"Instrumental Glory"
28. Stories to Share
Inside the TARDIS
It was all over now, and as much as they knew it, something about being back in the TARDIS made them feel… heavy. Not so long ago they'd all been going about their business, travelling along, going on errands. Then they'd been brought together by happenstance – for the most part and as far as Donna knew – and they had been hurtled into this… all this… Now they were meant to return to their lives as though the faces of those seventeen dead would not be haunting them.
When the TARDIS landed back where it had been, when Blaine had stepped on board, there was a brief moment, while Donna said her goodbyes to him, where he shared a look with the Doctor. Both of them knew that once Blaine left the ship, he was not likely to see any of them ever again, but that in turn the Doctor would see him again, later on in his life. He would be meeting a younger version of him, not by much, who would in turn be meeting the Doctor, as far as he was concerned, for the first time ever.
Before he did step out, he would say his goodbyes, too, but along with them he would add a request, one that might have been considered overstepping but that he couldn't go without making. He made sure it was just the two of them before he asked the Doctor if he might come and see Kurt again sometime, let him know what was really going on. He had never known the truth about the Doctor, not until the events at their school, and he wished so much for him to have an adventure of his own. What Blaine had been through with him now had been more terror than wonderment, but he had experienced something he wouldn't want to forget either. Whether or not the Doctor would heed his request was entirely up to him; Blaine didn't want to know the answer, not from him.
Watching the ship disappear as he reintegrated his own city, he was aware of the fact that he had not travelled in time, only in space, which meant that far away, right now, on Mesiary, the Isher Academy was still picking itself up… or would that still be a little while away for them? The Doctor had brought him back to the same time he'd left, hadn't he?
"Blaine, can we talk?"
He jumped, startled, and he turned to find himself standing face to face with the woman he'd once believed to be a substitute teacher.
"Gi… Gemma," he blinked, correcting himself. Even after he'd known about her real name and identity he'd had trouble correcting himself on it. "What are you doing here, I…" He stopped, slowly understanding what was about to happen. "You want me to write that note I found, don't you?" he asked, and she nodded, pulling a pen, an envelope, and a piece of paper from her bag. For a beat he was afraid he wouldn't remember what the note had said, but she pointed out that whatever he chose to write, that would be what it had said, and she was right.
He wrote the note, folded it and slipped into the envelope, which he sealed and signed across the flap, to show it hadn't been tampered with, and he gave it back to her. She thanked him, and she was gone, walking off like it was any other day. She was gone from sight, and he knew if he'd followed her at all he would have seen her literally disappear, as she returned to three years ago in Lima.
He needed a few minutes to settle down after that, with the quick succession of events. He needed to go back home after that, and while of course he would be able to tell Kurt, he didn't want him to worry more than he had to. His husband did worry about him sometimes, but Blaine loved him that much more for that.
It had taken him nearly all the way back to the apartment before he remembered what he'd actually been going out for when he'd spotted the Doctor and Donna, and he jogged back for a quick run to the store where he scooped up the cleaning supplies, then the bakery for a reward treat when they'd be through with their spring cleaning.
Stepping through the door, he could hear music which told him Kurt had started without him. Even then, he froze in the door to the second bedroom, which had been turned into something halfway between a music room and an office. The shelves that lined two of the walls, top to bottom, had been emptied out and now their contents were all around the floor, in haphazard piles, at the center of which sat a frazzled looking Kurt.
"I thought we said we weren't getting into that one yet," Blaine pointed out. Kurt looked up.
"You were taking too long," he shrugged, then blinked, getting a look at him. "Did you run?" Well there was no point in beating around it.
"I ran into the Doctor," he told him, and Kurt stared. "I know," he put his bags down, sidestepped his way around the stacks on the floor, until he could come and sit with him. "It wasn't the one from McKinley, at your graduation, it was the other one, him and… and Donna. They were out there, I didn't know what they were doing here, and then there was an instrument…"
He ran through his adventure, going to Mesiary, to the Isher Academy, meeting the children, finding out what they'd been up to, then the concert, the bus, and the building where the others had been left to kill one another.
"We could only save three of them," Blaine bowed his head. "And then…"
"They got away," Kurt filled in, and Blaine looked at him.
"How'd you know?" he asked, to which Kurt only smiled, giving a shrug and a pointed look. Blaine stared. "He did go to you, didn't he?" he smiled back. Kurt was playing coy. "What happened, what did you do?"
"We went after them."
TO BE CONTINUED (TOMORROW)
