A/N: Oh gosh, sorry this took so long. Writer's block...school trip...bloody website. Grr. Enjoy.

Err...if you don't get it, regular font is the present, italics are the flashback type things.

Chapter Fourteen

Kurt sank onto the bed, gripping the edge of the mattress with his three-fingered hands as he did so, feeling unstable and shaky. It was as if something had barreled into his stomach with all the force of a battering ram, knocking the air from his lungs in the process. His heart, if possible, was in an even worse condition, pounding wildly as if it were being drowned. However, it was the ache in his eyes that he was concentrating on, the hot, throbbing pain that only increased as a few ragged tears slipped out onto his cheeks.

It was hard to think that only the prior night he had been talking quietly with Stefan, his arm wound around Amanda's waist as they sat in his caravan. Now he was in the house of his biological cousins, in his niece's room just before the break of dawn, waiting for her to return with a pair of scissors. The sheer bizarreness of it all was much more than he thought he could bear.

And yet, there he was, with another man's blood on his shirt, in such a dreadfully lachrymose state that had he been asked to speak, he doubted he would be able to fulfill this request. All he was capable of at the moment was inhaling and exhaling shuddering breaths, and trying, to no avail, to forget everything that had occurred in the previous hours. Amanda's furious screams, Margali's excruciating sobbing, and the sight of Stefan's oddly bent neck played on a continuous loop through his head.

Who knew that it only took one argument to change his entire life?

Grunting slightly, Kurt lifted his hands to his face and swiped the tears away. It was pointless, though, for they reappeared as quickly as they had departed – his only company, at that point in time and what would most likely be the rest of his existence.

He wanted Gwen to be there with him, even if it was just her mere presence. That in itself was another thing for him to feel guilty about. She'd have a lot of trouble explaining why most of her hair was missing in the morning, when she faced her father – his brother – and their cousins.

However much he believed that he didn't deserve it, though, his wish was granted a moment later. The girl suddenly emerged from the darkness of the hallway, on tiptoe as she slowly and silently shut the door to her room. In the dim light of the instant before sunrise, he caught a glint of metal in her closed hand.

"Here," she whispered, pressing the source of the shine – metallic scissors - into his outstretched hand. Her face was more grim and serious than he had ever seen, as she raked her fingers through her remaining hair. It had been cut off at a sloping angle, so that one side was up to her neck, and the other fell just above her hip. As terrible as he felt about this, she seemed more preoccupied with him, as she pulled the edge of her sleeve over the palm of her hand and began blotting the area beneath his eyes. He didn't have the energy to wipe them away himself, or to even be embarrassed. Instead, he motioned for her to turn about, so that her back faced him. Then, with arms that felt like lead, he began to snip away yet another heartbreak in his life.

"An American man came and watched us for a while a few weeks ago. He left me with a job opportunity in the United States, but I highly doubt I'll take it." Kurt grinned, and Gwen felt as though he were enjoying a private joke. "Although it may provide me a chance to meet this Tony boy..." Upon this statement, his happy beam turned into a true smirk.

"I don't know why I did it," Gwen muttered, holding her head in her hands. As she peeked through her fingers, she saw Kurt smiling slightly as he toyed with a bandage on his arm. "What's so funny?"

"Oh...nothing." His grin widened even further, and she caught a glimpse of his fanged teeth in the darkened light of the kerosene. "Just...nothing."

"Whatever."

"So he was talking about pulling an all-nighter?"

"Uh-huh," she moaned, burying her face in her arms.

"And you decided, I like him!"

"Pretty much."

"That's very cute."

"Oh, shut - be quiet."

Kurt was now chuckling, as he reached over and patted her shoulder. "Come on, it can't be that bad. What did he say afterwards?"

Gwen squinted, trying to recall exactly what Tony had said and how he had said it. "'Yep...pretty buildings.'"

He was laughing uncontrollably now, his head thrown back. "Stop joking...oh, you're not?" Noticing her infuriated glower, he straightened and sobered up. "Sorry."

"You should be. After that, we watched the rest of the movie. He fell asleep first. I didn't sleep at all." She scowled. "And we didn't talk very much the next morning. He said, 'Goodbye, see you in September,' and that was it."

"Perhaps he was tired."

"Or perhaps it was really, really awkward and he had no clue what to say. Like me."

"You're talking now."

"So what?" Gwen heaved an impressive, somewhat dreamy sigh, resting her chin on her hand. "You know...I really like his glasses."

"Oh, liebe, welcome to love."

"Kurt, you're pulling too hard."

He whimpered softly in response, lessening the force of his grip on her destroyed hair. Gwen relaxed her shoulders in relief.

"Thanks," she whispered, remaining as still as a picture. "You need to do it quickly – I think I'm just gonna tell them that I did it myself."

Kurt took a shuddering breath, and finally uttered the first word of the rest of his life.

"Why?"

As Gwen ran, the dust kicked up around her flip-flops. It took an incredible amount of restraint to keep them on her feet, involving the curling of her toes around the edges of the shoes. However, the dry weather had dehydrated everything, including the ground she was dashing on, which made it much easier to move. Thank God for any small favors she was granted that night.

It had begun as normally as any other – she had darted out of her bedroom window with effortlessness, due to her habit, scuttled down the tree, and walked quickly to the area where Kurt's circus set up during the summer. There, she planned to talk with him, perhaps commiserate more about teenaged infatuation (something they had been doing quite a bit, ever since that stupid, clumsy, momentous kiss). It was normal, and it was their ritual. Even if Amanda, Stefan, or Margali were present, she felt comfortable enough with his family that she could share any information with them, devoid of any sort of shame.

When Gwen had arrived at her uncle's caravan, however, two people out of the four in the family were seated around his table, arguing heatedly. She hadn't appeared early enough to determine exactly what the subject was, but she had an idea of whom it was about. Only Amanda and Margali were there. Kurt and Stefan were not.

His brother, her uncle had written in a recent letter when she was back in Boston, had been quite upset lately, although no one was certain of the cause. For a generally serene man, he could be extremely volatile, especially when it came to something he felt passionate about. Usually he revealed the subject willingly, but this time, he had withdrawn further and further into himself. In fact, his family suspected that the basis of his current retreat from the monastery was because of this introversion.

The pair of women at the table were gesticulating fervently at each other as they whispered heatedly, so as not to disturb the sleeping population surrounding them. This was easy for Gwen to determine as she approached the window, innocently hoping to scare her uncle as she had once before. The sight of an argument greeted her instead. Had Kurt been there, she would have barged in despite whatever was occurring inside, but he wasn't. Rather, she knocked politely – or at least as politely as she was capable of in her confusion. This was accompanied by her hurried shout of "Hey, Amanda!"

The door opened almost as soon as she announced her appearance, and she was met with a frazzled Margali. Her grayed hair, usually swept up into a sleek, somewhat severe bun hung around her shoulders in thick, tangled waves – had it been a blondish red and thoroughly brushed, it would have definitely been similar to Amanda's own locks. This clearly was not the time to mention it to the older woman though.

Kurt's foster mother, in place of the usual small, kind smile she gave the girl, sighed loudly and pulled her inside, with perhaps a bit more roughness than required. Her daughter had turned in her chair to face the two other females, her pretty blue eyes clouded with concern.

"Mom-" she began, looking up at Margali anxiously, but she was cut off.

"You need to leave." This statement was directed at Gwen, as her shoulders were gripped and twisted so that she was in front of the woman, who was bent slightly at her knees. The worry lines etched into her forehead were more prominent at the moment, and any trace of affability she may have had before was completely gone. "Now, child. Stefan, he..." Her typically clear, powerful voice suddenly trailed off into nothing, and she hung her head so as not to meet the girl's face.

"He's not well," Amanda interjected, standing up and pacing towards the window, peering out fretfully. "In...his mind. You need to go home, Gwen. Please. How far away do you live?"

"Five minutes, if I run. What's happening? Where's Kurt?"

Amanda rubbed her temples, attempting to care for a visible migraine. "Stefan left a couple of hours ago, and Kurt left to go find him. Gwen...I think he had a knife with him. Please, go home."

"Why, Amanda?" Despite the obvious desperation and bewilderment in her voice, her ears acknowledged no answer. In the wake of this silence, she turned back to Margali. "What's happened?"

As the tight, corkscrew curls fell onto the blanket covering the space of the mattress between Kurt and Gwen, the girl sighed uncomfortably and squirmed the slightest amount. He couldn't blame her whatsoever; he'd spent enough time with Amanda to know that, no matter how little attention she'd paid to it as a child, hair was important to most teenaged females. It seemed quite irrational to him, but he was sufficiently compassionate to understand how great a loss this must be to his niece. His theories on the matter were confirmed a moment later, when she finally waved away the hand with the scissors in his awkward grip and swiveled her entire body around to face him.

"This sucks," she muttered harshly, hoisting one of the discarded locks at her folded legs and studying it dejectedly. Then, with a melancholy glance at his expression, she dropped the piece of hair. "It all...really sucks. Look, Kurt. I don't – I don't know what to say, exactly."

He nodded, urging her as much as he was equipped to continue speaking. Anything was better than the silence mingled with the tearing of her locks between the sharpened metal.

"I guess...Stefan...I'm really sorry you lost him."

Kurt let a near-soundless sob escape from his lips then, a hot puff of air carrying the tiniest quantity of his woe into the outside world. How many times had he heard that crying was part of the grieving process? Perhaps the tears and the anguished exhalations that accompanied them were just parts of the sorrow being released from the body, relieving the intense weight of grief at the same time.

"I've – I've never said this to you before, but I think it's as close as I'll ever get. I'm not good at it." She twiddled her thumbs together, picked at a piece of nail polish on one of her fingers. "What you're feeling now, about your brother – I think it's exactly the same way I'd feel if-" her voice was cracking noticeably now – "if you ever-"

Kurt shook his head emphatically, using his body to ask her not to say the dooming words. Then, under the surge of a new wave of misery, he reached out his arms and gathered Gwen into a broken embrace, water dripping silently from his amber eyes onto her newly cropped mane.

"Me too," he whispered.

Gwen was panting slightly, a normal side effect to her usual course taken from her cousins' house to her uncle's circus and vice versa. At the moment, she was hurrying in the latter direction, Amanda and Margali's warning still burning in her ears. She had been frightened plenty of times before, but never seriously. This time, it was tangible, it was real, and she might be in danger. This was nothing like the scary movies Tony had shown her. There were no masked men wielding buzzing chainsaws, or grotesquely deformed asylum patients with portable torture devices – it was a man she knew well, or at least, a man she thought she had known well.

Apparently no one had detected how far into himself Stefan had gone, how greatly acquainted he had become with his own unimaginable dark side. It was too late now, however. He had left Kurt's caravan screaming incoherently, although her uncle had reported detecting the words "demons" and "children" a few times. He had also given testimony to the large pocketknife his brother had insisted on taking with him.

Amanda and Margali, when Gwen had arrived at the trailer, had debated for a moment or two after explaining the circumstances to the girl who should escort her back to her house – if their relative truly was a threat, she definitely should not be alone. But while they had been deliberating over the subject, panic had seized her. Quietly, she slipped out of the door unnoticed, and began her mad rush back home.

Gwen was about halfway there, and that in itself allowed her the slightest relief. Stefan had never before seemed like a threat, but even his sister and mother appeared terrified at the moment. She could only assume that he had given them true reason to do so, and that propelled her even more quickly across the road. At the house, she could take a shower – nobody would be awake to ask her why she did so – bedizen herself with her favorite nightclothes (a baggy gown decorated with dancing cartoon poodles, an early birthday gift from Linda), and fall into a sweet dreamless sleep.

It was a nice thought, but the sharp gulps of air entering her lungs reminded her that she was not safe. Maybe her fear stemmed from nothing, but the only bane of her fear would be the warmth of her bed. Slowing down, she patted her pocket for her inhaler, before remembering that she had left it on the table in her room by accident. Groaning, she came to a complete stop, in an effort to regain her breath. It would not do to have an asthma attack that night, not when she very well might be running for her life. She stood in the middle of the street, hands on her knees, timing her inhalations for the greatest accuracy of lung regulation possible.

Just as her panting returned to normal, though, her scalp suddenly exploded in pain. Someone had snuck up behind her, seized her hair and was now yanking her upright. Try as she may to resist it, she was soon completely vertical. Gwen was unable to twist her head about to see who her attacker was due to the agony, but she had a good idea who it was.

As the tip of a knife began to poke at her neck ominously, but not enough to inflict any damage, she managed to gasp, "Stefan."

"We should finish," Gwen whispered solemnly, using her index finger to swipe away the tears forming in her eyes before extricating herself from her uncle's limbs. The scissors lay next to the discarded locks on the mattress, and she picked them up, offering them out to Kurt. Sniffling faintly, he relieved her of the object and motioned for her to turn around yet again. She figured that her hair had to be about even, although a few touch ups were clearly needed.

It was an odd feeling, to not be able to sense the weight of her long curls on her back anymore. Could she do so, had the second sharp item of the night not been pointed at her head, she would have swished her new hair about in an attempt to grow more accustomed to it.

It had been there so recently, but instantaneously it was gone forever. How bizarre.

"Let go of me," she moaned desperately, trying to twist out of the man's powerful grip. "Please, Stefan."

"I can't," he replied, digging the tip of the knife in further – not yet breaking skin, but obviously willing to do so. "Have you heard them?"

"Please let go," Gwen asked more loudly, endeavoring to hit him in his stomach with her pointed elbows, but failing.

"They've been here too long...demons, posing as children. How am I to be sure that you're not one of them?" This inquiry came out in a low growl, completely different to his usual voice. It was as if another entity had taken over her uncle's brother, and perhaps one not human at all. Judging by the pain emanating from her head, Gwen would not have been surprised if she found out he had been inhabited an alien force.

"I'm not, I prom- Christ, Stefan, that hurts." As soon as this came out of her mouth, she regretted it. Such a deeply religious man may have been further angered by that minor blaspheme.

This was proven when he pulled her closer, so that his mouth was right beside her ear. "The world need not worry," he told her in the softest, most dangerous whisper, one she would not have been able to hear had he been farther away. "I'm taking care of it."

"Of what?" she asked, the whimpering tone in her voice increasing exponentially with her words.

"The demons," he said proudly, straightening once more and lessening his grip on the knife at her neck, something the girl was grateful for. However, her hope for freedom was suddenly dashed, when the tip returned to its previous pressure and he stiffened. "Who's there?" he called out abruptly. She sensed his head swiveling about, trying to detect another person from the darkness of the night air. It appeared as though no one was with them, though, for there was no reply, and there came no aid.

She gulped, all her senses focusing on her attacker – his scent (dry wood), his heat, the strain of his weapon against her skin...

It was all over in an instant.

"Done," Kurt whispered. He set the scissors down on the bed yet again, for good this time.

There had been someone there, someone with skin so dark it had been impossible for his own brother to tell that he was nearby. Gwen immediately recognized him by the tone of his grunt, created when he tackled Stefan from the side.

The knife slid as the pair of men hit the ground, tearing her ponytail away between the holder and her assailant's fist. The terrifying sound barely registered in the girl's brain as she tumbled to the dusty road, a mixture of fear and relief fogging in her throat and head.

"I'm gonna go to the bathroom and see what it looks like," Gwen replied, sounding as excited as she could muster in the situation. She naturally seemed petrified, but Kurt admired her for her obvious feelings of anticipation, how she could look to the future already.

Gwen awoke to the sensation of being carried by someone much stronger than she. Opening her eyes, she identified Kurt's face above hers. Judging by his pace, they were walking slowly. After further investigation of her surroundings, she judged that they were moving back towards her house.

"Huhn?" she moaned, sitting up as far as she was able before collapsing again. "Wha?"

"You passed out," Kurt told her, and she noted with displeasure that she had to lean in closer to hear. "For – a while. A lot's happened, liebe. Oh, Gott in Himmel-"

She would forever remember the moment as the first time she saw the man cry.

Kurt, in search of something productive to do, swept the ownerless hair into a pile on the sheets, taking care not to leave a single strand. Gwen would return in a moment with the final verdict on her new hairstyle, something he both looked forward to and apprehended. For a man so disabled in a world full of tools meant for five-fingered people, he felt he had done quite well. It would undoubtedly be the first thing he'd feel anything optimistic towards for a very long time.

"His head – crashed on a rock when I was trying to get the knife away." He took a shuddering breath, before continuing. "I carried the body back to the circus. Margali...Amanda, she told me...she said she never wanted to see me again." Bowing his head even further, he continued. "So I grabbed you and took you back."

"Stay with me tonight," she commanded. "Please. You can stay under the bed when anyone walks by my room, and-"

It was clear by his expression that it would take no persuading to convince the man to throw caution to the wind and remain with her. He didn't want to be alone at all, and there was no way she could blame him. She was in great need of company herself.

Gwen reentered the room on tiptoe, as quietly as she had before. Then, by the light of the dawn shining through the window, Kurt detected a smile on her features – a genuine, happy smile.

"I like it," she murmured, fingering the ends of her hair gently as she grinned tearily. "I like it a lot."