Epilogue

"Dead...she's dead…"

"Kurt?"

"It's my fault...dead."

"Kurt!"

The pale boy shot up at the sudden shout of his name, nearly leaping into the air. He glanced around frantically to see Blaine sitting beside him, looking concerned. "Blaine?" he asked.

"It's okay Kurt," The other replied. "I think you were just having a nightmare."

Kurt looked around the room, frowning. "When did we leave the parking lot?" he asked and Blaine gave him a confused look, reaching out a hand to gently rest atop the pale boy's.

"What parking lot?" he asked.

It was Kurt's turn to look confused. "The McKinley parking lot. The Halloween dance. The murders. Freddie possessing me."

"Kurt, what are you talking about?" Blaine asked, his concern growing. He'd only entered the room a few minutes before, but it was in enough time to notice his friend had been in the throws of a nightmare.

It was then that Kurt got a really good look at where he was and for a moment, he didn't recognize the room at all. "Where am I?" he asked.

Blaine frowned. It must have been some nightmare Kurt had been having. "You're in the commons at Dalton Academy," he told him, not being the type of person who would treat the boy like something was wrong.

His words resonated with Kurt and the boy felt reality slip back into him. He deflated on the couch, noticing he was still fully dressed in his uniform and almost immediately wishing that he had changed into something more comfortable before he'd met Blaine and the Warblers down there earlier in the evening.

Truth be told, Kurt would be lying if he said he'd been sleeping well. Dalton's curriculum was a lot more challenging than McKinley's and even though the end of semester was still over a month away, teachers were already starting to pile on the review for final exams.

He ran a hand over his face. "I never should have watched that slasher movie with you guys last night."

Blaine chuckled. "Oh come on Kurt. We're stuck at Dalton in the middle of the week. How else would we have celebrated Halloween?"

"Not by getting possessed and killing off people," Kurt deadpanned.

"What?" Blaine asked in surprise.

"It was so real. I dreamt that it was my senior year at McKinley and I'd never even come to Dalton. On Halloween, I had to go to the basement to use the boy's bathroom because the regular one was out of order as usual. And then I got possessed and started killing people during the dance that night!"

Blaine's eyes got really wide at his words. Yeah, it definitely had been some nightmare. "Kurt?" he asked carefully. "Who were you saying was dead?"

Kurt blanched. "Rachel," he said in a quiet voice. "Freddie made me kill her. He made me force acid down her throat and I watched it burn through everything."

The boy sitting beside the couch shuddered because he had never heard of such gory detail in a dream before. But then something caught his attention. "Did you say Freddie?" he asked. Kurt nodded. "That's weird. I used to have an imaginary friend when I was a kid. He said his name was Freddie Studebaker. My mom still gets freaked when I bring him up."

Kurt stared at Blaine for a long moment. "That was him, Blaine. The ghost. His name was Freddie Studebaker. He'd been beaten to death by jocks in the boy's bathroom in the basement in 1967."

Blaine looked even more weirded out. "My mom's oldest sister, my aunt Angela has an age gap with my mom a lot like mine and Cooper's. She was a student at McKinley in 1967."

The pale boy could not believe what was happening here. Had he really dreamt of something that was partially a reality? Come to think of it, he'd never actually been in the basement of McKinley. It was boarded off. He'd always wondered why.

"Wait a second, I just remembered something," he said and looked at Blaine for a beat. "I like to look at old yearbooks. In the dream, that was how I knew about Freddie. The staff would never talk about the basement, or why it wasn't used, and that's the same in real life. But unlike in the dream, I've never actually seen either yearbook from 1967. Peculiarly, both the 66-67 and 67-68 yearbooks are missing from the library's alumni shelves."

Blaine furrowed his brow for a moment. "I wonder why that is," he said.

Kurt shook his head. "I don't know."

"Wait, was I in your dream?" Blaine asked, looking up at the boy.

He nodded. "Yes, but you were a twenty-seven year old detective with the Lima Police Department and an old fart asshole for a boss named Carmichael, who Freddie scared the piss out of at the end."

Blaine's face blanched. "Carmichael? That's my dad's middle name!"

Kurt was starting to get a weird feeling. So many coincidences. "Okay, any other strange facts you want to share to see if they were in my dream?"

Blaine studied his face for a moment, actually thinking about it. "Not that I'm aware of. Oh, unless one of your victims died by crossbow. My grandfather almost went to prison for assault when he accidentally shot a neighbor in the ass with one."

Kurt stood up and took a step away from the curly haired boy. "Okay, now I'm freaked out."

"What? I was joking. My grandfather wouldn't know a crossbow if it hit him in the ass."

"Blaine, one of the victims did die by crossbow! Granted, she was a girl who's supposed to be a freshman when I'm a senior, which means...she doesn't even go to McKinley yet, if she's a real person."

"Huh," Blaine said. "What was her name?"

"Kitty Wilde," Kurt said.

Blaine shrugged. "Never met anyone named Kitty. Although I do know a family named Wilde. I think they have a daughter, but I don't know her name. Never met her. I only saw a glimpse of her once a few years ago at some charity event. Shorter than me, but she's probably grown some now. Blonde hair."

Kurt was quiet for a moment, hugging himself. "Kitty Wilde is a blonde. And she was a real prissy bitch too. Freddie made me kill her because he said she would never replace Quinn as queen bee. Kitty idolized her."

Now Blaine was getting a weird feeling. "Who else died? And how?"

The pale boy started pacing. Normally, he didn't remember his dreams in detail, but this one did not seem to be a normal dream.

"First, I slit Principal Figgins' throat."

Blaine shrugged. That one seemed justified to him. Kurt had told him all about the penny pinching principal who refused to protect Kurt from the bullies at McKinley, or install security cameras.

"Next, Sandy Ryerson was stabbed several times with a dagger. And just minutes later, I tricked stoner Brett into thinking he could fly and he jumped off the roof." They were both people who unnerved Kurt a bit, but the only real problem he'd had with Brett was that he smelled homeless.

"Kitty was next. I shot an arrow through her head and then used two more to pin her hands to a bulletin board." Here though, Kurt paused, looking nervous and shifting from foot to foot.

Blaine nodded. "What happened then?"

Kurt swallowed. "Karofsky was next. He was locked in a classroom to await questioning when you caught him and his goons beating on me." He drew a breath before continuing. "I came in with an axe. I must have gotten it from an emergency kit on the wall with the fire extinguisher. First, I broke his jaw with the handle so he couldn't scream. Then, I castrated him, and finally, I chopped his head off."

Blaine squirmed a bit at the details, but secretly thought once again the actions would have been justified. Yeah, the jock was conflicted about his sexuality, but that was no excuse for trying to sexually assault Kurt. "And after Karofsky?"

Kurt's voice was soft when he replied. "That's when I killed Rachel in the choir room with the acid. I wanted to destroy her vocal cords."

"Why?"

"For never giving the rest of us a chance to shine," Kurt replied.

Blaine nodded, and indicated for him to go on.

"The next murder, is probably the most surprising of all of them." He paused, looking contemplative for a moment. "I tricked Sue into eating a pom-pom laced with cyanide."

Blaine furrowed his forehead, sensing a pattern here. "What happened after that?"

"Well, by this time, everyone was ordered to stay in the gym. Finn and I had gone against the order to go look for Rachel, even though I knew she was already dead." He gave his head a shake. "The dream didn't tell me how I got away from Finn without him being suspicious of my disappearance, but I next found myself in the library. JBI was in there, recording a stupid video for his vlog of all things. I ended up trying to crush him with a bookcase, but he moved enough out of the way that it only pinned his legs. So then I took the heaviest book I could find and embedded the corner in his head."

Kurt had stopped pacing, but he had started shaking. Reliving the whole thing, even though it hadn't been real just felt so...spooky so to speak.

"Finally, I gave Finn, Mercedes, Puck, and Sam the slip in searching for Rachel when I thought I heard her call to me for help. They didn't hear it. Subconsciously, I knew it wasn't really her because she was already dead. But for some reason, I followed the call anyway." He came back to the couch and sat down again, afraid that his knees might buckle if he kept standing.

"That's when I came across Azimio. The cops had released him and the other jocks on account of having bigger worries. Freddie made me attempt to physically fight him, and at the same time, I found myself struggling with Freddie's possession. Azimio managed to knock my helmet off and a shriek of my name when it came off alerted us that Lauren Zizes was bearing witness to the fight. Azimio had gotten distracted long enough for me to push him over and he fell down the stairs to the floor. I don't even know how I had the strength to do it. Probably should have realized then that I was dreaming."

So far, with the exception of Kitty, all the people Kurt had 'killed' in the dream had been people who had either hurt, offended, or oppressed Kurt at McKinley, or failed to protect him. Blaine couldn't explain away the coincidences, but the rest of the dream could just be Kurt's way of dealing with unresolved anger and anxiety issues.

Kurt knew he wasn't done exactly, but he didn't actually kill the last person who died. Blaine had killed her. He was quiet for a moment, deciding that maybe Blaine didn't necessarily need the blow by blow at the end.

"That was when you showed up and at that point, you'd figured out I was the killer. We wound up in the basement with Freddie switching his interest from me to you and then he took your gun and he...and he…" Kurt trailed off, not sure if he could actually say this part. He swallowed and shut his eyes. "He pointed the gun at me, said I had just been getting in his way. You'd knocked Lauren unconscious with a taser and we dragged her down with us. She'd been tied up and came to while Freddie was trying to get you to kill me. But you started fighting him in your own body for possession of the gun. It went off and shot Lauren in the back."

Blaine had frowned when Kurt had mentioned he had tried to kill him in the dream. He wasn't a psychologist, but he'd taken Dalton's elective Psych class the previous semester, and realized that it was probably Kurt's subconscious fear of being betrayed that had conjured up that part of the dream. He hoped the fact that he hadn't killed Kurt in the dream proved to the older boy that he could trust Blaine with his worries and fears.

The only part he didn't understand was the part about killing Zizes. Neither he nor Kurt knew the girl well. All Blaine really knew about her was that she was the warm body the New Directions had found to make the minimum twelve members for the Sectionals competition coming up this weekend.

"After that," Kurt continued, "we somehow managed to bring Freddie back from his place of murderous revenge and he left us alone, fleeing probably back into the bathroom when the other cops came down the stairs to see what the noise was. You told Carmichael that Lauren had been the killer and he decided he was going to take the credit because he said no one would believe you. That's when Freddie scared the piss out of him."

Kurt turned his head away to hide the flush at the memory of what had happened at the end of the nightmare, not really wanting Blaine to know that part. He didn't need the boy to know about his crush on him. It was probably silly anyway. Blaine might be gay, but he was the kind of guy who could get any guy he wanted and he was out of Kurt's league.

Blaine smiled reassuringly at him. "As far as nightmares go, that was pretty intense. Kind of freaky with the coincidences, but I'm sure we can explain those, eventually. Probably just stuff you heard and not registered at the time. As for the rest of it, well, you know your dreams are where your brain deals with things you don't really want to think about when you are awake. You've been under a lot of stress the past month or so. I'm surprised you haven't had more nightmares."

Kurt chanced a glance back at the other boy. "I think it was triggered by that slasher movie last night." It was at that point, he yawned and Blaine laughed lightly, standing from his spot on the floor.

"Come on mister," he said, holding out a hand. "It's the middle of the night. Let's get you to bed. For real this time."

Kurt giggled a little and took the boy's hand. He was so grateful that Blaine was his roommate and realized that that might have been why he'd come looking for him.

Blaine kept the smile on his face as he led Kurt back to their dorm, never once letting go of his hand. It reminded the pale boy of the day they'd met, but this felt much more intimate and he flushed again.

"Here we are Sleeping Handsome," Blaine said when they arrived at their dorm room. Kurt playfully swatted his arm as they entered.

"Blaine, you shouldn't say things like that!"

"I shouldn't tell you that you're handsome?" the curly haired boy replied casually, a small smile on his face. Kurt felt his ears go warm.

"Well, no...I mean yes…I mean…" Blaine chuckled at Kurt's adorable stammering. He leaned forward and whispered into the boy's ear.

"Oh, there you are. I've been looking for you forever." Kurt felt his breath catch and suddenly, Blaine's lips were on his. This time, it was real. This time, it wasn't a dream. And this time...well, he felt just as strongly about it as the dream kiss.

When the two boys finally broke for air, they were breathing heavily. Blaine leaned his head against Kurt's, his lips flush and plump from the kiss.

"By the way," he said. "Is Halloween really your birthday?"