This story was originally submitted for the 2010 KissKiss Exchange on the kurt_blaine community on Livejournal. Enjoy.
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion."
-Dylan Thomas, And Death Shall Have No Dominion
Blaine wipes the sweat off of his brow as he finishes repairing the faulty wiring of his space shuttle. He'd been awakened from his cryogenic sleep only a week ago, and things were already going wrong. Brilliant. Subsiding on freeze-dried food and stale-tasting coffee had done nothing to improve his mood.
The sterile, chrome walls hum lowly as the shuttle moves at a speed too fast for Blaine to see the little chunks of space whizzing by the porthole. Running his hands through his hair, he quickly surveys the navigation panel of his ship and wonders, for a moment, what he's doing here, in the middle of nowhere with only the twinkling stars to keep him company.
Deep down inside, he knows that he needs this, to get away from his life and his memories that are on Earth, where every moment spent breathing involves nostalgia and wishing to forget everything.
Blaine sets a direct course for the space station orbiting Solaris, and settles into his chair. He's got a lot of time to kill.
"I need the longest mission you have planned."
Wes looks up from where he's reading the daily newspaper. Blaine and he are sitting in the office that Wes uses when he isn't giving interviews and evaluating research being conducted. Being the director of the Dalton Research Institute doesn't give him as much time to relax as he'd like to.
Wes raises his eyebrows in the familiar way that he's been doing since high school, "What would possess you request such a thing? Are you all right?"
Blaine kneads his forehead tiredly, "I just need to get away for a while."
Wes sighs. He understands that Blaine's been unhappy lately, and he can't blame him. They've known each other since high school, and he's seen all of the facets of Blaine's personality. His friend's lost interest in everything around him, and is sad and listless most of the time. Wes doesn't blame him, but he doesn't want to lose one of the best rocketeers the institute has.
Wes makes a decision. He pulls out a file from the desk drawer marked "Mission Projects" and opens it.
"If you want it, we have one long-term mission available. It's planet 681 in the Echo quadrant, Solaris. The research team stationed there's shown disappointing results lately, and it's been a drain on the institute's funds. I'll send you to evaluate their current situation and let you decide whether to continue conducting research or not. Solaris is a mysterious planet, sure, but if there's nothing to find, there's nothing to funnel money for. They're on a space station orbiting the planet, as Solaris is all ocean and no land."
Blaine doesn't hesitate.
"I'll take it."
A blue planet with splashes of purple becomes larger and larger in the ship's porthole. The space station looms in the distance as Blaine's ship draws near. Blaine maneuvers his ship into one of the few docks and attempts to contact the team residing in the station. No reply. Blaine frowns.
Using the access code he received earlier from Wes, Blaine enters the bay doors and into the station.
The station is unkempt, paper strewn around randomly, wiring in a few areas of the wall needing repair, floors slightly grimy.
Blaine walks through the corridors of the station, fearing the worst.
A shadow moves ahead of him, and he's caught off-guard by a female figure in a red and white dress at the end of the corridor. Her hair is pulled back in a high ponytail, bangs fringing her forehead. She smiles childishly, and when Blaine makes a move to approach her, she runs away from him through the dim corridor.
There aren't any females on this ship, Blaine thinks hurriedly as he runs after the woman, not since one of the researchers returned to Earth. He rounds several corners, seeing the little glimpses of the female now and then. The sound of footfalls suddenly cease as he hurtles around another corner. He sees an open door at the end of the hall and a figure moving beyond it.
The figure makes a startled sound when Blaine enters the room. It's not the female, but a young man in a sweater-vest and glasses, standing at one of the many monitors that populate the room.
"Hey, man," the man says, "You must be Blaine Anderson, I'm Artie Abrams, the tech-dude around here."
Artie reaches out his hand for Blaine to shake, but Blaine can only look incredulously at the other man.
"Didn't you see that woman run by just now? Tall, blonde?" he asks.
At his question, a strange expression crosses Artie's face, but it's gone in an instant, replaced by a polite smile-
"She comes and goes as she likes. You might see her later." Artie says.
"There aren't supposed to be and females on this ship, to my knowledge."
"Who said that she was here in the first place?"
Blaine has no idea what Artie is trying to get at, "What's going on here?" he frowns. Neglected quarters, a strange person, the lack of any other life. Strange.
"I could tell you what's happening, but I'm not sure if it'll tell you what's really happening…"
Blaine's tired of beating around the bush. Perhaps there'd be someone else to question pertaining to the state of things around here.
"Is there anyone else aboard this ship besides you?"
Artie laughs humorlessly, "Sam committed suicide a while back, and Finn's holed up in his room. He refuses to come out, and I have to bring him food every now and then, if only to keep him alive. Maybe you should go talk to him. Keep him company. Not that he needs it, of course."
Artie's lackadaisical tone at mentioning a fellow researcher's death unnerves Blaine. He'd ask Finn when he reached his room.
There were only supposed to be three people on this station currently, excluding himself. One was dead, one was a bit crazy, one was in seclusion, and a mysterious fourth person was walking around similar to that of a ghost. The situation wasn't good. Not good at all.
The small flap at the center on Finn's door opens at Blaine's incessant knocking. Blaine is faced with dark eyes as Finn evaluates him.
"You're new here."
"My name is Blaine Anderson. I was sent by the institute. Didn't you hear the news of my arrival?"
Finn grunts, "Slipped my mind. Besides, there's nothing for you to see here. Just Artie and me passing the time. There's no need for an evaluation from you."
"There has been a death aboard this station," Blaine replies steadily, "and I glimpsed an unidentified person upon my arrival. I assume that you've seen her too. Just what is going on here?"
Finn narrows his eyes at Blaine's words," And how exactly can you-"
A crash resounds in the Finn's room. Finn jerks, turning toward the noise behind him, but not allowing Blaine to see.
"Is there something, or rather someone, in your room?" Blaine questions, suspicious.
Finn turns back to Blaine.
"Look," Finn tells him, "You have no business here. Don't expect me just to speak to you out of kindness. Why don't you come talk to me later, after you've had a nap or something?"
It's a strange request, but the look in Finn's eyes tells Blaine that he won't be getting any information out of him for the moment. Blaine sighs.
"If you insist."
Finn says nothing else, except:
"Be careful when you wake up."
Finn's strange words ringing his ears, Blaine surveys the living quarters he's living in. It's a simple room, with a good queen size bed and several other pieces of furniture..
He sets his scant luggage down and frowns as he changes into more comfortable clothing. The people on this station act as if there's a huge conspiracy going on, he thinks, and I'm going to find out why. He locks the door, just in case.
Blaine lays awake in his bed for a long time, brooding, before falling asleep.
Blaine's hit in the face by a bag of macaroons from the local bakery, the sweet scent of the pastries causing his mouth to water.
"Hey!" he yells at a slim figure moving closer, who's laughing merrily as he holds a pair of lattes in his hands.
"Here," the other man says a he hands one of the drinks to Blaine, and sits beside him on the edge of a low stone hedge overlooking a river, "Who would've thought that France would be so beautiful this time of year?"
"You would know," Blaine, says, "You've been planning this trip for months."
The other man laughs again before sipping and his latte and trying a macaroon. "It's good," he says, surprised, "Here, try it."
Blaine eats the rest of the macaroon, "It's good, despite the load of butter and sugar used to make it," he teases.
Blaine's companion sighs, "The caloric content of this little pastry is to be envied. I'll allow us to eat this just once. Next time we stop here on our next trip to France, no macaroons for us," he intones airily.
Blaine begins to smile. But dimly, in the back of his mind, he realizes that there will never be a next time, or a moment like this again. He's dreaming of a faint memory.
You're not here anymore, Kurt," Blaine says, looking into Kurt's glasz eyes, currently bordering on a beautiful sky blue color and the color of the sea, "I miss you."
Kurt's smiling softly at him, unaware of the truth, unaware of the world outside. But nevertheless, he replies:
"I'm always here."
When Blaine wakes, his eyes are blurry from unshed tears. He raises his arm to wipe them away, but settle instead on something next to him on the bed. And it's breathing.
Blaine's haze from sleeping is dissolved instantly by the adrenaline rush as he blindly stumbles off the bed, landing on the floor in a rather undignified-sounding yelp. He sees mussed chestnut hair, painfully familiar, the rest of the body covered by the blanket..
At Blaine's yelp, the person in bed stirs and yawns, stretching his arms as he sits up.
No, Blaine thinks, this thoughts repeating only one word, Nononono.
Glasz eyes open and crinkle as Kurt, holyshitKurt, smiles at Blaine as if nothing is wrong. At all.
"Morning, Blaine," Kurt says cheekily, "Is the floor more comfortable than the bed?"
I've gone crazy, Blaine realizes. The crazy in this goddamn ship has gotten to me in less than a day, and I'm hallucinating things that would send me to the psychiatry ward in no time. I'm in the middle of nowhere, in space, and Kurt is here with me. In bed.
Blaine leaps up and grabs Kurt's hand, saying "Come here with me for a second!"
"Blaine, what's wrong?" Kurt's hand feels so solid in his grip, but Blaine continues to walk out the room, with Kurt behind him. My mind has finally broken, and I'm having the most elaborate hallucination in the history of space! Blaine screams in his mind, and as much as he would like to accept this illusion, to shove the hallucination against the wall and cry into his shoulder like a drowning man that's finally breathed air, he grits his teeth and continues toward the dock, ignoring the hallucination's questions.
At the dock, he seats Kurt (no, the hallucination!) in one of the smaller pods.
"Stay here!" Blaine whispers urgently as he leaves the pod and strides jerkily to the controls, pressing a series of buttons on the dashboard.
"Blaine," Kurt questions from inside the pod, "What-"
The pod doors cut off Kurt's words as they close, and the ship leaves the dock, away from the space station. Blaine closes his eyes and tries not to let a tear slip out. The illusion is gone.
"You're not hallucinating, you know," a voice says. Blaine's eyes snap open. It's Finn, who smirks as he appears in Blaine's view, but there's a hint of sadness in his eyes.
"Looks like you'll believe us now."
The food looks more palatable than the junk he's been eating, but Blaine only pokes at it as if it's a dead animal. Artie and Finn are sitting at the table with him, silent.
Blaine finally gives up and pushes his plate away dejectedly, "What happened to me?" he asks the two.
Artie and Finn give each other a side-long look. Finn hisses, "You talk first."
Artie clears his throat nervously and looks Blaine directly in the eyes as he begins, "It started happening when we first arrived at the station. The first day, the entire crew went to bed, but when we woke up, we found that we weren't the only ones on the space station. People we knew or know back on Earth suddenly showed up, even though it's impossible. They even acted like the people we knew, and had memories," Artie pauses, and nudges Finn to continue.
"But they weren't people. We analyzed them in the lab," Finn says, "Their molecular structure is unlike what we've ever seen before, very similar to the molecular structure of the oceans on Solaris. There's nothing on that planet but ocean and more ocean, of course, but we're certain that they came from the planet. To screw with our minds-"
"I think that Solaris is trying to communicate with us," Artie interjects, "they haven't shown us any sign of harm. But the problem is, these… things… they imitate people that we found important, extremely important, back on Earth. When we're sleeping, Solaris appears to scan our minds and create the perfect composite of that person. It's difficult to comprehend, but it's true."
Blaine, strangely, believes them. Unless they're all suffering from an elaborate group delusion, which in unlikely, the two are most likely telling the truth. "So these people-"
"They're not people," Finn snaps angrily, and Blaine is startled by his ferocity, "They're moving objects that Solaris is torturing us with, and driving us insane to make us leave. The planet, according to Artie, is sentient, and I find that I believe him."
"But I send the pseudo-Kurt away. Won't that solve the problem?"
"Solaris will create another Kurt. He'll appear again, and you can't avoid it because keeping yourself awake is impossible. When you wake up again, the Kurt that you think you know will be there," Artie replies solemnly.
"But he won't be Kurt," Blaine says, and lowers his eyes.
"Exactly."
Blaine lies down on his bed to sleep again, and doesn't remember his dreams this time.
When he wakes up again, Kurt is seated in a chair beside his bed. He looks confused, but gives a small smile to Blaine.
"You sleep like a log," "Kurt" says, "and," he looks around the room. "Where are we?"
Blaine sits up, only inches away from Kurt, and pulls him into an embrace, "You've been sick for a while," he murmurs, "But you're all right now."
He knows, deep down inside, that it's not real, that it's not really Kurt he's holding in his arms but an imitation of him, but Blaine feels like he's finally found his air.
Blaine begins to hum and quietly sing the song that played on the radio in the car the first time they kissed, a soft piano ballad. They had been in college then, unable to ignore the attraction that they had felt toward each other, that ran deeper than friendship :
From my window
I saw two birds lost at sea
I caught our reflection
In that silent tragedy
But with hope prevailing
I draw galleons sailing
In full sail billowing free
So when the birds fly south
We'll reach up and hold their tails
Pull up and out of here
And bridle the autumn gales
I give you my hand
The fingers unfold
To have and forever hold
To marry the untold bliss's
And anchor this lost soul
"Has he passed away?" Artie asks Blaine as he types away in front of one of the monitors in his self-named "tech-room." Kurt is still in Blaine's room, patiently awaiting his return.
Blaine reluctantly replies in the affirmative.
"He seems exactly like the Kurt I knew- his mannerisms, his looks, the way he smiles. Do you think that he is Kurt?"
Artie sighs and replies, "I don't know, and we may never know. My idea is that Solaris is using our minds to create these things, and imitating our memories of them. How real Solaris' creations are is disputable."
"Solaris could have created real people."
Artie swivels in his chair and looks Blaine straight in the eyes, "But do they have real feelings?"
He resumes typing at the monitor. "Don't get caught up in the illusion. It won't end well for you."
Kurt is reading a book of Blaine's when the visions begin.
Kurt messily empties the contents of his stomach into the toilet, Blaine holding back his hair as he whispers comforting things into his ear. Kurt grimaces and heaves again.
The doctor tells Kurt that they're starting him on a new sort of medicine, as the one he's currently taking has had no affect. The medicine, no matter what it is or what it's supposed to do makes Kurt lifeless and drowsy, and he finds himself bedridden a good portion of the time. Blaine, when he's not busy working at the Dalton Research Institute, spends time with him, but Kurt hates taking up Blaine's time. They both know that the medicines don't really work.
A hundred years after the illness first appeared, and still nothing, in an age of space travel to faraway places people just a century ago couldn't possibly have even dreamed of. No cure, just treatment that doesn't even work. And Kurt can't help but be angry at Blaine, angry for Blaine's loyalty to him, spending just about every second with him when he's not working at the Dalton Research Institute. Kurt wants Blaine to be happy, and happy isn't Kurt with an incurable illness.
He hears the beep, beep, beeeep of a monitor to his side, and all he sees is the egg-white of the ceiling above him.
Doctors and nurses are rushing around the bed, and he can't tell them to leave him alone. He wants to sleep; he's very tired.
Blaine is standing next to him, next to the bed that is lumpy and scratchy and just plain uncomfortable. Blaine's crying, tears slipping down his cheeks as he's nudged to the side by a doctor.
The doctor murmurs something to Blaine, and Kurt sees through the haze in his eyes that Blaine sobs as he leaps forward to grasp Kurt's hand, which is lying limply on the bed sheets. Kurt, distantly, feels the warm touch and struggles to smile, to reassure Blaine that everything's going to be okay. Blaine will be lonely, but he'll be okay.
Kurt doesn't hear the drone of a long beep from the monitor. He can't.
Beeeeeep.
The sudden sound of the book dropping onto the ground snaps Kurt out of the memory. With a sudden wetness in his eyes, Kurt realizes that he's shaking.
Finn calls a group meeting for the ship crew, Blaine, and Kurt. Everyone except for Kurt is as taut as a string, and the tension in the room reaches an unbearable level. Finn in the first to speak:
"You can't keep this from Kurt," he insists, "he'll find out sooner or later what he really is."
"Find out what?" Kurt asks, looking between the three.
"Finn, no!" Blaine whispers. He doesn't know what Kurt's knowledge of his real identity will do to him.
Artie interjects, "Finn's right, Blaine. Believing that he's really Kurt is dangerous. He may come to suspect that something is off. He won't know why we're here in a space station, orbiting a planet that looks nothing like Earth. Think-"
"What are you saying?" Kurt asks. Everyone else stiffens. "Have I forgotten something?"
"You've been having visions, haven't you?" Finn asks him, "of real memories that belonged to the real Kurt. Of your own death. You're already dead-"
"Finn!" Blaine shouts, but Finn continues.
"-just a puppet created by that thing," he points toward the porthole, Solaris framed by the circular shape, "And you know that I'm telling the truth, don't you? How else can you possibly be here, with us?"
Kurt's face is incredulous. It's crazy, what they're saying. But Finn knows about the visions that he's been having. They're not things like normal dreams- he's never sleeping when they happen, and there's a genuine quality that he only feels when he's awake- that everything is real. But while he's Kurt, there's a certain sense of detachment that accompanies the visions.
Kurt looks down at his lap.
"I had visions," he whispers, "of myself in a hospital, dying. I'm with Blaine. I'm in the hospital bed, but it feels like I'm not really myself, like I'm not the one dying."
Kurt steels himself and turns to Blaine, "I really am dead, aren't I? Not a person, but the image of one?" He looks at Blaine for answers.
Blaine's face tells him everything.
Kurt stands shakily from his chair onto his feet. I need to be alone," he says, and flees the room. Blaine doesn't go after him. It's a lot for Kurt to take in.
"It's for the best, Blaine," Artie says nervously, looking at anywhere but him.
Blaine puts his face in his hands, "He's a person," he whispers, "Just like the rest of us."
"No," Finn says sternly, "He's a thing, not a person." The three sit and stew in silence, not sure of what to say.
Then they hear a scream.
Blaine knows that voice, "Kurt!" he shouts, launching himself off of his chair and runs out of the room, towards the source of the cry, with Finn and Artie following him.
They find Kurt lying face down on the cold metal floor in the engine room, a tube of something spilled next to him, the liquid smoking and burning a hole in the floor.
"He drank the liquid oxygen in one of the tanks," Finn says coldly, flipping Kurt's body over. A huge burn, ugly and dark, runs from Kurt's mouth down to his throat, black and green and blue, the flesh damaged beyond repair. Kurt's eyes are open, wide and blank and terrified, but Finn hurriedly closes them.
"Instant death. Or so it appears," Finn continues.
A hundred million thoughts are running through Blaine's head. He's found Kurt again, only to lose him. He's too shocked for words to say anything. Why would Kurt kill himself? He doesn't understand. Seeing Kurt's body, as lifeless as a doll like it was on those disgustingly pure-white sheets brings back painful memories. It's not Kurt, but it is Kurt, in a way. Kurt was already dead, but it seems like he's seeing him die for the second time.
"Let's take him to Blaine's room," Artie suggests.
Blaine quietly follows Artie and Finn as they carry Kurt's body.
Once Kurt's body is situated on Blaine's bed, Finn grimaces, and Artie takes a step back.
"This is my least favorite part," Artie mutters lowly, just enough for Blaine to catch it.
"What… what part?" Blaine asks, not understanding. Arties says nothing, just motions to the body.
Kurt's body twitches, and Blaine watches with increasing horror as it spasms in a way not unlike an epileptic seizure, strangely controlled. Kurt's head lolls from side to side as the rest of his body shakes, eyes remaining closed, fingertips curling and clutching at the bedspread.
Blaine reaches out his arms to Kurt in an attempt to hold him down, but Artie shoots a quick look at him and shakes his head.
The spasms suddenly stop, and Kurt goes as still and straight as a pole, not breathing, looking more like a pale mannequin made of porcelain than a person.
Kurt's eyes shoot open.
He sits up in the bed, looks at Blaine, opens his mouth, but closes it.
"He's been reanimated," Artie says, "That's why they can't be destroyed. You can kill them all you like, but they'll be up within the hour."
Kurt shudders and tries to draw into himself, his hands wrapping around his knees and trying to disappear into the bed. Blaine hesitantly tries to put his arm around Kurt's shoulders, but Kurt flinches away.
Artie and Finn leave the room. The two left are silent.
"Why do you care about me?" Kurt says quietly, looking anywhere but Blaine, "I'm not the real Kurt. I can't even kill myself to stop being a fake."
Blaine pulls Kurt into an embrace. "You're still human," Blaine murmurs into Kurt's ear, "Even if you don't feel like one."
Kurt is sitting next to the porthole in Blaine's room, staring at the planet in the distance. Blaine is reviewing the ship's logs at the desk.
Kurt speaks up.
"I can't hear the planet," Kurt says. "But it must know how I'm suffering." He turns to Blaine, "What am I here for?"
Blaine sets down the logs and looks at Kurt's lithe form across the room. He opens his mouth to speak, but a knock on the door draws away his attention.
Finn's on the other side of the door, a slight smile gracing his features, the first smile that Blaine's ever seen on his face. Finn looks a bit breathless, as if he had run all the way to Blaine's room.
"I did it!" Finn crows, "The molecule disruptor was successful!"
"The what?"
"I created a machine that can disrupt the molecular bonds that Solaris' creations consist of," Finn explains, "It continues to disrupt their molecular bonds once they've been destroyed, so they can't regenerate. Total death."
Kurt pushes himself away from the porthole and quickly strides to over where Blaine and Finn are, "So you say that you ca-"
"No!" Blaine shouts as he turns to face Kurt, "I'm taking you back to Earth. You can't destroy yourself."
"You'll never be able to bring him to Earth," Finn says, narrowing his eyes, "What if the same thing begins to happen there? How would we explain it?" He rubs the bridge of his nose tiredly, "Face it Blaine, you can never bring the dead back to life, no matter what you do."
Blaine doesn't reply. Finn leaves.
Kurt sighs and goes to sit at the desk, "I'll enjoy my time while I'm here," he says, fingering the bottle of sleeping pills on the table.
Blaine nod, resigned, and says, "I'll go get us some tea." He leaves the room and closes the door, leaning against the doorway for a moment, lost in thought.
Blaine returns with two cups in both of his hands. Kurt takes one and curiously sips it.
"Chamomile tea, I see," he says, smiling wryly, "My favorite."
"Good for the nerves," Blaine answers as he leaves his own drink on the table to gaze out of the porthole at Solaris.
"We might go down to Solaris to collect samples. You want to come?" Blaine asks, not turning around.
"Maybe," there's a slight shuffling sound as Kurt moves to stand next to him with both of their cups in hand.
"Here," Kurt says, handing Blaine tea. The action is so reminiscent of lattes and macaroons by the river that Blaine has to swallow the lump that's suddenly formed in his throat before accepting the drink. He sips at it as he studies Kurt, who stares wistfully out of the porthole. They stand together in silence for what feels like at least half an hour but is really only a few minutes.
A wave of dizziness hits Blaine out of nowhere, and he staggers back as his vision begins to swim before him. He feels himself becoming sluggish, and the room spins and turns hazy as he is forced to lie down on the bed. His mind is running slowly, but he can still feel the slight movement of the bed as Kurt sits next to him, running his hands through Blaine's hair to calm his shock.
"I'm sorry," Kurt murmurs, taking Blaine's tea that has spilled liquid in a small pool all over the bed, "This was the only way."
"You would never let me destroy myself," Kurt continues, and Blaine, barely registering Kurt's words, moves his eyes slowly over Kurt's form to his eyes, a stormy sea green. "Despite the fact that I'm just a memory of the Kurt you knew."
Kurt's eyes are sad, "I'm sure that we can be happy together somewhere, but it's not here, and not on Earth."
He leans over and softly kisses Blaine on the cheek, "For what it's worth, it was nice seeing you again," He gets up and leaves the room, a few folds of the bedspread the only evidence that he had ever been there.
Blaine feels his mind shutting down, and succumbs to sleep.
"Kurt…"
Blaine's dreaming again.
Kurt's walking down the hall to his next class, and Blaine, standing a few feet away, appreciates the view as the sunlight seems to bring out the color of his eyes, reminding him of supernovas and other things far away in the vastness of space.
"Welcome to Dalton," Blaine says as he smiles at Kurt, "My name is Blaine. What class are you going to next?"
Kurt shyly returns the smile and looks down at his schedule, "French."
Blaine takes Kurt's hand, tugging him down the hallway, "I know a shortcut."
Blaine's mind is drowsy from sleep as wakes. Kurt is nowhere in the room.
"Kurt?" Blaine calls hesitantly as he stumbles off of the bed, stumbling for a bit before he manages to walk out of his room.
He moves slowly toward the lab, fearing the worse. The door to the lab locked when he tries it, but he sees Finn in the room through the glass door. Blaine knocks on the door, and Finn turns around, face devoid of emotion.
"No," Blaine whispers, horrified, "No!"
He throws himself at the glass door at Finn, but it doesn't budge.
"You killed him!" he shouts, "You killed him!"
"How can you kill someone who was already dead in the first place?" Finn answers coldly.
Blaine slides down the length of the door.
"He asked me to," Finn says form the other side, "I couldn't refuse."
Blaine doesn't answer.
Footsteps echo from the hall as Artie, hearing the commotion, approaches them.
"I see that he did it," Artie says, his hand on Blaine's shoulder.
Finn stumbles up to the other side of the door, "it's finally over," he says, "the molecule disrupter used up all of the station's power." He laughs, but not out of humor, "I'll finally be with Rachel in death, not with some sick, twisted version of her," he hisses.
Artie tugs at Blaine's arm, "We have to get out!" he shouts, "The station will be sucked in by Solaris' gravitational pull."
Blaine grits his teeth, stands, and follows Artie down the corridors to the dock, leaving Finn behind in the lab.
"Tell me," he asks, "Who killed Sam?"
Artie turns to Blaine, "It was Finn." he says quietly, "Sam wanted to bring Solaris' creations back to Earth. We couldn't let him risk it."
Blaine doesn't answer.
The two reach the dock. Artie skillfully sets the coordinates of Earth onto the navigation system.
"Get into the pod," he says as he enters the pod doors, Blaine behind him.
The streets are grimy and wet with rain as Blaine strolls down the block, groceries in hand. He feels vaguely disoriented as he walks, as if a mist is hanging in his head, obstructing his thoughts.
How long have I been away? He thinks, Since Kurt's death, I haven't been myself. Blaine seizes up as rockateer and Solaris flash through his mind, but the thought is simply brushed away as he smiles and ascends the stairs to his apartment.
Blaine opens the door to his empty apartment and sets the bags onto the counter. He'll make a salad for dinner today and have some diet coke with it. Kurt always did like diet coke in those rare moments when he stopped caring about his health so much.
Blaine hums a song that he remembers the melody of but can't place the words and name of as he prepares dinner. He sets the salad and diet coke on the coffee table as he returns to the kitchen to grab a fork.
Utensil in hand, Blaine turns to return to the coffee table.
He stops.
Kurt's sitting on the couch in front of the coffee table, sipping the diet coke. He sets his drink down and smiles the smile that shows all of his bottom teeth and none of his top.
Blaine remembers.
Blaine is about to follow Artie, but he hears a faint whisper behind him:
"Blaine…"
"Kurt?" he whispers back.
The station is already being pulled into Solaris' atmosphere, and distantly, he hears the roar of the pod as it leaves the station, but he ignores it and walks through the corridors again, leaving the dock behind him.
The gravity is starting to affect him, but Blaine, body feeling heavier by the second, continues on. Kurt is here.
He walks through many of the rooms and corridors, but there's no one there, and it's slowly getting harder to do so. Solaris' gravity makes his leg struggle to move forward.
Blaine, feeling lightheaded, leans heavily against the wall of an empty corridor as the pull of gravity becomes too heavy to bear. He has to find Kurt. He has to.
A pair of legs fill his vision. He drags his eyes up to see the woman he first saw when he first arrived at the ship. She is all smiles and bouncy blonde hair, and she reaches out her hand to Blaine, waiting for him to take it.
Blaine understands.
He reaches out, fighting the pull of gravity, and takes her hand.
They're not on Earth. They're on Solaris.
"You'll stay with me?" Blaine whispers as Kurt approaches him and envelopes him in an embrace.
"Yes," Kurt whispers back, his glasz eyes set on Blaine's, "We'll be happy here."
The colors of autumn are full-blown as leaves of gold and red and dead crown the sky their beautiful colors. They land on the grass, kissing the blades as the last of the dew becomes their tears. The trees rustle all around, shaking with pity at the plight of the leaves. Do come back to us one day, they whisper, come back, and we will love you as we did before.
Blaine and Kurt's scarves move with the wind as the two ascend the slightly-steep but long hill. Thousands and thousands of gravestones dot the landscape, with the dates of birth and death varying wildly, a lone hyphen declaring the life lived in between.
Kurt trails slightly behind Blaine, giving him the space needed. It's an intensely private thing that he's infringing upon, and pretending that he's not there, just Blaine's shadow curling over the worn stones and slightly under-watered grass, is the best position for him to take at this moment.
Blaine slows as he reaches the very top of the hill, and looks back at Kurt, suddenly apprehensive. Kurt gives him a little smile and urges him on with his hands.
He just wants Blaine to be happy.
Blaine leaves Kurt standing a few yards away and makes his way to a single gravestone set slightly apart from the others, with lilies etched on the side, colored a faint white and light crimson. He kneels at the gravestone and slowly traces the name inscribed.
Kurt Hummel
"Hello, Kurt," he whispers.
That's all, folks. Read and review?