Hello, guys, I'm back, and I'm going to be updating like mad (both this story and a deeper exploration of Karofsky's suicide in Sam's Town, which will soon be named after my friend's favorite song) for the next few days. I won't be updating Friday because I have to go down to Santa Barbara (where my friend used to live) to attend his funeral, so I probably won't be updating again this weekend. Thanks for understanding, you guys. Thank you so much.
Disclaimer: I don't own the song "The Moment I Said It" by Imogen Heap used in Criminal Minds episode "Seven Seconds."
Also, huge warning for organ removal, graphic descriptions of blood, and definitely excessive violence in this chapter. Mia almost threw up when I finished writing that scene. I'm going to warn you guys again when you get to it, and then after the page break you can safely read again.
Chapter VII: The Moment I Said It
"The serial killer Blaine's mother left to find," Lauren blurted out in a rush, "is my father."
"What?" Puck heard "Blaine," "kill," and "father." "Blaine killed your father?"
"No," Lauren was getting frustrated. "The serial killer Blaine's mother is trying to find is my dad," she said, taking a deep breath.
Puck froze. "What, you gotta be kidding me. Your dad is the Buttonwillow Butcher?"
Lauren nodded. "Kurt and Blaine are at my house right now, and my dad's disappeared. I have no idea why."
Puck leaned against the doorway. "You didn't hear that Pearl's disappeared?"
Lauren's mouth fell open. "He's out there looking for her. And when he finds her, he's going to come back, which means he's going to expect the boys to already be dead," she said to herself. She covered her face with her hands. "I can't kill them. They're good, not just for each other but for the world. I've never seen them do anything malicious on purpose, and my whole life's been dedicated to erasing the malicious." She gave an un-Lauren-like shriek. "I can't take it anymore! I need help! I can't disappoint my dad!"
Most people would have responded, "Why the hell not?" but Noah Puckerman wasn't most teenagers. He knew all too well the sting of feeling like one has disappointed Daddy Dearest. And so he pulled Lauren together for a kiss. Lauren broke the kiss abruptly when she saw the police cruisers stationed outside the Halfway House from down the street. Her eyes grew huge.
"They've found me," she pushed him away and made to run.
Puck had never seen Lauren vulnerable like this. Hell, he had never seen her vulnerable, period. So what could he do but reach for her a few seconds too late?
Down the street, Det. Sai spotted the odd look on Lauren's face when their eyes met, and moved to tell Morgan about it. Her concerns were brushed off, so she went to Det. Bef and they managed to slip away unnoticed by the car-focused agents.
"Can you tell me where we're going, Agent Rush?" Det. Gadhavi's polite tone was a little odd considering the fact that he was blindfolded in the backseat of Pearl's car.
Pearl swallowed. "Blaine talks about the Glee Club a lot, and I distinctly remember him mentioning a girl named Lauren Zizes."
Det. Gadhavi stiffened, and Pearl reached over to remove the blindfold. "That doesn't answer my question," Det. Gadhavi said.
Pearl was silent for such a long time that Det. Gadhavi started to squirm. "I want to go to the Lima PD. They probably won't be as tight-lipped about her address." She turned the corner and stopped. "I need you to go get them. Don't let my team know I'm here."
"Shouldn't you be with your team?"
"My team would be more concerned with my safety than that of my son, and that is not something I find acceptable. But you want to be Chief of Buttonwillow Police, don't you? Or even the Indiana Bureau of Investigation?" Pearl's tone was vaguely threatening. "I can make it happen," she promised.
With a hard stare, Det. Gadhavi left. It took a lot less time than he expected to get the two Lima police officers to join Pearl in the car ride back to the police station, where all four investigators were soon engaged in searching public records.
"I've got it!" Det. Sai wrote it down. The detectives high-fived each other and cheered until they realized Pearl, the address, and Det. Sai's police radio were missing.
Puck paced back and forth. Tell the cops and get Lauren arrested for murder, or don't tell the copes and make Lauren kill Kurt and Blaine, or don't tell the cops and get Lauren killed by her father by refusing to let her kill Kurt and Blaine.
Puck straightened his shoulders and opened the door, only to walk directly into Blaine's surprisingly strong mother.
Wow, talk about a mother he'd like to fuck. Pearl Rush had shoulder-length red-blond curls, high cheekbones, a slender build, a long neck, a rosy complexion, and perfect skin. He started to lean down, then noticed that her lips were the color of blood and drew away. Her eyes were lined in black, like she had suffered several sleepless nights, and her skin was so pale, it didn't look human. Puck felt along the sides of his Mohawk, suddenly scared. This woman was a leader, and he wouldn't be able to control her to act in Lauren's best interest.
"Hello, Noah Puckerman," she said.
"Look, I know who has your son and Kurt," Puck said. "I just don't know where they are."
"No problem," Pearl grinned, her white teeth unusually sharp. "I do." Before Puck even knew it, he was pulled inside her car.
"Damn, this is a sweet ride," he said as she simultaneously broke every traffic law in Ohio.
"If you help me get my son and Kurt out alive, I will give you this damn car," Pearl said.
Puck stared at her oddly. "You'd just give me, what, fifty grand?"
"Forty-one grand," Pearl corrected. Puck stared at her, impressed, and shut up so she could concentrate on returning to her criminal roots. It paid off, and they arrived at a house listed under the name Lauren Zizes, spraying gravel everywhere.
"Stay in the car," Pearl instructed as she undid her seatbelt.
"Are you fucking crazy? My girlfriend is in there!" Puck pointed.
Pearl turned to him, beautiful and terrifying. "Your girlfriend took my son and delivered him to a known killer. You will stay in this car and give my team our location until I say otherwise."
"Damn," Puck muttered after she turned away. If that woman were in charge of the military, the Iraq War would never have happened. "Wait, how are you going to communicate with me in the car if you're in the house?" Puck asked. Pearl threw him Det. Sai's police radio, but no answers, before she walked to the front door and rang the bell. Her body language seemed different. Both Quinn and Santana would be proud of the Ice Queen she had become. Still, there was no point in thinking about the Cheerios, and Puck waited until the door opened to turn the radio on.
"Um, I'm Noah Puckerman. Um, this really badass chick just gave me this and told me to tell the Bayou or something to come here. Wait, who am I talking to?"
"This is the Lima Nursing Home. Are you on Alzheimer's medication? Stay there, we'll get your location using our GPS," said the woman on the other side of the line. Puck cursed. Someone in the background sounded like Sue Sylvester, but he ignored that and turned the radio off.
Further away, Cyanne let herself into Lauren's house. "Lauren Keyes," Cyanne greeted the dark-eyed girl in front of her without a trace of irony.
"What?" Lauren blinked first. "What are you doing here?"
"I followed you from Noah Puckerman's house," Cyanne waved to Kurt in the kitchen, Ice Queen persona fully in place. "Hello, Kurt. Your brother punched Dave Karofsky in the face."
Lauren's lip curled in a sneer. "You didn't tell anyone where you were headed."
"I'm sure that by the time your father gets here, my team will have arrived as well," Cyanne said calmly.
"If they get here even a second after my father does, you'll be dead," Lauren's hands curled into fists.
"Mother!" Blaine hollered. Cyanne turned to see Kurt blocking something from view. Something changed in her face. A second car crunched over the gravel driveway.
Lauren must have seen the expression Pearl wore. "Is Puck in your car?" Lauren asked.
Pearl didn't get a chance to respond before the door swung open. Zizes' mouth fell open in shock before he put both hands on Pearl's neck. Blaine and Kurt screamed, and Blaine tugged on the handcuffs so hard, he almost broke his wrist.
Pearl would have kicked herself if she weren't too busy trying to kick Zizes. She had let the Ice Queen mask slip for a second, and now her pretty white throat was paying the price.
Except it wasn't. Despite Zizes' strength, he couldn't snap her neck. He tugged her head so hard to one side that he felt the crack everyone else in the room could hear.
"Ow! That hurt, you asshole!" Pearl fought back harder, still not dead. Zizes realized this was a good thing and picked her up. She still kept up her retaliating assault; there were definitely going to be bruises everywhere tomorrow.
"Lauren," he looked at his daughter when he started having difficulty holding on to the woman. Lauren opened her mouth, almost ready to refuse, but Pearl winked and the wrestler grabbed the mother's flailing legs.
Blaine looked at Kurt, panic in his eyes. The struggle was beginning to knock things over. Something sailed over both boys' heads and landed in the sink. Lauren and Zizes were too preoccupied to notice, so Kurt stood up and saw Zizes' gun. He turned; Lauren and Zizes were too busy strapping Pearl down to see him take the gun.
"Kurt, they're coming!" Blaine warned. Kurt stuffed the gun in his socks. He didn't want to use it. He really didn't, so he didn't struggle when Lauren and Zizes freed them from the dishwasher and moved them to the cold room where they had, until now, only brought corpses.
[Proceed at your own risk!]
Kurt smelled the alarming amounts of blood that had been spilled in the room and his head spun alarmingly. Blaine saw Zizes flex his hand and reach for Kurt, so he picked up his boyfriend, weeping from the pain and effort.
Zizes waited until both boys were inside the room to pick up his scalpel, his intentions obvious. "Now, I'm not a monster, Lauren," he said, deciding that torturing Pearl was more important than torturing the boys. "Kill the boys please."
Lauren nodded, but Pearl caught her eye, and mouthed "Yes" to the question asked just before Zizes entered. Lauren walked over and took a few towels, left over from the days when she would have constant accidents. The way she stuffed them in Blaine's mouth as he struggled made it look like she was choking him with it, and she held him still so he couldn't make a sound or struggle.
Zizes sliced into Pearl's stomach. The skin was softer, but for some reason it was harder to cut than the skin of the corpses he was used to. He shrugged the fact off; living bodies were obviously different than dead ones. He felt the warmth of blood slip through his fingers. If it wasn't as warm as he expected, he didn't notice. But it was hard not to notice how Pearl was struggling far harder than he expected. Even when he had already taken out her kidneys and uterus.
When Zizes took out her liver, Blaine made a noise of protest and Kurt finally found the courage to open his eyes. The was exactly the shape Kurt had seen in textbooks, although a bit more greasy and bloody. He saw Zizes place the organ into an icebox, and he knew what he had to do. He reached into his sock, drew his gun, and fired at Zizes' chest. His arm jerked up and the bullet went through Zizes' eye instead. The man's head jerked back and something purplish-red splattered from the back of his head to the wall as he fell. For a few moments, all Kurt could hear was his own racing heartbeat and the echo of the gun. Then there was another boom from another part of the house and Lauren began to scream.
"You killed my father!" she was completely ready to tear his head off, but the door flew open and Agent Morgan pulled her off Kurt and held her down while Prentiss began to console the girl. Horatio, Hotch, Reid, and Det. Gadhavi ran to undo Pearl's bonds. JJ picked up an icebox, opened it, and shut it closed immediately before vomiting on the ground. Reid's wife ran in and pressed several cloths to Pearl's abdomen to stem the rather profuse bleeding.
"I need more towels!" she yelled.
Lilly and Callia ran to the captive boys. Callia lifted Blaine while Lilly made sure to keep his leg steady as Det. Bef came by with more towels for the bleeding. Det. Sai moved Kurt over to the ambulances waiting outside. Rossi took one look at Zizes' body on the ground and knew it was too late.
"We need to get her organs back inside her!" Varda yelled. Reid grabbed the boxes, Horatio held Pearl's upper torso, Hotch held her legs, and Det. Gadhavi made sure to keep her midsection as still as possible so Varda and Det. Bef wouldn't have to clean up quite as much blood. Varda climbed into the ambulance with Pearl once she was put on the stretcher, and everyone was left wondering just how everything went to hell so quickly.
Hotch spotted Pearl's car first, and he opened the door with so much force, he wrenched half the door off the car. Puck stared at him, open-mouthed, but the first words out of his mouth were still "Dude, you just broke my car."
Det. Sai somehow managed to hide her snickering. Hotch, however, was not laughing. "You radioed us in," he stated the fact.
Puck nodded, frozen in fear.
"Why?" Hotch crossed his arms.
Puck broke down and told him all Lauren had confessed to him. "She told me who her dad was. She said she had Kurt and Blaine at her house and her dad was looking for some place to bury them. When she left the house, she said she was going to kill him, so I walked after her and I ran into Blaine's mom—who's really hot, did you know?—and I told her all this, so she drove me here and told me to radio you guys after she could go inside because she didn't want you to tell her something she couldn't listen to. I guess she didn't want to disobey you, but she didn't want her kid to die or anything either." If he clenched his fist and tears filled his eyes at the word "kid," Hotch didn't call him out on it.
The BAU leader merely nodded. "Det. Bef, make sure he gives you guys his statement. Each SUV can fit five. Anyone coming to the hospital can get in the one I'm driving."
Horatio, Lilly, Callia, and Reid got into Hotch's car and he drove them to the hospital. By the time they all arrived, Kurt and Blaine had been given IV fluids for their dehydration and shock, and Blaine's leg had been set in a cast.
"Blaine!" Horatio ran over and hugged his grandson. "Oh, you are so brave, you are so brave," he said over and over, embrace tight enough to suffocate.
Lilly was a little less demonstrative and settled for putting one hand on Blaine's shoulder as the other covered her mouth. Tears started streaming down her cheeks when one of Blaine's hands covered hers. Kurt looked at them with a wide smile, glad that Blaine's support network had increased tenfold.
"Is there anyone we should call? Anyone you want to see?" Callia asked, bending down to brush his hair out of his face.
"My mother," Blaine blurted out the first person he could think of.
"She's still in surgery," Hotch said, pacing. "The doctors said they won't be able to put all her organs back in." Everyone looked at each other, sharing looks of worry. The question hung over everyone's head until Callia finally voiced it.
"Well, what's she going to give up?"
Lauren: "The day the child realizes that all adults are imperfect, he becomes an adolescent; the day he forgives them, he becomes an adult; the day he forgives himself, he becomes wise."~Alden Nowlen
I'm a little unsure of this because I'm still getting my feet back on the ground after not writing for a few days. Tell me how you felt about it! (In a review, perhaps? *nudge nudge*). Oh, and yes, the woman in the background was Jean Sylvester. I've ignored canon, shocker.
Next time, um, obviously we get to see Pearl get out of surgery. Please remember that Pearl has CIPA, so she can't really feel it, so whenever I feel like a story doesn't have enough violence I'll do something terrible to her to make up for it. It's also easier to make her a victim of excessive violence because she's half-vampire and therefore harder to kill than normal people.
I would like to extend an apology to OhMyGlee55 that this is uploaded at (I think 2 or 3 am) again because I have been completely out of it for the last few days.