sebastian.  barry.

“Sort of?  Everything I did was still me doing it, obviously but– Sebastian was just a persona.”  Never has he wished alcohol would help him more.  The liquid does nothing to ease his nerves and so he hardly touches it while the current amount of anxiety is strumming through his veins.  “You can totally leave now if you want and I’ll never bother you again, or- ask questions?  Whatever, I know it’s really weird and screwed up.”  Weird didn’t begin to cover it.  Neither did screwed up, Barry thought.  There was a reason he had never told a soul about what he did in high school.  As far as any of his current friends or coworkers were concerned, Barry was exactly the same as he is now.

With Blaine though it was not only a matter of how strange and wrong what he had done was, it was a betrayal in friendship.  Every personal word Blaine shared, Barry could only meet with half truths at the best.  Understandably, he was guilty for that detail on it’s own.

Blaine sat through the rest of Barry’s explanation with a partially open-mouthed look of dumbfounded he didn’t quite catch before he could turn it into something more neutral.  An elbow propped up on the countertop and he palmed over his mouth as soon as he felt the heaviness of his expression sink in.  One thing was for certain.  He didn’t want to take Seb–Barry’s offer to get up and leave.  Not when there were so many questions to ask.  Certainly not after the minute he realized that so much of him wanted to stay put.  It’d been a long time since he last saw this face until the restaurant and now.  Despite everything?  Turning his back and walking out the door just—he didn’t want to do that.

But there was a lead weight in his stomach, too.  He tried to reason with himself in those seconds of utter silence that fell between them where he was just stupidly looking at Barry, that the feeling was only temporary.  Something he could get rid of once he had answers.  “I don’t want to leave.  I really have missed you and it feels so good to see you again..  I–.  Our friendship was real.  Wasn’t it?  The you that I got to know was YOU?  How much of it was a persona talking in all the conversations we had and how much was you?”  There that was a start.  If it made any sense at all.