[Fic] Things We Represent
Things We Represent
Glee; Blaine + Brittany; ~2100 words; PG13+
Sipping at his coffee, he thinks about it for a moment, about the fact that he came here to be no one but himself, and yet has ended up being defined by everyone else; he’s Kurt’s boyfriend, the Tony to Rachel’s Maria, the pawn in whatever kind of game Santana was playing in the courtyard that day. He’s nervous, he thinks, because Brittany never showed any kind of interest in anything but helping him.
Originally written for the glee_rare_pairs exchange for ch_leesha; I really hope you enjoy it. Blaine and Brittany are a friendship I've wanted to write for a long time, so I'm glad your prompt gave me the opportunity.
“Hey Brittany!” Blaine calls, one afternoon after glee practice, “Can I talk to you for a second?”
He just shrugs in response to Tina’s confused eyebrow raise, waves Kurt along with Rachel, who’s gesturing excitedly about something Blaine thinks might have to do with a revival of Grease, he’s not really sure. He’s getting used to this now, the way that New Directions works, the funny kind of symbiosis that happens when everyone is interconnected with each other, but very few people want to admit it in turns.
Blaine likes it mostly, especially when it means that Brittany isn’t even the least bit puzzled by his request.
“Sure,” she says brightly, stopping near the doorway and leaning back against the wall, and he grins. She tilts her head at him, an invitation of sorts to continue, and the tassels of her beanie are actually really quite distracted. Blaine kind of wants to know where to buy one, even if he’ll never admit it to Kurt, who declared that it was like someone wearing a Thanksgiving turkey on their head. “Did you see my new campaign posters about charity?”
“No, but I’ll be sure to keep an eye out for them,” he says, smiling at her, and he means it, even if he’s pretty sure they’re mostly just advertising her cat. “I was actually just wondering if you’d help me with my dancing. I mean - I obviously haven’t been with you guys for long, and even I know it’s bad when you’re tripping over Finn’s feet. I just don’t want to be the reason we lose at Sectionals,” and if he sounds a little unsure of himself, a little too desperate or a little too needy, it’s because he is; he’s always put a little too much emphasis on the wrong things.
“Can’t Mike teach you?” Brittany asks, blinking curiously at him. “I mean, Mike’s running the booty camp, even if I thought Kurt would be because he’s always reading fashion magazines and yelling at you about not wearing proper socks.” She steps out into the hallway, and he follows her, weaving through the crowds of people.
“He complained once, and it was a joke, Brittany,” Blaine replies, tiredly, before quickly apologising. It’s not her fault, not really; Blaine loves the outfits he’s been wearing lately, not for what they are, but for what they represent - what he represents, now. He’s still the same person he always was, that hasn’t changed, but he ties his bowties with a flourish every day, slithers into brightly coloured jeans and gets to reinvent himself day after day, only to find that he’d rather stay the same.
On the condition that he becomes a better dancer, obviously, which -
“Mike’s really busy with football and tutoring and everything, and I don’t know, I just need to be able to dance without someone inevitably cracking a joke about the Warblers and how birds can’t dance. I mean, it’s cool, you know, that you guys feel like I’m part of the group and that you can -” Blaine trails off, because that’s a whole level of something that he doesn’t need to go into right now. He’s still not quite sure where things sit with Finn, or with Santana. “I wasn’t joking about not wanting to be the reason we lose Sectionals, that’s all.”
The hallway comes to end, and Blaine makes right, before stopping, turning to Brittany, who has Spanish. “Look,” he says, hurriedly, reaching out for her hand, “I don’t want to take advantage of you, or anything; senior year’s hard for everyone. I’ll buy you coffee or something to make up for it.”
She stares at him for a second, an expression he can’t quite place, and then she says, quite seriously, “is all that coffee why you’re so short? Because Kurt says you get a medium drip,” before walking off. Honestly, he’s not even offended - he’s just disappointed that Brittany, of all people, couldn’t think of something more original.
Blaine’s also not sure if that was a yes, or a no.
*
It turns out it was a yes, though, because Brittany comes up to him two days later, and asks if they’re meeting at the Lima Bean, because she’s free this afternoon. He nods, laughing at her point that coffee beans are nothing like lima beans, because he’s had that same thought at least a dozen times before, and it’s nice to know that someone agrees with him, even if he’s surprised that she actually knows what a lima bean is.
Blaine arrives a little early, sliding into a seat with his usual coffee and tapping his nails against the edge of the table distractedly, one hand scratching at the nape of his neck. He’s only here already because West Side Story practice finished up a little ahead of schedule, mostly due to Kurt and Miss Pillsbury finding some kind of flaw in one of Rachel’s Maria costumes, and he doesn’t know why he’s so nervous.
Sipping at his coffee, he thinks about it for a moment, about the fact that he came here to be no one but himself, and yet has ended up being defined by everyone else; he’s Kurt’s boyfriend, the Tony to Rachel’s Maria, the pawn in whatever kind of game Santana was playing in the courtyard that day. He’s nervous, he thinks, because Brittany never showed any kind of interest in anything but helping him.
When she finally turns up, he stands up and makes his way over to her, smiling and ordering her a hot chocolate with extra marshmallows. The barista accepts his money with a smile, even laughing when Brittany says, “I don’t get why people always say that they’re like pillows.”
They walk back to their table, and Brittany sits opposite him, stirring her drink. She seems a little distracted by something, but he’s not sure how to approach that, so he just says, “thanks for coming.”
“You asked me to,” she replies, like it’s obvious. Which, it probably is, but in some ways, he’s always going to be a Dalton boy; it’s always going to be a part of him, like the way he’s sometimes a little too oblivious and the fact that he likes Katy Perry. “And I didn’t eat lunch today, because they were serving pasta shells, and I think it’s wrong to steal things from the ocean. We learnt about environmental concerns in geography.”
“I didn’t either,” he says, because there’d been an impromptu rehearsal to iron out some of the choreography for West Side Story, and he pushes his plate of biscotti towards Brittany. “Have some, it’s really good.”
Brittany leans out and takes a piece, swallowing before saying, “I’m going to be at the bottom of the pyramid tomorrow.” Blaine braces himself for the inevitable joke about his eyebrows, but instead she says, “It’s scary, how much Coach Sylvester wants us to win this year. Quinn called her Cruella de Vil, but Lord Tubbington’s allergic to dogs and he likes her, so I don’t think her coat is made out of puppies.”
“Well, I think you’ll do great,” Blaine says, because it’s easier than going into the numerous things wrong with Coach Sylvester and how she treats the Cheerios. McKinley’s surprised him in a lot of ways, but Kurt was definitely right about her insanity.“Besides, you promised to teach me how to dance, so you’ll probably get a lot of exercise just repeating the same steps over and over until I catch up.”
“I taught Artie how to dance, when we were dating,” Brittany says, and she looks thoughtful again, kind of pensive. “Artie’s the only one who’s ever bought me coffee before,” she adds, and Blaine looks up suddenly from his cup, raising an eyebrow questioningly.
He’s about to say something about it, because he had coffee with Kurt dozens of times when they were still friends, but he’s also had coffee with Rachel and Mercedes and Tina and with the Warblers, and once that disasterous time with Puck when they got kicked out because apparently it’s easy to mistake sugar for drugs, when she adds, “I don’t want to date you. My campaign is about strong, independent women, and I’m sticking with that.”
Blaine waves his hand around wildly to indicate that he feels the same, nearly knocking his coffee cup to the floor in the process, and then he stops, thinks about it for a second, feels suddenly unsure. He’s heard things about Brittany from Kurt, knows what they call her in the hallways when they’re not ogling her in her Cheerios uniform, and it makes him feel - a lot of things, but mostly just like he wants to be her friend. Maybe that makes him arrogant, or a little self-centered in that way that he can be sometimes, even if he’s mostly oblivious to it until it’s too late, but he got himself into this by wanting help with his dancing, and he likes Brittany, all things considered.
“No,” Blaine says, grinning at her. “It’s just - you’re helping me, and it’s what friends do. Besides, you can’t let me eat all this biscotti alone, my mom is really strict about family dinners and I have to go home to one after this.”
“I think my home moved while I was asleep,” she replies, and he has no idea what she’s talking about, but he asks anyway. Because it’s possibly a little too metaphorical, but in the last few weeks, Blaine’s found his own home shifting too, and it’s cliche, he doesn’t care, but home is where the heart is makes a little more sense now; he’s slowly finding that he belongs at McKinley, in the choir room, with the New Directions.
Blaine says something like this once she finishes her explanation (he’s pretty sure Brittany just forgot to close her curtains before she went to sleep), and she smiles softly at him in response. “We’re like a family,” she agrees. “I’m glad you joined us.”
“Thanks,” he says, swallowing around the final mouthful of coffee in his cup, before glancing at his watch. “I think we should really start with the dancing lessons, though.”
Brittany just nods, finishing her own drink. Realising they haven’t actually worked out a place to practice, Blaine stands up, pushing his chair back under the table, bouncing a little on the balls of his feet. He hums a little, trying to find some kind of a rhythm, and sways from side to side, tapping his feet. It’s not even the most embarrassing thing he’s ever done in the Lima Bean, because apparently there are some lessons he never learnt from the GAP Attack, but Brittany doesn’t even seem to mind, because she stands up and joins him, infinitely more graceful as she spins him around.
He’s loved watching her dance for weeks now, so at home with her body and in the way that she moves in a way that sometimes, he feels like he’s just pretending to be, and he just smiles at her as she takes his hand and spins him again, says, “You’re really good.”
“You’re really bad,” she says, and he just doubles over laughing. He’s not, per se, but jumping over furniture, doing a simple one-two step, miming things that may or may not actually go with the lyrics, these things are easy, like Dalton was easy, like stepping out in front of the Warblers was easy, and it’s harder to blend back in than he expected. He wants to, though, one of the things that Blaine is learning at McKinley is that there’s a right time for everything, and his new school may not be a paragon of acceptance, but it lets him be all these things, a leader and a follower all at once. Brittany seems to understand that about him, at least a little.
“I guess we’ll just have to work on that,” Blaine replies, leaning over and grabbing his bag before Brittany spins him right into a patron in her eagerness. “We can find somewhere to meet next week, and I’ll even buy you another coffee.”
Brittany just smiles in agreement as he walks her to the door, and before he knows it he’s been talked into appearing on her internet talk show, which -
It’s kind of a rite of passage for New Directions’ members, or so he’s heard, and he really can’t think of a better way to thank Brittany for the amount of help he’s going to need with his dancing.
Glee; Blaine + Brittany; ~2100 words; PG13+
Sipping at his coffee, he thinks about it for a moment, about the fact that he came here to be no one but himself, and yet has ended up being defined by everyone else; he’s Kurt’s boyfriend, the Tony to Rachel’s Maria, the pawn in whatever kind of game Santana was playing in the courtyard that day. He’s nervous, he thinks, because Brittany never showed any kind of interest in anything but helping him.
Originally written for the glee_rare_pairs exchange for ch_leesha; I really hope you enjoy it. Blaine and Brittany are a friendship I've wanted to write for a long time, so I'm glad your prompt gave me the opportunity.
“Hey Brittany!” Blaine calls, one afternoon after glee practice, “Can I talk to you for a second?”
He just shrugs in response to Tina’s confused eyebrow raise, waves Kurt along with Rachel, who’s gesturing excitedly about something Blaine thinks might have to do with a revival of Grease, he’s not really sure. He’s getting used to this now, the way that New Directions works, the funny kind of symbiosis that happens when everyone is interconnected with each other, but very few people want to admit it in turns.
Blaine likes it mostly, especially when it means that Brittany isn’t even the least bit puzzled by his request.
“Sure,” she says brightly, stopping near the doorway and leaning back against the wall, and he grins. She tilts her head at him, an invitation of sorts to continue, and the tassels of her beanie are actually really quite distracted. Blaine kind of wants to know where to buy one, even if he’ll never admit it to Kurt, who declared that it was like someone wearing a Thanksgiving turkey on their head. “Did you see my new campaign posters about charity?”
“No, but I’ll be sure to keep an eye out for them,” he says, smiling at her, and he means it, even if he’s pretty sure they’re mostly just advertising her cat. “I was actually just wondering if you’d help me with my dancing. I mean - I obviously haven’t been with you guys for long, and even I know it’s bad when you’re tripping over Finn’s feet. I just don’t want to be the reason we lose at Sectionals,” and if he sounds a little unsure of himself, a little too desperate or a little too needy, it’s because he is; he’s always put a little too much emphasis on the wrong things.
“Can’t Mike teach you?” Brittany asks, blinking curiously at him. “I mean, Mike’s running the booty camp, even if I thought Kurt would be because he’s always reading fashion magazines and yelling at you about not wearing proper socks.” She steps out into the hallway, and he follows her, weaving through the crowds of people.
“He complained once, and it was a joke, Brittany,” Blaine replies, tiredly, before quickly apologising. It’s not her fault, not really; Blaine loves the outfits he’s been wearing lately, not for what they are, but for what they represent - what he represents, now. He’s still the same person he always was, that hasn’t changed, but he ties his bowties with a flourish every day, slithers into brightly coloured jeans and gets to reinvent himself day after day, only to find that he’d rather stay the same.
On the condition that he becomes a better dancer, obviously, which -
“Mike’s really busy with football and tutoring and everything, and I don’t know, I just need to be able to dance without someone inevitably cracking a joke about the Warblers and how birds can’t dance. I mean, it’s cool, you know, that you guys feel like I’m part of the group and that you can -” Blaine trails off, because that’s a whole level of something that he doesn’t need to go into right now. He’s still not quite sure where things sit with Finn, or with Santana. “I wasn’t joking about not wanting to be the reason we lose Sectionals, that’s all.”
The hallway comes to end, and Blaine makes right, before stopping, turning to Brittany, who has Spanish. “Look,” he says, hurriedly, reaching out for her hand, “I don’t want to take advantage of you, or anything; senior year’s hard for everyone. I’ll buy you coffee or something to make up for it.”
She stares at him for a second, an expression he can’t quite place, and then she says, quite seriously, “is all that coffee why you’re so short? Because Kurt says you get a medium drip,” before walking off. Honestly, he’s not even offended - he’s just disappointed that Brittany, of all people, couldn’t think of something more original.
Blaine’s also not sure if that was a yes, or a no.
*
It turns out it was a yes, though, because Brittany comes up to him two days later, and asks if they’re meeting at the Lima Bean, because she’s free this afternoon. He nods, laughing at her point that coffee beans are nothing like lima beans, because he’s had that same thought at least a dozen times before, and it’s nice to know that someone agrees with him, even if he’s surprised that she actually knows what a lima bean is.
Blaine arrives a little early, sliding into a seat with his usual coffee and tapping his nails against the edge of the table distractedly, one hand scratching at the nape of his neck. He’s only here already because West Side Story practice finished up a little ahead of schedule, mostly due to Kurt and Miss Pillsbury finding some kind of flaw in one of Rachel’s Maria costumes, and he doesn’t know why he’s so nervous.
Sipping at his coffee, he thinks about it for a moment, about the fact that he came here to be no one but himself, and yet has ended up being defined by everyone else; he’s Kurt’s boyfriend, the Tony to Rachel’s Maria, the pawn in whatever kind of game Santana was playing in the courtyard that day. He’s nervous, he thinks, because Brittany never showed any kind of interest in anything but helping him.
When she finally turns up, he stands up and makes his way over to her, smiling and ordering her a hot chocolate with extra marshmallows. The barista accepts his money with a smile, even laughing when Brittany says, “I don’t get why people always say that they’re like pillows.”
They walk back to their table, and Brittany sits opposite him, stirring her drink. She seems a little distracted by something, but he’s not sure how to approach that, so he just says, “thanks for coming.”
“You asked me to,” she replies, like it’s obvious. Which, it probably is, but in some ways, he’s always going to be a Dalton boy; it’s always going to be a part of him, like the way he’s sometimes a little too oblivious and the fact that he likes Katy Perry. “And I didn’t eat lunch today, because they were serving pasta shells, and I think it’s wrong to steal things from the ocean. We learnt about environmental concerns in geography.”
“I didn’t either,” he says, because there’d been an impromptu rehearsal to iron out some of the choreography for West Side Story, and he pushes his plate of biscotti towards Brittany. “Have some, it’s really good.”
Brittany leans out and takes a piece, swallowing before saying, “I’m going to be at the bottom of the pyramid tomorrow.” Blaine braces himself for the inevitable joke about his eyebrows, but instead she says, “It’s scary, how much Coach Sylvester wants us to win this year. Quinn called her Cruella de Vil, but Lord Tubbington’s allergic to dogs and he likes her, so I don’t think her coat is made out of puppies.”
“Well, I think you’ll do great,” Blaine says, because it’s easier than going into the numerous things wrong with Coach Sylvester and how she treats the Cheerios. McKinley’s surprised him in a lot of ways, but Kurt was definitely right about her insanity.“Besides, you promised to teach me how to dance, so you’ll probably get a lot of exercise just repeating the same steps over and over until I catch up.”
“I taught Artie how to dance, when we were dating,” Brittany says, and she looks thoughtful again, kind of pensive. “Artie’s the only one who’s ever bought me coffee before,” she adds, and Blaine looks up suddenly from his cup, raising an eyebrow questioningly.
He’s about to say something about it, because he had coffee with Kurt dozens of times when they were still friends, but he’s also had coffee with Rachel and Mercedes and Tina and with the Warblers, and once that disasterous time with Puck when they got kicked out because apparently it’s easy to mistake sugar for drugs, when she adds, “I don’t want to date you. My campaign is about strong, independent women, and I’m sticking with that.”
Blaine waves his hand around wildly to indicate that he feels the same, nearly knocking his coffee cup to the floor in the process, and then he stops, thinks about it for a second, feels suddenly unsure. He’s heard things about Brittany from Kurt, knows what they call her in the hallways when they’re not ogling her in her Cheerios uniform, and it makes him feel - a lot of things, but mostly just like he wants to be her friend. Maybe that makes him arrogant, or a little self-centered in that way that he can be sometimes, even if he’s mostly oblivious to it until it’s too late, but he got himself into this by wanting help with his dancing, and he likes Brittany, all things considered.
“No,” Blaine says, grinning at her. “It’s just - you’re helping me, and it’s what friends do. Besides, you can’t let me eat all this biscotti alone, my mom is really strict about family dinners and I have to go home to one after this.”
“I think my home moved while I was asleep,” she replies, and he has no idea what she’s talking about, but he asks anyway. Because it’s possibly a little too metaphorical, but in the last few weeks, Blaine’s found his own home shifting too, and it’s cliche, he doesn’t care, but home is where the heart is makes a little more sense now; he’s slowly finding that he belongs at McKinley, in the choir room, with the New Directions.
Blaine says something like this once she finishes her explanation (he’s pretty sure Brittany just forgot to close her curtains before she went to sleep), and she smiles softly at him in response. “We’re like a family,” she agrees. “I’m glad you joined us.”
“Thanks,” he says, swallowing around the final mouthful of coffee in his cup, before glancing at his watch. “I think we should really start with the dancing lessons, though.”
Brittany just nods, finishing her own drink. Realising they haven’t actually worked out a place to practice, Blaine stands up, pushing his chair back under the table, bouncing a little on the balls of his feet. He hums a little, trying to find some kind of a rhythm, and sways from side to side, tapping his feet. It’s not even the most embarrassing thing he’s ever done in the Lima Bean, because apparently there are some lessons he never learnt from the GAP Attack, but Brittany doesn’t even seem to mind, because she stands up and joins him, infinitely more graceful as she spins him around.
He’s loved watching her dance for weeks now, so at home with her body and in the way that she moves in a way that sometimes, he feels like he’s just pretending to be, and he just smiles at her as she takes his hand and spins him again, says, “You’re really good.”
“You’re really bad,” she says, and he just doubles over laughing. He’s not, per se, but jumping over furniture, doing a simple one-two step, miming things that may or may not actually go with the lyrics, these things are easy, like Dalton was easy, like stepping out in front of the Warblers was easy, and it’s harder to blend back in than he expected. He wants to, though, one of the things that Blaine is learning at McKinley is that there’s a right time for everything, and his new school may not be a paragon of acceptance, but it lets him be all these things, a leader and a follower all at once. Brittany seems to understand that about him, at least a little.
“I guess we’ll just have to work on that,” Blaine replies, leaning over and grabbing his bag before Brittany spins him right into a patron in her eagerness. “We can find somewhere to meet next week, and I’ll even buy you another coffee.”
Brittany just smiles in agreement as he walks her to the door, and before he knows it he’s been talked into appearing on her internet talk show, which -
It’s kind of a rite of passage for New Directions’ members, or so he’s heard, and he really can’t think of a better way to thank Brittany for the amount of help he’s going to need with his dancing.