A/N: This chapter gives a bit more background as to what happened to Kurt when he was taken from his parents. Warning for angst, anxiety, violence, kidnapping, blink-and-you'll-miss it sexual assault, nightmares, and talk about Kurt's mother's death.
"Kurt! Kurt! Can you please come to the house? You've been lazing about long enough. It's time to get to work!"
Kurt opens his eyelids a slit and looks up at the sky, noting the position of the sun above his head, hovering off to the east.
"Right now?" he calls, his voice thick like molasses, dripping from his groggy lips. He usually wouldn't question his mother, but he doesn't understand her demand for his return. By his reckoning, he's only been out for a few minutes shy of half-an-hour. His mother's dyes, simmering at a low boil in her cast-iron cauldron over the large outdoor fire pit, shouldn't be ready yet. They're working with violet today – a special order for the regent's house - and a shade that deep takes over an hour to steep. Kurt had woken up early and gathered more than enough wood to keep the fire stoked, so there's no way she could possibly need more. Besides, the linens Kurt is responsible for salting haven't soaked long enough to take the dyes even if they were ready. He has no other chores until after lunch, so what could his mother need him for?
"Yes, my darling," she yells snappishly. "I need you back at the house right now."
"Yes, mother," he replies, hiding his disappointment behind a yawn. He'd only just drifted off, and he was having the most amazing dream about traveling the world, exploring from shore to shore of their country on horseback, camping out under the stars, even riding boats to other lands. The warm breeze ruffles his hair and immediately brings back an image of the welcoming darkness – a clear night sky filled with silver points of light, and him bobbing along in a sailboat, surrendering to the whim of the wind and the water, letting them navigate his course for him. He sighs, tempted to return to it, but he won't disobey his mother. She isn't a frivolous woman. She must have her reasons for calling him home. "I'm coming."
"And d-don't forget that bucket of raspberries I sent you out to pick, or I'll…or I'll tan your hide!"
Kurt's eyes pop open wide, every inch of cozy sleep-drunkenness erasing from his body, replaced by a cold fever at the sound of his mother threatening to spank him. His mother has never threatened him, never laid a hand on him. Violence is not a part of her nature. Even if it was, Kurt tries to never give her a reason to be angry. Kurt and his mother are almost kindred spirits – closer in heart and mind than most mothers and sons. Kurt's mother and his father have argued on more than one occasion the merits of spanking. His father claims Kurt will become spoiled and unruly without a hiding from time to time, but his mother is ardently against it, and when it comes to Kurt, his mother always wins.
Kurt knows his father isn't thrilled by that, but he stopped arguing the point long ago. He must trust his wife's judgment in the raising of their only child as he mostly leaves her to it.
And raspberries…they haven't had raspberries on the place since a herd of the regent's deer ate all the bushes years ago. Why would his mother think she sent him out for raspberries? But more unnerving is the unease in her voice, obvious to detect since Kurt has never heard it before. It could be that she and his father are fighting, which has been happening with growing frequency. Kurt doesn't know exactly why the fighting started, or what it's over, but it usually stops when he enters the room, followed by inscrutable glances thrown his way.
Kurt does have a theory. He guesses it's because he's turned old enough to be apprenticed. Apprentice to a trade is what his father wants for him. His mother, however, would prefer him educated - sent to a fine school in the city and come out in society as an accomplished young man. She has raised him that way – with a respect for hard work and an appreciation for the life it provides them, but also with a certain air of refinement that comes with learning the "delicate" arts: reading, writing, sewing, painting, music.
Frippery his father believes more suitable for women, and overall a waste of a man's time.
Kurt likes his mother's vision for his future better, but he fears she might lose this battle, seeing how poor they've become, the debts they owe piling up faster than they can pay them.
Even young as he is, Kurt understands their money woes. He knows who the tax collectors are when they show up at the garden gate. One of his mother's best milking cows went with them the last time they showed up. He's afraid to know what they'll take next time they come.
Maybe his mother and father are fighting, and that's why she wants Kurt back at the house. She knows when he shows up, the fighting will stop.
Kurt stands quickly and brushes the grass off his seat, trying to remember where he left his bucket. If he finds it, he can gather a few handfuls of blueberries or blackberries along the way. Strawberries are his mother's favorites, but they don't come up the way they used to. If he can't find the bucket, he can carry them back in his shirt. Then at least she'll have something to…
A loud clatter echoes across the meadow, dull and splintered, like the sound of a chair hitting a wall and breaking. He hears muffled voices – one definitely his mother, and then his father saying, "He's coming, alright? You don't have to do that. He's coming."
Kurt stops in his tracks and listens, waiting for another noise or another voice. Any sound. Everything seems to have stopped with him – the birds and the bugs wait in the flowers and the trees, the sheep grazing have stopped their chewing, even the wind holds its breath. Fear grips Kurt's chest and holds on with nails bared. Did his mother hit his father with a chair? Did his father raise a fist to his mother? Kurt has known his father to be a strict man, but not an abusive one. His mother and father love each other, adore each other. He would never hit her.
But then…
"Where the hell is that boy?" he hears a strange man's voice growl, and those nails wrapped around Kurt's chest dig in. He's petrified. He doesn't want to take a step closer. He doesn't want to go anywhere near his house. He can feel danger in the air, hitting him, prickling his skin. If he turns and runs in the opposite direction, how far can he get? To the next farm for help? To town?
Running to town at full tilt will still take an hour. Can he risk leaving his mother in danger for that long?
He hears a thump - the sound of something soft being hit - and then his mother scream in pain.
"Run, Kurt!" she wails as another punch lands. "Run now!"
(Later, when he's tied up in a wooden cart on his way to the regent's house, he'll realize that his mother was commanding him to run away, that every word she had said was a signal – a clue that he was in danger - hoping he would be able to figure it out.
His mother hadn't been calling him for help.
She knew there was nothing anyone could do to save her.)
"Mom!" Kurt screams, racing for the house. "Mom! No!" Kurt's bare feet pound the earth, but the ground is slick from an evening rain, and with every step he takes, his right foot slides. His toe catches in a gopher hole and his ankle twists, a sharp pain shooting up his leg to his knee, but he doesn't stop. He hears another punch, then another, then a tortured groan he knows came from his dad.
"Dad! Dad!"
Kurt leaps the wooden fence into the garden. A pair of rough hands grab him before he hits the ground. Kurt flails in all directions, fighting blindly the man who has his arms wrapped around him from behind, struggling to wriggle free. His captor lifts Kurt up over his head and drops him on his tailbone, startling him with the pain. Then the man pounces, pinning Kurt on his back, holding his wrists down in the dirt above his head.
"No!" Kurt screams, kicking out with his legs, biting at the hand that tries to cover his mouth. "Get off of me! Get…off…of me! Mom! Dad! Mom!"
His right foot – the one he twisted when he tripped – connects with something soft, and he hears a man curse at him through a groan.
"Bloody damned little fuckin' motherfucker…"
The man pinning Kurt's arms laughs.
"Kid gotcha there," he says to the injured man out of Kurt's line of sight. "Good thing you ain't married."
"Yeah, well," the strained voice mutters, and then a heavy fist sinks into Kurt's stomach. Suddenly, Kurt can't breathe. He gasps for breath, curling in on himself to minimize the pain, but the fight in him is gone. "I'd getcha tit for tat, kid," the man grumbles bitterly, "but the regent wants this." The man grabs Kurt between the legs - not hard enough to hurt, but it stuns Kurt into absolute terrified silence. "Ha! That shut him up, didn' it?"
Kurt squeezes his eyes tight as a wave of humiliation hits him.
No one has ever touched him like that before.
But from the sounds of it, it was going to happen again.
The thought of that turns him to stone. Even his wrists and his ankles being tied doesn't snap him out of it. These men kidnapping him were going to sell him to the sex trade. That's the only explanation. But why? Why him? He was only eight.
Then another word spoken, one shuffled out of his head when the man put his grubby hand on Kurt's crotch, strikes back at him like the clapper on a bell.
Regent. These men aren't selling him into any sex trade. They're selling him to the regent.
Kurt's heard stories about the regent's house – how kids went there and were never heard from again. How children were beaten skinless if they didn't behave, and had their parts cut off and fed to the dogs for trying to run away.
If Kurt was being taken to the regent, he would never see his mother or father alive again.
When he opens his eyes, he sees only the darkness behind a heavy strip of fabric fitted over his eyes and tied at the back of his head. The knot catches in his hair, pulling out strands as he tosses his head left and right, trying to dislodge it so he can see.
"Settle down, ya lanky bastard," the man he kicked says, swatting Kurt hard on the behind, his tailbone stinging from the painful drop earlier.
Kurt feels his body lifted by the shoulders and the knees, and the severity of his situation crashes in on him - the reality that if these men succeed in taking him from his home, he'll disappear - but before he can make a last-ditch attempt at an escape, he's thrown onto something hard. He feels it roll slightly, hears the neigh of an impatient horse, and he knows what he's on. He's in a cart pulled by a horse.
He's being stolen away, and no one is coming to his rescue.
"No!" he screams, thrashing back and forth, fighting with the ties at his wrists and ankles, trying to work himself loose. "No! Mom! Dad! Please! Don't let them take me!"
"Ugh. Gag him, Reginald. I can't listen to that brat scream the whole trip back."
Kurt can't get the binds undone – the knots far too well tied – but he manages to creep up onto his knees, leaning against the side to yell over the edge.
"Mom! Dad! Help me! Hel-oof!"
The same fist that planted into his gut wallops him across the chin, and he swears he feels his brain swim around. He tastes blood in his mouth; part of his lower lip aches, then tingles and goes numb.
"Shut it!" the man hisses, squeezing Kurt's cheeks hard with unforgiving fingers. Kurt squeals, and the man shoves a rough piece of fabric between Kurt's lips and teeth, tying this tight, too – so tight that Kurt can't close his mouth around it.
"What about th' parents?" the man who had held Kurt down asks as his partner – Reginald, apparently - climbs into the cart.
"I already knifed the woman," he answers, his tone all business, saying the words easy like letting someone know that's it's about to rain. "Prob'ly dead a'ready. And the dad's leg is broke. He won't be followin' anytime soon."
The reins snap, and the horse whinnies in objection. Its hooves trample the wet earth and the cart pulls forward, stuttering at the start, banging Kurt's head into the side.
Kurt repeats the man's words in his head, fragments knocking around his skull along with his rattled brain.
'Knifed the woman…dead already…dad's leg broke…won't be following…'
His mother was dead. The man beat her up and stabbed her. Now, she's dead. And his father injured – alive, but injured…as far as Kurt knows. They live in a remote area. They don't get a lot of visitors. If his father can't make it to help, or if no one stops by to check on him, he could die from his injuries, or starve within weeks.
But Kurt has to hold on to the hope that he'll be alright, because it's all Kurt has.
Kurt didn't get to see either of them, didn't get to tell them he loved them, didn't get to say good-bye.
Where his mother is concerned, he won't ever get the chance.
"No," he mumbles with tears rolling anew down his face, soaking the fabric in his mouth until he can taste the salt of them on his tongue. "No! Dad! Mom! Dad! Help me! Somebody help me!"
He's not yelling loudly, and his jabbering makes no sense. No one outside the cart will hear, but the man with the reins turns and swipes him across the face with a crop all the same.
"Stop it!" the other man hisses. "You mark him up and the regent will have both our skins."
"Ah, he'll heal up 'efore we get there, won't ya?" The man spits in Kurt's face, the rank stream of saliva stinging the new cut on his cheek, and Kurt lays still, crying in quiet.
"See?" the wickeder of the men says to his companion. "He's learning to be a good boy a'ready. He'll be primed and ready for the regent once we reach 'is house." He chuckles. "I imagine that will earn us twice our fee – doing all the hard work for 'im."
Then the man whips the horse a little harder in a symbolic gesture, throwing his head back and laughing when the horse kicks back uselessly with its hind legs, but he's the only one who laughs. Kidnapping kids and killing women doesn't sit right with the other man. He may be a cutthroat, but by need and not want. He tries to live by a code, and this he didn't sign up for. But he's in it up to his neck, and he knows it. There's too much on the line for him to risk for the sake of one kid, especially when he has a kid of his own.
So he doesn't join in the man's laughter. He sits quiet and stares at the horse, stares at the road, at anything that might take his mind off of everything they'd done.
There's no laughter in him.
Not that Kurt would have heard, because inside his mind, he's screaming.
"No! Don't let them take me! Mom! Dad! No!"
After their long day of travel - of sitting beneath the burning sun, negotiating the trail almost blind with sunlight shining its worst in his eyes when he gave up his hat to Kurt - Sebastian is dead to the world. But in his arms, he feels Kurt struggle. Secure in the stone fortress of his mind, constructed to keep the world out, Kurt's whimpering finds a way through, and he wakes when tears that are not his own run down his neck.
"Kurt?" Sebastian mutters, the words landing in Kurt's hair brushing against Sebastian's chin. "Kurt? What's wrong?"
"Please," Kurt pleads, his legs and arms moving weakly in unison, as if they were bound. "Please, let me go…"
"Kurt," Sebastian says, cursing his locked-in brain and exhausted body for rousing too slowly.
"Don't take me away!" Kurt sobs, the sound catching in his throat like they're trying to choke him from the inside. "I want to stay with my mom and dad! Don't…don't take me…please…"
Sebastian couldn't have opened his eyes wider if he wanted. He lets Kurt go so the boy won't feel confined, then pulls the blankets off him in hopes that the cold air might shock him awake, but neither does the trick. He's trapped in this nightmare, with no way out.
Sebastian knows how that feels.
That's why Sebastian offered to take Kurt with him, in part to keep his own nightmares away.
"Kurt, I need you to wake up," Sebastian says. Kurt's face is a mess of hot tears and puffy cheeks, his nose running down over his upper lip. Sebastian kisses Kurt's forehead, talking to him calmly. "Wake up, Kurt. Open your eyes and look at me."
Kurt's eyelids flutter open. He stares at Sebastian, but his blue eyes have turned black, fearful but devoid of consciousness, and Sebastian knows that Kurt doesn't see him.
"Don't let them take me away," Kurt begs, his voice losing its steam.
"I won't let them take you, darling," Sebastian promises. "I won't." Kurt's cries rip through Sebastian's body like shears, tearing his seams apart, the carefully mended wounds he shows to no one popping stitch by stitch as he tries to soothe Kurt's despair. "They'll never take you again. Now wake up. Please, Kurt. I need you to wake up."
"Don't…" Kurt whines, sounding lost, sounding young – so much younger than the boy he is. "Don't take me away. P-please…p-please…" His whines turn into defeat, and Kurt finally breaks down, going slack, going quiet.
"I won't let anyone take you," Sebastian says, rocking Kurt in his arms and hushing him back to sleep, feeling like he's signed some kind of warrant with those words, using his life as collateral. "I'll protect you. I won't let anyone hurt you again. Not the regent, not his men, not the bounty hunters…no one, Kurt. No one."
He'd made that same promise to someone else once, and he failed in his attempt to keep it – failed horribly. He'll be damned if he breaks that same promise a second time. This isn't just about keeping the damaged boy in his arms safe from harm. It's his chance to redeem himself.
But at the same time, whether he entirely realizes it or not, Sebastian has put himself in a prime position to hurt Kurt someday.