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Grief falls like ashes.
It clouds his world, turns it grey and stale. The sterile whites and blues fading behind sleeping eyes.
Sebastian drifts, the pain ebbing away in waves and tides. He cracks open his eyes to the soft murmur of another morning report at his side or the muted tread of sneakers across his floor, pays attention sometimes when they ask him too, blinks hazily through the exhaustion and the drugs that keep him relatively pain free. They all know it’s coming, that it’s only a matter of time, and they gather around like maybe just being there with him will keep him anchored but the face he looks for is never there.
Remembering is the worst part.
When he closes his eyes, Blaine smiles back at him.
—
part i: Teach me.
—
The thing is that Blaine Anderson is a romantic.
“What even are you? His little cheerleader? Did I somehow step back into high school without even noticing?”
Sebastian Smythe is not.
“Ease up, Quarterback, take those ham hocks off my patient before you make things worse and we all get sued.”
The encouraging smile that Blaine had been busily projecting in the general direction of Dopey the World’s Worst Intern (like if only he could emanate enough positivity it might rub off) tightens, frozen awkwardly in place while Sebastian emphatically waves Sam away from his patient with little regard for the wounded expression that slips across his face. He can feel Blaine watching, his big eyes drifting magnetically back to the embarrassed hue of Sam’s face as Sebastian dismisses him to go check on the status of the operating room, mouth caught in the shape of a protest as Sam disappears through the door with his head bowed and the door snaps shut behind him.
Some days Sebastian still can’t believe that Santana had ever seen anything in that guy beyond the strangely hypnotic presumed sucking power of his lips and golden retriever charm, but he considers it his duty to ensure his life is as miserable as possible whenever Evans wanders onto his service for how much that relationship had messed her up. Nothing personal and all that.
Sebastian steps into the space Sam had been occupying, easing the intubation tube carefully into position with steady hands and blatantly ignoring the shifting and sighing from the intern standing across the bed from him, clearly putting deep thought into whatever it is that he’s about to say.
“You’re a little mean.”
His eyebrow arches upwards in a silent, ‘And?’
“Okay, you’re a lot mean. To Sam. You’re mean to Sam. And he’s under a lot of pressure at the moment, you know, he’s studying to retake his interns test soon and it’s stressful. He’s stressed out. And usually, I mean, usually he smiles like, all the time, even when people are being mean to him but at the moment he mostly just looks like a dog someone’s kicked. So I was just thinking that maybe you could try being nicer. To Sam.”
Eyes lift slowly, his fingers deftly continuing the work without visual aids to regard the flushed cheeks and the bright eyes of the intern standing across the bed from him.
“You’re an intern,” Sebastian says slowly, the boredom inherent in his voice intended to shut down the strange, bright cast of those eyes as they stared at him with the utmost hope, like maybe somewhere beneath his caustic exterior there was a nice guy just desperate to find his way out. “Why is your mouth moving and more specifically, why is it moving around me?”
Sebastian can see the hesitation trace across that overly expressive face, the curve of a smirk at the corner of his lips seeming to goad the uncertain response from Blaine’s lips. “You’re like my .. my half-sister’s, boyfriend’s best friend, so I ..”
Which must have seemed like a much more convincing reason in Blaine’s head if the furrow of his brow is any indication. Though admittedly, the interpersonal relationships within the confines of their hospital read, at best, like a primetime high school drama and nepotism wasn’t exactly unheard of around these parts.
Being the half-brother of Tina Cohen-Anderson was probably equal parts blessing and curse around this neck of the woods, all of the infamy and none of the actual relation to the surgical legend, but Sebastian was willing to bet that Miss Dark and Twisty herself couldn’t lay eyes on Mister Sunshine here without wanting to carve the blinding optimism right on out of him.
Still.
Sebastian couldn’t have the interns thinking he was the nice attending.
The judgement written into the lines of his face was reason enough for the kid to shift uneasily, his voice conversational if not a little bemused as he replied, “So you thought that because I’m your .. half-sister’s, boyfriend’s best friend, that made us friends? You thought you’d defend your boyfriend to me and that, out of the strength of this well-tested bond of ours, I’d, what? Flutter my eyelashes and say, oh I’m sorry, Bambi, the world’s most annoying intern, I didn’t realize I was supposed to be catering to your boyfriend’s delicate sensibilities.”
Colour spilled across Blaine’s cheeks and his mouth dropped open as he stammered out an embarrassed, “He isn’t - he’s not my boyfriend.”
This was far too good to be true.
“But you want him to be.”
“Do not,” Blaine hissed, scandalized, his eyes darting in the direction that Evans had departed in not so long ago.
“Do too.”
“Do not.”
“Do too.”
Sebastian’s eyebrows raised in a silent challenge and Blaine’s mouth snapped shut, eyes dropping in embarrassment and the smile settled wider across Sebastian’s lips. Finally something to brighten up his day a little.
“Well, have you told him?”
The indignant squawk of, “Shut up,” only served to coax that part of him that had always enjoyed tugging on girl’s pigtails at the playground a little too much back into existence.
“I’m your Attending, you can’t tell me to shut up,” Sebastian replied easily, the smug cast of his smile only feeding off of the deepening blush spreading across Blaine’s skin. “So you want me to be nicer to Evans, is that it?”
The hopeful, “Please?” was almost endearing, in it’s own way.
“Confess your love to him and I’ll think about it.”
Sebastian stifled the laugh at the annoyed wrinkle of Blaine’s nose but gave up entirely at the decisively huffy, “Shut up.”
This was going to be fun.
--
And that’s how his story starts.
It’s a big hospital stuffed full of wide-eyed and eager interns and, to Sebastian at least, they all start to blend together into one anthropomorphic powder blue blob, firmly beneath his notice when he isn’t shooing one off to get him his coffee. So when Annoying But Cute intern approaches him with a nervous deerlike expression, Sebastian is more than ready to request a bone-dry cappuccino and send him on his merry way but Blaine launches right in, fast enough to cut off his request before it can even form.
“Doctor Smythe? I’m assisting Doctor Chang today with a pain patient and—”
Typically whenever an intern starts speaking to him Sebastian’s first instinct is to ask for coffee and to start walking in the opposite direction. From the rapid rate of Blaine’s current speech, Sebastian doubts he’d manage to get a word in edgewise to even get his coffee order out there, so instead he starts walking, but the steady volume of Blaine’s babbling suggesting that he isn’t going to be quite so easily shaken off.
“—I read this article when I was helping Sam study—”
“Pathetic,” he chimes in helpfully with a judgemental glance over his shoulder and earns the momentary furrow of Blaine’s forehead but again it doesn’t seem to dissuade him.
“Yes, I’m pathetic, I know, but I did read this article and I have a photographic memory and, what with the Chief’s new rules about wanting the interns to be heard—”
Sebastian turns on his heel as the realization that Blaine isn’t just going to give up and stop talking on his own becomes abundantly clear, raising his hands to halt Blaine in his tracks. “Slow down. Fewer words.”
Blaine inhales sharply, angling his chin to stare up at him as he said, “I think — if I’m right — he needs an ENT. You are an ENT, right?”
He takes a moment to eye the kid with interest, considering the nervous and borderline guilty expression on his face before asking, “Your resident is Wilde, right?”
The nervous bob of Blaine’s head in response earns a quirk at the corner of Sebastian’s lips.
No wonder the kid was worried about sneaking information to him. “She shut you down right?”
“She wouldn’t even let me speak,” Blaine replies indignantly, his chest puffing out in annoyance and hands starting to rise from his sides before he pushes them back down again, shuffling awkwardly on the spot and adding an awkward, “I just — I’m sure I’m onto something, that’s all.”
“Alright then,” he says after a moment, doing his best to ignore what he’s pretty sure was an aborted fistpump and the hastily tempered beaming smile that flickers across Blaine’s lips, “Lead the way.”
And maybe it shouldn’t surprise him. Maybe it’s a sign of a flawed system or his own shortcomings as a teacher that when Blaine, all nervous darting eyes and guiltily hushed voice, suggests that he might have found him a case, that it momentarily stuns him enough that Sebastian doesn’t even pause to check out his ass as he leads him back to the exam room.
After all, interns who presented him with the opportunity to one-up Chang without even trying deserved that particular courtesy. Especially since he’d been so smug lately.
Instead he follows in Blaine’s wake, pretending to listen to whatever it is this peppy creature is yapping away about as he leads him to the exam room Mike’s set himself up in.
And there’s something about the way that Blaine’s face lights up when after one quick test, Sebastian confirms his diagnosis and the man’s bellows of pain disappear into relieved stammering about that being the pain, that’s somehow endearing. Sebastian feeling that own glimmer of smug satisfaction he’s feeling in his chest reflected in the brilliant smile thats found it’s way to Blaine’s face.
Mike takes the interruption in his stride, shaking off Sebastian’s gloating with his usual goodnatured eyerolls and Blaine’s entirely too busy rattling off some obscure medical journal article by date, volume issue and page number at the question of how he’d even heard of the condition to even notice the calculating glint in Wilde’s eyes. Sebastian can’t help but feel like he’s watching Bambi being stalked by a mountain lion.
Sebastian tilts his head, curiosity suitably peaked.
If there’s one thing that Sebastian has always been attracted to, it’s potential.
Blaine has a lot of potential.
-
It sticks with him throughout the day, the prospect of something new jittering through his hands as he wanders the lobby, scouting for entirely too cheerful interns.
The punchline is that Sebastian doesn’t take an interest very often.
Seeking out and rewarding an intern isn’t exactly in his nature, but as he locks eyes on the familiar head of hair he tells himself that Blaine has earned it. The Chief’s new kick about encouraging the interns to speak out may have been completely out of line with Sebastian’s own particular teaching style (in that he’d much rather they didn’t talk or so much as breathe near his patients unless they absolutely had to) but perhaps it had worked out just this one time. It had been a good catch, a brilliant catch even, which is what prompts him to do it.
Sebastian isn’t known for his generosity.
“Anderson.”
The head whips around, big eyes blinking over at him as they’re torn away from — Evans, of course — before he scurries over. “Despite your unfortunate taste in men, you’re apparently not as completely useless as I thought you were. That was a nice catch today, I figure the least I could do is let you scrub in and see the case through. You’re with me.”
He’s never wanted to be the nice attending. He isn’t Mike Chang and he isn’t known collectively around the hospital as McDreamy (which was just fine with him really. McSteamy was by far the better nickname.) Sebastian doesn’t just offer up the wealth of his expertise for anyone and he certainly doesn’t hand out opportunities like scrubbing in on one of his surgeries to interns to have them thrown back in his face.
However apologetically.
“Right now?”
Blaine looks so utterly torn that it takes precisely five seconds for Sebastian to put two and two together, even as he begins to stutter out some rambling explanation for what was so incredibly demanding that he’d pass up time in the operating room.
“I can’t. I’m so sorry, Doctor Smythe, really I am, but I’m busy helping the Chief — the Chief’s intern. But maybe next time I could —”
And Sebastian can see it, is the thing; it’s like Blaine’s entire universe is hitched upon the exhausted heap of blond that’s half spilled across one of the couches in the waiting room, entirely oblivious to the way in which Blaine revolves steadily around him. It’s painful in how obvious it is, how obvious Blaine is, with every stolen glance back over his shoulder like maybe, just maybe, this might be the time that he catches Sam staring back.
Worse than that, it’s infuriating, and Sebastian can’t figure out why.
Blaine has potential, is the thing that gets to him, he’s a tiny little ball of talent and possibility that is so wrapped up in getting Sam Evans to notice him that he doesn’t even seem to realize what he’s sacrificing. Irritation digs in sharp beneath his skin and Sebastian steps backwards, shaking his head as if he could shake off the conversation as he says, “No, Bambi, there isn’t going to be a next time.”
Sebastian Smythe isn’t anyone’s Yoda and if Blaine wants to let his career crash and burn for the sake of an unrequited crush on a guy who doesn’t even notice him, well good luck to him.
He waves his hands for emphasis, as if to shoo Blaine back into Evans’s lack of attention with a pointed sneer of, “Pathetic,” to rub a little salt into that wounded expression Blaine’s wearing like a badge of honour before turning on his heel.
This would be why he doesn’t bother with interns.
-
There’s a certain kind of satisfaction that comes from the ability to end seven years of chronic, excruciating pain with a simple procedure that he could probably do blindfolded with one hand tied behind his back. The (momentary) annoyance he’d felt when presented with the disappointment that was Blaine Anderson had melted away in the face of his victory, the knowledge that his patient would be waking within a few hours and for the first time in years, he would be almost completely out of pain.
If that wasn’t worth a drink then Sebastian didn’t know what was.
And maybe there is a certain synchronicity to sliding onto a stool at the bar across the street to find Blaine perched right next to him, twirling a straw through his drink and looking for all the world like the glummest little carebear that never was. Joe’s is always packed with staff from the hospital so it isn’t so much a coincidence as a probability, but he’s still tempted to roll his eyes and make a jab about one-sided relationships, but Blaine cuts in before he can even begin to summon words with the right amount of snarl in them.
It’s starting to become a habit.
“How did it go?”
Sebastian’s eyebrow inches upwards and he almost senses the sigh before it comes as Blaine persists, lifting his chin stubbornly as he says, “I know, I’m pathetic and Sam has no idea that I even exist, I missed my surgery and I think I stood in gum on my way here. Can you please just tell me how the surgery went? It went well, right?”
And it’s ridiculous that he finds Blaine’s complete inability to be succinct endearing or maybe he’s just feeling generous, riding the high of a successful surgery, but he eases off the judgement, temporarily at least, as he replies, “I’m going to assume you’ve had a few too many to drink already and ignore that you felt like you had to ask me that. The surgery was a success: in a few hours, Mr. Pattemore will wake up entirely free of pain for the first time in almost a decade. Sucks that you missed it, Bambi.”
He hesitates, glancing in the bartender’s direction, uncertain as to whether it was his determinedly good mood or the bar-lighting or the way Blaine smiled at the news of a good outcome, but he breaks anyway. The hint of curiosity that had been peaked earlier curling into the corners of his lips as he asks, “Photographic memory, huh?”
Blaine nods, nose scrunching drunkenly in a way that is definitely not endearing and Sebastian raises his eyebrows in a challenge, leaning into the bar to ask, “Okay, Periodic Table, go.”
What he’d been expecting, Sebastian hadn’t been entirely sure, but as Blaine immediately began to rattle the elements off without hesitation, his lips curving up into a brilliant smile, Sebastian shakes his head and doesn’t even bother to hold back the low whistle of appreciation.
Blaine trails off, laughing as he says, “I can keep going, you know,” the straw of his drink caught between his teeth.
And maybe there’s something more than a little embarrassing that this kid has made it through med school and still drinks drinks that come with a straw, but it’s almost cute. Annoyingly cute.
“Impressive,” Sebastian says instead, waving Joe over to their corner of the bar and casting an amused glance at Blaine’s nearly empty glass, “Drink up, Bambi. That at least deserves a free drink.”
—
And that’s all it is really.
Sometimes Blaine will seek him out in the hospital with wide hopeful smiles, trying to wheedle his way onto a case when Wilde is feeling particularly disgruntled with being saddled with her flock of interns and cuts them loose. Once he’ll catch him at the bar, eyes stuck on a corner that is filled with people celebrating Evans’ passing mark in his (repeat) intern’s exam that Blaine is, despite his investment in ensuring said exam had even happened, quite blatantly not a part of.
Sebastian will buy him a drink and slide it across the table, because pathetic as that crush is, the miserable expression on Blaine’s face has him resembling a puppy that’s just been kicked and animal cruelty is not on Sebastian’s list of vices. Or he’ll send him off to grab a cappuccino from the lobby and let him tag along on his cases, because as much as he likes to pretend those years didn’t exist, once upon a time he was an intern too and Blaine, at least, doesn’t forget his coffee order.
It’s not a big deal because Sebastian doesn’t let it become one.
He has much bigger problems to deal with.
—
“It wasn’t good.”
Santana sounds incredulous, the expression on her face so disgusted at even the idea that she possibly wasn’t good at something that Sebastian has a hard time keeping a straight face. As if sensing his amusement her eyes zero in, the hawk-like stare lingering on his mouth as she snarls, “Don’t smirk at me, Smythe, this is serious. I am not average, okay, I am mind-blowing. I am unbelievable. Sex with me is like winning a gold fucking medal at the Olympics.”
“I’ve never had any complaints,” he replies, rolling his shoulders and shifting lazily until his spine cracks and the mattress creaks beneath him, blinking slowly up at the springs of the top bunk.
He had been trying to cram in a few hours of sleep in the on-call room before someone (probably an intern) inevitably fucked something up and he got called in to clean up the mess. Sleep was apparently a rarity when Santana Lopez was having an existential crisis.
“Shut up, Smythe. I know you don’t, nobody ever does. It was like — god I felt like I was on another gynie rotation. This is messed up, okay? I feel — is this what it feels like to be an Evans? Tell me I’m not an Evans.”
“You did marry an Evans,” he offers unhelpfully, folding his forearms arms across his eyes and wondering if he could possibly have this conversation in his sleep. He’s willing to bet he could at least put in a decent showing.
“We agreed that was never going to come up again,” she hissed in response and Sebastian winced accordingly with a pointed, Ow, at the thump of a — was that a shoe? She seriously threw a shoe at him.
Resigning himself to the fact that he wouldn’t be allowed to sleep anytime soon he slowly pushed himself up, rubbing his shoulder where the shoe had hit and sighing loudly before waving a hand in her general direction, “Take off your pants.”
“Excuse me?”
Sebastian rolled his eyes, dragging his shirt up over his head and waving a hand more specifically in the general direction of her pants, “Do you want to be good at this or not? Take off your pants, I’ll teach you the Smythe method.”
“That’s offensive. You can’t teach me how to be good at being a lesbian,” she replied, her fingers already unknotting the drawstring at her waist regardless.
“If you prefer we can talk about your Vegas wedding and crippling embarrassment of a marriage to Evans instead?” he offered, tossing his shirt in the general direction of the bed and flashing an obnoxious smile in her direction.
Her upper lip curled in disdain, dark eyes fixed on his head as she sneered, “Though I suppose with that hair and your giant girlcrush on Bambi, the world’s tiniest intern, I guess we may as well welcome you into the sisterhood.”
He smiled. “That’s what I thought.”
“You disgust me,” she replied, shoving her scrubs over her hips and staring hard across the room at him.
“Tell me that after I save your sex life.”
“Still offensive.”
—
The point is that Sebastian is busy.
He doesn’t have a girlcrush of any size on any one, least of all an intern, and Santana has more than likely lost her mind trying to decipher one too many convoluted metaphors involving leaves and lesbianism. Leavesbianism. The fact that his level of disdain for Evans on any given day is ranked on the scale of whether Little Anderson’s trailing after him telling him about the scented candle he left in his new locker in the resident’s lounge so his scrubs will smell like cinnamon buns or if he overhears the kid practically begging to be palmed off as one of Evans’s interns has very little to do with anything.
It’s simply a level of pathetic that he can’t stomach.
And sure, maybe being so invested in Santana’s sexual identity crisis could be a symptom of his attempt to mask the confusing new development of his own, internal landscape.
But it could also just be that he found her suffering amusing.
He was leaning towards the latter.
—
“Did you even ask for me?”
Sebastian pauses, turning his head slowly towards the door that led to the elephant graveyard that was the interns locker room and tilting his head just slightly. That was louder and significantly more dramatic than usual. He’s always liked a good intern brawl.
The reply is muffled, low, but he’d recognise that other voice anywhere and currently it’s reaching a level of distraught that he has yet to witness. Hesitating, Sebastian glances casually up and down the hallway and upon finding it empty shuffles closer to the door pressing it ajar so he can listen.
It’s the responsible thing to do, after all.
“I decorated your stupid locker — I helped you study and — you don’t — you don’t even see it. You don’t see anything.. I’m such an idiot.”
He shifts a little further into the door, curiosity getting the better of him and his eyes catch on the blond halo of Sam’s hair and the tense set of his shoulders. Beyond him he can just see the top of Blaine’s head, the ruffled state of his hair as the gel has started to lose it’s hold and the weave of his hands at his sides that, more than anything, tells him how upset he is.
“And you, you’re an asshole. You didn’t even think to ask for me?”
A smile slides slowly across his lips, eyebrows hitching upwards as he steps back from the door, letting it slide shut to the sound of, “Screw you, Doctor Evans,” and digging his hands into his pockets, resisting the urge to whistle beneath his breath as he makes a hasty exit, keeping his face carefully neutral when Blaine breezes past him only moments later with tears gathered at the corners of his eyes and anger staining his cheeks red.
It seemed Bambi wasn’t quite as spineless as he’d thought.
—
“Would you quit sulking? It’s making me nauseous.”
“I’m not sulking,” Sebastian replies patiently, resisting the urge to turn over and bury his face into the thin pillow in the on-call room, like it might possibly drown her out. Sebastian likes Santana, most of the time at least, but this is getting ridiculous. “I’m sleeping, there’s a difference.”
“You’re sulking. You have that same constipated look on your face as you did that time I told you I could see grey in your hair.”
He cracks open an eye, glaring pointedly in her direction as he snaps, “That was a lie and you know it.”
“Sulking,” Santana replies with a raise of her eyebrows, stretching her arms up over her head until he hears her spine crack and smirking over her shoulder at him when his eyes inevitably drift to her breasts. “I know you’ll miss getting to tap this fine ass, but don’t worry old man, I’m sure there’s a nurse around here who’s into the silver fox thing. Or an intern, I hear you’re into them these days.”
“I’m not into interns,” he grumbled beneath his breath, rolling to face the wall and ignoring the cackle of laughter that followed.
He isn’t old.
He should have known better than to befriend the she-demon. Especially when she was deserting him in order to pursue a mature and adult relationship, whatever that meant.
“Oh come on, Smythe. It’s practically a rite of passage around here for the Attendings to screw an intern, your buddy Chang pioneered the practice and now his face is on the cover of the New England Journal of Medicine. Maybe it’d do you some good,” he can practically feel the smirk directed at the back of his head, “Help you relive your youth.”
“I’m not old,” he snapped, dragging his arm up over his eyes, “I’m sleeping, go away.”
“Well when you’re done with your little nana nap, I hear Crazy Ryder is running the skills lab for the residents today.”
Sebastian sighed, rolling back to face Santana and blinking grumpily up at her, “Why should I care what Sergeant Major Crazy is doing?”
“Two words for you: live tissue,” Santana’s eyebrows inch upwards slowly, the smirk sliding wide across her face. “Want to come watch the residents and their baby interns squirm with me? I’ve got fifty that says that Rose tosses her lunch.”
Sebastian pushed himself up to sit on the edge of the bed, rubbing at his face before saying, “Sixty if she cries.”
“Deal,” Santana replied, smiling widely as she watched him clamber to his feet. “Now do you want me to grab you a walking frame or do you think you can make it on your own?”
“Blow me, Lopez.”
“Only in your dreams, Smythe.”
—
“I told you.”
“You did not tell me, I told you. See, Rambo’s a psycho. He probably got turfed out of the army for murdering the rest of his platoon. Did you see that?”
“Shut up, it’s coming, Rose is going to hurl.”
“She is not — look at those big old tears in her eyes. She’s going to cry.”
“Incoming.”
In unison they backtrack hurriedly away from the door, Sebastian lifting the chart he’d gathered for precisely this purpose towards his eyes and pretending to study it while Santana leaned in to peer down at it with him. On cue the door to the skills lab flies open, Marley Rose storming past them with bright eyes and fury written across her face.
They watch the door slowly swing shut in her wake, turning to glance down the hallway she’d disappeared down before Santana piped up, “Totally going to hurl, hand it over.”
“Oh please, she’s closer to tearing Major Crazy’s throat out. I call a rematch, fifty that Wilde wants to bone the crazy.”
“Fine. But only because I don’t steal from pensioners.”
“Bite me.”
“You’d enjoy it too much.”
—
“Is that — is Bambi petting the pig? Seriously?”
Sebastian craned his neck around, eyeing where the familiar gelled head of hair is bent close over the head of the pig he is currently supposed to be monitoring, stroking softly at it’s ears as he talks to it. It was the third time they’d reconvened outside the skills lab so far, but now a trauma in the emergency room had thinned out the remaining candidates, only Wilde and her flock of interns left to babysit the livestock that Lynn had butchered in the name of science (and crazy).
“Apparently,” Sebastian replies, blinking slowly at the sight and looking hurriedly away when he can feel Santana’s eyes studying him curiously. “Shut up.”
“I didn’t say anything,” Santana replies, digging her hands into her pockets and looking away, even though the curve of her lips says it all. “I just think it’s adorable you have a crush on a five-year-old.”
“He isn’t a five-year-old,” Sebastian protests before wrinkling his nose and amending, “And do I look like a preteen? I don’t have crushes. You’re the five-year-old.”
"Five, twenty-five, same thing," And before he knows what she’s doing her eyelashes are fluttering, voice pitched low and unnervingly sweet in what he’s sure is the most horrific imitation of what he assumes is meant to be Blaine ever made, “Oh, I'm so sorry about this little guy it must have been awful, one day you're at some beautiful farm out in the country with all your friends rolling in mud and then the next thing you know you're sedated and stabbed in some skills lab. Let me sing the song of my people and coax a dozen tiny squirrels out of the walls to dress your wounds.”
He wrinkled his nose, ignoring that it wasn’t an entirely inaccurate impression of what Blaine was probably whispering into that doomed barnyard creatures ear and scoffs, “You’re embarrassing yourself.”
“Have you even seen him out of scrubs? He looks like the product of a very specific fetish website,” Santana replies, tone bored as she glances down to inspect her nails. “Though I suppose everyone is comparatively young and nubile when you’re a dirty old perv."
“I have things to do,” Sebastian grumbles, turning on his heel and hurrying away as if he can possibly outrun her laughter.
Santana’s mocking call of, “Adorable,” rings in his ears but he determinedly ignores it.
Sebastian has absolutely no interest in interns. Adorable or not.
—
And okay, even if he was interested, it was in a strictly professional sense.
So what if he keeps tabs on him every now and then? Unlike the rest of the interns, Anderson isn’t completely useless and he likes to know that the people he lets onto his service aren’t going to let him down. So when he notices that Blaine has started acknowledging Evans in the cafeteria again and has stopped stalking past with his nose in the air whenever Evans so much as looks like he might want to say hi, it’s only natural that he wonders if he’s going to have to bear witness to another backslide into the world’s most pathetic crush again.
And if when he goes out for drinks with Lopez that, in a strange new twist in their relationship doesn’t come with a fifty percent guarantee that he may or may not be getting laid out of it, he doesn’t pick up anybody else when he catches a glimpse of that familiar head of hair in the corner, well, there’s a well-known curse when it comes to Joe’s and hook-ups and Sebastian isn’t about to end up having sex with a future patient or patient’s child or sibling or the Chief’s long-lost nephew.
It’s called being a professional and it has absolutely nothing to do with wanting to find his way inside of those obscenely tight pants Anderson wears outside of the hospital. Despite what anyone else might have to say on the subject.
—
Feelings are completely foreign territory to Sebastian. His last (and debatably only) attempt to venture into the realm of what people with an actual ability to connect on an emotional level with other human beings did had ended with his best friend’s ex-wife fleeing to California in order to escape from both him and his feelings, so needless to say, he hasn’t exactly been willing to give them a second shot. It’s moments like this that he remembers why.
Relationships inside the hospital are a revolving door of problems just waiting to happen and Sebastian knows that just as well as anyone. Even actively rejecting the term relationship hadn’t been enough to spare him from the turmoil that was the emotional landscape of the hospital; some of the nurses still refused to talk to him on a good day.
It was part of the reason why he and Santana understood each other so well.
Santana was one of the strongest people he knew. Sebastian wasn’t the sentimental type and he rarely (if ever) would concede to the idea that they needed each other’s support in any way because Sebastian had grown up with the reality that he didn’t really need anyone, but there was something comforting about knowing there was someone out there who knew him well enough to blackmail him into doing something if they needed to.
And vice versa.
It’s why there’s some small part of him that feels obligated to listen to the anger and the pain and that raw edge of rejection that surfaces the moment that her Leavesbian has disappeared on the wind. For all her tough exterior, Santana isn’t nearly the girl that she makes herself out to be, so when she tells him she really needs to break some bones today, Sebastian doesn’t get in her way.
He catches her throughout the day, sadness clouding her usual fire and when hours pass without even one insult, it pushes him far enough out of his comfort zone to approach.
“You doing okay?”
She’s thrown herself into an impossible project, grateful for the mangled mess of a body that had ended up in their ER if only for the challenge it presents. Sebastian would be more concerned if it weren’t for the way she turns on him, a familiar fire lit in her narrowed eyes as she asks, “Do I look like I’m okay?”
Sebastian frowns, tilting his head as if to deliberate over his answer before shrugging as he replies, “You look great.”
A smile breaks her lips, genuine for just a moment before sliding quickly into a more familiar curve of a smirk, her shoulders rolling back as she replies, “Of course I do. Get outta my way, Smythe. I have bones to build.”
—
“Little Anderson sure can wrap himself around a suture, huh?”
So the thing is, Santana’s preoccupied and in his own way, so is he.
Preoccupied enough, at least, that he doesn’t pay enough attention to what he’s doing. So maybe he smiles a little too widely when he’s inviting Little Anderson onto his service or the pat to his shoulder hadn’t strictly been necessary. Or maybe calling him Little Anderson and talking to him when there were nosy half-sister’s lurking and watching had been tempting fate. Maybe it had simply been that complimenting Blaine on his pulley stitch in front of a full operating room had been pushing the boundaries entirely too far.
Except, in his eyes it wasn’t.
Or at least it hadn’t been until someone had to come along and point it out.
Santana he could ignore. She could crack jokes about girlcrushes until the sun went down and he wouldn’t pay it much attention, it was simply how they worked.
Mike on the other hand.
“Sebastian, Tina has .. concerns.”
“Issues more like.”
Mike has known him for his entire life and, despite their differences, they get each other. Mike may not understand him in the same way that Santana does, but their history bonds them in a way that even their wildly differing personalities hadn’t been able to combat and, while Sebastian would deny it until his dying breath, Mike would always be the brother that he never had.
So when Mike turns to give him the look, he sighs, rolls his eyes and reels in the sarcasm, if only for a moment.
“About Blaine,” Mike clarifies, watching him intently from the corner of his eye like Sebastian’s expression might give him away. “Apparently Blaine is .. fragile and getting involved with a superior might make him more fragile.”
Sebastian wrinkles his nose at the implication. “Calm down, I was talking about his sutures, Chang.”
Mike turns on his heel, expression serious and puffing up to his full height, like it might somehow make him a little more intimidating, “Keep Little Smythe out of Little Anderson is my point okay.”
“Excuse me?”
“Little Smythe does not enter Little Anderson, are we clear?”
Sebastian blinks slowly, uncomprehending for a moment before he scoffs out a laugh, “You have got to be kidding me. That’s just .. creepy. And inaccurate.”
Mike raises two fingers, jabbing them from his eyes in Sebastian’s direction in what is clearly his most intimidating I’m watching you pose and backs away, blatantly ignoring Sebastian’s loud correction of, “Big Smythe.”
—
The thing is that Sebastian likes to think that he’s learned his lesson.
There had been a time when a doe-eyed intern with a spectacular ass would have been a siren call he wouldn’t have been able to ignore. Hell, the fact that said intern was incestuously tied up into the tangled mess that was the collective love lives of half the hospital (and semi related to his best friend’s girlfriend) would probably have been a bonus before. Sebastian had always had a thing for forbidden fruit.
But the fact of the matter was, he’d matured as a person — grown, despite protests to the contrary and Mike had come right out and said, no touching, or words to that effect at least.
(Okay, so Sebastian may still be refusing to acknowledge the actual words on the grounds of a) inaccuracy and b) how completely ridiculous they were. It wasn’t like he was about to trip and nail a hot intern entirely by accident.)
The point was that the man who had once chased his best friend’s wife just because he had a shot had evolved, or attempted to at the very least and that said warnings were, to be frank, kind of offensive. He had plenty of things to keep him occupied. Between the pathetic state of Santana’s love life and her continuing streak of bad luck meant that he currently had a very important nose to fix and what was undoubtedly going to be a longstanding engagement for inadvisably heavy drinking sessions.
And maybe his track record had meant that the talk had been warranted, at least in someone’s (Tina’s) eyes, but now that the idea had been brought up, it seemed like he couldn’t stop thinking about it.
Or rather, thinking about him.
Sure, he’d spent more time lately thinking about Blaine Anderson than he really had any right to, but he liked to think that had all been (for the most part) entirely innocent. Now Blaine was in his head.
And because he wasn’t supposed to look, he couldn’t seem to help himself.
And because he wasn’t supposed to touch — well, he couldn’t seem to think about much of anything but touching.
So, if you really thought about it, clearly it was Tina’s fault.
She only had herself to blame.
—
Sebastian is already three steps into the supply closet, harbouring a certain amount of annoyance at the apparent disappearance of every intern in the entire hospital, when he stops short, staring in disbelief at the sight of the one intern that he has actually been doing his best to avoid appearing from around the corner. He hesitates, wondering if he can back out of the supply closet before Blaine sees him, but before he knows it Blaine has looked up from his armful of supplies, a strange, nervous expression crossing his face until he looks a little bit like a deer caught in headlights.
Strangely enough, Sebastian can relate.
“Doctor Smythe - hi - hello.”
“Do you know where they keep the IV kits in here?” he asks, rather than address the strange breathless quality of Blaine’s voice or the way Blaine’s smile falters at the corners of his lips, his big eyes shifting guiltily beneath Sebastian’s stare. “And where the hell are all the damn interns?”
Blaine’s mouth drops open around the complete lack of an explanation and he shuffles a step or so backwards, reaching into one of the boxes to procure the IV kit Sebastian has been aimlessly half-looking for with a flourish and offering a smile that’s just a little too bright when Sebastian takes it from him. “The interns are interning,” Blaine says abruptly as he starts to shuffle awkwardly around Sebastian in the aisle, his big eyes wide and overly earnest, “Busily interning. We’re very busy. Doing intern things.”
It’s weird behavior, but Sebastian doesn’t think much of it. Surgical interns are some of the most sleep deprived people in the entire medical industry and Sebastian’s used to their weird quirks by now. What he isn’t used to is that insistent voice in the back of his head telling him not to look that means that his eyes drift automatically to the nervous drag of Blaine’s tongue across his lips or the flex of his arms around the pile of supplies he’s tucked in against his chest as his body turns, almost instinctually, to follow the direction Blaine is moving in.
“Doctor Smythe. Little Anderson.”
The sound of Mike’s voice from the doorway almost makes him jump, his head whipping around as momentary guilt squirms in his chest before he reminds himself, firmly, that he wasn’t doing anything wrong. He meets Mike’s eyes as he says, “I needed medical supplies. I found the intern in the supply closet. Did not invite the intern into the supply closet.”
There’s an awkward stand-off, Mike staring back at him with calculating eyes while Sebastian listens to Blaine shifting uncomfortably at his side. “Go away now, Blaine,” he says hurriedly and Blaine whispers a thank you as he scurries past, Sebastian watching him leave before his eyes drift back to Mike’s unimpressed stare.
“Would you quit looking at me like that, already? I didn’t do anything.”
“I’m watching you,” Mike reiterates, stepping backwards and lifting his fingers in that single gesture that makes Sebastian roll his eyes.
“I didn’t do anything.”
“Don’t.”
“Didn’t.”
A finger waves over Mike’s shoulder and Sebastian rolls his eyes and turns on his heel to find his way back to his patient where, at the very least, he knows he won’t be accused of anything.
Who needed interns anyway? Every single one of them were more trouble than they were worth.
—
It’s all over the hospital within a few hours.
A crazy intern underground surgery ring exposed as one of them almost died on the table. It’s absurd in the way that a lot of the things that happened inside of the hospital’s walls were absurd, but he remembers the nervous expression on Blaine’s face in the supply closet earlier and a part of him can’t help but listen intently to ensure it isn’t Blaine’s name that the nurses are whispering.
He tells himself it’s because Blaine has potential, that it’s because he’s spent the past few days (weeks?) with his head full of Blaine Anderson. He isn’t worried, he’s just a little concerned.
And as it turns out he was half right, Blaine isn’t the one lying in a hospital bed after a very shaky appendectomy.
He was the one holding the scalpel.
—
Sebastian isn’t a nostalgic person.
His past is not a burden that he likes to carry with him, he prefers to keep his eyes forward, to look to the future. Some might say that it was a self-preservation tactic, Sebastian simply saw it as practical: there was no point in revisiting the things in life that he couldn’t change.
The thing with the past was that it always found it’s way back to you, whether you wanted it to or not.
Maybe it was just another kid; a fierce thing with tired eyes whose father’s night terrors had made her afraid to sleep in her own house. Maybe it was the burden of guilt in her eyes as she flipped determinedly through channels on the corner television, stifling a yawn against the knuckles of her hand in the same breath that she insists she isn’t tired. He’d taken the coffee from her hands, patted his shoulder and let her head rest there until she went to sleep.
Nobody expected compassion from a guy like him, much less empathy; neither of which were his strong suit.
Or maybe it’s the nervous flash of a smile he remembers from the supply cupboard, the evasive tactics as Blaine danced around him and scurried off to go do what would probably be the stupidest thing of his entire medical career.
Maybe he’s just tired himself.
Sebastian isn’t a nostalgic person; he doesn’t linger on the past. Interns make stupid mistakes and kids are resilient. But the expression on Blaine’s face, the exhaustion written over the guilt and the shame and the fear tugs at a part of him he likes to pretend doesn’t exist anymore.
“It’s your fault you know.”
Mike looks up from the zip of his jacket, exhaustion evident in the lines of his face as he blinks slowly, watching as Sebastian drops an elbow onto the desk at the nurses station and leans in against it next to him.
“I never even thought about Little Anderson that way until you brought it up and now I can’t stop. It’s just there. You planted the seed.”
He watches as Mike sinks back in his seat, staring up at him with a clear warning on his face as he says, “Unplant it.”
Sebastian clucks his tongue noncommittally, looking away and waiting for the inevitable sigh to fall from Mike’s lips. They know each other entirely too well by now. It’s part of the problem.
His eyes drift back to the familiar figure bundled up in one of the waiting room chairs, knees pulled up beside him and eyes fixed on dead space.
Sebastian isn’t good at this game, at saying the words that he wants to. He’s tired and it’s late and it’s the only way he can explain why he looks at the boy sitting on that chair like he’s waiting for a death sentence and says, “When we were kids, your mom used to see how tired I was and make you bring me home with you, because she knew I was all alone and that I needed a family.”
He frowns, the words stilted on his tongue as Mike turns his head, his expression softened.
“That was a good thing.”
Zipping his jacket up the rest of the way he tugged his bag up over his shoulder, turning to look hard at Mike as he adds, “So if you don’t bring him home, I will.”
—
It’s been almost two weeks.
Two whole weeks in which he has done his utmost best to avoid Blaine Anderson as often as he reasonably could, lest that strange sense of nostalgia resurface abruptly to swallow him whole and make him say strange things to lifelong friends and make them think he’d, somehow, gone soft. In truth it hasn’t been all that difficult — interns had been banned from the operating room for the time being and the attendings were being encouraged to treat them like lepers.
Sebastian had never been a generous teacher.
That dissuaded most of them.
Except, apparently, for the one that he was attempting to dissuade.
“Hi.”
He glances up from the chart he’d been inspecting the moment he hears it, watching warily as Blaine approaches with a nervous expression on his face. Sebastian can’t help but think that the little raise of fingers in a wave would be somewhat endearing if it didn’t set alarm bells ringing in the back of his head. Something is clearly up.
“I know,” Blaine says when Sebastian doesn’t immediately reply to his greeting, leaning into the desk on both elbows and looking up at him with those big eyes of his, “I get it. I’m the intern who organised the secret surgery ring that ran illegal procedures in the basement and you probably don’t want to talk to me. But the thing is, I’ve been told that I should go ahead and seek out sex as a way out of my sad predicament—”
Which is around about the time Sebastian’s brain shorts out.
He’s spent weeks now trying to push the images that Mike had unwittingly planted in his head, far, far from his thoughts and here Blaine is casually fanning the flames. His fingers clench momentarily around nothing, blinking rapidly at the sight of Blaine’s lips still moving, pretty sure he makes out the words, “.. So what do you say?”
This has to be a joke.
“Why are you talking about sex to me? It’s inappropriate, I’m your teacher. I have things to teach. Double board certified things.”
There’s a brief, awkward moment in which Blaine just blinks back at him and Sebastian gets the distinct impression that he missed something vitally important.
“That’s what I was talking about,” Blaine blurts back at him, eyes widening and a glow in his cheeks, “The medicine. That’s what I want you to teach me. The sex — that was, I was joking. It was a joke.”
The only consolation is that Blaine looks about as mortified as he feels and Sebastian can’t help but be grateful for the interruption that tears his attention away, hoping that the entire conversation he just had will melt away into the past if he just pretends it never happened, but Blaine is lingering over his shoulder still, eyes fixed hopefully on him.
The thing is, his case for the day is kind of incredible, it isn’t every day that you get to make a person talk again, so maybe he is kind of showing off when he talks up his cutting edge surgery and feels Blaine’s eyes glued to his face. It’s a small thrill that never really goes away, but having that admiration directed at him feels good in all the ways that it’s probably not supposed to.
And maybe — maybe he’s just a little weak in the face of those stupidly big eyes of his.
“Blaine here is on cappucino duty. Which, Doctor Anderson, I’m still waiting for.”
He turns his head expectantly, catching the broad flash of a smile that’s all teeth across Blaine’s face before he nods politely, smile dimming to something a little more private as he replies, “Right away, Doctor Smythe.”
—
Sebastian has a problem.
The thing was, distance was safe.
It kept Blaine Anderson and his endearingly cheerful disposition and ability to charm even the most disgruntled or frightened of patients into liking him far, far away from him.
It kept him from blatantly staring at the miracle of creation that was Blaine Anderson’s ass in scrub pants when he should be keeping his eyes firmly averted (the miracle being that anyone’s ass could look good in scrub pants.)
And somehow, due to his own pride or momentary weakness in the face of those big eyes and criminally long eyelashes, he had gone and forfeited his distance, invited Blaine to observe of all things and now — now he didn’t have a choice. He had to suffer through it.
His only saving grace is that at least he isn’t the only one with a similar problem.
“I think she wants me,” Santana says as they wander down the corridor, her forehead furrowed in thought. “Guys have this way of looking at you like they’re already having sex with you in their head. It’s the same expression you have on your face every time you look at Bambi, like it’s deer hunting season and you have a hankering for some venison. Girls are more complicated, subtle, I can never quite tell if they’re admiring the view or wondering what kind of bra I’m wearing.”
“Lopez, I’m going to be honest with you here, the crazy new intern who encouraged other interns to cut out her appendix? Not the Leavesbian you’re looking for.”
“Crazy hot new intern,” she corrects absently, pursing her lips in deep thought.
“No hot interns,” he replied sharply, “The hot ones are the ones that cause trouble, they’re the ones that distract you from realizing your full potential. They wander around, talking about sex and batting their eyelashes and asking you to teach them things and then say they were joking. You need to focus on the medicine. Take all that pent up sexual energy you waste thinking about hot, naked and available interns and channel it into your genius. Your godliness.”
Santana wrinkles her nose at him, disgust written on her face as he scoffs, “Projecting much?”
Sebastian rolls his eyes, digging his hands into the pockets of his scrubs and replying, “My point is, stay away from the interns.”
He rolls his shoulders back, hoping to escape with even a scrap of his dignity intact.
The words, “Don’t eat the venison,” chase him down the hall.
—
It only seems to grow worse as the day goes on.
Blaine hovers is the thing, his proximity a constant niggle at the back of Sebastian’s mind as he stands just a little too close while they talk to the patient or he leans in over his shoulder, breath tickling the back of Sebastian’s neck while he’s pointing out the computer model of how the surgery is going to work. It’s excruciating, Blaine’s constant presence is excruciating; a reminder of everything he’s not allowed to touch lingering so close that he can’t take it anymore.
For such a small person, Blaine seems to take up a whole lot of room.
It’s the third time that Blaine’s fingers have grazed his arm in the past hour, the fifth time he’s felt the heat of his body brush past him far closer than was strictly necessary and he simply can’t take it anymore.
That he snaps isn’t the surprising thing.
“Get out of my space.”
Blaine stumbles backwards in surprise, eyes shooting up to meet his and blinking rapidly as his hands draw behind his back, stammering out an apology and scuffing the toes of his sneakers against the floor in his awkwardness.
“Just — go finish prepping the patient for surgery. I can’t breathe in here without you hovering over me like that.”
No the surprising part comes later, long after Blaine has already scurried out of the room to finish prepping their patient for surgery, the chastised expression of a scolded child plastered across his face. It’s when he glances automatically up into the gallery from the OR to find Blaine peering curiously down at him through the glass, his eyes fixed on the work of Sebastian’s hands and he realizes that he hasn’t scared him off, that for all of the Bambi jokes Blaine isn’t really some startled deer that can be shooed away back into the wilderness with a few tough words, that gets to him.
It’s when he knows he’s in trouble.
—
It’s too late for this — for the knock on his door that drags him out of his shower, shoulders aching from surgery and eyes heavy with the nap he had told himself he wasn’t going to have. The success of his day’s labour still hangs in the balance and he assures himself that his patient’s reticence to test out the voicebox he had built for her is the thing that leaves him unsatisfied, itching for something that is in no way within reach.
He needs the victory today, needs something after what feels like the longest day he’s had in a very long time, but the face that greets him from the other side of the door doesn’t feel much like a victory.
Instead he stares, stricken dumb as Blaine shifts awkwardly outside his door, tugging at the sleeves of his jacket and smiling hesitantly up at him as he says, “You made a woman speak today. Mrs. Patterson? She spoke. She said ‘Hi’.”
Sebastian holds his ground but Blaine slips past him through the door and Sebastian isn’t sure what is happening as he turns slowly to stare him down, sure that the confusion he’s feeling must be registering across his face as this strange, strange creature with his stupidly hopeful smile infiltrates his apartment in the same way he’s infiltrated the rest of his life, somehow filling this space like he fills every other room; like he’s filled Sebastian head for weeks.
And all that Blaine does is stand there, staring at him, smiling like he belongs there.
His breath catches at the apprehensive shift of Blaine’s eyes, the way his head tilts and he shifts on his feet before he starts to speak again, “You know that I respect you, right? As a man and as a teacher and as a surgeon. I respect you, I do.”
Blaine’s breath hitches, his teeth catching on the skin of his lip, his fingers moving to unbutton his coat. “So, teach me?”
The revelation of exactly what Blaine means hits him square in the chest as he shrugs the coat from his shoulders, laying it across the back of his sofa and begins to unthread the ends of his bowtie, Sebastian watching the vivid red strip of material slip through his fingers and slither to the ground before he can think to form a protest. “What are you — no, Blaine, don’t do that.”
But even as he speaks Blaine just looks at him, those earnest eyes fixed right on him as his fingers unpick the buttons of his shirt and he toes off his shoes and Sebastian barely has the presence of mind to reach back and push the door to the hallway shut behind him as Blaine repeats, “Teach me.”
And Sebastian doesn’t know how he became this person, that he can stand here with the intern who has been regularly visiting his most vivid fantasies lately swiftly stripping every layer of clothing he has and still find it in himself to protest. Maybe he really has evolved as a human being or maybe it’s just Mike’s warnings lingering in the back of his head but he says, “We can’t do this — you’re Little Anderson and I, for who knows what reason, promised and I’m your teacher.”
“So,” Blaine replies defiantly, staring back at him determinedly as he slips his shirt off his shoulders and it joins the growing pile of his clothes on his floor, “Teach me.”
Blaine’s name sounds almost pained as it rolls off his tongue and Sebastian has to look away as Blaine’s fingers move steadily on to his belt, swiftly unbuckling it and dropping it with a clunk to his floor. Sebastian hears the slide of the zipper and the the rustle of more fabric and his curiosity as to how Blaine even gets into those pants is only matched by how he can possibly find his way out of them with such apparent ease.
“Teach me.”
As much as he tries to keep his eyes averted, to not look because he really has been trying, desperately trying, to keep to his word; his eyes catch on the bundle of Blaine’s ridiculously tight jeans lying on his floor and are drawn magnetically upwards. It’s the thick muscled curve of his thighs and the fact that there are stags, of all things, printed across his junk and it isn’t funny, not really, because of course Blaine Anderson was the kind of guy who wore underwear that had animals printed on it, but there’s a soft little dip of his stomach Sebastian wants to bite at and strong arms and the bare planes of his chest —
And clearly Sebastian had it wrong all along. He’d cast Blaine as Bambi the moment those big hazel eyes batted up at him, rendered him some helpless little creature that needed to be protected from someone like him, but standing here he realizes that at some point Blaine had gone and turned the tables on him.
Maybe Blaine wasn’t the one who needed protecting after all.
“Am I really so bad?”
His eyes make it back to Blaine’s face, to the eyes that for the first time since he’d appeared in Sebastian’s doorway seem hesitant and Sebastian can practically feel the rejection radiating off of him, the way his chin tilts just a little higher in defiance and his lips set in a firm line that does nothing but make his chest clench because there is absolutely no way that one human being can possibly be that adorable.
“No,” he breathes out slowly, feeling his resolve crumble with each gradual step forward and he knows, knows this is a terrible idea, but that doesn’t stop his hands from reaching out to touch, cupping Blaine’s cheeks as he crowds in until he feels the warmth of Blaine’s body against his, tipping Blaine’s chin up as he lets out a hollow laugh, “I am.”
And he doesn’t know if it’s Blaine pulling him in or if he’s just falling, but their lips meet and he can feel it right through his body; a current that sings in his blood and shudders in his bones and for a moment, just a moment, nothing else matters.
He can hear the echo of Blaine pleading for Sebastian to teach him in his ears and he wants to. He wants to guide Blaine’s lips to his and steer his hips into motion, he wants to teach him how their bodies fit together and pant encouragement into the shell of his ear. Maybe Santana’s right, maybe he’s too old and Blaine’s only a goddamn intern, but as his palm skates down the dip of Blaine’s spine, dipping beneath the elastic of Blaine’s ridiculous novelty underwear and his fingers dig into the curve of his ass he doesn’t care.
They stumble laughing into his bedroom, bumping noses and lips and tripping over the pile of clothes left strewn in their wake and it’s been coming for weeks now, Sebastian knows that, but when there’s nothing left but slick skin between them and the weight of Blaine settled on top of him he surrenders.
He has an eager student and this is one thing Sebastian is overqualified to teach.
—