AN: I know, I know, I said that there'd be more action and plot and whatever in this chapter. But really, the majority of this is just filler. I PROMISE things will move faster (well, anything's really faster than this) after this chapter. I just had a random stroke of writing inspiration and I just sat down and wrote all of this and now it's past one in the morning so I'm rambling in this AN.

Oh, and if you feel compelled to, please leave a review, whether it's bad or good...I just like to know that people are actually reading what I'm putting up and not just stumbling upon it by accident xD

I do not own Glee :P

For the second time in less than twenty-four hours, Kurt abruptly awoke in what he thought to be an unfamiliar setting. This time, however, he was lying atop a mattress instead of across the damp rocks of a river, and he'd actually known where he was within a minute or so of consciousness.

The holding cell was shrouded in pitch-black darkness, rendering Kurt unable to see even his own hand in front of his face. The lack of windows in the basement complex made it so Kurt had no idea of the time, and therefore unable to decide what exactly he should do with his time now that he was awake and fully coherent.

Kurt turned over in the thin blanket covering his still uniform-clad body. He could still feel some of the pain that he remembered from when he'd woken up beside the river, but most of it had dulled down, allowing him to move without agony.

Kurt sat up and propped his head up on his elbows. Now that he had a bit of time to spare, he finally had the chance to think through everything that had happened at the Warbler camp during the ambush. Immediately an endless number of questions began to rush to his head. What were the Warblers going to do now that they believe McKinley ambushed them? Did anyone else know that the attack had been planned by Prince Dustin himself? Did Wes and David make it out of the campsite okay? Did Blaine survive the jump into the river as well?

The thought of Blaine caused a lump to form in Kurt's throat. Just before the jump, he'd finally kissed the boy he'd been in love with as long as he could remember, and now there was a chance that he'd never see the boy in question ever again.

"Stupid, stupid, stupid!" Kurt harshly whispered to himself as he punched the wall beside him. Why did he have to kiss Blaine right before he jumped? Sure, it was in the heat of the moment, but leaving everything as it was would've made losing him so much easier. Kurt would've just continued with expecting that Blaine had thought of him as nothing more than just a close friend.

But he had to go and kiss him, and Blaine just had to go and kiss him back just as passionately. Now Kurt was left to wonder if Blaine kissed back in surprise, or if he wanted to. What if he'd responded the way he did out of pity for Kurt? Maybe he just felt bad that his best friend had feelings for him and didn't want to ruin things in the last few seconds they had left together. Blaine was, after all, notorious for thinking of others a little bit too much before himself.

Kurt let out a groan and repositioned himself so that his back was leaning against the wall. Trying to stray his thoughts from Blaine, he tried to figure out what his plan of action was once the ND released him from captivity. Was he going to go back to Dalton and the Warblers to finish up his training? No, that wasn't an option, as he already had Captain Jesse and Prince Dustin as enemies for knowing the truth about the ambush. Maybe he could find some way to sneak back into Dalton and find a way to Lima. Then he and Mercedes could run off somewhere together, maybe finding a place to live in one of the small border towns on the edge of McKinley, where 'Cedes could be close enough to Dalton to visit her family, and Kurt could be outside the borders so as to not get hunted down by the Dalton royalty.

But the question crept back up into Kurt's mind, no matter how hard he tried not to think about it: What if Blaine was still alive?

Kurt imagined embarking on a long expedition to find his lost friend, walking along the river and the towns along it until he found Blaine. However, it would take months, if not years, to fully search each and every town on both sides of the river.

"Ughh!" Kurt sighed in exasperation, burying his face in his hands. Just then, from the corner of his eye, Kurt watched as the center lamp of the basement lit up, revealing the silhouettes of two people.

Kurt's eyes fully adjusted to the light just as his cell door was unlocked, allowing the entry of two men. The shorter man of the two then proceeded to light the lamp inside the cell, giving Kurt a clear view of the two.

The taller of the two was a young dirty blonde with short hair with a thin body but muscular arms emphasized by a sleeveless shirt. He wore a friendly face, smiling at Kurt fondly as he saw him. Kurt smiled weakly back.

"Ah, so you must be Kurt." The dirty blonde said, "My name's Frederick. Jeff and Nick sent me down here to give you some work to do while you stay. After all, we can never let an extra set of arms and legs go to waste here at The Fort!" He finished a little too cheerily for Kurt's taste.

The shorter man by the lamp coughed loudly.

"Oh, and this here is Kyle. He's new here, so he was sent to shadow me for a few days to get a feel for the place." Frederick chuckled, turning to Kyle as he stepped into the light, giving Kurt a chance to look at his features.

Kyle turned out not to be a man at all, but a teenage boy of what looked to be fifteen or sixteen years old. He had a long mop of black hair falling over his face, obscuring his eyes from Kurt's view.

"Nice to meet you." Kyle nodded in Kurt's direction. How he managed to see through his hair, Kurt didn't know.

"Nice to meet you both as well." Kurt responded politely, remaining in his seated position on his bed.

"Okay, so first thing's first." Frederick began, still smiling at Kurt. Why in the world was he so happy? "We've got a clean set of clothes for you outside the cell. They're just some spare clothes we keep around for new recruits, but since you're kind of our prisoner, they'll have to do. Afterwards, we have a few errands around The Fort to get done that we need help with, especially with all the preparations going on..."

"Preparations?" Kurt questioned. He remembered vaguely that Jeff had mentioned something about a meeting before he'd fallen asleep.

"Well, thanks to you and your helpful information about Dalton, we're expecting an attack on McKinley anytime soon." Kyle explained, pride evident in his voice as he knew of the happenings of the ND.

"And by preparations, since Nick and Jeff run the place, that basically means everyone's running around in a panic trying to gather up as many weapons and as much armor as they can in the shortest amount of time possible." Frederick added. "So, anyway, because of that, I'm going to have you tidy up some of the storage closets the soldiers have already ripped apart as well as clean up a few oil spills that have been sitting around on the ground for a few days now."

"Sounds good." Kurt replied. Honestly, he was sort of excited to do some work. Some good old fashioned hard labor would provide a distraction from all his thoughts and questions for a while, as well as let him stretch his sore muscles.

Just then, out of nowhere, Kurt's stomach let out a huge growl, causing Kurt to blush.

Frederick laughed once again. "Oh, yeah. And as a bit of incentive for working, we have a saying around here."

"You mean you have a saying..." Kurt heard Kyle mumble under his breath.

Frederick apparently had heard Kyle as well, since he gave him a playful slap on the shoulder. "No work, no eat. You do your chores for the day, and you get three square meals. If you don't finish or if I find your work unsatisfactory, you either fix it up and eat, or leave it unfinished and starve. That clear?"

Kurt nodded his head right as his stomach let out another unpleasant growl.

"Well, it looks like we better get you started right away, then." Frederick said, still chipper and happy much to Kurt's confusion.

"Just wondering," Kurt began as he slid off the edge of his bed, "what time is it, exactly?"

"I'd say it's around seven or eight at night." Kyle replied. "Nick and Jeff brought you back sometime around nine in the morning, so you were sleeping for a while."

Kurt had a feeling that he'd be up late that night, his sleeping schedule completely thrown off.

The night passed by uneventfully, with Kurt putting all the effort physically possible into the work that Frederick had given him to do. Lucky for Kurt, the work wasn't so easy, either, as the supply rooms looked as if a tornado had blown through each and every one of them. Crates were overturned and on their sides, scattered across each room, making the closets almost impossible to navigate, let alone organize. Thankfully, Kurt's organizational skills had always been in top shape, so the process of cleaning up wasn't so excruciating. The oil spills had also been easy to clean, and Frederick had even let Kurt keep the oily rag as what Frederick called "a souvenir for your first day of ND work". It had only taken Kurt a few hours to finish all the chores, so he had been settled down in his cell afterwards with a plate of soup,carrots and bread. What he didn't expect, however, was for both Frederick and Kyle, who had been supervising him throughout the day, to sit and eat with him on the floor of his cell.

"Why are you staying here? Don't you have somewhere else you need to be?" Kurt asked sincerely. Throughout his day of work, he'd become more comfortable around Frederick and Kyle, becoming slightly more accustomed to Frederick's seemingly permanent cheerfulness and Kyle's lack of conversation, and he had to admit, they were fairly nice people to be around.

"Nah. My job here is basically being 'Head of Housekeeping' as Nick calls it, so really my only assignment right now is to watch over you and make sure you don't get into trouble." Frederick replied before taking a sip of his soup.

A short silence followed, with only the sounds of silverware against bowls and plates being heard throughout the basement.

"So, Frederick, what brought you to join the army?" Kurt asked in an attempt to start a conversation.

"I was born and raised in a little town called Vogyl, not too far from here." Frederick had a faraway look in his eyes upon mentioning his hometown.

"I think I've heard of it before." Kurt tried to remember why he recognized the name of the town.

"Well, it's sort of well-known for being a prominent place for traveling performers to stop by in. It's a fairly artistic place." Frederick took a bite of his carrots.

"Right! One of my good friends from home's mother is a traveling singer, so I bet she's mentioned Vogyl in passing." Kurt remembered listening to Mercedes's mom's tales of her travels all around Ohio. He remembered her tales of all of the places in the nation, from the tiny towns such as Vogyl to the grand cities in Diamant and Crawford.

"Yeah, so I grew up there with my parents and my little brother, Adam. My mom ran a local inn while my dad went out into the forest to hunt. He'd sell the meat and pelts of the animals to merchants passing by, and the two of them were saving up their money to hopefully one day send me and Adam over to Crawford once we were old enough."

"So why didn't you go there?"

"When I was about fifteen, probably about Kyle's age here, and Adam was about ten or eleven, my dad got into a bit of an accident with a wild boar in the forest. Thankfully, he survived, but the injuries were so bad that we had to send for a doctor all the way from Diamant. Needless to say, that cost us quite a bit of money, and it basically drained all the savings we had to send me to school.

"About a year later, when i was sixteen, I saw an ad tacked up to a tree that said that the ND was recruiting, with an age minimum of sixteen. The recruitment included free room and board, food, training as well as pay that could be sent directly to the family. I went home that day and did some calculations, and I found out that if I joined the army immediately, I could save up enough money to send Adam to Crawford by the time he turned sixteen, the minimum age to board there. It took a bit of convincing, but I got my parents to let me join, and I've now been working here for almost eight years."

"And what happened to Adam?"

If it was possible for Frederick's smile to grow any wider, it did right after Kurt asked that question. "I ended up making enough for Adam to go to Crawford, where he studied to become a doctor. Now he lives in McKinley, helping to give healthcare to many poor families that can't afford high-quality doctors like we had to for our dad."

The thought of Adam made Kurt smile almost as broadly as Frederick was. It was amazing how great of a family Frederick had come from. Kurt didn't think he'd heard a story as inspiring in his entire life.

"So, Kurt. What made you join the Warblers?" Frederick asked, stacking his, Kurt's and Kyle's now-empty plates and bowls.

"Oh, well...my grandfather was in the military during the Independence War, so I figured I'd follow in his footsteps. Also, my dad used to teach martial arts, so you could say I've been raised to fight in an army." replied Kurt.

"Was your grandfather a Warbler in the war, then?"

"No, actually, he was one of the original New Directions."

Frederick raised an eyebrow. Kurt was used to getting confused reactions whenever he talked about his grandfather. Some people back home in Lima had even gone so far as to frown upon Kurt's family, seeing as his grandfather had helped to defeat the Dalton army.

"So then why did you live in Dalton, of all places?"

"It's a bit of a long story, but I'll try to summarize." Kurt said, telling a story his father had told him more times than he could count. "After the war, my grandfather met a woman from Dalton, Lily Canton, one of the daughters of a family in the nobility, during a unification party between the citizens of Dalton and those of McKinley. They basically fell in love at first sight, and they were married. Luckily, Lily's parents were accepting of her new husband and gave them a place to stay in Lima, where they grew old and had a son, who later inherited the house. That was my father."

"Oh, so do your parents still live there?"

"No...umm...my mother passed away when I was eight, and my father passed when I was sixteen."

The smile melted off of Frederick's face for the first time since Kurt had met him.

"Kurt, I'm so sorry I-"

"It's okay." Kurt gave Frederick a weak smile. "I've gotten used to it. Besides, I enlisted in the army right after my father passed with...with one of my best friends, so it made it a bit easier."

Silence ensued once again in the small cell, the faint lamplight casting shadows on the walls.

"Kyle, I haven't heard anything from you all supper." Kurt inquired, facing the quiet black-haired boy. "What brought you here?"

Kyle remained silent, tilting his head farther down to shield more of his face with his long hair. Then suddenly, he stood up and walked out of the cell without a word, leaving behind his plates and the sounds of his footsteps on the stairwell back up to the main floor.

Kurt and Frederick shared a confused and concerned look.

"To be honest, even I don't know why he's here, and he's been with me 24/7 for the past couple of days." Frederick admitted, a look of concern and guilt on his normally cheerful face. "I'd better go find him and make sure he's okay. Besides, it's getting pretty late."

Frederick picked up the stacks of plates and bowls and stood up off the hard floor. Kurt stood up as well.

"You know, since you probably won't be able to sleep, I figure you could use some time tonight to wander around a bit. Get to know The Fort a bit better and meet some people." Frederick smiled once again as he walked to the cell door.

"Wait, I'm really allowed out of here this early? I haven't even been here a day!" Kurt asked in surprise. The rules at The Fort sure were strange for a military headquarters.

"Sure thing. You've been great today, you got all your work done, and even if you did try to run, there's extra security on all the doors and entrances at night, so I don't think you'd be able to get out so easily. Just go and take a look around, maybe talk to some people. Rose always keeps the bar open late, too, if you get thirsty." Frederick winked and made his way up the stairs, leaving the doors open and unlocked.

Kurt first lay down on his bed, trying to will himself to go to sleep in order to get his sleeping pattern back in check, but after a few minutes, he realized he wasn't going to be passing out anytime soon.

Kurt headed up the stairs into the brighter light of the main floor. The area was significantly quieter than he had previously seen it, as when he'd first arrived it'd been bustling with activity, then it'd been filled with scurrying soldiers during the day. Now, most of the soldiers were asleep, save for a few still chatting at the bar and the guards stationed at the doors leading outside.

Kurt had walked through most of The Fort while he was doing his chores, seeing almost every room of every floor when he was cleaning up the oil spills (how the ND soldiers managed to spill oil in so many random places, Kurt had no idea). However, there were still a few rooms on the top floor of the building that Kurt had yet to see, so out of sheer boredom and insomnia, Kurt decided he'd go up to check out the rooms. He waved to Rose as he passed the bar, then headed up the stairwell to the top floor.

There were only a few doors lining the hallway, and Kurt knew that the majority of them led to the rooms of the higher-up officials in the ND. There was one room in the center that Kurt hadn't looked into, and it was what Kurt assumed to be the main office of Nick and Jeff.

The door was wide open, so Kurt stepped into the empty office to see exactly what he had expected a military officer's room to look like. A desk sat on the far side of the room, covered in what looked like plans for weapons and maps that had been drawn on with several circles and arrows. A single large map of Ohio and its provinces was attached to the wall on the right, with markers stuck into it with pins in several places. A few couches rested along the walls, along with a small table with what looked to be a chess set on it. Kurt walked over and looked at the board to find that the chess game had been left unfinished, a few pieces off the board and blacks and whites all mixed together-

"ALRIGHT! WILL SOMEBODY PLEASE TELL ME HOW THE HELL HE GOT IN HERE!"

Kurt jumped, almost knocking the table and chess set over in their entirety as he heard Jeff's voice yelling from the floor below. Kurt looked out the door of the office, along with several other soldiers peeking out the doors of their rooms who had either been awake or had been woken up by Jeff's loud yell.

The scream was followed by group of loud, elephant-like footsteps pounding up the stairwell to the top floor. Kurt simply stepped to the side of the office when Jeff stormed in frantically, not noticing Kurt's presence until he slammed his palms onto his desk.

"YOU!" Jeff shouted, pointing a finger at Kurt accusingly. "YOU SENT HIM HERE, DIDN'T YOU!"

Kurt was stunned. What in the world was Jeff talking about? He didn't "send" for anyone...

Just then, Nick burst into the room along with Frederick, the two of them holding a short, struggling male between them.

Kurt swore his heart stopped in that moment.

"I swear, this is all a misunderstanding! I'm just looking for my friend, Kurt! I heard he was here, and..."

The curly-haired captive suddenly looked straight at Kurt, his hazel eyes staring into Kurt's blue ones, rendering Kurt nearly speechless.

"B-B-Blaine?"