figure out why this is giving him so much pause. Chandler and some of his other friends do memes (or whatever) like this all the time, and there's nothing ever unusual about it; Blaine usually makes some joke like leaving song lyrics that are questions ("why you so obsessed with me?" or "can you pay my telephone bills?" or "is that a hickey or a bruise?" come to his mind almost instantly) and doesn't bother to ask real questions because he doesn't want to come across as creepy. But something about Kurt opening himself up like this has Blaine sitting up a little straighter in his bed and biting his lip a bit, and slowly, the comprehension sort of washes across him, which is that Blaine doesn't actually know that much about Kurt. Chandler is an absolute open book. Even Blaine himself doesn't hide much online; he pretty much has nothing to hide. But Kurt, though it's totally in keeping with what Blaine knows about Kurt's personality...Kurt remains kind of an enigma. Blaine knows his likes and dislikes, knows he's from Louisiana and he's a Virgo and he has a stepbrother. Blaine knows that Kurt loves Patti Lupone and hates houndstooth. But what does Blaine know about Kurt's life?
And then, almost as suddenly as this realization bubbled up within him, another sinks hard and fast into the pit of his stomach like a stone, which is that Blaine can't bring himself to ask any personal, prying questions of Kurt, even on anonymous. Something about the enormity of it all is deep and strange and terrifying, and it's like when his parents give him an iTunes giftcard for his birthday - there's so much, so much that Blaine wants that he ends up getting nothing, head reeling from the options. Well, it's like that except with about eighty extra layers of creepy invasive rude wrong! tacked onto the top of it. Blaine could ask Kurt just about anything, and chances are Kurt would answer; he said it himself, he's bored, and he's the one who chose to reblog the post. But Blaine wouldn't know where to begin.
His head's still spinning and spinning and spinning when Blaine finally clicks the link and his fingers are typing before he fully knows it and when he looks at Kurt's ask box the question he has typed says, Whatever happened to Sam Evans?
There's that, then.
Blaine hits ask before he can second-guess himself and takes a couple of deep, fortifying breaths. He clicks back to his dash and the post is still sitting there, and it looks like Chandler's reblogged it too, and Blaine figures, it's only fair if he lets Kurt ask something back, right? So he reblogs it, changing the link in the post to his own ask box, and then clicks away from Tumblr for a moment to get his head right again, checking his school email and opening up his iTunes and just breathing, breathing.
Suddenly this stress-free night has gotten a little out of hand.
Blaine's only got one message when he comes back. It's hard for him to open - and god, why is this such a big deal? - but it's only an anonymous question asking him when his birthday is "for science." He answers it with a smily face and kicks back to his dash only to see he's already got another message. He clicks to that one almost without even thinking after the simplicity of the first one only to find Kurt answering his question.
kurtrageous answered you:
I... I wish I had a better answer to this question than I do, Blaine.
Um. I don't know how much you know about when Hurricane Hanna hit? It didn't get TONS of news coverage because the damage it did was mostly insignificant in the grand scheme of things, not like Katrina was or anything, but it did take out a few things pretty hard, and one of those things was the business that Sam's dad helped run. Their whole family lost almost all their money - that's Sam and his parents and his little twin brother and sister, right - and they were in a pretty terrible place for a while. Sam actually came and stayed with us at my house for a little bit so he'd still be able to go to school rather than having to drop out and find work to help.
When he graduated they still weren't really back on track, and I think Sam was having a hard time dealing with stuff - his parents were insistent on him going to college but he knew they couldn't afford it at all, and I think they had a fight and he just...left. Brittany (our tall blonde dancer friend) was the only one who really heard from him at all before he went and she said he said some stuff about finding himself?? We've all kind of assumed he's ~traveling the world~ or what have you but he could be, like, sleeping on a park bench somewhere.
God, I don't ever really think/talk about this and I'm getting a little overwhelmed. I'm so sorry I had to be the bearer of bad news on this for you. I hope he comes back to us. :( ♥♥♥
Blaine has to read the whole thing two or three times over before it really sinks in. So not only does Blaine not know where his best pen-pal friend is, neither does anyone else. The emotional impact it's having on him is tremendous and weird. On the one hand, it's devastating; on the other hand, nothing's really changed, has it? Just because Blaine suddenly knows why he hasn't heard from Sam in a year and a half doesn't change the fact that Blaine hasn't heard from him. He's still missing, just in a deeper, realer way.
"Tumblr is weird tonight!" Blaine shouts into the quiet of his room. His iTunes plays softly in the background still.
Blaine shuts his laptop with a firm snap and gets up to make himself some hot chocolate. It's not all that great, since he has to make it in the microwave, but it's warm and liquid-sweet, and he flashes to the way that Harry Potter could always shake off the fright of a dementor by eating some chocolate. It feels like that. He bobs and dances oddly around his room while he waits for it to heat, trying to shake the weirdness of the sudden heaviness in the air and on the internet. By the time he crawls back into his bed, mug in his hand and I Kissed A Girl in his speakers, Blaine thinks he's ready to try again for his lazy relaxing evening on the internet.
His browser is still open to his answer from Kurt, and he shakes himself and hastily clicks straight to Kurt's blog, eager to see what other kind of silly questions he may have gotten. There's an anon that Blaine instantly pins as Chandler, an ask that says Are you descended from Cleopatra? Because you've got a killer asp! to which Kurt has replied "You don't even know what my asp looks like, nonners" with a gif of some black girl twerking, and the laugh that shakes through Blaine finally has him feeling a bit more at sorts. He also has a question from a fashion blog about one of his design sketches he posted a month or so ago (Blaine had been so taken with it he'd tried to like it more than once), which he's answered very politely and adorably. And there's one more anonymous question:
Anonymous --> you reblog pictures of new york all the time and you say you want to live there, right? what's keeping you! you belong there bb!!
Blaine's smile twists a little, curious. Kurt does want to come to NYC; Blaine's been following his blog long enough to figure that much out. And Blaine must admit it would be awesome if Kurt were to suddenly be within subway distance of his own dorm room. The smile fades a little as he reads Kurt's answer, though:
Okay, anon, listen up because I'm only going to answer this once, and only because you asked so sweetly. I love the City. I have no doubt in my heart that I belong there. But apparently the universe has other plans. I was all set to go there straight out of high school, but the university I'd chosen (coughcough rhymes with Mazda Miata), while it accepted my best friend, rejected me pretty soundly. Plans = dashed to bits. It was while I was working on a backup plan the following winter (which I admit I should've thought of sooner, joke's on you, Kurt) that my dad suffered a serious heart attack and was unconscious for almost two weeks. Awesome right!! There was no way I was leaving after that. I had to at least stay until he was in the clear healthwise, and by that point it was too late to get a second-semester audition, and there's still always the risk that he'll suffer another if he didn't make some serious lifestyle changes, which I naturally had to monitor because there's no way he was going to do it himself.
So yeah apparently I'm not meant to go to New York, apparently I'm meant to help my father and mentor my old high school glee club and work 25 hours a week at my favorite local coffee shop. Life could be so much worse. I still do karaoke at Applebee's Thursday nights. :)
And there it is: the exact kind of personal question Blaine's been twisting up inside trying to figure out how to ask. A few more pieces of the Kurt puzzle fall into place right before his eyes, and Blaine's worried, because he's starting to like the picture they paint a little bit less. How can Kurt ever believe that he doesn't deserve everything he wants in life? Blaine knows Kurt was a year ahead of him in school; his dad's heart attack is a full two years behind them now, and if he hasn't experienced anything else since then Blaine's pretty certain he's in the clear. And also doesn't Kurt have a stepmom who would totally look out for him even if Kurt weren't around? The more Blaine looks at the answer Kurt had given, those glib exclamation points and that little smily at the end, the more it just sounds so incredibly...defeated. Someone squeezed all the air out of Kurt's dreams, and Kurt is so convinced that that means it was popped, punctured irreversibly, when Blaine - Blaine's not so sure that it wasn't just untied from the bottom, sent whizzing around the room making that stupid farting sound.
(Blaine lost control of this metaphor somewhere.)
He's never seen Kurt get this personal online, and Blaine can't help but soak it up, hold it close to him with all the other great and fascinating things he knows about his friend. With a little shake of his head, Blaine makes himself leave Kurt's page behind and go back to his dashboard. Naturally, he's got a couple of messages from the meme too.
Anonymous asked you:
Did you go to Beyonce's culinary school? Because you are TOO bootylicious for me, baby.
Blaine answers this with Chandler, go to bed.
Anonymous asked you:
you seem to place a lot of value on your internet friends, and like i never see you talk about any """irl""" friends. are these relationships more significant to you or??
Tumblr is weird tonight.
What's even weirder, what takes Blaine by surprise almost just as much as anything has on this (weird, weird) Friday night, is how quickly the answer comes to him.
Short answer...yes, actually. I think something about e-relationships that makes them so much stronger than real-world friendships in certain cases is the serendipity of it all. You meet someone in real life because you frequent the same locations, you're thrown into similar situations: Oh, we have a class together, yes you can borrow my pencil. Oh, I've seen you in this coffee shop before, no I haven't tried their chocolate biscotti, is it any good. When you meet someone online, it's for one of two reasons: A) You have a void in your real-world relationships that you're seeking to fill, and you're hunting for someone who understands you in a way none of the randoms you see day-to-day truly can, like a piece is missing. Having been so involved in LGBT communities online I believe VERY strongly in the strength and influence of this. Or B) You randomly bump into someone that you're not even prepared to meet across the whole great spectrum of the internet - which, remember, could conceivably be ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD geographically - and you click in such a strong, innate way that your friendship forms from, like, the ether. Lol inarticulate there at the end but tl;dr I LOVE MY INTERNET FRIENDS. They're actually the best people I know. :D
Once he's satisfied with his answer Blaine publishes it, studying on the anon question a little more, trying to figure out if he thinks it's the same person who sent Kurt that question about New York - the diction is remarkably similar. He's still staring at it when he realizes suddenly that the same Katy Perry song has been on loop on his iTunes for like the past twenty minutes and he laughs to himself and takes it off repeat, letting it shuffle away to Hey Monday and some other stuff as he catches back up on his dash from his weirdness/hot chocolate/more weirdness spell. Chandler posted a really cute picture of himself with a snowman he made that's supposed to be his boyfriend, and he wants to hate it but he can't, really, especially with the way he totally got his hair right. He likes it, and leaves a reply of snow-tally adorable! because he knows Chandler hates his bad puns.
There's another question in his ask not too long after, and it's from Kurt.
kurtrageous asked you:
You don't know ANYONE better than us? :P
Blaine answers, Not here in New York.
And Tumblr is officially too weird, and he shuts his laptop again, and rolls over and goes the hell to bed.
"We we we so excited," he mutters to himself.
III. #queue
from: Chandler Kiehl
blainers!!!
Blaine grabs some napkins, wiping the grease of his pizza dinner from his hands so he can prepare himself for what is probably about to be a tedious and silly text message conversation. He hates when his Dumb Friend Chandler does this - he'll text him with just his name, or worse, with just the word "Hey," and drag everything out four or five texts longer than he needs to. It's probably a pet peeve that a kinder person wouldn't have, but if Blaine wanted to make small talk, he'd have a real phone call with voices and everything. He sighs and answers.
to: Chandler Kiehl
chandler.
from: Chandler Kiehl
whaaaat r u doing on like march 12 or 13? :D
to: Chandler Kiehl
ive got class, thats your spring break but its not mine, remember?
from: Chandler Kiehl
but class is just during the day right? like what do u have in the evening??
to: Chandler Kiehl
i dont know, c, im not exactly thinking that far in advance
from: Chandler Kiehl
WRONG ANSWER!!!!
from: Chandler Kiehl
what ur doing is coming 2 c TOMMY w/ me!!!!! AMIRITE
Blaine's annoyed expression vanishes instantly in favor of a wide, astonished grin. The current Broadway revival of The Who's Tommy has been taunting Blaine ever since it opened, with the knowledge that it was playing right across town but that he had yet to reach a point where he had both the time and the money to go see it. Chandler, meanwhile, never has the trouble shelling out for an extra ticket if it means someone will actually go see things with him; he and his boyfriend have a lot of things in common but his fanatical love for Broadway is not one of them. Blaine's more than happy to capitalize on the opportunity.
And like. Tommy. Nothing gets Blaine's theatre blood pumping harder than watching a phenomenal performance of a role he'd like to play himself one day. Between that and The Who he can't believe this is finally actually happening.
to: Chandler Kiehl
WHY DIDNT YOU SAY THAT IN THE FIRST PLACE youre so dumb, of course im coming with you!!
from: Chandler Kiehl
AS IT SHOULD BE. its cool if i stay w/ u rite? in the city
to: Chandler Kiehl
absolutely! is it just the two of us at the theatre or is j finally going to come? is the who enough to lure him in? hahaha
from: Chandler Kiehl
no, alas, just u n me
from: Chandler Kiehl
altho if u wanted 2 invite a +1 i wont stop u.....provided he can get to ny all the way from looziana on such short notice ;) ;) ;)
And just like that, Blaine's back to annoyed. Because Blaine's Dumb Friend Chandler can't seem to shake this notion that Blaine and Kurt are "meant to be." No matter how many times Blaine insists that Kurt is just his friend - that he likes being friends with Kurt, that he wants it to stay that way, and how annoying he thinks the concept of "two gay guys can't just be friends, they must be involved!" is - Chandler tries to point out little ways in which they are apparently "perfect" for each other. Their infinitely compatible fashion sense and music tastes. Their unconventional relationships with their brothers. Their shared love of New York City and all the mystical, mysterious things it holds. (He's also quick to remind Blaine that they are friends, and yet they've never once tried to date, so no one is proving any cliches to be true.) It's annoying. But it's typical Chandler-annoying, so Blaine is doing his best to ignore it.
to: Chandler Kiehl
unless youve got the cash for a third ticket it should probably just stay you and me. lol.
from: Chandler Kiehl
fiiiiiine, fine, but u know u should rly be gettin some of that by now
from: Chandler Kiehl
all im sayin is he is RUULLLLLL qt and u know we have like the same taste in dudes so u cant tell me u dont c it
(Blaine will admit Chandler has a point there. Though Chandler's tastes often seem to be "anything breathing with a cute face and a penis" from an outsider perspective, Blaine knows he definitely has a type when it comes down to it, and it makes a decent Venn diagram with Blaine's own. Blaine's actually always found Jeremiah to be quite the charmer and will even confess to being a little jealous when he and Chandler first started dating.)
to: Chandler Kiehl
what are you even talking about, though. he never posts pictures of his face.
from: Chandler Kiehl
FALSE!! false. blainers u need to up ur tumblr stalking skillz
from: Chandler Kiehl
ive found a good 4 or 5 on his blog alone PLUSSSS u can just go to his profesh site!! smh
to: Chandler Kiehl
well excuuuuse me if STALKING isnt exactly one of the "skillz" i pride myself on *eyeroll*
from: Chandler Kiehl
u have still not ttly succumbed 2 the tumblr beast, then
from: Chandler Kiehl
consider urself lucky u have been spared
They go back to talking about Tommy after that, and arranging the rest of their plans for when Chandler takes the bus down from Connecticut to figure out which night they're going and make sure they can get their tickets secured. Blaine gets pretty jazzed about the show - who is he kidding, he gets downright squealy - and finishes his pizza and diet Sprite in great spirits, dumping his plates and heading back to his room from the dining hall with a spring in his step and Pinball Wizard already stuck in his head. Naturally, his immediate instinct is to blog about it.
jumpupbubbleup:
THIS JUST IN: Tumblr user Chandler kiehlingmesoftly and I are going to see the revival of THE WHO'S TOMMY in slightly less than a month! I'M PRETTY MUCH SCREAMING. One of my favorite musicals AND one of my favorite long-distance friends? It basically can't get better and it's not even MY spring break! :D :D :D
Brace yourselves for me reblogging a LOT of Tommy stuff in upcoming weeks, sorry I'm not sorry.
He gets reblogged almost instantly by Chandler, who adds simply TOMMY IS A TRANQUILIZER!!, a screencap of his Megabus itinerary, and a gif of Giselle from Enchanted flailing her hands in excitement. High on their planning, Blaine dives into the #Tommy tracked tag without really thinking it through and is confronted with The Who but also Rugrats and Power Rangers and all sorts of other bizarre, totally unrelated junk. "Blahhh," he says out loud, and returns to his dash, refusing to let his spirits get down.
His post has another note, and he's pleased to see that it's from Kurt.
kurtrageous reblogged you
How thrilling! You'll have to tell me how the female lead does, I've heard she's one to watch. Smash some mirrors for me ;)
It's the tags Kurt's put on it that catch Blaine's attention, though: #and also I'm really glad to hear that you get to spend some irl time with chandler #sometimes I worry about you just sitting alone in your single room doing homework and blogging ♥ #but now you get real hang-out time with real people so hooray!
He looks up from his monitor, catching his own eye in the mirror on the back of his door. Did he - does Blaine really sound that pathetic? Even through the internet to someone who's only known him for about three months? Maybe he doesn't go out partying with a ton of fraternity pals every weekend, and maybe he does spend a lot of time blogging. Chandler spends a ton of time blogging and Kurt's never "worried" about him. And maybe he does focus kind of heavily on his homework, but he's just trying to get good grades and make sure he's making the most of his education, and maybe he did just eat dinner alone in the cafeteria but -
"Oh my god."
Oh my god, Blaine doesn't really have any friends.
But that's not true! He has Chandler...in Connecticut. And Tasha in Maryland, and Kurt in Louisiana, and Jackie in Wisconsin and his brother in California and Wes back in Ohio. He has Jeff, who lives just on the other side of the city, but the last time they hung out was probably before Christmas; he has Sam, or at least he used to, and now he doesn't even know where he is. Everyone who's closest to Blaine's heart is at least one state border away from Blaine's body. Blaine loves his internet friends from the bottom of his goddamn soul but in the case of nearly all of him, that's all they are: his internet friends. They're not people he studies with in the library or gets drinks with at the bar.
He blinks at his reflection, and then frowns solidly, first at himself and then at his computer screen and Kurt's tags. Well, so what? Blaine's surrounded himself with people that make him happy and fill his heart, and if those people can nine times out of ten only do so electronically, so be it. Kurt's not the boss of him and if he wants to gush about seeing Tommy with a boy he only catches up with face-to-face about once every couple of months, Kurt totally can't tell him how to live his life. Blaine smiles resolutely and tugs his phone from his pocket, scrolling back through all his texts with Chandler and getting giddy with it all over again. Even going to college in New York for almost two years now, Blaine doesn't get to indulge in Broadway very often, and this is easily going to be the highlight of what has already been a tricky, strenuous semester.
all im sayin is he is RUULLLLLL qt Blaine reads again - Dumb Friend Chandler, world-class poet - and he bites his lip, dropping the phone onto his mattress beside him and clicking over to Kurt's blog proper. There is, in fact, a link in his sidebar for his professional website, and the front page is exactly what Chandler implied - several photos of not-the-greatest quality but of the utmost confidence, of Kurt rocking some of his most kurtrageous fashion-forward ensembles. A good two-thirds are from the neck down but some of them include hats and therefore must extend all the way up. It's the most of Kurt's face Blaine thinks he's ever seen, even in those two American National High School Show Choir Concert TOUR! videos.
Blaine's lip slips even further between his teeth as he studies on the photographs. Kurt has downright enviable hair, a rich color that styles up weightlessly into swoops and swirls that Blaine's Medusa-ratnest curls could never achieve in a million years. The hair spills over a pale, high-structure complexion - high forehead, high cheekbones, unique character nose and strong jaw - and tapers down behind his elfin ears to a small scar on his neck that Blaine's never noticed before. In more than one of the pictures there's a small blue feather threaded into his bangs, and Blaine realizes he remembers that feather from the tour, and how wardrobe had a fit when Kurt and a couple of the McKinley girls came back one night with those extensions without having told anyone. So some of these photographs must be several years old.
There's one - exactly one - picture where Kurt is staring directly into the camera, and when Blaine's eyes land on his, he suddenly finds that he can't tug them away. Though the photo is of dubious quality, Blaine can still tell that they're some sort of undefinable clear-blue-green color, with a blaze of self-assured ferocity behind them that it's impossible to fake. His eyes are actually really, really stunning.
Kurt's actually really, really stunning.
"Chandler!" Blaine shouts into his empty room, shaking his head a little and hitting his back-arrow until he's on his dashboard again. This is ridiculous. Blaine and Kurt are not "meant to be." Kurt is Blaine's friend. His really good-looking friend with whom he has a lot in common who worries about him in the tags of his posts complete with little hearts.
Right.
~
So Blaine is having kind of a low week.
He spends Monday and Tuesday avoiding Tumblr as much as possible in a frantic, desperate effort to make sure he's studied enough for his Modern Playwrights exam. He feels like he's got a pretty good handle on it...until Wednesday, when he walks into the test and discovers that it covers two more chapters of the text than he thought it did, and he's only prepared for one of the two major essay questions. Blaine bombs it worse than he's ever done on anything his whole college career. He's one of the first to finish because there's only so long he can stare at questions he just straight-up doesn't know the answer to before he can't fool himself any longer. He immediately races back to his room and faceplants into his bed, letting out a little scream of rage into his pillow. Because, like, really?
A teeny voice in his head that sounds suspiciously like Kurt (which, like, Blaine barely even remembers what his voice sounds like, so how does that work) decides to remind him that if he knew the number of anyone in his class - hell, if he knew the names of more than half the people in that class - he probably could have texted someone to double-check on the material for the exam. But he doesn't.
(He kicks his feet into the mattress a couple of times and tells this voice to shut up.)
With that horror out of the way, Blaine finally resurfaces on the internet, and the first post on his dashboard is Chandler squeeing up a storm about his plans with Jeremiah for Valentine's Day on Saturday. He sighs and rolls his eyes so hard it almost hurts, trying not to be a cynical brat about it - but it's hard. The next post down is from Kurt -
Well, sort of.
kurtrageous reblogged kurtrageous
Hello all ♥ Just in case anyone missed it, I'm going out of town for a little bit to celebrate my stepbrother's birthday and I won't have a whole lot of internet access while I'm away! Because I'm Eternalone™ I'll be driving back on Saturday. I threw some stuff in my queue that I hope will tide my adoring public over until then~
Blaine's parade has officially been rained on. So maybe just moments before Blaine was grumbling about Kurt's annoyingly accurate insight into his life - the fact still is that lately, Kurt's been one of Blaine's life's only positives. After the clusterfuck that this week is steadily becoming, the last thing he needs is to be completely cut off from anything but queued-up Robo-Kurt until late Saturday night. Who else is he going to hate cheesy Valentine's Day posts with? Who else is going to cheer him up about his hot-mess exam by instead quizzing him on his knowledge of mainstream 90s pop songs and awarding him an A+ for sheer nerdiness? (Okay, maybe Blaine's making that one up, but stranger things have been known to happen.)
Blaine pokes at Kurt's actual blog page a little bit but sees nothing too exciting yet, and instead just slides his laptop shut again and trudges out to the one on-campus food spot he knows is open right now. It may still be freezing outside, but there are some things that can only be mollified by ice cream sandwiches.
It's not till late the following evening, when Blaine's browsing Tumblr in between Googling up some photos he needs for a Powerpoint presentation, that Kurt's queue starts doing anything interesting: There's a picture of Taylor Lautner on his dash.
Blaine snorts a little. Taylor Lautner? Who even talks about that guy any more? Twilight died ages ago, and Blaine doesn't think he's done a single movie since those - at least not that Blaine's ever heard of, and Blaine likes movies enough that he definitely would have heard about it. Lautner's tabloid fodder at best. But the picture seems a little bit older, from back when people must have cared a little bit more, and it's not an unappealing picture. Blaine definitely can't deny that the dude has an amazing body. His eyes trace the hard lines and prominent curves of his musculature (he's shirtless, naturally) and Blaine decides he probably wouldn't kick him out of bed.
This seems to be Kurt's main interest in him as well. The tags say #before he gets fat #goodness those SHOULDERS #sighs dreamily and Blaine's waning smile revives itself and it's not till he's scrolled down two or three more posts on his dashboard that Blaine realizes he has also surreptitiously reached up and touched his own shoulders through the thin henley he's wearing.
My shoulders are nice too, he thinks, with a bit of defensive sass to it, and oh dear sweet god where did that come from?
He spends the next couple of hours with his arms flexed just a little, for reasons he totally cannot comprehend but whatever, and right before he goes to bed another of Kurt's queued posts kicks out and this time it's a video. It's got almost a hundred thousand notes, which seems pretty crazy, and also a little out of character for Kurt - he's not the type to post those things that are incredibly "Tumblr-popular" with tons of outdated dorky jokes or whatever. Intrigued beyond anything, Blaine reads the caption - They met on Tumblr, and the one girl flew in to meet her girlfriend - and then watches it.
Oh, god, it's cute. It's painfully cute, and so sharply touching that Blaine almost starts crying right then and there. The littler of the two is on crutches and she just straight up drops them to the floor to start hugging and kissing her girlfriend, like any sort of injury or incapacitation she may have means nothing in the face of their relationship. The soft "you can stop now" from the other girl at the end of the video lends credibility and intimacy to the moment and gosh, Blaine is just sort of overwhelmed. He reblogs it almost instantly; it's exactly the sort of thing he stands for, on the internet, connections being forged across the online ether because there's no way to do it in real life, only to ultimately become reality, and especially for young gay people like these two women. Blaine's honestly surprised Kurt didn't tag it with his url (Kurt, unusually, hasn't tagged it with anything) to make sure that Blaine saw it or draw his attention to it, because he's pretty sure Kurt must have posted it especially for him.
Well. But wait. What if.
No, Blaine cuts himself off from that train of thought at once. Well, almost at once. Because his brain is still whirring down the little tributaries of his stream of consciousness, which is that Kurt probably didn't tag it with his name because he was worried Blaine (or, y'know, someone) would interpret that as Kurt implying that he wanted this sort of thing with Blaine, which he obviously doesn't, except if it's so obvious that he doesn't want it, then why didn't he just go ahead and tag Blaine in it anyway, because he should know that people will understand that that's not what he means, and so maybe he does think people will take it that way and he's afraid they will because maybe he would mean it that way if he -
No.
But what if?
what
if???
~
from: UNKNOWN
Um. Hello. Is this Blaine?
Blaine blinks a little at his phone. Yes, he wants to say, it's Blaine, who the hell are you? The number has neither a New York nor an Ohio area code, so he's really confused as to what's going on, and he's still studying on it when his phone buzzes in his hand again -
from: UNKNOWN
(This is Kurt, by the way. I got your number from Chandler? I really hope this isn't too creepy.)
Blaine's confused face cracks in favor of a huge grin and he saves the number to his contacts at once.
to: Kurtrageous
no no not creepy at all!! to what do i owe the pleasure haha
from: Kurtrageous
Oh, you know, the usual. I thought I was going to be able to handle my brother's girlfriend tonight knowing that I can finally get away from her tomorrow but four days is really just three days too many.
to: Kurtrageous
is she that bad then?
from: Kurtrageous
Oh, god, Blaine, I honestly can't stand her. She's just so WEIRD - not eccentric, I adore eccentric, but just that bland, unnerving kind of weird - and that alone would be bad-enough-but-
tolerable, but on top of that she treats Finn so badly.
from: Kurtrageous
I realize the boy tends closer to the "post" side than the "pin" side of intelligence, but he's still a grown adult attending college. She's got no right to condescend to him like this, and everyone sees it but Finn himself because he's just so damn smitten. The thought that he's thinking about marrying this woman....
from: Kurtrageous
Sorry. Our first non-Tumblr conversation probably shouldn't just be me complaining nonstop about Horse-Face Jennifer. ;)
Blaine laughs. Kurt's holding nothing back tonight - this girl really must be pretty dreadful. Blaine's always respected Kurt's honesty.
(He tells him as much.)
to: Kurtrageous
no worries! i always respect your honesty lol. and its not like i had any other ~thrilling friday night plans that youre keeping me from here
Kurt's next response takes a little bit longer to come through:
from: Kurtrageous
Ooooh, I honestly can't believe you. /shakes fist And yet simultaneously, I'm not surprised.
to: Kurtrageous
whats that supposed to mean? haha
from: Kurtrageous
Exactly what it sounds like. Of course you don't have plans on Friday night.
Blaine's smile fades.
to: Kurtrageous
omg, im not THAT boring, jeez :P
from: Kurtrageous
I guess I'm just speaking from a place of jealousy, here. It just burns me inside to know that you're sitting in the heart of the most magical city on Earth but that on a FRIDAY NIGHT you're not even going to leave your residence hall
to: Kurtrageous
oh and i suppose if you were here youd be so totally living it up?
to: Kurtrageous
but wait, thats right, youre not here. youre still not in new york.
from: Kurtrageous
Wow, did you have to crouch down for a blow that low?
from: Kurtrageous
You know why I'm not there and you know that it's killing me. Jesus.
to: Kurtrageous
actually i honestly dont!!
to: Kurtrageous
your dad is fine, your glee club is fine, im pretty sure the only thing holding you back is you.
from: Kurtrageous
You don't know anything about me. I can't believe you're acting like you do. You're being really immature.
to: Kurtrageous
and youre being a coward.
Blaine takes a deep breath and lets it out more rapidly than he'd like to. This is ridiculous. He can't believe Kurt would be such a brat about this whole thing, and while at the same time he can't quite believe himself with how aggressive he's being about the situation, he's been realizing as the words flow from his fingertips that Kurt has needed someone to tell him this for a long, long time. And this is what Blaine does: He finds people who need help, and he helps them. Even if he has to be a dick about it.
Kurt doesn't respond, so Blaine texts again.
to: Kurtrageous
my life may not be super-exciting, but its my life, and im living it the way i want to. i know for a fact that you cant say the same right now.
to: Kurtrageous
come to new york. ill be here when you do.
from: Kurtrageous
If I ever make it to New York, it will definitely not fucking be because of you, Blaine.
To crown off Blaine's week from hell, he and Kurt stop texting for the night. Blaine's actually pretty sure they're not going to be talking again for a while yet.
He wishes that knowledge didn't hurt so much.
IV. #meme (redux)
kiehlhaul reblogged anunkindnessofcock
Who do you ship me with? Celebs, real people, other tumblrs, etc.
"Oh, please," says Blaine, out loud, even though he's sitting alone in the campus coffee shop trying to work on his résumé and people will probably give him weird looks for talking to himself. Blaine hates this one, especially when it comes from Chandler, because literally all Chandler is doing with this one is fishing for compliments about himself/Jeremiah and how totally, sickeningly adorable they are. It's classic Dumb Friend Chandler behavior that he's just not in the mood for right now, considering he still can't find a new number for the manager he'd worked for at Subway in Ohio now that he'd switched stores and that dude is probably going to be his best reference and ugh, adult life is a pain in the ass.
The worst part about it is the tags, though: #everyone do this one #AND REBLOG IT TOOOOOOO!!! #that means you guys: #armaninicole #meaningfulgagalyric #jumpupbubbleup #electricbluestilettos #I'm watching yooouuuuu. Blaine hates to see his url in that lineup because he knows what Chandler's angling for. And he also knows that if he doesn't reblog this in the next hour, he's going to receive about eight annoying, strongly worded text messages. Might as well suck it up and get it over with.
Blaine reluctantly reblogs and changes the link to his own ask box, tagging with #meme and #I hope we can all just ignore this one before returning to the Ohio yellow pages website where he continues to make zero progress. He gets up and orders another coffee, along with another of their shitty muffins (they've tried to liven them up with green sprinkles, but it's doing nothing to obscure their lackluster flavor and for crying out loud it's barely even March; but they're dirt cheap and Blaine somehow can't stop eating them), and sits back down at his computer to discover he already has five messages. "Oh, please," he says again, and the girl at the booth in the corner side-eyes him from where she's hunched over an assignment for some sort of art class.
One of them is, naturally, from Chandler, and it says in all caps "TUMBLR USER KURT KURTRAGEOUS!!!!!" and Blaine deletes it without even publishing it. The other four?
Also say Kurt.
All in all Blaine gets twelve asks regarding the meme and every single one of them says Kurt or kurtrageous or "that cute boy you're always reblogging from Louisiana." Most of them are anonymous asks, but even a couple of Blaine's friends that aren't Chandler are brave enough to come forward and say it, too. I think it could be really good for both of you says Tasha from Maryland, who got asked out by her now-girlfriend a few weeks ago on Valentine's and has been sweeter and sappier than usual ever since. And finally, for the first time, Blaine stops and lets himself genuinely wonder:
Is Tasha right?
God, Blaine likes Kurt. He's smart and funny and incredibly easy on the eyes to an almost criminal degree, and they have so much in common. But that's really the problem: Blaine likes Kurt too much. He definitely likes him too much to dump the prospect of an awkward long-distance relationship onto him when Blaine is historically terrible at romance and could never put Kurt through something like that. Their friendship as it stands now means everything to Blaine; they're still on a little bit of touchy ground after their fight last month, but there's been some profuse apologizing and things are nearly back to normal, or even better than normal. Blaine doesn't know what he would do if he lost that Kurt, and he knows there's a ninety percent chance that that's exactly what would happen if he tried to make it into something new. His last online "boyfriend" certainly taught him that.
It could be good for both of them. In some parallel universe where it wouldn't ultimately be really, really bad.
Blaine makes a post about it, since that seems the less ridiculous of his options (really, twelve asks?).
jumpupbubbleup:
Ha ha, very funny, guys. It's even funnier that some of you seem to think it's never crossed my mind before. Rest assured that it has, and that I'm a big boy and can make my own decisions even if you don't like them. (That goes double for you, Mr. Kiehl.)
Blaine can make his own decisions.
But twelve people are actively disagreeing with him. Not just Chandler. Not just Blaine himself having weird second-guessed thoughts. Twelve whole people, some of whom he probably barely even knows.
Blaine is going to need another shitty muffin to deal with all of this.
part 2
Fill request for: switch842
Prompt: "AU where Kurt & Blaine meet over some sort of social network site (twitter or tumblr, etc)"
Rating: just barely R/NSFW, and not really till the end, but eh
"Warnings"/Spoilers: Tumblr! And Chandler. Way, way more Chandler than anyone ever planned on. Also, the elements of canon I've ended up using vs. the ones I threw out all kind of function together in a weird-ass way, please just roll with it lmao.
Word Count: Somewhere in the neighborhood of 16k?? I K R
Summary: Blaine's Dumb Friend Chandler opens up the world of Tumblr to him. Then Tumblr user kurtrageous opens up the whole damn world. (Blaine-Chandler and Blaine-Sam friendship, blink-and-you'll-miss-it/implied past!Blaine/Sebastian)
I. #about me
It's Blaine's Dumb Friend Chandler that finally persuades him into creating a Tumblr account.
Blaine's always maintained a kind of active presence online - but with the emphasis on "kind of." It's mostly been occasional Facebook and Twitter updates and a small but dedicated role in a couple of smaller forums designed to help teens that are struggling with coming out and other LGBT issues. Blaine's prided himself on the latter extraordinarily; that's actually where he met his Dumb Friend Chandler in the first place, though since he moved to New York he and Chandler have connected a bunch "IRL" too. (Blaine should really stop calling him his Dumb Friend Chandler, but the title just seems to have stuck. Blaine loves Chandler, but he really can be so dumb. Endearingly so, but still.)
Chandler, meanwhile, adores Tumblr. Chandler adores quite a number of things, and a disconcertingly high percentage of those things are connected to his ever-present smartphone. He tweets and tumbls and Facebooks almost constantly, and he's got a Pinterest and two separate Instagram accounts, one of which is dedicated solely to pictures of himself and the food he is about to eat. He tells Blaine that Blaine simply must create a Tumblr account, that he's living in the past and has no idea what he's missing, and so eventually rather than put up a fight with his somewhat exhausting pal, Blaine caves. He signs up with his personal email to make sure his professional school account doesn't get cluttered with weird stuff, and picks a lyric from his favorite Roxy Music song as his username because it's got less of a chance of being taken already, and pokes at one of the free generic layouts until it looks kind of nice, and there you have it:
Blaine Anderson is on Tumblr.
And, just like his Dumb Friend Chandler pretty much warned him by example, he gets kind of addicted.
~
At first, because he doesn't really know anyone or anything else, Chandler's the only person Blaine is following. Although with the sheer volume of his posts, and the frequency with which his userpic and URL change - always some variant of a pun off his last name, either "feeling" into "kiehling" or "killing" into "kiehling," and oh how upset he'd been when he found out "yourekiehlingmesmalls" was being hoarded (though for Halloween, he does switch it up a bit to "mschanandlerkohl" and change his icon to Matthew Perry from Friends) - it really does feel like he's following two or three people, at least. But there's only so long Blaine can take the cutesy selfies of Chandler and his boyfriend, gifs of the white and purple My Little Pony, and endless Polyvore designs without a little bit of a break, so he cautiously ventures into one of the parts of Tumblr he finds most frightening - "the tags."
Fortunately for Blaine, it ends up not being so bad. The Katy Perry tag is wonderful and has so many cute pictures of her - there's a blog solely for pictures of her with little kids and animals, which he follows almost instantly - and the Brooks Brothers tag is riddled with some weird kids called the Janoskians but he still manages to strike gold here and there. Slowly but surely he finds other "real people," too, and that's the part that Blaine loves the most - that friendship stretching across miles, and knowing that he can be there for people who may not have found anyone in their immediate physical vicinity who'll care about them that much.
Blaine has been that person. It's not exactly a barrel of fun.
He's been an active blogger for about two months now, and as he lolls on his stomach across his dorm room bed, mindlessly tumbling as a procrastination method for a theatre history paper he really, really doesn't want to write, it occurs to Blaine that this is probably exactly how one is meant to use Tumblr. He posts a cool fanart he found of Cyclops and Wolverine and tags it with #me and Sam :( and then clicks back to his dashboard proper, and sure enough, the top post on his dash is from his Dumb Friend Chandler. It's a video, the thumbnail just a blurry black screen with some people on it that look a fair distance away. He reads Chandler's commentary first and is surprised to see that all it says is
ohwhatakiehling:
Blainers!!!!
Curious, Blaine studies on it further. The original poster is a user with the URL "kurtrageous" - it's not a user Blaine has ever seen around, he doesn't even think Chandler has reblogged from them before - and the text of his post says I can't believe I found this on YouTube. YouTube! Who other than my dad was taking video of this?! but then in another paragraph by itself just the two words Sigh... Nostalgia.
Now Blaine's even more curious. So finally, he clicks "play" on the embedded video, and the sharp laugh and "oh my GOD" is out of his throat before he can stop himself.
Who was taking video of this and putting it on YouTube? Who on Earth cared that much about the American National High School Show Choir Concert TOUR!, especially from almost four years ago? He remembers this venue, remembers how ridiculous it was to be playing in someplace so large when there was barely anyone in the seats - it had by far been the largest place they'd played on the piddly 8-stop tour. And just like that, the nostalgia is washing over him: the memory-ingrained choreography for Raise Your Glass that he could probably still do in his sleep till this day, his improv'd duets with Nick or Jon backstage that he was so sad could never feature in the actual concert lineup, that all-girls' school that had been on the tour with them whose members had probably slept with fifty percent of the Warblers and vice-versa, how sad he'd been that Wes and David and the other seniors couldn't come with them because of college, his penpal Sam from that Louisiana choir who had fallen out of touch since they started college and it was breaking Blaine's hea--
Wait. Tumblr user kurtrageous said "nostalgia" too. Snapping back to reality, Blaine actually manages to focus on the video before him - and it's of that Louisiana choir. It's the big group number they did to Don't Stop Believin', which had easily been the highlight of the show according to all the newspaper coverage the tour got (though Blaine's Teenage Dream earned a fair amount of praise also, he remembers smugly); it isn't the whole song, but it's enough to see the impressive light show the number had included and to hear the (Blaine's not too proud to admit it) even more impressive vocals it featured.
Blaine scans the lineup of high schoolers flouncing around the stage. One of them is the one who posted this video. He spots Sam and he aches a little, but there's no way the OP is him. There's that incredible black soloist, super-tall guy, dancers, pushy lead girl, scary Latina... Blaine barely remembers most of them. He has no idea who this could be.
He dives into the "related videos" on YouTube but there aren't any of the Warblers, just another one of the Louisiana group (McKinley, the video says, he remembers that now) doing Lady Gaga's Born This Way with their cheesy-cute T-shirts. This one, Blaine does remember one stand-out from: the slim brown-haired boy whose shirt had garishly proclaimed "LIKES BOYS." Blaine remembers thinking how tacky that was, and being a little bummed out that the one openly-gay kid on the tour who wasn't from Dalton needed to broadcast it so intensely. It definitely put him off the group - the whole number did.
He also remembers Pushy Lead Girl more clearly once he sees her "NOSE" tee, and that's what finally makes him reblog the video off Chandler and add his own comments.
jumpupbubbleup:
Oh my gosh, are you from this McKinley group? Our whole choir HATED you guys! :P
Blaine chuckles to himself, adds #except for Sam :( in the tags, and then catches sight of the clock at the bottom of his desktop and swears softly. This paper is due tomorrow and he's barely even halfway done. Banishing the weird show choir reminiscing from his mind - though swearing he's going to call Jeff tomorrow, he knows he's in New York too and they connect so much less often than they really should - Blaine makes himself sit up and haul a couple of his reference texts into his lap, skimming half-heartedly for please, just one more good quote...
He lasts about twenty minutes and writes, like, half a paragraph before his open Tumblr tab sucks him back in, informing him he has 8 new posts. Six of them are Chandler. One is another mind-blowing work of art from this adorable lesbian painter from Maryland he started following last week, and one is a hipster Instagram of a really sweet pair of brogues that Blaine is suddenly coveting (he one-clicks it to his queue).
And buried in the notes of people liking that stupid video he posted a few days ago of his brother in that free credit commercial, there's a reblog from "kurtrageous," with some more text added on below the Don't Stop Believin' video.
Blaine clicks to the blog almost immediately to read the full thing -
kurtrageous:
WHAT? Were you on this tour??? Oh my god, are you from that prep school from - Iowa (Ohio? Indiana? What is geography)...wait, why did you hate us??
Blaine laughs, casting a cursory glance over the soft, minimalistic chicness of kurtrageous's custom blog theme and then drifting up to reblog almost instantly.
jumpupbubbleup:
LMAO. Ohio! But yeah, the thing was that my friend Jeff (the super-blond guy from our group) had a HUGE thing for that girl in your choir with the "NOSE" shirt, but then the one time he tried to make a move on her, that really, really tall kid turned out to be her boyfriend, and he scared the crap out of Jeff and made him feel like a loser. Because I guess he was on the football team, or something? And said some not-nice things about boys from private schools (we are NOT a "prep" school, FYI!), and IDK, I guess hurt Jeff's feelings. So we all decided to stand in solidarity with Jeff and hate you guys a lot, haha. Plus, since you guys went to Nationals that year and we didn't, you kind of hogged all the stage time from the rest of us....
Once he's done reblogging, Tumblr loops him back to kurtrageous's blog automatically, and Blaine finally decides he's going to check it out. The chicness pervades everything, the whole theme and even some of the post content clearly focused on aesthetics: black and white photographs, no two posts of too much similarity back-to-back with one another, a clear eye for fashion and the visual, no extraneous design elements. Blaine ends up going pages and pages back before he even realizes it, and catches at least one nice men's ensemble that he himself reblogged, as well as some audio posts from some of his very favorite musicals. They've clearly taken different approaches to blogging, but considering their mutual interests and their shared pasts in embarrassing-but-fun high school show choir, he and this guy (and Blaine thinks it's a guy, he's just got a hunch, though the post content is all incredibly gender-neutral) are not at all dissimilar people.
He finally gets to a post tagged #here you go it's my face #enjoy it while you can this won't be happening again any time soon. The image is taking a while to load, but when it finally does, Blaine gasps "oh my god" abruptly for the second time that evening.
It's that kid. That "LIKES BOYS" kid with the brown wispy hair and the nice countertenor. (Okay, maybe Blaine remembers a little bit more about everything than he really cares to admit.) It's a professional-grade photograph, not an over-filtered Instagram or a webcam snap or anything, and it's caught him in three-fourths profile with his bangs swept artful-casual up back from his forehead and his neck craned just-so that a glimpse of throat is visible overtop of the fabulous scarf he's wearing. Compositionally it's stunning.
Boy-wise it's not so bad either.
Blaine's having a hard time reconciling this sleek aesthete with the show-choir kid of the past, but his curiosity is so piqued that he almost can't make himself pop back to the dashboard to see if the guy has re-reblogged back. But he has -
kurtrageous:
SNORTING IRL. The "really, really tall kid" is my stepbrother and if you truly know him he is about as intimidating as a gerbil. I am so sorry that he ruined us for you. Please, please forget anything he ever said. As for "NOSE" girl, I'll have to ask her if she remembers this Jeff of yours ;) And as for us hogging the stage time...sorry I'm not sorry!
There's also a note on his dash that Blaine finds even more fascinating: kurtrageous started following you.
His face stretching in a tiny glimmer of a smirk despite himself, Blaine goes back to his blog and follows him back.
(And then, by god, he makes himself finish this horrible paper.)
II. #meme
So Kurt's probably Blaine's favorite person he's found on Tumblr yet.
Once he started following him, Blaine realized he and Kurt have even more in common than he anticipated. Their appreciation for fashion is mutual and with a lot of overlap (though Kurt tends much more toward the avant-garde and envelope-pushing; Blaine supposes he's not calling himself "outrageous" for nothing), their music taste is even more compatible (Blaine's a little more pop, Kurt's a little more showtunes, but they never hate any of each other's guilty pleasure stuff), and they even share a love for trashy reality television. Blaine stops being surprised when Kurt is #1 on his Tumblr "crushes" week after week, or when Kurt will reblog something Blaine never would have expected and yet can seamlessly fit into his understanding of Kurt's favorite things. For the first time in a while - and definitely for the first time exclusively on Tumblr - Blaine feels like he's making a genuine online friend and not just a casual pal he can talk to about collegiate a cappella or the woes of extra-curly hair.
One Friday near the start of the spring semester, Blaine has blissfully knocked out all of his film studies homework and is allowing himself a full weekend of veg-out relaxation to do literally nothing, so naturally his first order of business is to throw himself onto his bed and plop his laptop on his stomach to check Tumblr. His addiction has bordered on dangerous a couple of times, but he's managed to keep on top of his studies, something Blaine is proud of to a kind of pathetic degree. He hasn't been on since mid-day yesterday and he's excited to space out into catching up on his dash, drop a couple things in his queue, and talk to Kurt and Chandler.
jumpupbubbleup:
In the immortal words of one Ms. R. Black: It's Friday!! And I am most certainly looking forward to the weekend, weekend.
He contemplates uploading the song, but decides to just make it as a text post. When it kicks him back to his dashboard, the first thing Blaine spots is an alert about a new message in his askbox. It's from Kurt, and it takes Blaine a few seconds to figure out what it's in response to, before he remembers reblogging an audio of Rio by Duran Duran from Kurt's blog and adding some cryptic tags about his brother....
kurtrageous asked you:
You say you have stories to tell and then you DON'T TELL THEM?? For shame, Mr. Anderson. Please share with the class. Especially with that 'cooper!' tag on there I MUST KNOW
Blaine laughs, rubbing a hand across his face, and answers privately: Both us Andersons were performers from an early age, as I'm sure you've deduced.... We may have choreographed a performance to a Rio/Hungry Like the Wolf mashup of our own creation as children that Cooper may have demanded we re-perform as adults to a classroom full of my peers my junior year at Dalton. No, before your ask, there are no videos of this performance. And if there were, I'm sure my face would be so red that it would throw off the color balance of the whole thing and render it unwatchable.
(There is a video, but there's no way Blaine is telling Kurt that.)
The response he gets is just the single word CUTE.... and he doesn't feel the need to answer that with any further extrapolation (though he's laughing in earnest now, and trying not to think about how gaga some of his Warbler buddies had gotten over his "famous" brother), so Blaine returns to his dashboard and starts checking stuff out. He scrolls and scrolls and scrolls, past a fit of dress-up doll posts from Chandler and a YouTube video of the Yale Whiffenpoofs (Kurt told him that one of his girlfriends from high school is actually dating a Whiffenpoof and Blaine swooned from jealousy) and all sorts of other things, and slowly Blaine can feel his brain begin to unwind from his hectic week of classes that he's still not quite familiar with, the tension of New York in early February evaporating out of his body as his old Dalton sweatshirt and new sherpa blanket and laptop warm him up on the outside and the happy feelings of having great friends on the internet warm him up on the inside.
Blaine finally gives up on his endless scrolling and clicks his arrow to zoom back up to the top, looking in his drafts to see if there's anything he wants to post and scoping out a few individual blogs to make sure he didn't miss anything he might have really wanted to see. By the time he's back on his regular dashboard it's almost half an hour later, and he's got a few new posts to catch up on; several of them are from Kurt, who appears to be indulging in Friday-night tumbling as well, and one of them....
kurtrageous reblogged thewizardandi-dina
Ask me that one question you've always wanted to know the answer to but you've been scared to ask.
The tags say #go ahead I'm bored and clicking the link goes straight to Kurt's ask box.
Blaine's trying to figure out why this is giving him so much pause. Chandler and some of his other friends do memes (or whatever) like this all the time, and there's nothing ever unusual about it; Blaine usually makes some joke like leaving song lyrics that are questions ("why you so obsessed with me?" or "can you pay my telephone bills?" or "is that a hickey or a bruise?" come to his mind almost instantly) and doesn't bother to ask real questions because he doesn't want to come across as creepy. But something about Kurt opening himself up like this has Blaine sitting up a little straighter in his bed and biting his lip a bit, and slowly, the comprehension sort of washes across him, which is that Blaine doesn't actually know that much about Kurt. Chandler is an absolute open book. Even Blaine himself doesn't hide much online; he pretty much has nothing to hide. But Kurt, though it's totally in keeping with what Blaine knows about Kurt's personality...Kurt remains kind of an enigma. Blaine knows his likes and dislikes, knows he's from Louisiana and he's a Virgo and he has a stepbrother. Blaine knows that Kurt loves Patti Lupone and hates houndstooth. But what does Blaine know about Kurt's life?
And then, almost as suddenly as this realization bubbled up within him, another sinks hard and fast into the pit of his stomach like a stone, which is that Blaine can't bring himself to ask any personal, prying questions of Kurt, even on anonymous. Something about the enormity of it all is deep and strange and terrifying, and it's like when his parents give him an iTunes giftcard for his birthday - there's so much, so much that Blaine wants that he ends up getting nothing, head reeling from the options. Well, it's like that except with about eighty extra layers of creepy invasive rude wrong! tacked onto the top of it. Blaine could ask Kurt just about anything, and chances are Kurt would answer; he said it himself, he's bored, and he's the one who chose to reblog the post. But Blaine wouldn't know where to begin.
His head's still spinning and spinning and spinning when Blaine finally clicks the link and his fingers are typing before he fully knows it and when he looks at Kurt's ask box the question he has typed says, Whatever happened to Sam Evans?
There's that, then.
Blaine hits ask before he can second-guess himself and takes a couple of deep, fortifying breaths. He clicks back to his dash and the post is still sitting there, and it looks like Chandler's reblogged it too, and Blaine figures, it's only fair if he lets Kurt ask something back, right? So he reblogs it, changing the link in the post to his own ask box, and then clicks away from Tumblr for a moment to get his head right again, checking his school email and opening up his iTunes and just breathing, breathing.
Suddenly this stress-free night has gotten a little out of hand.
Blaine's only got one message when he comes back. It's hard for him to open - and god, why is this such a big deal? - but it's only an anonymous question asking him when his birthday is "for science." He answers it with a smily face and kicks back to his dash only to see he's already got another message. He clicks to that one almost without even thinking after the simplicity of the first one only to find Kurt answering his question.
kurtrageous answered you:
I... I wish I had a better answer to this question than I do, Blaine.
Um. I don't know how much you know about when Hurricane Hanna hit? It didn't get TONS of news coverage because the damage it did was mostly insignificant in the grand scheme of things, not like Katrina was or anything, but it did take out a few things pretty hard, and one of those things was the business that Sam's dad helped run. Their whole family lost almost all their money - that's Sam and his parents and his little twin brother and sister, right - and they were in a pretty terrible place for a while. Sam actually came and stayed with us at my house for a little bit so he'd still be able to go to school rather than having to drop out and find work to help.
When he graduated they still weren't really back on track, and I think Sam was having a hard time dealing with stuff - his parents were insistent on him going to college but he knew they couldn't afford it at all, and I think they had a fight and he just...left. Brittany (our tall blonde dancer friend) was the only one who really heard from him at all before he went and she said he said some stuff about finding himself?? We've all kind of assumed he's ~traveling the world~ or what have you but he could be, like, sleeping on a park bench somewhere.
God, I don't ever really think/talk about this and I'm getting a little overwhelmed. I'm so sorry I had to be the bearer of bad news on this for you. I hope he comes back to us. :( ♥♥♥
Blaine has to read the whole thing two or three times over before it really sinks in. So not only does Blaine not know where his best pen-pal friend is, neither does anyone else. The emotional impact it's having on him is tremendous and weird. On the one hand, it's devastating; on the other hand, nothing's really changed, has it? Just because Blaine suddenly knows why he hasn't heard from Sam in a year and a half doesn't change the fact that Blaine hasn't heard from him. He's still missing, just in a deeper, realer way.
"Tumblr is weird tonight!" Blaine shouts into the quiet of his room. His iTunes plays softly in the background still.
Blaine shuts his laptop with a firm snap and gets up to make himself some hot chocolate. It's not all that great, since he has to make it in the microwave, but it's warm and liquid-sweet, and he flashes to the way that Harry Potter could always shake off the fright of a dementor by eating some chocolate. It feels like that. He bobs and dances oddly around his room while he waits for it to heat, trying to shake the weirdness of the sudden heaviness in the air and on the internet. By the time he crawls back into his bed, mug in his hand and I Kissed A Girl in his speakers, Blaine thinks he's ready to try again for his lazy relaxing evening on the internet.
His browser is still open to his answer from Kurt, and he shakes himself and hastily clicks straight to Kurt's blog, eager to see what other kind of silly questions he may have gotten. There's an anon that Blaine instantly pins as Chandler, an ask that says Are you descended from Cleopatra? Because you've got a killer asp! to which Kurt has replied "You don't even know what my asp looks like, nonners" with a gif of some black girl twerking, and the laugh that shakes through Blaine finally has him feeling a bit more at sorts. He also has a question from a fashion blog about one of his design sketches he posted a month or so ago (Blaine had been so taken with it he'd tried to like it more than once), which he's answered very politely and adorably. And there's one more anonymous question:
Anonymous --> you reblog pictures of new york all the time and you say you want to live there, right? what's keeping you! you belong there bb!!
Blaine's smile twists a little, curious. Kurt does want to come to NYC; Blaine's been following his blog long enough to figure that much out. And Blaine must admit it would be awesome if Kurt were to suddenly be within subway distance of his own dorm room. The smile fades a little as he reads Kurt's answer, though:
Okay, anon, listen up because I'm only going to answer this once, and only because you asked so sweetly. I love the City. I have no doubt in my heart that I belong there. But apparently the universe has other plans. I was all set to go there straight out of high school, but the university I'd chosen (coughcough rhymes with Mazda Miata), while it accepted my best friend, rejected me pretty soundly. Plans = dashed to bits. It was while I was working on a backup plan the following winter (which I admit I should've thought of sooner, joke's on you, Kurt) that my dad suffered a serious heart attack and was unconscious for almost two weeks. Awesome right!! There was no way I was leaving after that. I had to at least stay until he was in the clear healthwise, and by that point it was too late to get a second-semester audition, and there's still always the risk that he'll suffer another if he didn't make some serious lifestyle changes, which I naturally had to monitor because there's no way he was going to do it himself.
So yeah apparently I'm not meant to go to New York, apparently I'm meant to help my father and mentor my old high school glee club and work 25 hours a week at my favorite local coffee shop. Life could be so much worse. I still do karaoke at Applebee's Thursday nights. :)
And there it is: the exact kind of personal question Blaine's been twisting up inside trying to figure out how to ask. A few more pieces of the Kurt puzzle fall into place right before his eyes, and Blaine's worried, because he's starting to like the picture they paint a little bit less. How can Kurt ever believe that he doesn't deserve everything he wants in life? Blaine knows Kurt was a year ahead of him in school; his dad's heart attack is a full two years behind them now, and if he hasn't experienced anything else since then Blaine's pretty certain he's in the clear. And also doesn't Kurt have a stepmom who would totally look out for him even if Kurt weren't around? The more Blaine looks at the answer Kurt had given, those glib exclamation points and that little smily at the end, the more it just sounds so incredibly...defeated. Someone squeezed all the air out of Kurt's dreams, and Kurt is so convinced that that means it was popped, punctured irreversibly, when Blaine - Blaine's not so sure that it wasn't just untied from the bottom, sent whizzing around the room making that stupid farting sound.
(Blaine lost control of this metaphor somewhere.)
He's never seen Kurt get this personal online, and Blaine can't help but soak it up, hold it close to him with all the other great and fascinating things he knows about his friend. With a little shake of his head, Blaine makes himself leave Kurt's page behind and go back to his dashboard. Naturally, he's got a couple of messages from the meme too.
Anonymous asked you:
Did you go to Beyonce's culinary school? Because you are TOO bootylicious for me, baby.
Blaine answers this with Chandler, go to bed.
Anonymous asked you:
you seem to place a lot of value on your internet friends, and like i never see you talk about any """irl""" friends. are these relationships more significant to you or??
Tumblr is weird tonight.
What's even weirder, what takes Blaine by surprise almost just as much as anything has on this (weird, weird) Friday night, is how quickly the answer comes to him.
Short answer...yes, actually. I think something about e-relationships that makes them so much stronger than real-world friendships in certain cases is the serendipity of it all. You meet someone in real life because you frequent the same locations, you're thrown into similar situations: Oh, we have a class together, yes you can borrow my pencil. Oh, I've seen you in this coffee shop before, no I haven't tried their chocolate biscotti, is it any good. When you meet someone online, it's for one of two reasons: A) You have a void in your real-world relationships that you're seeking to fill, and you're hunting for someone who understands you in a way none of the randoms you see day-to-day truly can, like a piece is missing. Having been so involved in LGBT communities online I believe VERY strongly in the strength and influence of this. Or B) You randomly bump into someone that you're not even prepared to meet across the whole great spectrum of the internet - which, remember, could conceivably be ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD geographically - and you click in such a strong, innate way that your friendship forms from, like, the ether. Lol inarticulate there at the end but tl;dr I LOVE MY INTERNET FRIENDS. They're actually the best people I know. :D
Once he's satisfied with his answer Blaine publishes it, studying on the anon question a little more, trying to figure out if he thinks it's the same person who sent Kurt that question about New York - the diction is remarkably similar. He's still staring at it when he realizes suddenly that the same Katy Perry song has been on loop on his iTunes for like the past twenty minutes and he laughs to himself and takes it off repeat, letting it shuffle away to Hey Monday and some other stuff as he catches back up on his dash from his weirdness/hot chocolate/more weirdness spell. Chandler posted a really cute picture of himself with a snowman he made that's supposed to be his boyfriend, and he wants to hate it but he can't, really, especially with the way he totally got his hair right. He likes it, and leaves a reply of snow-tally adorable! because he knows Chandler hates his bad puns.
There's another question in his ask not too long after, and it's from Kurt.
kurtrageous asked you:
You don't know ANYONE better than us? :P
Blaine answers, Not here in New York.
And Tumblr is officially too weird, and he shuts his laptop again, and rolls over and goes the hell to bed.
"We we we so excited," he mutters to himself.
III. #queue
from: Chandler Kiehl
blainers!!!
Blaine grabs some napkins, wiping the grease of his pizza dinner from his hands so he can prepare himself for what is probably about to be a tedious and silly text message conversation. He hates when his Dumb Friend Chandler does this - he'll text him with just his name, or worse, with just the word "Hey," and drag everything out four or five texts longer than he needs to. It's probably a pet peeve that a kinder person wouldn't have, but if Blaine wanted to make small talk, he'd have a real phone call with voices and everything. He sighs and answers.
to: Chandler Kiehl
chandler.
from: Chandler Kiehl
whaaaat r u doing on like march 12 or 13? :D
to: Chandler Kiehl
ive got class, thats your spring break but its not mine, remember?
from: Chandler Kiehl
but class is just during the day right? like what do u have in the evening??
to: Chandler Kiehl
i dont know, c, im not exactly thinking that far in advance
from: Chandler Kiehl
WRONG ANSWER!!!!
from: Chandler Kiehl
what ur doing is coming 2 c TOMMY w/ me!!!!! AMIRITE
Blaine's annoyed expression vanishes instantly in favor of a wide, astonished grin. The current Broadway revival of The Who's Tommy has been taunting Blaine ever since it opened, with the knowledge that it was playing right across town but that he had yet to reach a point where he had both the time and the money to go see it. Chandler, meanwhile, never has the trouble shelling out for an extra ticket if it means someone will actually go see things with him; he and his boyfriend have a lot of things in common but his fanatical love for Broadway is not one of them. Blaine's more than happy to capitalize on the opportunity.
And like. Tommy. Nothing gets Blaine's theatre blood pumping harder than watching a phenomenal performance of a role he'd like to play himself one day. Between that and The Who he can't believe this is finally actually happening.
to: Chandler Kiehl
WHY DIDNT YOU SAY THAT IN THE FIRST PLACE youre so dumb, of course im coming with you!!
from: Chandler Kiehl
AS IT SHOULD BE. its cool if i stay w/ u rite? in the city
to: Chandler Kiehl
absolutely! is it just the two of us at the theatre or is j finally going to come? is the who enough to lure him in? hahaha
from: Chandler Kiehl
no, alas, just u n me
from: Chandler Kiehl
altho if u wanted 2 invite a +1 i wont stop u.....provided he can get to ny all the way from looziana on such short notice ;) ;) ;)
And just like that, Blaine's back to annoyed. Because Blaine's Dumb Friend Chandler can't seem to shake this notion that Blaine and Kurt are "meant to be." No matter how many times Blaine insists that Kurt is just his friend - that he likes being friends with Kurt, that he wants it to stay that way, and how annoying he thinks the concept of "two gay guys can't just be friends, they must be involved!" is - Chandler tries to point out little ways in which they are apparently "perfect" for each other. Their infinitely compatible fashion sense and music tastes. Their unconventional relationships with their brothers. Their shared love of New York City and all the mystical, mysterious things it holds. (He's also quick to remind Blaine that they are friends, and yet they've never once tried to date, so no one is proving any cliches to be true.) It's annoying. But it's typical Chandler-annoying, so Blaine is doing his best to ignore it.
to: Chandler Kiehl
unless youve got the cash for a third ticket it should probably just stay you and me. lol.
from: Chandler Kiehl
fiiiiiine, fine, but u know u should rly be gettin some of that by now
from: Chandler Kiehl
all im sayin is he is RUULLLLLL qt and u know we have like the same taste in dudes so u cant tell me u dont c it
(Blaine will admit Chandler has a point there. Though Chandler's tastes often seem to be "anything breathing with a cute face and a penis" from an outsider perspective, Blaine knows he definitely has a type when it comes down to it, and it makes a decent Venn diagram with Blaine's own. Blaine's actually always found Jeremiah to be quite the charmer and will even confess to being a little jealous when he and Chandler first started dating.)
to: Chandler Kiehl
what are you even talking about, though. he never posts pictures of his face.
from: Chandler Kiehl
FALSE!! false. blainers u need to up ur tumblr stalking skillz
from: Chandler Kiehl
ive found a good 4 or 5 on his blog alone PLUSSSS u can just go to his profesh site!! smh
to: Chandler Kiehl
well excuuuuse me if STALKING isnt exactly one of the "skillz" i pride myself on *eyeroll*
from: Chandler Kiehl
u have still not ttly succumbed 2 the tumblr beast, then
from: Chandler Kiehl
consider urself lucky u have been spared
They go back to talking about Tommy after that, and arranging the rest of their plans for when Chandler takes the bus down from Connecticut to figure out which night they're going and make sure they can get their tickets secured. Blaine gets pretty jazzed about the show - who is he kidding, he gets downright squealy - and finishes his pizza and diet Sprite in great spirits, dumping his plates and heading back to his room from the dining hall with a spring in his step and Pinball Wizard already stuck in his head. Naturally, his immediate instinct is to blog about it.
jumpupbubbleup:
THIS JUST IN: Tumblr user Chandler kiehlingmesoftly and I are going to see the revival of THE WHO'S TOMMY in slightly less than a month! I'M PRETTY MUCH SCREAMING. One of my favorite musicals AND one of my favorite long-distance friends? It basically can't get better and it's not even MY spring break! :D :D :D
Brace yourselves for me reblogging a LOT of Tommy stuff in upcoming weeks, sorry I'm not sorry.
He gets reblogged almost instantly by Chandler, who adds simply TOMMY IS A TRANQUILIZER!!, a screencap of his Megabus itinerary, and a gif of Giselle from Enchanted flailing her hands in excitement. High on their planning, Blaine dives into the #Tommy tracked tag without really thinking it through and is confronted with The Who but also Rugrats and Power Rangers and all sorts of other bizarre, totally unrelated junk. "Blahhh," he says out loud, and returns to his dash, refusing to let his spirits get down.
His post has another note, and he's pleased to see that it's from Kurt.
kurtrageous reblogged you
How thrilling! You'll have to tell me how the female lead does, I've heard she's one to watch. Smash some mirrors for me ;)
It's the tags Kurt's put on it that catch Blaine's attention, though: #and also I'm really glad to hear that you get to spend some irl time with chandler #sometimes I worry about you just sitting alone in your single room doing homework and blogging ♥ #but now you get real hang-out time with real people so hooray!
He looks up from his monitor, catching his own eye in the mirror on the back of his door. Did he - does Blaine really sound that pathetic? Even through the internet to someone who's only known him for about three months? Maybe he doesn't go out partying with a ton of fraternity pals every weekend, and maybe he does spend a lot of time blogging. Chandler spends a ton of time blogging and Kurt's never "worried" about him. And maybe he does focus kind of heavily on his homework, but he's just trying to get good grades and make sure he's making the most of his education, and maybe he did just eat dinner alone in the cafeteria but -
"Oh my god."
Oh my god, Blaine doesn't really have any friends.
But that's not true! He has Chandler...in Connecticut. And Tasha in Maryland, and Kurt in Louisiana, and Jackie in Wisconsin and his brother in California and Wes back in Ohio. He has Jeff, who lives just on the other side of the city, but the last time they hung out was probably before Christmas; he has Sam, or at least he used to, and now he doesn't even know where he is. Everyone who's closest to Blaine's heart is at least one state border away from Blaine's body. Blaine loves his internet friends from the bottom of his goddamn soul but in the case of nearly all of him, that's all they are: his internet friends. They're not people he studies with in the library or gets drinks with at the bar.
He blinks at his reflection, and then frowns solidly, first at himself and then at his computer screen and Kurt's tags. Well, so what? Blaine's surrounded himself with people that make him happy and fill his heart, and if those people can nine times out of ten only do so electronically, so be it. Kurt's not the boss of him and if he wants to gush about seeing Tommy with a boy he only catches up with face-to-face about once every couple of months, Kurt totally can't tell him how to live his life. Blaine smiles resolutely and tugs his phone from his pocket, scrolling back through all his texts with Chandler and getting giddy with it all over again. Even going to college in New York for almost two years now, Blaine doesn't get to indulge in Broadway very often, and this is easily going to be the highlight of what has already been a tricky, strenuous semester.
all im sayin is he is RUULLLLLL qt Blaine reads again - Dumb Friend Chandler, world-class poet - and he bites his lip, dropping the phone onto his mattress beside him and clicking over to Kurt's blog proper. There is, in fact, a link in his sidebar for his professional website, and the front page is exactly what Chandler implied - several photos of not-the-greatest quality but of the utmost confidence, of Kurt rocking some of his most kurtrageous fashion-forward ensembles. A good two-thirds are from the neck down but some of them include hats and therefore must extend all the way up. It's the most of Kurt's face Blaine thinks he's ever seen, even in those two American National High School Show Choir Concert TOUR! videos.
Blaine's lip slips even further between his teeth as he studies on the photographs. Kurt has downright enviable hair, a rich color that styles up weightlessly into swoops and swirls that Blaine's Medusa-ratnest curls could never achieve in a million years. The hair spills over a pale, high-structure complexion - high forehead, high cheekbones, unique character nose and strong jaw - and tapers down behind his elfin ears to a small scar on his neck that Blaine's never noticed before. In more than one of the pictures there's a small blue feather threaded into his bangs, and Blaine realizes he remembers that feather from the tour, and how wardrobe had a fit when Kurt and a couple of the McKinley girls came back one night with those extensions without having told anyone. So some of these photographs must be several years old.
There's one - exactly one - picture where Kurt is staring directly into the camera, and when Blaine's eyes land on his, he suddenly finds that he can't tug them away. Though the photo is of dubious quality, Blaine can still tell that they're some sort of undefinable clear-blue-green color, with a blaze of self-assured ferocity behind them that it's impossible to fake. His eyes are actually really, really stunning.
Kurt's actually really, really stunning.
"Chandler!" Blaine shouts into his empty room, shaking his head a little and hitting his back-arrow until he's on his dashboard again. This is ridiculous. Blaine and Kurt are not "meant to be." Kurt is Blaine's friend. His really good-looking friend with whom he has a lot in common who worries about him in the tags of his posts complete with little hearts.
Right.
~
So Blaine is having kind of a low week.
He spends Monday and Tuesday avoiding Tumblr as much as possible in a frantic, desperate effort to make sure he's studied enough for his Modern Playwrights exam. He feels like he's got a pretty good handle on it...until Wednesday, when he walks into the test and discovers that it covers two more chapters of the text than he thought it did, and he's only prepared for one of the two major essay questions. Blaine bombs it worse than he's ever done on anything his whole college career. He's one of the first to finish because there's only so long he can stare at questions he just straight-up doesn't know the answer to before he can't fool himself any longer. He immediately races back to his room and faceplants into his bed, letting out a little scream of rage into his pillow. Because, like, really?
A teeny voice in his head that sounds suspiciously like Kurt (which, like, Blaine barely even remembers what his voice sounds like, so how does that work) decides to remind him that if he knew the number of anyone in his class - hell, if he knew the names of more than half the people in that class - he probably could have texted someone to double-check on the material for the exam. But he doesn't.
(He kicks his feet into the mattress a couple of times and tells this voice to shut up.)
With that horror out of the way, Blaine finally resurfaces on the internet, and the first post on his dashboard is Chandler squeeing up a storm about his plans with Jeremiah for Valentine's Day on Saturday. He sighs and rolls his eyes so hard it almost hurts, trying not to be a cynical brat about it - but it's hard. The next post down is from Kurt -
Well, sort of.
kurtrageous reblogged kurtrageous
Hello all ♥ Just in case anyone missed it, I'm going out of town for a little bit to celebrate my stepbrother's birthday and I won't have a whole lot of internet access while I'm away! Because I'm Eternalone™ I'll be driving back on Saturday. I threw some stuff in my queue that I hope will tide my adoring public over until then~
Blaine's parade has officially been rained on. So maybe just moments before Blaine was grumbling about Kurt's annoyingly accurate insight into his life - the fact still is that lately, Kurt's been one of Blaine's life's only positives. After the clusterfuck that this week is steadily becoming, the last thing he needs is to be completely cut off from anything but queued-up Robo-Kurt until late Saturday night. Who else is he going to hate cheesy Valentine's Day posts with? Who else is going to cheer him up about his hot-mess exam by instead quizzing him on his knowledge of mainstream 90s pop songs and awarding him an A+ for sheer nerdiness? (Okay, maybe Blaine's making that one up, but stranger things have been known to happen.)
Blaine pokes at Kurt's actual blog page a little bit but sees nothing too exciting yet, and instead just slides his laptop shut again and trudges out to the one on-campus food spot he knows is open right now. It may still be freezing outside, but there are some things that can only be mollified by ice cream sandwiches.
It's not till late the following evening, when Blaine's browsing Tumblr in between Googling up some photos he needs for a Powerpoint presentation, that Kurt's queue starts doing anything interesting: There's a picture of Taylor Lautner on his dash.
Blaine snorts a little. Taylor Lautner? Who even talks about that guy any more? Twilight died ages ago, and Blaine doesn't think he's done a single movie since those - at least not that Blaine's ever heard of, and Blaine likes movies enough that he definitely would have heard about it. Lautner's tabloid fodder at best. But the picture seems a little bit older, from back when people must have cared a little bit more, and it's not an unappealing picture. Blaine definitely can't deny that the dude has an amazing body. His eyes trace the hard lines and prominent curves of his musculature (he's shirtless, naturally) and Blaine decides he probably wouldn't kick him out of bed.
This seems to be Kurt's main interest in him as well. The tags say #before he gets fat #goodness those SHOULDERS #sighs dreamily and Blaine's waning smile revives itself and it's not till he's scrolled down two or three more posts on his dashboard that Blaine realizes he has also surreptitiously reached up and touched his own shoulders through the thin henley he's wearing.
My shoulders are nice too, he thinks, with a bit of defensive sass to it, and oh dear sweet god where did that come from?
He spends the next couple of hours with his arms flexed just a little, for reasons he totally cannot comprehend but whatever, and right before he goes to bed another of Kurt's queued posts kicks out and this time it's a video. It's got almost a hundred thousand notes, which seems pretty crazy, and also a little out of character for Kurt - he's not the type to post those things that are incredibly "Tumblr-popular" with tons of outdated dorky jokes or whatever. Intrigued beyond anything, Blaine reads the caption - They met on Tumblr, and the one girl flew in to meet her girlfriend - and then watches it.
Oh, god, it's cute. It's painfully cute, and so sharply touching that Blaine almost starts crying right then and there. The littler of the two is on crutches and she just straight up drops them to the floor to start hugging and kissing her girlfriend, like any sort of injury or incapacitation she may have means nothing in the face of their relationship. The soft "you can stop now" from the other girl at the end of the video lends credibility and intimacy to the moment and gosh, Blaine is just sort of overwhelmed. He reblogs it almost instantly; it's exactly the sort of thing he stands for, on the internet, connections being forged across the online ether because there's no way to do it in real life, only to ultimately become reality, and especially for young gay people like these two women. Blaine's honestly surprised Kurt didn't tag it with his url (Kurt, unusually, hasn't tagged it with anything) to make sure that Blaine saw it or draw his attention to it, because he's pretty sure Kurt must have posted it especially for him.
Well. But wait. What if.
No, Blaine cuts himself off from that train of thought at once. Well, almost at once. Because his brain is still whirring down the little tributaries of his stream of consciousness, which is that Kurt probably didn't tag it with his name because he was worried Blaine (or, y'know, someone) would interpret that as Kurt implying that he wanted this sort of thing with Blaine, which he obviously doesn't, except if it's so obvious that he doesn't want it, then why didn't he just go ahead and tag Blaine in it anyway, because he should know that people will understand that that's not what he means, and so maybe he does think people will take it that way and he's afraid they will because maybe he would mean it that way if he -
No.
But what if?
what
if???
~
from: UNKNOWN
Um. Hello. Is this Blaine?
Blaine blinks a little at his phone. Yes, he wants to say, it's Blaine, who the hell are you? The number has neither a New York nor an Ohio area code, so he's really confused as to what's going on, and he's still studying on it when his phone buzzes in his hand again -
from: UNKNOWN
(This is Kurt, by the way. I got your number from Chandler? I really hope this isn't too creepy.)
Blaine's confused face cracks in favor of a huge grin and he saves the number to his contacts at once.
to: Kurtrageous
no no not creepy at all!! to what do i owe the pleasure haha
from: Kurtrageous
Oh, you know, the usual. I thought I was going to be able to handle my brother's girlfriend tonight knowing that I can finally get away from her tomorrow but four days is really just three days too many.
to: Kurtrageous
is she that bad then?
from: Kurtrageous
Oh, god, Blaine, I honestly can't stand her. She's just so WEIRD - not eccentric, I adore eccentric, but just that bland, unnerving kind of weird - and that alone would be bad-enough-but-
tolerable, but on top of that she treats Finn so badly.
from: Kurtrageous
I realize the boy tends closer to the "post" side than the "pin" side of intelligence, but he's still a grown adult attending college. She's got no right to condescend to him like this, and everyone sees it but Finn himself because he's just so damn smitten. The thought that he's thinking about marrying this woman....
from: Kurtrageous
Sorry. Our first non-Tumblr conversation probably shouldn't just be me complaining nonstop about Horse-Face Jennifer. ;)
Blaine laughs. Kurt's holding nothing back tonight - this girl really must be pretty dreadful. Blaine's always respected Kurt's honesty.
(He tells him as much.)
to: Kurtrageous
no worries! i always respect your honesty lol. and its not like i had any other ~thrilling friday night plans that youre keeping me from here
Kurt's next response takes a little bit longer to come through:
from: Kurtrageous
Ooooh, I honestly can't believe you. /shakes fist And yet simultaneously, I'm not surprised.
to: Kurtrageous
whats that supposed to mean? haha
from: Kurtrageous
Exactly what it sounds like. Of course you don't have plans on Friday night.
Blaine's smile fades.
to: Kurtrageous
omg, im not THAT boring, jeez :P
from: Kurtrageous
I guess I'm just speaking from a place of jealousy, here. It just burns me inside to know that you're sitting in the heart of the most magical city on Earth but that on a FRIDAY NIGHT you're not even going to leave your residence hall
to: Kurtrageous
oh and i suppose if you were here youd be so totally living it up?
to: Kurtrageous
but wait, thats right, youre not here. youre still not in new york.
from: Kurtrageous
Wow, did you have to crouch down for a blow that low?
from: Kurtrageous
You know why I'm not there and you know that it's killing me. Jesus.
to: Kurtrageous
actually i honestly dont!!
to: Kurtrageous
your dad is fine, your glee club is fine, im pretty sure the only thing holding you back is you.
from: Kurtrageous
You don't know anything about me. I can't believe you're acting like you do. You're being really immature.
to: Kurtrageous
and youre being a coward.
Blaine takes a deep breath and lets it out more rapidly than he'd like to. This is ridiculous. He can't believe Kurt would be such a brat about this whole thing, and while at the same time he can't quite believe himself with how aggressive he's being about the situation, he's been realizing as the words flow from his fingertips that Kurt has needed someone to tell him this for a long, long time. And this is what Blaine does: He finds people who need help, and he helps them. Even if he has to be a dick about it.
Kurt doesn't respond, so Blaine texts again.
to: Kurtrageous
my life may not be super-exciting, but its my life, and im living it the way i want to. i know for a fact that you cant say the same right now.
to: Kurtrageous
come to new york. ill be here when you do.
from: Kurtrageous
If I ever make it to New York, it will definitely not fucking be because of you, Blaine.
To crown off Blaine's week from hell, he and Kurt stop texting for the night. Blaine's actually pretty sure they're not going to be talking again for a while yet.
He wishes that knowledge didn't hurt so much.
IV. #meme (redux)
kiehlhaul reblogged anunkindnessofcock
Who do you ship me with? Celebs, real people, other tumblrs, etc.
"Oh, please," says Blaine, out loud, even though he's sitting alone in the campus coffee shop trying to work on his résumé and people will probably give him weird looks for talking to himself. Blaine hates this one, especially when it comes from Chandler, because literally all Chandler is doing with this one is fishing for compliments about himself/Jeremiah and how totally, sickeningly adorable they are. It's classic Dumb Friend Chandler behavior that he's just not in the mood for right now, considering he still can't find a new number for the manager he'd worked for at Subway in Ohio now that he'd switched stores and that dude is probably going to be his best reference and ugh, adult life is a pain in the ass.
The worst part about it is the tags, though: #everyone do this one #AND REBLOG IT TOOOOOOO!!! #that means you guys: #armaninicole #meaningfulgagalyric #jumpupbubbleup #electricbluestilettos #I'm watching yooouuuuu. Blaine hates to see his url in that lineup because he knows what Chandler's angling for. And he also knows that if he doesn't reblog this in the next hour, he's going to receive about eight annoying, strongly worded text messages. Might as well suck it up and get it over with.
Blaine reluctantly reblogs and changes the link to his own ask box, tagging with #meme and #I hope we can all just ignore this one before returning to the Ohio yellow pages website where he continues to make zero progress. He gets up and orders another coffee, along with another of their shitty muffins (they've tried to liven them up with green sprinkles, but it's doing nothing to obscure their lackluster flavor and for crying out loud it's barely even March; but they're dirt cheap and Blaine somehow can't stop eating them), and sits back down at his computer to discover he already has five messages. "Oh, please," he says again, and the girl at the booth in the corner side-eyes him from where she's hunched over an assignment for some sort of art class.
One of them is, naturally, from Chandler, and it says in all caps "TUMBLR USER KURT KURTRAGEOUS!!!!!" and Blaine deletes it without even publishing it. The other four?
Also say Kurt.
All in all Blaine gets twelve asks regarding the meme and every single one of them says Kurt or kurtrageous or "that cute boy you're always reblogging from Louisiana." Most of them are anonymous asks, but even a couple of Blaine's friends that aren't Chandler are brave enough to come forward and say it, too. I think it could be really good for both of you says Tasha from Maryland, who got asked out by her now-girlfriend a few weeks ago on Valentine's and has been sweeter and sappier than usual ever since. And finally, for the first time, Blaine stops and lets himself genuinely wonder:
Is Tasha right?
God, Blaine likes Kurt. He's smart and funny and incredibly easy on the eyes to an almost criminal degree, and they have so much in common. But that's really the problem: Blaine likes Kurt too much. He definitely likes him too much to dump the prospect of an awkward long-distance relationship onto him when Blaine is historically terrible at romance and could never put Kurt through something like that. Their friendship as it stands now means everything to Blaine; they're still on a little bit of touchy ground after their fight last month, but there's been some profuse apologizing and things are nearly back to normal, or even better than normal. Blaine doesn't know what he would do if he lost that Kurt, and he knows there's a ninety percent chance that that's exactly what would happen if he tried to make it into something new. His last online "boyfriend" certainly taught him that.
It could be good for both of them. In some parallel universe where it wouldn't ultimately be really, really bad.
Blaine makes a post about it, since that seems the less ridiculous of his options (really, twelve asks?).
jumpupbubbleup:
Ha ha, very funny, guys. It's even funnier that some of you seem to think it's never crossed my mind before. Rest assured that it has, and that I'm a big boy and can make my own decisions even if you don't like them. (That goes double for you, Mr. Kiehl.)
Blaine can make his own decisions.
But twelve people are actively disagreeing with him. Not just Chandler. Not just Blaine himself having weird second-guessed thoughts. Twelve whole people, some of whom he probably barely even knows.
Blaine is going to need another shitty muffin to deal with all of this.
part 2