Fic: The Many Halloweens of Cooper and Blaine Anderson (Slightly Abridged)
Title: The Many Halloweens of Cooper and Blaine Anderson (Slightly Abridged)
Rating: PG
Word count: 4300
Spoilers: all aired episodes
Warnings: bullying
Summary: Halloween has always been a special day for the Anderson brothers.
This was supposed to be all fun and games, but it got a bit angsty on me in parts. Gah! Anyway, Happy Halloween everyone! <3
~1994~
“You're seriously not going to dress him up?” Nothing devastates Cooper more than the thought of someone not being given the chance to pretend for at least one day of the year. Even if that someone happens to be a baby.
“Cooper, he's nine months old. He doesn't care either way.”
Cooper looks down at his little brother gurgling away on the living room rug, chewing on a plastic ring and bouncing up and down on his bum. The kid wants to dance and play and dress in a freaking costume, come on! “Of course he cares! Look at him! He wants to have fun, too!”
His mother rolls her eyes and crosses her arms over her chest. “Cooper -”
“I'll do everything, okay? It'll be my job. I'm in charge of costumes.”
His mom heaves a sigh and regards him for one long moment. “Fine... Just be careful with him then.” She points her finger and gives him a stern look - a killer combination - and walks out of the room. Blaine looks up at Cooper and tosses his teething ring away. He uses the side of the chair to haul himself to his feet and starts to walk along the length of it. It's like he knows.
“All right, Squirt. I got ya,” Cooper says. Blaine giggles when Cooper scoops him up into his arms and heads for the stairs.
When he presents the finished product to his mother, she laughs. At least at first.
“Where did you get that black stuff you painted his nose with? And is that my hair band?”
“Yes. And from a little pot in your bathroom.”
“My eyeliner? Cooper, that was very expensive, and it's too harsh for his baby skin. We need to wash it off.”
“But, Mom -”
“Oh, all right. He does look adorable. Let me get a picture first.”
His mom makes him take Blaine back upstairs and clean off the little bug nose Cooper painted on him, but she lets him keep the hair band with the sparkly antennas that he glued there. All in all, he makes a pretty cute bumblebee, even if the black and yellow striped t-shirt he's wearing belongs to Cooper himself and is miles too big.
Cooper takes his squeaky-clean-nosed brother back downstairs and sets him on the floor in the living room so that his mom can help with his pirate eye patch. He's been practising his pirate talk all week just for this day. There's a loud bang and Blaine lets out a high-pitched wail. Cooper vaults over the coffee table to pick him up from where he's faceplanted next to the sofa.
“He tripped over that shirt. It's too long, Cooper.”
“Sorry, Blainey,” Cooper says, lifting his brother from the floor.
“Coo, Coo,” Blaine replies, his big eyes still streaming and his lip sticking out in a pout.
“Mom, did you hear that? He said my name!”
His mom laughs and waves her hand in the air. “He's just babbling, hon. He hasn't even said mom or dad yet.”
She leaves the room and Cooper holds Blaine close to his chest. He knows what he heard. “You did say it, didn't you, Squirt? You said my name.”
“Coo,” Blaine says again and reaches for Cooper's eye patch. It's perfectly positioned, but Cooper lets him play with it anyway.
~1996~
Cooper is playing Peter Pan in a show at school, and he's decided that he needs to properly prepare for the role so he's wearing his costume as often as possible. When it comes to dressing Blaine to take out with him this year, he knows exactly what to do. He needs a sidekick. And who better to play his sidekick than his own little brother? And as for Peter Pan - he has only one true sidekick. Cooper is going to need a lot of glitter.
His mom has a whole room full of supplies so it takes him a while to find exactly what he needs. He places the case of glitter and beads and buttons down next to Blaine and searches through the closet for something he can use to make a set of wings. He's already dressed Blaine up in a mint green sweater and a pair of his tall socks that are almost the same colour. He wishes he could sew and that he had more time, because Tinkerbell is supposed to wear a dress, though he knows his mother would never allow them out of the house without a sweater on Halloween night anyway. She always makes him hide bulky layers under his costumes and it really ruins the authenticity.
He finds bendy wire and a roll of shimmery plastic stuff that his mom uses when she gives people fancy baskets full of food and things as gifts. He sets to work cutting and taping while Blaine smears the glitter all over himself. He's glad his brother is starting to get old enough to help, because he's cutting the makeup time considerably by glittering himself up.
“Coop, whas at?” he asks, trying to flick a rhinestone off the tip of his finger.
“These are your wings, Blainey. You're gonna be my Tinkerbell.”
“You can fwy...” Blaine begins to sing happily, bouncing in place and throwing a dash of glitter into the air.
Cooper joins in on the song as he finishes up Blaine's wings and straps them to his back. “Too bad you aren't blond,” he says. He has to grab Blaine's hand when he reaches back to feel for the wings.
“What have you done to my craft room!” Uh-oh. Mom.
So of course that is the moment Blaine lets out a thunderous sneeze, glitter shooting out of his nose like fire from a dragon. Their mother stands stock-still like she's in shock until Blaine raises one chubby, glitter coated hand at her and grins. “Pretty,” he says.
She marches forward and snatches him up, pointing one shaking finger directly at Cooper. “Cooper Anderson, you clean this mess up at once!”
She peels the wings from Blaine's back and tosses them to the ground. “But Mom, he's my Tinkerbell!”
“No he's not, he's a little boy. Now clean up this mess or you aren't going out tonight at all.”
As she marches out of the craft room, Blaine looks down sadly from over her shoulder, a whole fist full of glittery fingers shoved into his pouting mouth.
~1998~
He's stuck watching Blaine at the supermarket, as usual. He's become entranced with the display of pumpkins and gourds near the entrance, so that's as far as they've managed to get. Mom left with the cart to do the shopping, distractedly telling Cooper to keep Blaine occupied so she could finish up as quickly as possible.
Blaine is separating all of the pumpkins that he likes best, telling them stories and giving them names when he finds the ones he says they need to take home with them.
He ends up with five: Orangey, Coral, Creamsicle, Carrots and Fred. He sets them all up in a semi-circle on the floor and sits down in front of them.
“Blainey, you're gonna be in people's way sitting there,” Cooper warns him, but he is ignored. Blaine starts singing a song about the pumpkins and by the time their mother returns with a cart load of groceries, he's amassed quite a crowd of onlookers.
Five little pumpkins
Sitting on a gate
The first one said,
"Oh, my, it's half past eight!"
The second one said,
"There are witches in the air!"
The third one said,
"Good folk, beware!"
The fourth one said,
"We'll run and run and run!"
The fifth one said,
"Let's have some fun!"
OOOOOOOH went the wind
And OUT went the light
And the five little pumpkins
Rolled out of sight
“Oh, sweetheart, what are you doing?” their mom asks Blaine, bending down to look at his circle of pumpkins.
“I found us pumpkins to buy, Mama,” he tells her. He stands up and grabs Orangey, ready to begin loading him into the cart.
“Just pick one, sweetie,” she says. “That's too many.”
“Mom, he named them,” Cooper says pleadingly as Blaine regards his pumpkin friends with a look of abject terror in his eyes at the thought of leaving them behind. “They're only small ones.”
“What are we going to do with all of them?”
“I'll help him carve them.”
His mother smiles in that exasperated way of hers and bends down to help Blaine gather up his pumpkins and add them to the cart.
Once at home, Blaine helps Cooper wash off the dried mud from the pumpkins and set out the newspaper. When Cooper gets the knives Blaine starts to cry.
“Blainey, what's the matter? We're gonna make Jack-O-Lanterns out of them, right?”
“No, don't cut them open, Coop. Please. Don't kill them.”
“Blaine, they're -” Cooper looks down into Blaine's big, shiny, golden eyes and sighs. Like he could say no to that face. He roots through the drawer for a pack of Sharpies. “Well, let's give them faces then, all right?”
On the morning after Halloween they find the remnants of Orangey, Coral, Creamsicle, Carrots and Fred smashed all over the sidewalk in front of their house. Cooper practises his best preacher voice and helps Blaine lay them to rest in a hole they dig in the backyard.
~2001~
“Cooper, can you take me shopping for a Halloween costume?”
He looks despondent, sitting on a kitchen stool, his little legs dangling and his feet kicking against the island. Cooper feels bad, but, God, he has plans. “Squirt, it's Halloween and I've got a date. And this girl...” He widens his eyes and motions to his chest. Because this girl... Blaine looks slightly horrified and then even more melancholy. Cooper sighs and takes a seat on the stool next to him. “How come you don't have a costume yet?”
“I don't know. When I asked Mom last week she laughed and said that was your department, but I didn't want to bug you. Then she just forgot, I guess. She's been busy with Dad out of town.”
Cooper watches as Blaine shrugs and tries to force a smile and rubs at his nose like he does when he's trying not to cry. “I don't need candy anyway,” he says.
Cooper sighs because boobs. But Blaine is his little brother. He gets up to find the cordless phone.
“Okay, I cancelled my date. I would say you owe me, but she was completely moved by the fact that I was doing it to help out my little brother, so you're in the clear. I'm totally getting some on Friday night thanks to you!”
“Getting some what?” Blaine asks, and Cooper claps him on the shoulder.
“You'll find out some day, Squirt. Some day.”
Cooper makes a pot of coffee and raids the craft room for supplies. When they're done there is a pretty passable ninja sitting at the kitchen island drinking a mug of coffee. Well, it's more like sugary milk with a dash of coffee, but Blaine doesn't need to know that.
“Don't tell Mom on me,” he says, and tops off Blaine's cup with another small hit of caffeine.
~2003~
“Muahahahahaha!!!!” Blaine jumps a mile off the sofa and Cooper breaks up laughing.
“What are you doing here, Coop?”
“I came home so I could take you out trick or treating, Blainey. And the drive from Columbus was totally worth it to see the face you just made.”
Blaine rolls his eyes. He's been doing that a lot lately and he isn't even a teenager yet. “More like you came to do your laundry and steal as much food as you can carry.”
“That too,” Cooper says with a laugh and plops down next to Blaine on the sofa. There's a scary movie playing on TV but Blaine doesn't seem to be paying it a lot of attention. “You make a damn fine Elvis, if I do say so myself. And I think I'm an excellent judge, seeing as I'm a rather perfect Elvis in my own right.”
Blaine grins at him finally, showing the gaping hole left by a missing tooth on the left side of his mouth. “After we go out, do you wanna do karaoke?”
That's when Cooper gets the best idea ever. He snaps his fingers and jumps up from his seat. “Be right back,” he says, and dashes up the stairs.
He comes down decked out in his own Elvis costume from his stint working as a waiter in a '50's themed diner the year after he'd graduated from high school. He still looks damn good in it too. The Anderson brothers are gonna rock the bobby socks off of everybody tonight.
“Thank you, thank you very much!” Cooper says, spreading out his arms and curling his lip. But where Blaine should be jumping up and down and complimenting Cooper's genius, he's hiding his red face in his tiny little hands. That's a lot of face and not much hands, really. It's damn near impossible to hide.
“Coop, what are you doing?”
“Taking you out to get free candy. In style.”
“I'm gonna get beaten up at school tomorrow,” Blaine says, shaking his head and worrying his lip between his gappy teeth.
“Oh, you are not, we make the best Elvises ever. Come on.”
Cooper tries several times to get Blaine to join in on his favourite Elvis songs, but he looks around nervously each time and asks Cooper to please wait until they're passed Elm Street to begin the impromptu singalong. Cooper soon discovers the reasoning behind Blaine's uncharacteristic willingness to hide his fabulous showmanship.
“Hey, Anderson, what the hell are you supposed to be?”
Blaine's back stiffens and he grabs Cooper's arm, trying to hurry him along.
“Yeah, you should have saved yourself the trouble and dressed up as a midget.”
Another boy guffaws at the first and shoves a piece of candy into his mouth, dropping the empty wrapper onto someone's lawn. “Then you wouldn't have needed a costume at all,” he says with his mouth full. A stream of toffee-saliva leaks out of the corner of his mouth and Cooper nearly gags.
“That's what I meant by 'save yourself the trouble', dumbass,” the first kid says and elbows the one with the brown shit on his face in the side.
“Who are these guys?” Cooper whispers to Blaine, who is still attempting to drag him away.
“Just some mean older boys from the bus. Ignore them. Let's get out of here.”
But Cooper doesn't want to get out of there. He looks at his baby brother's frightened eyes and back at the two buffoons still standing there waiting for a reaction. He'll give them a reaction all right.
He grabs the bigger one by the mask he's got slung over his shoulders and pulls him towards him. “What did you say to my little brother?” he asks in his best menacing bad guy voice.
“Uh... n-nothing, sir.”
“He said he's a midget,” the dirty-faced idiot says, and Cooper reaches out and grabs him as well. He knocks the two of them together, squeezing them both by their forearms.
“Apologize to Blaine,” he demands. He lets them both go, forcing them down onto their knees on the grass.
“S-sorry, Ander-Blaine. Sorry,” they say in unison.
Cooper turns to his wide-eyed brother. “Do you accept their apologies?”
“Um... I guess. If they promise not to bother me ever again.”
Cooper hunches down in front of them and stares them both in the eye in turn. “Well?”
“We promise.”
“Promise.”
“Good. You boys are smarter than you look. You don't want me coming back to find you. Because believe me, I will. Now... if you would just give me your candy, I think we'll call it square.”
Cooper grins at the two boys cowering on the grass as he dumps half of their Halloween loot into Blaine's candy bag. He tosses their bags back down next to them and wishes them a Happy Halloween before slinging his arm around Blaine's shoulders and heading back toward home.
“Come on, Blainey. We've got us some King to karaoke.” Cooper thinks their duelling Elvises might even rival their duelling Simon LeBons.
~2009~
“But you said you'd come with me to watch the movie. I play zombie number eighty-three. You've got to see the makeup they put on me, it's so cool! I mean, I'd rather show off my natural handsomeness, but still, it's a major motion picture!”
Blaine isn't moved by Cooper's impassioned plea, it would seem. He stays were he is, seated on the sofa eating popcorn, shrouded in his usual cloud of teenage angst. Cooper heaves a sigh and steals his bowl of popcorn.
“Fine, if you don't want to go out... I suppose we'd better stay in and hand out candy anyway.”
That throwaway comment finally gets a reaction out of Blaine - he lets out a tiny, indignant sounding snort.
“What?” Cooper asks, his mouth full of popcorn.
Blaine rolls his eyes. “Like anyone is going to come to the neighbourhood gay kid's for candy. If any of them come around it will only be to egg our house.”
That gets Cooper's attention. He sets the popcorn bowl on the coffee table and spins around to face Blaine, tucking his legs up under him. “Blainey, have kids been picking on you?”
Blaine rubs a finger over the bridge of his nose, a gesture he's made since childhood. Cooper wraps an arm around his back. “What do you care?” he asks, his voice low and wet-sounding. “I see you once a year. You'll go back to your sun and palm trees in a couple of days anyway.”
“Of course I care. You're my baby brother. What can I do?”
Blaine gives him a wobbly smile and his shoulder lifts and falls under Cooper's hand. “Not really anything. Sorry... We should - we should just go out to see your movie -” He goes to get up, but Cooper pulls him back down onto the sofa.
“Nah. We can go another night. I think I have an idea...”
They end up lurking around the side of their house, dressed completely in black, even their faces dusted over with their mother's black eyeshadow. When the kids eventually show up with eggs and toilet paper, they jump out and scare the living daylights out of them, pelting them with water balloons. They roll around on the grass, laughter streaming from their mouths and tears from their eyes.
When Blaine hugs him goodnight, for the first time in years Cooper feels like a good brother. That feeling lasts a whole three weeks, until he gets a call from his tearful mother telling him that Blaine is in the hospital.
~2011~
4:54pm
From Blainey
Happy Halloween, Coop!
7:54pm
From Coop
B, that's HILARIOUS. Call me pronto so we compare and contrast our best impressions of The Situation.
5:01pm
From Blainey
No can do, Coop. I'm going trick or treating with my BF. :)
8:03pm
From Coop
I see how it is. No time for the big bro on our fave holiday anymore. Have fun, Squirt! Don't do anything I wouldn't do.
5:05pm
From Blainey
I'll probably do a lot of things you wouldn't do actually. Seeing as I have a BF instead of a GF. ;)
8:06pm
From Coop
Now that's just naughty. Have you been drinking?
~2012~
When Cooper sneaks into the house as quietly as he can in order to surprise his brother, he finds him sitting listlessly in a chair with an open book on his lap, surrounded by bowls of candy all set to hand out to the neighbourhood kids. He doesn't look like himself - he's pale and drawn and hunched and there are huge purple bruise-like marks under his eyes.
“Happy Halloween, Squirt,” he says. Blaine starts and knocks his book to the floor. He doesn't bother to retrieve it, instead glancing up and giving Cooper a painful looking smile. It falls quickly and he hunches even more, his arms crossed protectively across his body.
“Hey, Coop,” he says, his voice quiet and thick like he's been ill.
“You not feeling well, Blainey?” Cooper drops his bag and crouches down in front of his brother, hand out ready to check his temperature.
Blaine shakes his head, making eye contact at last after a long awkward moment. His eyes look wet and a little bloodshot. “I did something bad,” he says and then he breaks apart right there in the living room chair. The childlike confession stirs Cooper's brotherly instincts and he takes Blaine into his arms and rocks him back and forth as he cries.
“Shh, shh. It'll be okay. Tell you what - we're gonna turn out the lights and take one of these bowls of fun-sized candy bars upstairs and we're gonna eat the entire thing while you tell me what happened. And then we'll find a way to fix it, okay? I promise.”
An hour later they lay in Blaine's bed surrounded by Butterfinger wrappers and Blaine seems to have finally cried himself out. He stares up at Cooper with his big, sad eyes and Cooper can't help but think back to when he was tiny. He still looks so much the same, really, but for his five o'clock shadow. It's weird how much grown people resemble their baby selves. There's a kind of beauty to it, really. They grow up, but their eyes stay the same. The centre of truth and agelessness.
“Can I dress you up like a bumblebee?”
“What? No. Why?”
“No reason. Just reminiscing.” Cooper heaves a sigh and bites into another Butterfinger. He's going to have to go to the gym tomorrow to work off all the excess calories. Blaine is still watching him, waiting for the answers. He wishes he was more than just talk and actually knew how to fix things. It might take him all night and several more Butterfingers, but he was sure gonna try to come up with a solution. “I miss the days when you would just lie there while I dressed you up in a ramshackle bumblebee costume and painted your face with Mom's makeup. Things were much simpler then.”
~2013~
When Kurt slides open the door of their loft, Cooper swoops through with his cape fanning out and his sword at the ready - only to find both Kurt and his brother, his Halloween-loving little Blainey himself, wearing boring old street clothes. Well, as boring as those two ever get, anyway.
“Seriously guys, no costumes? Get in the spirit, would ya!” He slides off his Zorro mask and tries to put it on Kurt, but he ducks under his arm and begins to fastidiously poof up his hair.
“We don't get any trick-or-treaters anyway,” Blaine says, smiling fondly at Kurt's disgruntlement.
“It's depressing,” Kurt adds with a sigh.
“Well, you could go out you know. To a club or a party.”
They shrug in perfect unison. It's a little bit frightening. “Rachel wanted us to go to one with her, but we kinda wanted to spend out first New York Halloween at home. Only we bought candy and there aren't any kids to give it to,” Kurt says. He begins to unwrap a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup, only to have Blaine swat it out of his hand. He makes an indignant squawk and Blaine raises his shoulders and his eyebrows.
“Good lord, it's like you're celebrating your Golden wedding anniversary or something.”
Blaine rolls his eyes. “We're not that bad.”
“You are. You've even got matching old man bowties.”
Blaine looks down at himself and over at Kurt. “Nah, Kurt's it's a different shade - more lilac than aubergine.”
“They're both purple! That's it, you're coming out with me. Find costumes now, I mean it!”
And this is how Holly Golightly, Paul Varjak and Zorro end up touring around Brooklyn parks, giving out candy to homeless people. After they run out, they stop off at Kurt and Blaine's favourite karaoke bar for some killer duets.
At the end of a transcendent rendition of All Shook Up, Blaine gets up on his tip-toes and throws his arms around Cooper's neck. Cooper feels as though he's stepped into a time machine and may or may not have to wipe at his eyes. “Thanks for saving Halloween, Coop. Just like always.”
“Of course, Blainey. I may be a terrible brother every other day of the year, but not on Halloween!”
Blaine disentangles himself and cuffs Cooper on the arm. “You're not a terrible brother, Cooper. Now come on, I think they want an encore.”
Blaine turns and grins at the crowd and Cooper thinks, yeah, there he is; there is the little showboating twerp I raised. He's glad to have him back. It's time for some Duran Duran.
~*~*~*~