Title: Keeping the Balance (7/10)
Author: sun_and_rain
Rating: PG-13
Warning: deals with issues of consent, homophobia, and memory loss
Summary: No one recognized the name when Kurt first spoke it–a name he'd found buried somewhere in his dreams–but he couldn't shake the feeling that it was important: "Blaine". Whatever had been taken from them had something to do with Blaine.
Chapter Summary: Kurt, Rachel, and Mercedes try to get through to the glee club. Certain things go to plan. Others don't.
A/N: Once again, I remain humbled by all of your sweet words and continued loyalty to me. You are incredible for still reading such a silly little story. So here's an extra-long chapter in recompense! On that note: you know how I said we were going to crazy town? This chapter is crazy town. No kidding. This part gets very, very dark. Check out Blinding by Florence and the Machine ( /watch?v=ZQjx9ZiVQvY) for this chappie.
Chapter Seven: The Red Pill
Kurt lightly scanned the room, skipping over Santana's crude whiteboard drawings and the game of hackeysack Puck and Sam were playing next to Artie. They had been in the choir room for about ten minutes, give or take, and those ten minutes had so far been spent in utter awkwardness. No one said anything (not even Santana), and yet everyone kept sending him suspicious glances, superbly failing at trying to pretend they weren't looking at them. Quinn was the only one bold enough to outright stare. He felt her gaze lift up the hairs at the back of his neck.
Rachel, sitting in the seat next to him, strangled his hand. Mercedes sat on Rachel's other side, providing silent support.
He hadn't thought this through.
How do we even know this is going to work? He thought helplessly. Blaine: do you actually have a plan?
As had become the norm since waking this morning, Blaine remained silent in answer. He hoped he and Rachel weren't expected to do this without help. Neither of them had any Magic in them. It would be a pointless exercise without it.
The bell had rung a few minutes ago, signaling the end of school, and Kurt glanced back at the door again as Tina and Mike danced their way in.
Tina caught sight of Rachel first, and she opened her mouth to say something-when Mike saw her too and squeezed Tina's hand. Tina's mouth snapped close. Kurt sent both of them a thankful look.
They were the last people in the club to arrive. Kurt waited a few more minutes, making sure Karofsky kept his promise.
He and Mercedes had cornered a few people throughout the day. They found the jock in the locker room a few minutes before school had let out, and asked him to keep the rest of his team away from the choir room for the day. (They didn't need to involve anyone that wasn't already affected). Karofsky had given them a searching look before agreeing to tell his teammates that Glee was canceled. They were only a week out from the big halftime performance, so it wasn't the greatest lie to tell, but Karofsky had assured them that the team would swallow any excuse to take a break from their relentless schedule of training and rehearsing.
It was strange, but Kurt had forgotten all about the game coming up in the wake of everything that was happening with Blaine. The rest of the world seemed faded and unimportant compared to the danger threatening over his head. He supposed that Karofsky must have talked to the football players since his apology in the locker room, because he didn't remember being heckled at all this week. In fact, the jocks all seemed to be much more receptive to Mr. Schue and the rest of the glee club—even going so far as to be enthusiastic about the upcoming performance. It should have been surprising that his mortal high school enemies were cooperating happily with him—or at the very least heartening—but it barely registered as important.
It was funny how he had lived through the past month of high school the same as he had any other, and yet recalling its events seemed as disaffecting as recalling the events of a book he'd read.
It had been ten minutes since the bell rang. Everyone was here. Karofsky had kept to his word. The rest of the glee club had started to get curious about why they hadn't started yet.
He supposed now was as good a time as any.
Clearing his throat, he slipped his hand from Rachel's grip and stood up by the piano.
"Kurt?" Finn asked curiously. The room immediately quieted. (His friends were really bad at acting normal.)
"Finn," Kurt acknowledged. He braced himself. "I asked Mr. Schue if we could take today just for ourselves. To do some team-building. So it's just us today."
The room filled immediately with dissenters.
"Are you kidding?!" Tina exclaimed.
"Don't we have a performance in like a week?" Santana pointed out bluntly. "Why's Berry here? I thought she was getting comfy in a padded room."
"I'd rather get some of those dance moves down than kumbaya with you guys, no offense," Puck added. "I don't wanna look like a douchebag out there next Friday."
"Quiet, let me finish!" Kurt interrupted. "This is important!"
Santana rolled her eyes and raised her hands in surrender. Puck shrugged. Kurt saw Quinn out of the corner of his eye, watching him intently. He swallowed.
"Listen," he started quietly. "We need to talk about what's going on. This entire month has been weird, and I know you all know it. There's something missing. Something's been taken from us. I've seen you guys trying to figure it out by yourselves."
His friends stirred. Brittany nodded sagely, and Kurt found himself wondering how much she knew. She grabbed Santana's hand, who was shifting awkwardly in her seat, and turned to look specifically at Quinn (who had a slight wrinkle of worry in her stone expression).
Tina looked around at everyone warily.
"So it's not just me?" she asked softly. Mike took her hand.
Kurt found himself locking eyes with Finn. And it struck him, once more, how much they had all isolated themselves because of this.
Kurt had seen Finn struggling with his re-written memories. He had watched as he'd grown steadily more helpless and angry as Rachel refused to come to school; as Karofsky hassled them both in glee club; as Finn himself kept looking for someone he couldn't even remember had existed. Finn had been involved in this from the beginning: he had been the first person to help Kurt after Kurt had found Blaine, and had grown to be good friends with Blaine in the time the other boy had been with them. Finn was his family….
And Kurt hadn't even thought to talk to him about any of this.
He had been so wrapped up in his own problems that he hadn't even noticed how his silence was allowing so many others to continue hurting. Like Mercedes. Like Tina, Mike, whatever Brittany knew, and that look in Santana's eyes. Like Quinn, and Puck. Like Rachel.
This wasn't a one-time thing. This wasn't snapping at someone out of stress and baking them food in apology. This wasn't a fight he regretted when sitting by a bed in the hospital. This was a pattern of thinking he had fallen into.
One he had to break out of, if he ever wanted to stop hurting the people he loved.
"You're not going crazy," he told Finn's eyes softly. "There's really something wrong. You just don't remember what it is."
He glanced around at the hopeful and scared faces of his friends.
"Rachel does," he announced to them. "She's been avoiding us because she thinks she's the only one who remembers. But I think, if we could listen to her, we might remember, too."
That was Rachel's cue. He looked at her, but she shook her head slightly, her eyes wide. Kurt, frustrated, turned to Mercedes—who started gesturing none-too-subtly for Rachel to get up. Quinn watched them, alarmed.
"She can't say it," Kurt continued as Mercedes and Rachel finally made their way up to meet him. "But we thought… if she could sing it… we might understand."
The room was uncharacteristically silent, and tense. No one said anything—not even Quinn. Kurt took a breath and nodded to Rachel.
Then, sitting down at the piano… started playing.
'Get them to resonate at the same frequency,' Blaine prompted as Kurt sat on Rachel's couch.
Kurt blanked. '...What?'
'Make them feel what you're feeling,' the presence inside of him explained. 'Make them realize there's something missing. Parts of their minds are locked from them—make them notice it. Make them force open the lock.'
Feel what he was feeling. Did Blaine mean by magic? 'How are we supposed to do that? Should I concentrate really hard or something?'
A tickle of humor ran across his cheeks. Blaine didn't answer him in words, though. Instead, a memory surfaced, feathering across his mind gently: Tina sat on a stool, singing an Ingrid Michaelson song. Kurt was crying without knowing he was crying. When he looked over, he saw Rachel in the same condition. He blinked and looked back at Tina—who had tears swimming in her eyes.
Suddenly, he understood. Oh. Make them feel.
Music prickled his skin. Rachel began singing.
"Seems that I have been held in some dreaming state… A tourist in the waking world—never quite awake."
Her voice had threaded through it a strange power: it was weird, atmospheric… magical. It haunted the air, pressed down on his bones. Felt more like she was opening him up and reading his contents aloud like a book than singing a song.
He glanced at the rest of the choir room. Make them feel.
"No kiss, no gentle word, can wake me from this slumber," Rachel continued quietly. "Until I realized—that it was you who held me under—"
And suddenly, there, the room shifted—changed—her voice was everywhere, heavy, shifting, reshaping—
"Felt it in my fists—In my feet—In the hollows of my eyelids—"
He did. They did—a tingling, an electricity in the air, waking up forgotten nerves someone had put in storage. His hands, his toes, the hollows of his eyelids…
"Shaking through my skull—Through my spine—And down through my ribs—"
She was narrating their present—their bodies following almost simultaneously to copy her words. She spoke, and it happened to them. Magic. Blaine, Kurt thought dizzily.
She went into the chorus, and the air sparked around them. Kurt and Mercedes joined in as back up, like they were enchanted. Power thrummed through his veins and he felt it join the song—the spell, for that's what it had to be, a spell—through his voice. He caught a glimpse of Finn—enraptured, staring at Rachel like it was impossible to look away. And Quinn—eyes already welling up, seeing something in front of her no one else could see. Puck, a small frown on his face. Santana, her lips pressed into a thin line. Tina, hands to her mouth, Mike gripping her arm. All of them, staring at the images the others couldn't see.
"No more dreaming like a girl—so in love, so in love—no more dreaming like a girl—so in love, so in love—no more dreaming like a girl," Rachel was chanting, the words drilling into Kurt's head. He turned back to the piano, and then—
"So in love with the wrong world."
A breath in the music, and the world froze. Blaine—there he was, standing right across from him, at the opposite end of the piano. Real, living, in full Technicolor and 3-D, right across from him. They locked eyes, Blaine's an eternity of amber, and—
Kurt fell in.
all around the world was waking I never could go back
Images tumbled around him, out of order.
"Who are you?"
"You see, I've run away. And I'm afraid I can't go back."
this was not at all how Peter Callaghan acted whenhe woke up
"Whatam I? That's a more appropriate question, I think."
all the walls of dreaming they were torn wide open
Kurt shifted closer. Thought please. Thought must. Thought want. He watched as it echoed in Blaine's eyes… felt it tear at his throat…
"You're already screaming. All the time. You're screaming. I think you've been screaming for so long you don't even hear yourself anymore. But you don't need me to show you how to do it."
…like a magnet had snapped his attention into place.
Blaine, outside the door. He had wanted to come to school with him.
"Let me in!"
Blaine could help him…
no more dreaming of the dead
"And I remember screaming, and everyone was looking at me, but I told them she was in the bathroom."
… He glanced around the table, at faces that had been stressed, tense, and edgy only last month—now glowing with contentment. Finn, Carole, his dad. Blaine. For the first time since the prospect of the new marriage, Kurt felt like he was part of a family.
His family.
"I felt it the minute I saw you. But I couldn't tell if it was you or me. Or even if it was… me or the magic. And then it kept getting more intense, like I couldn't be happy until I was near you, and… I didn't know who I was, anymore. I couldn't control my body. I've never… you do something to me, to it, and sometimes it feels like I've got a separate creature inside me. There's me, Blaine, and then there's… "
for a boy for a body in the garden
Kurt's stomach flipped and he felt his breath hitch. Oh crap. There.
There it was. There was the form. There had been a form outside. It was underneath the oak tree. It was crumpled underneath the oak tree and it wasn't moving.
"You feel so deeply, Kurt. I think you underestimate how powerful that is. I don't think you believe anyone can hear you, but you're the clearest thing I've been able to hear since I got here."
It slammed into him like a crashing tidal wave. Everything in him stretched in thirst with a suddenness and intensity that scared him, and he found himself pulling with greedy invisible fingers at the well of fire hiding inside of the boy beneath him—except he didn't have to pull at all, it was rushing into him like some kind of niagara of blazes, igniting inside of him and—
"It's always me, even when it feels like it isn't."
in a language he couldn't read, but he could feel
so in love so in love
"Do I get a magic wand?"
"You get a Blaine. I hope that's not too disappointing."
"Were you going to tell me? Or was I just going to kill you and wake up in the morning with a dead body in my bed?"
synapse slipping through the hidden door
"Hey, Blaine? Who was the one who helped you build walls the first time?"
the word 'soul mate' floating tantalizingly in his mind's eye, with trailing strings of love and trust and forever following its afterimage like ghostly petals
he was going to throw up
"Don't—" open the door—
Synapse slipping through the hidden—
"Door," Rachel, Kurt, and Mercedes finished, and Kurt was thrown starkly into the real world. He stumbled, hand falling onto a discordant chord on the piano.
The room jumped, jerking awake. Mercedes looked at him, eyes spooked. The room was tense, cold—Blaine, his presence and his magic, was gone.
"What was that?" a breath finally broke the silence.
The room exploded with noise.
"Did you see—?"
"Kurt, did you know those guys?!"
"Oh my god, what just happened?"
"Was Blaine magical? Like, fairy-tale-lord-of-the-rings magical, seriously?"
"I knew it, I knew we were missing—"
"No but really, that was trippy, like, fucked-up trippy. Are you guys for real? What did you slip in the cafeteria food?"
"How did you do that?"
"How could we have forgotten a whole person?"
"Where is he now? Kurt?"
"Kurt?"
"Kurt…"
Kurt shook his head, feeling weirdly light-headed.
"Kurt? Are you okay?"
"Kurt!"
Mercedes shook him. "Kurt, are you okay?" she repeated.
Kurt blinked rapidly, trying to bring her into focus. For some reason, he kept seeing Tina overlaid on top of her. 'Maybe you should go to the nurse.'
"I'm fine," he told Tina. Mercedes. "I just, I need—I need some air. I need to get some air. I'll be fine. I'll be right back. I'm just… I'll be right back." He was too stuffed full. He got up from the piano, reality floating, shifting, around him.
"I'll be right back," he repeated blindly as he left the choir room.
It was cold. He didn't remember walking out of the school. Was he outside?
slipping through the hidden door… slipping through… someone's slipping… go back inside, Kurt, someone's…
The air sharpened itself against his skin as he walked, trance-like. Ghostly images overlaid themselves overtop the world in front of his eyes. "Kurt…" it whispered to him. He was in the choir room. No, he was outside. He was just outside the school, clinging to the railing while he made his way down the steps, as if blind. Blaine was with him, holding his hand so tightly.
Kurt, someone called, voice muffled and echoing inside of the caverns of Kurt's head. Blaine? Too cold. It was too cold out here. Kurt, stop!
"Where are you?" the cold asked him. Kurt didn't know. Outside. I'm outside… Wasn't he supposed to be going to the choir room? His head hurt.
"Come find me," said the cold, mischievous and mocking. His legs weren't working. Kurt placed his hand against the hallway walls and pushed against them as he stumbled his way to the choir room. He was too hot. No. Too cold. His head was throbbing, and his body was aching—Karofsky had told him he'd said Blaine wasn't ever coming back. He remembered. He remembered saying it—he had just said it, a few minutes ago, he—
'You're just fascinating, aren't you?' His eyes couldn't adjust, too many realities shining headlights into his irises. He was in the girl's bathroom with Blaine. He was stumbling against the brick wall of the school building. He was standing in the hallway outside of the choir room, with someone who had brown eyes and a feral smile. "Come on, I want to talk to you." Kurt gasped as he jerked away, fell against something—it was brick, rough against his hands, he was outside, he was outdoors—his mind overstuffed with multiplying images, knowledge crowding his head. 'I don't want you to die! Kurt—!' Someone's looking for you—'The magic, it's, it's like a drug, and your body can't function without'—I think it has something to do with Blaine—'You must be Kurt'—
He grabbed at his head, trying to slow everything down. Kurt squeezed his eyes shut, leaning heavily against the brick wall. Run! Get out of there! someone screamed at him, but the sound was distorted and too far away.
The pain passed as quickly as it came, and his lids slipped open to find intense brown eyes staring back at him.
His entire body froze.
Brown eyes. They were real. The brick against his back was real. He'd somehow slipped into the alleyway between the school and the football field in his fevered haze. This was real. It was getting dark, he was in an alley, and a boy was watching him.
"You were in my head," the words exited his mouth before he thought to give them leave.
"In your ear," the boy in front of him corrected, dark amusement coloring his gaze. The world doubled, and Kurt and the boy were in two places at once. Kurt watched outside of himself as a copy of the boy in the choir room was super-imposed over the one in front of him, the two speaking at the same time. "Blaine's the only one—"
"—who can get into your head," Kurt mouthed along with them. His eyes widened as knowledge crept its tendrils over his brain.
"Andrew," he remembered.
Andrew's answering smile was a shark's grin. "That was faster than I thought you'd be," he commented. "Good. I want you to remember everything."
"What do you mean?" A flashing image of Blaine, wrecked and dying on the ground, cut through his voice. Kurt flinched violently. A nightmare. "Remember everything," he repeated numbly, trying and failing to look away from the outline of Blaine's dead body. "Blaine," his voice came out soft and breath-painted. "Did you to something to him? Why do you want—? What are you doing to him?"
Andrew was as vigilant as a hawk, eyes gleaming in the gathering dusk. "Don't worry. You'll remember."
He could feel Blaine so clearly next to him, like a gaping wound in his mind…
"You're a Fascinator." He didn't know what the phrase meant. And then suddenly he did. "I'm a Fascinator." His head was pounding, and Kurt had to lean all of his weight against the wall. He couldn't keep his balance. It was too hot. "What are you doing to me?" he gasped out as phantom fingers caressed his scalp. Remembered fingers from a time he'd lost—was gaining back.
"I'm not doing anything," Andrew protested happily. Kurt supposed it was true: he was still only standing there and watching. "You're unblocking yourself. When was the last time you ate?"
Kurt couldn't remember.
"We've been lacing your food with amsugnol. But that's not going to do much if you're not eating it, is it?" Amsugnol. The word sparked a hazy memory from a dream. Someone had spoken to him while he was asleep: It's a numbing agent. Fascinators used to take it for pain.
"My friends tell me it's been a few weeks since you had a proper meal. And if your body begins to remember, it won't be long before your mind follows its example. You're doing this to yourself."
'Kurt, please, don't do this to yourself.'
"You took Blaine," Kurt gasped out, and as he said it, he could see it happening. 'NO, NOT HIM! PLEASE! HE'LL DIE, YOU CAN'T, PLEASE, NOT HIM—' "Where is he?"
"He hasn't told you?" There was something new and dark in Andrew's voice. "Don't you guys have little mind pow-wows every night?"
"Mind…?" Blaine flickered out of existence in front of his eyes. Chills raced up his arms and dread dropped into his stomach. "No," he said, locking eyes with the boy in front of him. "He can't tell me. You know he can't, you told him not to."
"Did I?"
"You're doing something to him," Kurt growled, sick of Andrew's darkly playful evasions. "He's losing—he's losing himself. Every time I see him, he's more… not himself. What are you doing?"
"Setting him free," two Andrews answered him. Kurt blinked hard, trying to erase the overlapping image of the past. His sight blurred.
"What does that even mean?" he asked, frustration burning behind his eyes. "Stop answering me in riddles!"
"It means he's learning how to let go of his body. He doesn't need it."
"Let go of his—?!" Kurt remembered the fuzzy, terrified look in Blaine's eyes in his dreams; the odd stumbling, and half-aborted movements. "Are you kidding me? You're killing him!"
"No," Andrew countered vehemently. "We're helping him." His face was alight with a restless passion that crept up Kurt's spine like crawling insects.
"You're insane," he said warily. "He doesn't want any of this. He never wanted it."
"Blaine doesn't know what he wants," Andrew shrugged. His expression shifted, something calculating entering his voice. "That's why I'm here. To help him realize what he wants."
A jolt of fear shot lightning down Kurt's spine, forcing a harsh clarity to come over him as he realized what Andrew meant. 'Help' him.
Those utter bastards.
A wave of anger rose fast and uncontrolled within him. No. He had no right. Where did he get the right to treat people the way he did? Where did Dalton get the right to ruin others' lives the way they've ruined Kurt's, and Rachel's, and Mercedes' on a whim? How was that 'helping' anyone?!
His family was torn and distant to each other because no one could remember anything of the time when they hadn't been. Rachel hadn't gone a day without nightmares. His friends had all witnessed a horror that no one could properly remember, and so no one knew how to deal with their feelings about it. Dalton had torn his life apart—had torn Blaine's life apart—they had all been so happy, and Dalton had meddled with everyone where they had no right to meddle, and it had to stop!
He pushed himself away from the wall, venom fueling his movements.
"You won't help anybody," he spat, gathering strength. "You've hurt my friends. You've hurt my family. You've tampered with our lives, our minds, and you can't get away with that! I'm going to find him, and I'm going to take him far away from you, and then I'm going to come back and hurt you for what you've done to us!"
Andrew laughed, loud and bright and shocking. His hand pressed against Kurt's chest and forced him back against the wall. "Is that what you're going to do?" he chuckled, face much too close to Kurt's own. His breath tickled Kurt's cheeks and Kurt flinched away, his head banging painfully against the brick. "How exactly do you plan to do that? You don't even know what you're doing right now!"
His blood throbbed. "Why, what am I doing?" he asked. Tears pricked his eyes, frustrated and pain-filled. It hurt. Why did it hurt so much?
(Run! Kurt, run! a muffled voice clamored inside his head. 'Blaine's the only one who can get into your head.')
What am I doing?
His eyes grew wide with shock as the answer came barreling through his mind.
"Dying." He said it as Blaine said it as Andrew said it. All of them, past and present within his mind. The syllables echoed deep in the caverns of his body, repeated in three, six voices, shaking his core with the undeniable truth. What he'd been forgetting—the piece of the puzzle he'd been missing all this time… what Blaine couldn't tell him.
A matter of life and death.
His life, and his death.
He was dying. He was dying—!
"Won't leave you much time to find him and enact your oh-so-threatening revenge." Andrew was still laughing, boyish and breathless with amusement. Kurt couldn't speak. "Good luck with that." As if on cue, Kurt's head split open. One last wall in his mind: dissolved. He cried out as residual pain and a horrible kind of longing sliced down his limbs. (Kurt!)
"He's not yours." Andrew continued, unimpressed. "Blaine doesn't belong to you, Kurt. He belongs with Dalton. He belongs with me. He's mine. And you can whine and scream about it all you want, it's not going to change the fact that—"
Andrew suddenly cut off. Kurt swallowed as he watched Andrew's expression shutter closed, focused on something just below Kurt's neck. Slowly, he followed Andrew's gaze to see what it had landed on.
ve you
Written in golden, flowing script, it peeked out from its place below his breastbone, just above his shirt.
Kurt's heart leapt to his throat. It beat there erratically as Andrew's lips parted, his fingers slowly inching up and curling around the material of Kurt's collar. The collar pulled down. The rest of the script revealed itself.
I love you
It sat defiantly on his skin amid several others like it, sweeping into spaces hidden by the rest of his shirt.
Andrew was very still.
"…Who gave you this?"
His voice was soft, almost reverent. Fingers gently traced the lines of the script, and Kurt's body seized in a violent shiver at the touch. Andrew glanced up at that.
"Blaine," he said emptily.
Again, watching him carefully, Andrew's fingers brushed over the script. It tugged harshly like an exposed nerve, and Kurt couldn't stop himself from jerking away. The touch was vulnerable, invasive.
"What a clever gift," Andrew said quietly, eyes suspiciously wet. His thumb lightly edged the outline of the thread as he went back to studying its contours. "Very clever. Who knew he had it in him." His hand hovered over Kurt's skin. Kurt felt paralyzed. What was going on?
"I'm sorry," Andrew told him, voice as deceptively light as his touch.
Kurt watched him carefully. "…For what?"
Something had changed in Andrew—where he was once all clear, hard lines, he had suddenly become angry, fragile, muddied watercolors. Kurt braced himself.
"I was going to let you go tonight," he told Kurt. "I was going to make you forget everything. You were going to lose it all after finally knowing it again, and then I was going to let you go. You would have died in your bed at the end of next week from withdrawal—sudden, unexpected. I thought that would be poetic. But…" A brief, fake smile twitched at Andrew's lips, and his fingers curl over the lettering, just barely touching it. Kurt tensed, skin tender. "This changes everything. Blaine has plans for you, and I can't let that continue. You see…" Andrew met Kurt's eyes, and it was like looking at a rabid, injured animal. "I'm only here to teach him a lesson. It's a lesson he has to learn, Kurt. If I let you go now, he's going to think he can still save you, and he can't. He'll never be able to save you."
Andrew was venomous, now, and he knifed the heel of his palm into Kurt's chest. Kurt's whole body gave a jolt as electricity stung through his veins, igniting him as Andrew ground his palm into the threads of words exposed to him—as if he could somehow rub them out if only he pressed hard enough.
"Because he killed you the minute he set eyes on you. And he needs to realize that."
It was like someone was peeling and stripping off his skin, and Kurt could barely pay attention as Andrew adjusted his grip and took something out of his pocket. Withdrawal, Andrew's painful grip, he felt too stretched over—
"Are you watching this, Blaine?" Andrew called out, and for the first time his face was deadly serious. Kurt was paralyzed as the muffled voice screamed too far away inside his head: NO NO NO NO NO NO—"You don't have a choice anymore. You don't have a plan. This is what happens when you pretend you can fool us…"
Andrew pierced through him like a lance: "People get hurt."
Pain.
Shock.
Kurt's mouth parted as he forgot to breathe. No: he couldn't breathe. He couldn't keep himself upright. Something foreign was sticking out of him. He looked down.
A knife.
It had been a knife.
"What…?" he mouthed.
He was shaking, he was—falling, he—couldn't take a breath, it hurt to take a breath, shouldn't it be hurting more he had a knife inside of his stomach—
In front of his eyes, the world shifted, and he was in the choir room, looking up as Erickson plunged the same knife into Blaine. 'Heal yourself.' Horror slicked his throat, or was that the herb he had swallowed? Andrew's voice floated over him, sounding weirdly dazed: "Do you see what he turns us into? What he makes us do?"
The ground was wet—with snow? Blood? He was wet with it. Light-headed. A hand ran through his hair.
"You and me, Kurt, we're the same. Fascinators. But Blaine… you don't understand what he can do. Erickson's right: he's a parasite. He twists our minds. Gets into our heads. He's in your head right now, isn't he? Aren't you, Blaine?"
Erickson plunged the knife in. 'Heal yourself.'
"Don't worry. He won't be able to make us do anything after we're through with him."
No. Kurt's lips formed the word, but no sound came out. No.
"You can die happy in the knowledge of that. In a way, I've set you free, too."
No, Kurt tried to cry, but instead something ragged and thick coughed up his throat. His body twitched uncontrollably on the ground. Wet ground. There was too much blood. Footsteps faded away and light went with them. Scream. Get help. Scream. But he couldn't. Over and over in front of him, the image of Blaine being stabbed presented itself. Heal yourself. Sharp. It hurt. Where was Mercedes? Rachel? Sebastian? (Who was Sebastian?) Heal yourself. White, choked off, pale. Heal yourself. Help. Help. Blaine, help, please, help.
Muffled voices were screaming his name. Inside his head. Heal yourself. Wake up, oh my god, what happened, someone call 911, stop the bleeding, what happened, and he couldn't answer them. He couldn't open his eyes.
KURT!
HEAL YOURSELF!
Was it still wet? Maybe it was just the snow.
It was too cold.
…
Who was Sebastian…?