THE BATHROOM, THE DRUNK AND THE LITTLE MERMAID

I remember when i saw you
I never thought that you could care about me
Then we had a conversation
Boy we couldn't imagine how we would be
(Alexia – Gimme Love)

The bathroom came with the house like this. One window, single-sink, a tiny bathtub and the most hideous tiles he had ever seen in his entire life. It had almost been reason enough to say no to the house. Actually, Blaine is pretty sure he wouldn't have bought the house at all if he hadn't been in desperate need of one, as the place has several features he's not happy with, the bathroom just being the worst of all.

Blaine could survive without a double-sink, at least for the moment, but there's a whole world of remodeling to do for which he would like to have the time and means. Besides the tiles, that he would take down and substitute with something less shabby than light purple, he would change the old bathtub with something bigger and possibly from the 21st century. And of course this place needs a shower too: a good-size sauna and steam room combo walk-in shower, with a comfort seat, and possibly a wooden frame – because daddy really needs one.

The fact that he's thinking about all this while Leo is bent over the toilet throwing up makes him realize that he's done this so many times at this point that the whole thing has become routine and he can perform it without actually having to think about what he's doing. It's sad, but on the other hand quite normal. One can get used to anything, it's how you keep living even when things are not going great.

Leo leans over the toilet and retches again. It's the third time in less than an hour. He's vomiting bile, at this point. Blaine has seen nothing solid coming out of his mouth, so he probably hasn't eaten anything. He rarely does, after all. Blaine wonders how Leo keeps himself standing all day with only the little he manages to force down his throat at breakfast and sometimes – very rarely, to be honest – at lunch.

Leo used to eat for two at every given meal. Blaine remembers how he would go grocery shopping the day before Leo was coming because he knew the kid would meticulously raid the fridge and the kitchen cabinets after every time they had sex. He was a little hurricane, clearing away everything in his wake. Feeding him was a full-time job, like keeping him satisfied. Now feeding him is a war, like everything else.

It seems a lifetime ago. An entire different life, to be precise, lived by someone who's certainly not him anymore. It's going to be his birthday in a few weeks, and that's not how he thought he would spend his big forty at all. He has always pictured himself on a beach in Ibiza surrounded by a large group of very sexy men wearing hardly anything and offering him massages, nice drinks and the occasional blowjobs. Instead he is here, stuck in this bathroom, away from the only family he's got left, Timmy's grandparents, trying to fix a boy he managed to ruin spectacularly.

But it's just karma hitting back, really, because he had never imagined Leo with him on that beach. It was his little personal revenge, one of the many stories he would come up with to comfort himself. He was going to be happy and he was going to enjoy his life even when Leo would inevitably leave him behind to go and see the world with a boy or a girl his age. You will see, boy, he would tell himself, it's nice having you but when you'll have enough of me, I will still be me, I will still have my beautiful, glamorous life. You will not break my heart.

He had been so convinced it would happen, so determined not to let the love he was feeling for this kid destroy him, that he hadn't stopped for one second to really consider that what Leo had been telling him for five years could be the truth. And this is the consequence of that: Leo suffering and him destroyed for that, exactly what he had tried to avoid.

Leo eaves again, coughing up spit and more bile. Blaine combs his hair back and cleans his mouth with a wet hand towel. The fact that the kid doesn't push him away says something about how bad he must feel. “How much did you have to drink?” Blaine asks softly. He tries not to sound too aggressive, but Leo has made a mission of taking everything he says as bad as he possibly can.

“Is it already that time of the night?” He asks, rolling his eyes. “If you didn't notice, I don't feel like being lectured right now.”

“It wasn't a lecture, I was just trying to understand what happened and to make a little conversation since we're bound to be here a while.”

“Nobody's keeping you, Anderson.” Leo sits down on the floor, resting against the hideously tiny bathtub.

There's this thing he always does, Blaine notices. He calls him by his last name now, to put some distance between them, but every time he tries to look away, he really can't. He always ends up throwing side glances at him anyway. Blaine wonders if Leo realizes that's because a part of his brain can't really believe he's really here and it doesn't wanna risk losing sight of him again by looking away. It happens to Blaine too.

“I know, kid.”

“Don't call me that.”

Blaine sighs. “I'm sorry.”

Leo accepts his apology in silence, which Blaine counts as a blessing. At least he didn't curse or say something mean to him. It's progress, he thinks. “Did you take something?”

Leo rolls his eyes again, and then he grabs the first thing that catches his attention – which happens to be Timmy's Little Mermaid's bath toy figurine – to give himself something to do. “Yes. No. I don't know,” he groans confusedly and, Blaine dares to hope, shamefully. “Probably. Is this your son's?”

Blaine knows he's asking only to change the subject, but he doesn't care. He would take any form of normal conversation with Leo nowadays. “Yes, there's a whole set of them scattered around the house. All the characters. They help with his bath time.”

Ariel seems incredibly small between Leo's long, skinny fingers. “Does he like the Little Mermaid?”

“He likes that she's a redhead,” Blaine shrugs. “He'd have a field day with Annie.”
Annie is a name he can still say out loud without triggering an earthquake. She and Leo never stopped talking, she has helped him out several times and she's still calling whenever she can to check on him.

“Well, he has good taste,” Leo comments, and the little shadow of a smile on his lips makes Blaine's heart beat a little faster. But of course it doesn't last that much.

“He's still too young to think like that.”

“You're never too young to know what you want.”

There's so much hatred in his eyes when he says that, so many things unspoken, that Blaine just looks down, not wanting to make everything worse. Every time they take a step forward, they take ten backwards. Every single time. It's like in nightmares, when you run and run and you go nowhere.

The silence that falls is so dense and awkward that Blaine really thinks this is it for tonight. If he's very lucky, he might be able to get him out of his clothes and into his pajamas before putting him to bed, but civil conversation is over for the night. Leo surprises him, though.

“Why are you doing this?” He asks, and he sounds tired as much as Blaine feels.

“I am doing this because I must—“

Leo clicks his tongue, shaking his head. “I thought so.”

“And because I want to,” Blaine goes on. “I've spent all my life doing things I wanted to do and shouldn't have done, and I did several things I had to do without wanting to do them. But this, this is something I must do but I also want, so please, kid, let me.”

He never knows when his words will get through to Leo these days. Sometimes he says something quite harmless and he gets an awful, often physically dangerous, response from him. Sometimes he dares to pour his heart out and Leo just looks at him with empty eyes. “Whatever was there between us is not there anymore. You know that, right?” He says suddenly, as if coming back from wherever he had gone.

Blaine doesn't think that's true. He knows Leo and he knows himself, he knows how they click together and how they resonate for each other whenever they're close enough to do so, and he can still feel that vibration between them. But it's not the right moment to talk about that, he doesn't even know if it would be healthy. He has to grant Leo the right to feel anyway he wants to. “I just want to help.”

“You lost that train when you dumped me in New York.”

How many times did he already say this? “I was just trying to help you, Leo,” he explains, carefully avoiding to mention that Kurt had threatened him, demanding that he did not bother his son ever again. “I know you don't see this, but you were deranged that night and I was making it worse. I had to leave.”

“No, I needed you and you run because you couldn't bother to be with me the right way,” Leo retorts, raising his voice. “That is what happened.”

“Leo, you were about to marry.”

Blaine knows the memory of Meredith is very hard to handle for him. Her name, together with Adam's, is one of those that can't be said. “But I never did, did I? So you leaving me didn't help shit.”

“I had hoped it would,” Blaine sighs. “I-I tried to do what I thought was best for you, Leo.”

Leo lets out a disheartened laugh. “You were so good at reading me that I can't believe you really thought that was the best thing to do, Anderson. I simply can't,” he says, shrugging. “What I believe is that you saw a chance to be free of me and you took it.”

“No! No, Leo, that's absolutely not what happened. I really did want to help you.”

“By disappearing off the face of the earth?” Leo says, accusingly.

Blaine would like to tell him that yes, that's exactly what he tried to do. He disappeared hoping that Leo would forget him or hate him so much that he would make a point out of living his best life just to spite him. He should have known that it was not going to happen, but in that moment he had dared to hope it would.

“And you know when I understood?” Leo goes on, mercilessly. “Because at first I couldn't believe you were really gone, you know? Yes, you changed your number, but it wasn't the first time you would go weeks or even months without picking up for me. It wasn't that big of a deal, right? But then one day, it is your birthday, so I want to hear your voice—well, I want you to hear mine, to be honest, but I figure it could be both. So I call Sam. I have never tried to call her before, but I still have her number and I think that, since it's your birthday, wherever you are, she must be with you. So I call and she picks up, and she probably doesn't even look at the screen or maybe, who knows, she doesn't have my number, so she answers without knowing who's calling her. I say Hi, it's Leo. How's it going? and she just freezes, man. I can't see her, but I can hear the way her breath catches in her throat. She barely greets me and I can feel she wants to hang up. I don't make much of it at first and I ask, Is Blaine there? Can I talk to him real quick? I just want to wish him happy birthday. And she says she can't really talk. That she's very very sorry, but she really can't. And she's so nervous. I've never heard her stutter like that. I asks her, please, to put you on the phone. Just for a moment, but she's so scared that she apologizes again and then she hangs up. I call Sam again, but her phone is off. And when I try two days later, her number has been disconnected. And that is when it gets me, you know? How much you wanted to get rid of me, I mean. You went out of your way to instruct your best friend not to talk to me. You made sure to cut me out in every possible way. At that point I was sure that if I'd come to your house, I wouldn't find you there.”

“Leo...”

“But I never had the courage,” Leo never stopped looking at him, but the anger in his eyes is turning into pain now, making his stare unbearable. “As long as I was just thinking you had moved away, there was still a chance it wasn't true. But if I had gone to Westerville or to New York and found someone else in your house, then it would have been real and I would have died. So I kept myself away.”

Leo's voice is breaking and Blaine's heart breaks with it. “Kid, I'm so sorry.”

He reaches out for him, but Leo swats his hand away. “Don't touch me!” He screams. He scrambles up, his tennis shoes slipping on the floor for a moment. “You were supposed to come and get me, Blaine! To show me that I was so fucking wrong in thinking that you had really abandoned me! But you never did! You left me and you didn't even wonder what that would do to me! You destroyed me! So you don't get to say you want to help. You didn't when you could and now it's late!”

Blaine wanted him to talk and now he's drowning in the flow of words coming out of his mouth. That's exactly what he deserves, he thinks, but he's not sure he can handle it. He had his reasons, but the kid doesn't see them, and his intentions were good, but they weren't enough. Guilt is eating him alive, but he doesn't have the right to say that to Leo. He can only try to fix things and he has no idea how or if it's even possible at this point. When Leo storms out of the bathroom, tears of frustration streaming down his face, he doesn't try to stop him.

They both need some space right now. He will think about how crossing it again tomorrow.