![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rmTitle: To You the Honor
Rating: PG
Pairings/Characters: Kurt/Blaine
Word Count: ~2,050
Spoilers: 3.05
Summary: There's a thing on a thing in a still from the thing ... explained behind the cut. In the many spoilers for 3.05, there's been a still going around of Blaine's room that shows he has a classical fencing plate on the wall. I used to be a classical fencer. I no longer fence for a lot of complicated reasons. And so, when trying to imagine Blaine in that sort of environment, I wrote this, which is very possibly the most self-indulgent thing I've ever written.
Author's notes: For those of you looking for the next part of the Boston/DC/etc. arc, I'll be waiting to post that until some of the frenzy around 3.05 dies down. Thanks to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sillygleekt for beta services (all mistakes are my own) and a surprise that shall be forthcoming.
“What's that?” Kurt asks, sometime in the night.
They've been drowsing, but not sleeping. At one point, they were mobile enough to finally get all their clothes off, but not much more. The light's still on, and Blaine's bedroom door is still open because no one is home, and eventually, they'll do everything they did when they first got here again, just better and more and with less trembling.
Blaine hums before he responds, as if he has to drag himself up from a great depth, his head pillowed too comfortably on Kurt's chest.
“What's what?”
Kurt tries to gesture with his chin. It's habit. “That. The swords,” he says, still not being clear. It seems like a terrible time to ask did your father think hanging that on your wall would make you want to rescue some damsel in distress?
“Oh,” Blaine says with an awkward chuckle. “I used to fence.”
“Why did you stop?” Kurt asks. He's smiling at yet another new thing learned about this boy.
Blaine sighs before he begins. There are details that must be said, and they aren't without backstory. “I started when I was eleven and quit after the dance.”
Sadie Hawkins, Kurt thinks but doesn't say. He nods for Blaine to continue.
“My dad and I were bonding over movies then, I guess, when I started. And that was pretty good. Better than that mess with the car later, anyway. He probably thought I wanted to be this or that hero or something, and, you know, actually, I wanted this or that hero.”
He laughs nervously. He wants to say fuck because he wanted to fuck all those heroes, but even after what he and Kurt have just done he can't quite bring himself to be that adult. Or that crass.
But Kurt laughs, small and gentle and knowing. “Did you like it?” he asks.
“I loved it,” he says, before correcting himself. “Okay, no. I hated it at first. You have to wear all this bulky stuff, and the points are dull and the swords bend, since, you know, they can't go into you --”
“That would be bad,” Kurt notes.
“And a mask and everything. And it's just... it was less beautiful than I thought it would be,” he says, voice growing small. “It seemed too safe. And ordinary for a long time. But, yeah, I loved it. More than anything.”
“Why'd you stop? I mean, just the....” Kurt trails off – accident? attack? – he has no idea how he's supposed to refer to it.
But Blaine knows what he means and shakes his head. “I'd gotten older, and there was a lot of other drama going on,” he says because it's easier than saying, I had my first wet dream about my instructor, or everyone talked about girls all the time, like having one was a requirement of learning to fight. It's easier than saying people hated me for being good and then hated me for not being good enough or there was this one asshole used to tease me about being Filipino, because someone like me never would have been allowed the privilege of a sword in all their bullshit fantasy Englands and Frances.
He smiles at the memories, no matter how unpleasant. They'd taught him something of the world the way his school before Dalton hadn't.
“I was just sort of serious about it a way that other people weren't, I guess,” he adds with a shrug. “And I just... I couldn't bear to explain it.”
Kurt makes a considering noise. “Show me sometime?” he asks, and tilts his head to look down at Blaine, who is looking up at at him all open adoration and mischief.
Because there is a part of Blaine that is tempted to leap up naked and explain stances and positions.
It wouldn't even be that odd, so many of the historical treatises are illustrated with the naked form anyway. He looks at them still, sometimes, on the Internet. But he's not that comfortable yet, not with his own body, and it's been too long.
He nods anyway. “Sure. I mean, I'm not sure how. It kind of takes two,” he says, bashfully.
Kurt takes Blaine's hand and puts it to his heart, just as Blaine had told him to, earlier that day in the auditorium.
“I can help,” Kurt offers.
“You'll let me kill you?” Blaine jokes, only realizing it sounds weird and heavy after he's said it.
“Yes,” Kurt breathes, looking at the ceiling. Then, “I bet you were beautiful.”
Blaine smiles against him.
“Not that you aren't now,” he amends.
“We should turn out the light,” Blaine says after a long silence, but Kurt shakes his head and so they don't.
*
“Right, you should probably wear this and this,” Blaine says, shoving his old fencing jacket, a plastic chest protector and a mask at Kurt. “The jacket probably won't fit right, but hopefully our skulls are the same size?”
Kurt laughs. They're in Blaine's garage, and they both feel ridiculous.
“Just so you're clear, I feel totally weird about this.”
“Why?” Kurt asks, all innocence.
“I'm not... I'm not qualified to be showing you any of this. And I'm breaking a hundred safety rules. But, I'll be careful, and you'll do what I say, and it should probably be okay?”
Kurt nods, blushing. “Of course.”
Blaine has to help him with the chest protector, and they realize quickly there's no hope the jacket will fit at all. It barely still fits Blaine.
“My father's is in here somewhere,” he says, tossing it aside, as Kurt watches him dig through the grey ugly storage bins that seem to exist in every garage.
“He fenced too?” he asks, voice carefully neutral. Blaine never tells him all of anything at once, and, as usual, he's not quite sure what he's stumbling into here.
“A long time ago. Sport fencing. It'll be good enough,” Blaine says, not looking at him, still focused on the bins.
Kurt refrains from mentioning that he's taller than Mr. Anderson now too, but eventually Blaine finds the jacket and when Kurt struggles into it the sleeves are too short, and it pulls terribly across his shoulders, but at least it's on.
“Not very fashion forward is it?” Kurt asks, looking down at his awkwardly exposed wrists.
“No,” Blaine breathes. “If it fit, it'd be hot. Trust me. But yeah.” He pauses; he knows how Kurt can be about his image. “Is it okay? Do you mind?”
“Just show me something,” Kurt says, trying to push past how ugly and strange he feels in the face of all Blaine's gifts.
*
Blaine finds he can't bear to show Kurt anything without explaining it first. So he talks about what Kurt would be like as an opponent to him.
“You're taller, so you could hit me before I could hit you. So I'd have be be fast, and only come in when I was sure. You're a bigger target though, so that's something,” he says and Kurt laughs, oddly delighted, having been fragile for too long.
“And here, I have to teach you how to stand first,” he says, and drops into a garde.
Kurt sucks in a loud breath, and Blaine laughs, blushing. “Okay, here,” he says, standing and grabbing Kurt's hips. “Put your feet like this and now step forward, and bend your knees and --”
“This is not comfortable,” Kurt says as he sinks down.
“Yeah, it takes some getting used to,” Blaine says, letting go, stepping forward and back, springing, really, across the cement of the floor, always staying low and level.
“Well now I know what to thank for your thighs,” Kurt mutters to himself.
*
It takes most of the day to get to a point where Kurt can stand in a garde that's decent enough for Blaine to feel comfortable using him for target practice.
The first time he hits him, Kurt let's out a sharp ow! and jumps back.
“Are you all right?” Blaine asks, dropping out of garde immediately.
“Yeah, yeah,” Kurt says breathing heavily, his hand to his side over his jacket.
“What, I didn't get anything unprotected, did I …?” Blaine asks, frightened, covering Kurt's hand with his own.
“No. But I could feel it. The point --”
“Tip,” Blaine corrects, it's covered with plastic and tape after all.
“Between my ribs. I could feel it,” Kurt says again, awed and frightened.
Blaine grins.
“What?” Kurt asks, finally thinking to struggle out of the mask and shake out his hair, even as he's still trembling a little.
“That's what made me love it,” Blaine says.
“What... I don't...why?”
“It stopped feeling stupid then. It was months before I was even allowed to drill with another person, a year before I was allowed to actually hit someone. To be hit. And the first time, it was like that, the tip landed right between my ribs and my body knew, you know?”
“It's a dying place,” Kurt says, and it's half a question, full of wonder.
Blaine nods, grinning, so pleased he gets it. “And then it was just down to me, you know? Not my teacher, not my dad. Just, whatever I could do in those moments. You never want to get hit, but sometimes, I just wanted that check, that reminder that I couldn't do this without wanting, needing, to be perfect.”
“Were you?”
Blaine pauses for a moment, and then looks at the ground. “Sometimes,” he breathes.
*
“I should show you something else,” he says, out of the blue a few weeks later, when they're sitting in his bedroom leaning against each other, Kurt studying, and Blaine staring almost blankly at the print.
“What?” Kurt says, looking up.
“There's a salute,” he says.
“You did that, the other day.”
“No. There's a big formal one, like for exhibitions or in front of royalty or whatever,” Blaine says, as he scrambles off the bed.
“Is that a problem you have often? Fencing in front of royalty?” Kurt drawls.
“No. But. Look, it's important.”
“Show me, then,” Kurt says, sitting up in that posture he uses whenever he starts randomly quipping about being 137th in line for the British throne.
“It's... remember when I said, I never got to hit anyone, never got hit, for a year?”
“Yeah?”
“When you fence with someone, that person is letting you use their body to learn, and vice versa. It's a really big deal.”
“Other people laughed, didn't they, when your instructor --”
“Maestro”
“Maestro, then, told you that?”
“Yes.”
“What's the salute?” Kurt asks.
“Well there's all this stuff, I guess, it's just me, so I can't show you,” Blaine says, his body turning awkward.
“But?” Kurt presses with his voice, noticing that Blaine is wringing his hands.
“In the middle of it, one person says, 'to you the honor.'”
So Kurt says it.
And Blaine stops and bows his head and closes his eyes for a moment.
It's obvious to Kurt that the gesture has nothing to do with the salute. It's just that he's remembering.
“I obey,” he breathes.
“Oh,” Kurt blurts on an intake of breath. He doesn't mean to speak, but suddenly this whole thing is all so obvious, and he's grateful, in a way he's usually not, that he's not just taller than Blaine now, but broader, and he stands, and wraps his arms around his boyfriend.
“I miss it so much,” Blaine says, and Kurt wonders if he's kept that confession in for years, choosing that print and framing and hanging it himself.
“You could go back to it, in New York, if you wanted,” Kurt says, his voice curving up like it's a question.
Blaine hums. The idea seems terrifying, but also vastly appealing and too far away.
“You could keep your swords by the bed,” Kurt continues, imagining it, murmuring nonsense, “ready to defend us from rodents and rats, robbers and slum lords. It's very poetic.”
Blaine laughs, because it won't be anything like that. It will be hard work and tedium and dissatisfaction that he won't really be able to explain to anyone, but oh, he is going to love every minute of it.
Rating: PG
Pairings/Characters: Kurt/Blaine
Word Count: ~2,050
Spoilers: 3.05
Summary: There's a thing on a thing in a still from the thing ... explained behind the cut. In the many spoilers for 3.05, there's been a still going around of Blaine's room that shows he has a classical fencing plate on the wall. I used to be a classical fencer. I no longer fence for a lot of complicated reasons. And so, when trying to imagine Blaine in that sort of environment, I wrote this, which is very possibly the most self-indulgent thing I've ever written.
Author's notes: For those of you looking for the next part of the Boston/DC/etc. arc, I'll be waiting to post that until some of the frenzy around 3.05 dies down. Thanks to
sillygleekt for beta services (all mistakes are my own) and a surprise that shall be forthcoming.“What's that?” Kurt asks, sometime in the night.
They've been drowsing, but not sleeping. At one point, they were mobile enough to finally get all their clothes off, but not much more. The light's still on, and Blaine's bedroom door is still open because no one is home, and eventually, they'll do everything they did when they first got here again, just better and more and with less trembling.
Blaine hums before he responds, as if he has to drag himself up from a great depth, his head pillowed too comfortably on Kurt's chest.
“What's what?”
Kurt tries to gesture with his chin. It's habit. “That. The swords,” he says, still not being clear. It seems like a terrible time to ask did your father think hanging that on your wall would make you want to rescue some damsel in distress?
“Oh,” Blaine says with an awkward chuckle. “I used to fence.”
“Why did you stop?” Kurt asks. He's smiling at yet another new thing learned about this boy.
Blaine sighs before he begins. There are details that must be said, and they aren't without backstory. “I started when I was eleven and quit after the dance.”
Sadie Hawkins, Kurt thinks but doesn't say. He nods for Blaine to continue.
“My dad and I were bonding over movies then, I guess, when I started. And that was pretty good. Better than that mess with the car later, anyway. He probably thought I wanted to be this or that hero or something, and, you know, actually, I wanted this or that hero.”
He laughs nervously. He wants to say fuck because he wanted to fuck all those heroes, but even after what he and Kurt have just done he can't quite bring himself to be that adult. Or that crass.
But Kurt laughs, small and gentle and knowing. “Did you like it?” he asks.
“I loved it,” he says, before correcting himself. “Okay, no. I hated it at first. You have to wear all this bulky stuff, and the points are dull and the swords bend, since, you know, they can't go into you --”
“That would be bad,” Kurt notes.
“And a mask and everything. And it's just... it was less beautiful than I thought it would be,” he says, voice growing small. “It seemed too safe. And ordinary for a long time. But, yeah, I loved it. More than anything.”
“Why'd you stop? I mean, just the....” Kurt trails off – accident? attack? – he has no idea how he's supposed to refer to it.
But Blaine knows what he means and shakes his head. “I'd gotten older, and there was a lot of other drama going on,” he says because it's easier than saying, I had my first wet dream about my instructor, or everyone talked about girls all the time, like having one was a requirement of learning to fight. It's easier than saying people hated me for being good and then hated me for not being good enough or there was this one asshole used to tease me about being Filipino, because someone like me never would have been allowed the privilege of a sword in all their bullshit fantasy Englands and Frances.
He smiles at the memories, no matter how unpleasant. They'd taught him something of the world the way his school before Dalton hadn't.
“I was just sort of serious about it a way that other people weren't, I guess,” he adds with a shrug. “And I just... I couldn't bear to explain it.”
Kurt makes a considering noise. “Show me sometime?” he asks, and tilts his head to look down at Blaine, who is looking up at at him all open adoration and mischief.
Because there is a part of Blaine that is tempted to leap up naked and explain stances and positions.
It wouldn't even be that odd, so many of the historical treatises are illustrated with the naked form anyway. He looks at them still, sometimes, on the Internet. But he's not that comfortable yet, not with his own body, and it's been too long.
He nods anyway. “Sure. I mean, I'm not sure how. It kind of takes two,” he says, bashfully.
Kurt takes Blaine's hand and puts it to his heart, just as Blaine had told him to, earlier that day in the auditorium.
“I can help,” Kurt offers.
“You'll let me kill you?” Blaine jokes, only realizing it sounds weird and heavy after he's said it.
“Yes,” Kurt breathes, looking at the ceiling. Then, “I bet you were beautiful.”
Blaine smiles against him.
“Not that you aren't now,” he amends.
“We should turn out the light,” Blaine says after a long silence, but Kurt shakes his head and so they don't.
*
“Right, you should probably wear this and this,” Blaine says, shoving his old fencing jacket, a plastic chest protector and a mask at Kurt. “The jacket probably won't fit right, but hopefully our skulls are the same size?”
Kurt laughs. They're in Blaine's garage, and they both feel ridiculous.
“Just so you're clear, I feel totally weird about this.”
“Why?” Kurt asks, all innocence.
“I'm not... I'm not qualified to be showing you any of this. And I'm breaking a hundred safety rules. But, I'll be careful, and you'll do what I say, and it should probably be okay?”
Kurt nods, blushing. “Of course.”
Blaine has to help him with the chest protector, and they realize quickly there's no hope the jacket will fit at all. It barely still fits Blaine.
“My father's is in here somewhere,” he says, tossing it aside, as Kurt watches him dig through the grey ugly storage bins that seem to exist in every garage.
“He fenced too?” he asks, voice carefully neutral. Blaine never tells him all of anything at once, and, as usual, he's not quite sure what he's stumbling into here.
“A long time ago. Sport fencing. It'll be good enough,” Blaine says, not looking at him, still focused on the bins.
Kurt refrains from mentioning that he's taller than Mr. Anderson now too, but eventually Blaine finds the jacket and when Kurt struggles into it the sleeves are too short, and it pulls terribly across his shoulders, but at least it's on.
“Not very fashion forward is it?” Kurt asks, looking down at his awkwardly exposed wrists.
“No,” Blaine breathes. “If it fit, it'd be hot. Trust me. But yeah.” He pauses; he knows how Kurt can be about his image. “Is it okay? Do you mind?”
“Just show me something,” Kurt says, trying to push past how ugly and strange he feels in the face of all Blaine's gifts.
*
Blaine finds he can't bear to show Kurt anything without explaining it first. So he talks about what Kurt would be like as an opponent to him.
“You're taller, so you could hit me before I could hit you. So I'd have be be fast, and only come in when I was sure. You're a bigger target though, so that's something,” he says and Kurt laughs, oddly delighted, having been fragile for too long.
“And here, I have to teach you how to stand first,” he says, and drops into a garde.
Kurt sucks in a loud breath, and Blaine laughs, blushing. “Okay, here,” he says, standing and grabbing Kurt's hips. “Put your feet like this and now step forward, and bend your knees and --”
“This is not comfortable,” Kurt says as he sinks down.
“Yeah, it takes some getting used to,” Blaine says, letting go, stepping forward and back, springing, really, across the cement of the floor, always staying low and level.
“Well now I know what to thank for your thighs,” Kurt mutters to himself.
*
It takes most of the day to get to a point where Kurt can stand in a garde that's decent enough for Blaine to feel comfortable using him for target practice.
The first time he hits him, Kurt let's out a sharp ow! and jumps back.
“Are you all right?” Blaine asks, dropping out of garde immediately.
“Yeah, yeah,” Kurt says breathing heavily, his hand to his side over his jacket.
“What, I didn't get anything unprotected, did I …?” Blaine asks, frightened, covering Kurt's hand with his own.
“No. But I could feel it. The point --”
“Tip,” Blaine corrects, it's covered with plastic and tape after all.
“Between my ribs. I could feel it,” Kurt says again, awed and frightened.
Blaine grins.
“What?” Kurt asks, finally thinking to struggle out of the mask and shake out his hair, even as he's still trembling a little.
“That's what made me love it,” Blaine says.
“What... I don't...why?”
“It stopped feeling stupid then. It was months before I was even allowed to drill with another person, a year before I was allowed to actually hit someone. To be hit. And the first time, it was like that, the tip landed right between my ribs and my body knew, you know?”
“It's a dying place,” Kurt says, and it's half a question, full of wonder.
Blaine nods, grinning, so pleased he gets it. “And then it was just down to me, you know? Not my teacher, not my dad. Just, whatever I could do in those moments. You never want to get hit, but sometimes, I just wanted that check, that reminder that I couldn't do this without wanting, needing, to be perfect.”
“Were you?”
Blaine pauses for a moment, and then looks at the ground. “Sometimes,” he breathes.
*
“I should show you something else,” he says, out of the blue a few weeks later, when they're sitting in his bedroom leaning against each other, Kurt studying, and Blaine staring almost blankly at the print.
“What?” Kurt says, looking up.
“There's a salute,” he says.
“You did that, the other day.”
“No. There's a big formal one, like for exhibitions or in front of royalty or whatever,” Blaine says, as he scrambles off the bed.
“Is that a problem you have often? Fencing in front of royalty?” Kurt drawls.
“No. But. Look, it's important.”
“Show me, then,” Kurt says, sitting up in that posture he uses whenever he starts randomly quipping about being 137th in line for the British throne.
“It's... remember when I said, I never got to hit anyone, never got hit, for a year?”
“Yeah?”
“When you fence with someone, that person is letting you use their body to learn, and vice versa. It's a really big deal.”
“Other people laughed, didn't they, when your instructor --”
“Maestro”
“Maestro, then, told you that?”
“Yes.”
“What's the salute?” Kurt asks.
“Well there's all this stuff, I guess, it's just me, so I can't show you,” Blaine says, his body turning awkward.
“But?” Kurt presses with his voice, noticing that Blaine is wringing his hands.
“In the middle of it, one person says, 'to you the honor.'”
So Kurt says it.
And Blaine stops and bows his head and closes his eyes for a moment.
It's obvious to Kurt that the gesture has nothing to do with the salute. It's just that he's remembering.
“I obey,” he breathes.
“Oh,” Kurt blurts on an intake of breath. He doesn't mean to speak, but suddenly this whole thing is all so obvious, and he's grateful, in a way he's usually not, that he's not just taller than Blaine now, but broader, and he stands, and wraps his arms around his boyfriend.
“I miss it so much,” Blaine says, and Kurt wonders if he's kept that confession in for years, choosing that print and framing and hanging it himself.
“You could go back to it, in New York, if you wanted,” Kurt says, his voice curving up like it's a question.
Blaine hums. The idea seems terrifying, but also vastly appealing and too far away.
“You could keep your swords by the bed,” Kurt continues, imagining it, murmuring nonsense, “ready to defend us from rodents and rats, robbers and slum lords. It's very poetic.”
Blaine laughs, because it won't be anything like that. It will be hard work and tedium and dissatisfaction that he won't really be able to explain to anyone, but oh, he is going to love every minute of it.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2011-11-08 03:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-08 03:37 pm (UTC)