Chapter Text
Santana Diabla Lopez doesn’t know shit.
That’s what kept going through Kurt’s head for the rest of the day after she had her little tirade. It was what he had to tell himself in order to process the fact that, even after all these years, Santana turned into such a vile, hateful person when something so much as brushed against her soft underbelly of vulnerability. When Kurt really thought about it, it wasn’t exactly a surprise that she still acted like she’d been possessed by a demonic alter ego at the slightest provocation… just disappointing. Disappointing the way Rachel’s silence was. Disappointing the way Lima in general was.
Sometimes Santana was a heat-seeking missile loaded with harsh truths when she was lobbing insults, but sometimes she just threw out words she learned during Wikipedia comas in hopes that something resonated and hurt. Sometimes, despite apparently being a grown up who was totally mature enough for marriage, she regressed into a scared little girl who attacked people’s weak spots regardless of what those people were supposed to mean to her and what those people intended when they dared to speak up (like she always did).
Santana Lopez had always been the biggest bully in the choir room. Even Puck stopped tossing Kurt in a dumpster every day after he joined glee, and he had only ever been doing it because of some warped sense of tradition. Santana, though, Santana needed to feel big and some days the only way for her to do it was to make others feel small. Today was one of those days, Kurt knew, because Santana had been all too happy to dish it out, but flounced off before Kurt had the time to make her take it.
And if he had been given the chance to snap back, he would have told her in no uncertain terms that she didn’t know shit.
But she hadn’t, and now Kurt was stuck with the vision of the evil mirth in her eyes and a new voice whispering in his head about how inadequate he was.
He tried not to let it get to him. After all, he’d heard a lot of what she said before from all sorts of people, told straight to his face and behind his back. Hell, pretty often it was Santana calling him a lady even when she was in a good mood. Just because this was the first time Kurt was subjected to a Lopez Original Minute-Long Meanologue didn’t mean he was going to let it break him. He was already broken enough after Blaine had moved on with Dave Karofksy and that was when Kurt was the dumper. He couldn’t afford any more fractures.
It wasn’t until he was standing naked in front of his bedroom mirror, door locked and curtains drawn, squeezing at his hips in a way he hadn’t since he was on the Cheerios’ diet regime, that he realized it was already starting to break him a little.
And that was just silly. Kurt knew that he was a good-looking man. Even when he was barely sleeping at night because he was in agony over his cheating ex-boyfriend, he had male models at Vogue flirting with him. Even when he was barely functioning at all because he was in agony over his ex-fiancé, customers still left phone numbers along with hefty tips when he worked shifts at the diner. Adam Crawford auditioned his glee club for Kurt instead of the other way around, and he did it with a song about how great Kurt’s ass was. When the news broke that he had ended his engagement, half the guys at NYADA had pretty much offered to suck his dick ‘in sympathy.’ And the one he took up on the offer— a graduating senior from mime class, never one for gossiping, and already booked for a national tour of Jersey Boys that ensured he wouldn’t try for a real relationship— had been very happy with the encounter, Kurt remembered with a blush. It hadn’t been enough to get Kurt out of his I can’t believe we broke up why did I do that funk, but it had cleared some of the fog from his eyes.
It had been, Kurt realized with a start, exactly the kind of thing he could use right now. He looked at himself in the mirror, then focused on his face. He took a deep breath, and with his mind set, whispered to himself: “You are desirable. You are attractive. Santana doesn’t know shit.”
And then he marched over to his closet on a mission to prove it.