Kurt felt his mouth go extremely dry. The blonde was far from alone, flanked by two large guys in similar suits, and that was only who they could see from the doorway. There could be more. He looked at his Dad, who had gone pale at the sight, and that just wasn't a good sign at all. Very few things could shake Burt Hummel, and those things that did were almost exclusively bad.
Like his Mom's death, for instance.
Burt turned to look at Kurt, and he gave an almost imperceptible nod. For a moment Kurt was confused, because hadn't the whole memory erasing scheme just been abandoned rather dramatically? By proving that it hadn't worked the first time?
And then he realized that his Dad was referring to his other power. It would just never have occurred to him on his own to use it, because he had been told for as long as he could remember never to use that one, especially on people other than his parents, because it was almost guaranteed to get them noticed. So it probably made sense that using it in that moment hadn't occurred to him right then.
But if discovery was what they were worried about, that ship had pretty much sailed already.
The blonde stalked into the room as if she owned the place. "Honestly, we hadn't quite expected this turn of events", she said conversationally. "I had forgotten the faces of both boys in that house, but now that I'm thinking about it, you do look awfully familiar", she said directed at Finn, who looked at her in confusion.
Kurt didn't say anything, but concentrated on his father. It had been such a long time since he'd practiced this particular skill that he was worried if he even remembered how to do it, but then his Dad waved his arm and the woman was slammed into the wall without there having been any sort of physical contact, so apparently he had done it right.
She yelled something to her colleagues that Kurt didn't quite understand, and they moved to the center of the room, one launching himself at Puck, while the other went after Finn.
Not looking all that menacing had its advantages, Kurt thought, and concentrated on Puck, to give him a power as well. He didn't look at the results and moved on to concentrating on Finn, who still seemed a little out of it.
Kurt's power worked promptly on Finn, and just an instant later the tall teen found himself with a superpower all for himself. And when Kurt saw the results, he groaned.
Why did fate, or whatever decided who got what when Kurt did this have to be so cruel? Because he certainly wouldn't have picked this.
Finn, the boy who had enough problems coordinating his movements properly in a largely two dimensional space was floating a few feet above the air, and looked completely helpless. The way he was flailing about made it look as though his goal was to perform a backflip in midair.
"Whoa!", Puck said from the other corner, but whether it was because his best friend was floating in the air, or because he had just simultaneously punched and electrocuted someone with his fists was hard to tell.
Kurt stopped concentrating on Finn, because that power really wasn't helpful at all, and only remembered when he heard a loud crash that he probably shouldn't have taken that power away while Finn was still floating.
But at least Puck and his Dad were doing splendidly with their borrowed super powers. Of course Burt had made acquaintance with that particular gift before, and knew he would get telekinesis and how to use it, but apparently Puck also got the hang of electro punching pretty quickly. And Kurt had to admit, it looked pretty impressive.
Kurt realized that they were lucky no one had pulled out a gun yet, but when he realized that it was because they were looking for him, and they wanted him alive, it was already too late. He had been to focused on getting everyone else their powers that he hadn't really been paying attention to his own immediate vicinity.
He turned around, but before he could do anything he already felt something being stuck to his neck and saw the man who had been in Finn's bedroom with the blonde smirking triumphantly. Kurt raised his hand, trying to get the device off, but he was barely half way through the movement before everything around him went black.
—-
He had no idea how long it was before he came to again, but it felt like fighting his way through a haze of fog inside his head. He tried to open his eyes, but the command got lost somewhere between his brain and his eyelids, so they stayed closed. He tried listening to his surroundings, but before he could identify any one sound he'd already drifted off again, so there was no way to know anything.
But waking up was important. Somehow, someway it was significant. Then again, it was comfortable right here, so why bother? Why not just stay like this, drifting, without a care in the world? If waking up didn't work, then sleep must be the better alternative, right?
He felt comfortable with that idea for a while, but something was bothering him. He couldn't pinpoint it, thoughts in his head barely even forming words, but something wasn't right. He wasn't supposed to be asleep right now, he was supposed to be doing… something.
But the thought wouldn't leave him, and it was as if his own subconscious was yelling at him to wake up. So he tried again. And was satisfied to find that there were, in fact, sounds around him. There was a beeping noise, and some shuffling papers.
Slowly, he blinked his eyes open, and found his retinas assaulted with way too bright light. When he lifted his hand to cover them, he realized that it was tied to something.
And that was enough of a shock to finally wake him up fully.
He was sitting in some sort of chair, tilted, like you would find at a dentists and his hands and feet were held by metal restraints attached to it. As he looked up, he saw a blonde woman there, and it took him a minute to connect her to the last events he remembered.
Now at least he knew how Finn had felt when he had been so out of it. It was like looking at the world through a large cotton ball. He wanted to say something, but the connection between his mouth and his brain was still malfunctioning. So what came out was more of a disconnected groan than any one word.
The blonde turned around when she heard that.
"Well you're awake early", she said, scrutinizing him over the rim of rounded glasses that looked completely out of place on her drawn features. "Huh. Maybe there was something to all of those reports, after all."
He wanted to ask 'what reports' but decided not to. Decided, as in, couldn't remember what mental resources would be required for that task. He tucked rather futilely at his restraints, without realizing that he probably wouldn't be successful that way.
She looked down at her clipboard, and scribbled something on the page. Kurt was waiting for her to say something interesting, maybe fill a few movie cliches and reveal the bad guys's plan or something like that, but was disappointed.
So, saying something, attempt number two. This time, he was delighted to be able to produce a somewhat disconnected groan, and to gain back enough sensory capacity to notice that his tongue felt oddly numb.
She gave him an amused sort of look. "You know, you're not really what I expected."
Whatever the hell that meant.
"H… how so?", Kurt managed to say, even though slightly slurred.
"The way you look, mostly", she said conversationally, and finally set the clipboard down, looking at him directly. "Not exactly pulled straight out of a DC Comic, if you catch my drift."
He supposed he did, but then, he doubted there were many people who could pull off artificial bat ears and wings convincingly. Or a cape. Then again, with the right patterns…
"I just don't really get how Agent Nevada and you managed to evade us for that long. Neither of you look like you have it in you. But I suppose that just makes sense. If people suspected where you really came from, you probably would have been retrieved long ago."
"Retrieved? Don't you mean kidnapped?", Kurt asked. Feeling was returning to his tongue, and possibly more importantly, he was starting to get better at processing her words.
"No, I mean retrieved. That's when you lose something that belongs to you, and then you get it back. But don't worry about it, those devices can make the best vocabulary a little wonky."
"I don't belong to anyone", Kurt protested. Also, his vocabulary was excellent. How dare she?
"Oh really? Because that's not what it says on my clipboard here", she said in an amused tone, picking up the clipboard and waving it around. Kurt had a tough time following the movement with his eyes, and it distracted him from the conversation for a moment.
"Well then your clipboard is wrong", Kurt managed to say.
"Are you sure? Because I happen to know for a fact that the people who wrote this here are very smart."
The fact that she was talking to him like a child was very frustrating. But not nearly as frustrating as the fact that he probably needed that.
"Just because you kidnapped me before doesn't mean you get to take me back", he managed to say.
"Oh, is that what you remember? Being kidnapped?" She looked at him with raised eyebrows. "I should probably write that down somewhere. Could mean your mental acuity isn't all it's cracked up to be."
"My ment… menstr… my thinking is fine." He had meant to spit the sentence out with a certain amount of venom, but his own confusion was making that a little difficult.
"Oh, yes, I can tell", she said with a mean smirk that gave Kurt the strong urge to punch her in the face. Or possibly get into a bitch slapping contest with her.
"My dad's not gonna let you get away with this", he said, lisping slightly on some of the s sounds, but with some credible conviction.
"I'm pretty sure whichever scientist it was whose test tube you crawled out of, he's going to be very understanding. It's like he's getting back his carefully constructed blastozyte."
"I don't crawl in test tubes."
"Well I doubt you would make a habit of that, you are a little large for those, now. But you've had a lot less contact with the inside of an ovary than most people I know."
That sounded like an insult, sort of, but was a little bit difficult for his befuddled brain to understand.
"I don't know what you're talking about", he said in a defiant tone, but in all honesty, he didn't. Not that he was an expert on the subject or particularly wanted to consider his parents creating him, but he was pretty sure that ovaries were involved in some form or another.
She took of the glasses and eyed him with genuine curiosity. "How, exactly, do you think it was you came into this world?", she asked.
"When a mommy and a daddy love each other very much…", he started reciting in a monotone, but didn't continue since he was pretty sure a grown woman such as herself would be familiar with the concept.
"True, that's what happened for most people. But not for you. Or any of our other test subjects, but I doubt you've met any of them so that might not be relevant to you as much…" she seemed to have lost her train of thought for a moment, but then looked at him more intensely.
"So, if I'm not mistaken, Agent Nevada and subject Sigma told you they were your biological parents?"
"Who?"
She looked down at the clipboard again. "Well you would probably refer to them as 'Burt and Melinda Hummel' but I can assure you, those names are fake."
Now that wasn't really a surprise. He knew that, when they had gotten him out of that strange facility they'd taken on new identities, but he was pretty sure whatever she had just said were not their real names. "They are my parents", he said in a tone that would be used to explain a rather basic concept to a particularly dense child. Or Finn, on some days.
"No, but they are liars. You don't have any parents. Not really, anyway. You are a genetic experiment, the result of some scientist - some of our nation's finest minds, mind you - mashing genetic sequences together. And you are a successful experiment if that makes you feel any better."
It didn't, really.
And it also sounded a little too far fetched to be true. Maybe it was the ridiculousness of the statement, but he realized with a jolt in that moment, that he could just look into her mind to see if she was lying. She had to be, obviously, but he wanted to convince himself.
"And once they were done mashing those genes together, you were implanted into the uterus of one of our dedicated female agents, to be brought to term. Maybe not the most romantic way of coming into existence, but at least your life has a clear purpose that's always been known. A lot of people would be very envious of that."
She flipped through the pages stuck to her clipboard, while Kurt was too busy trying to get his powers to work again to protest the things she was saying.
"I can even look up the name of the agent, if you're interested. Actually, I'm interested now, since it came up…" she kept on flipping, and then apparently found the page she was looking for. "Huh. Well that I didn't expect. Then again, I've surrogated more than once, and who would really keep track of these things…?"
She looked up and gave him a wry grin. "Looks like I'm the one you need to thank for your existence, subject 734AlphaB"
And that was a lie.
Of course, had to be.
After an initial moment of shock he was finally able to gather his wits about him enough to actually enter her mind.
What he found there was not encouraging at all.
She wasn't lying. At least at the surface level he was scrutinizing her at, it didn't seem that way. She really believed what she was saying.
But it was impossible that that was true, of course. Maybe she was just misinformed…
He delved deeper into her mind, in a way he usually wouldn't without hesitation, but he was shaken up enough by the thought that what she was saying could be true, that he didn't really pay attention to any of his usual reservations.
He looked at her memories, and it seemed as though she had actually been a surrogate mother more than once. Memories of walking around pregnant, looking down on those who weren't, because they weren't nearly as dedicated as her. Looking down on the male agents especially, because this was a level of commitment they would never be able to display. They could look after the little annoyances and claim some fame if their experiments turned out to be promising and not among those to be eliminated, but they could never be part of the process like this.
Who cared about stretch marks, when you could serve the future of your country and finally get a leg up over all the men in a military organization?
And her claim to have done that more than once looked to be true, as well. And in all of those memories the same pride was ringing through.
"Did you hear? The last one you carried didn't have any powers, she was eliminated", he heard a man in the memory say.
"So?", the woman asked back without any emotion in her voice. No real emotion in her head, either. "You do know we're not supposed to refer to them as 'he' or 'she'. If the supervisor heard you talk like that, he'd probably put you out of active care taking duty, and that doesn't look good on your resume."
The connotations were clear, looking into her head. 'Eliminated' meant exactly what it sounded like. A child that had grown inside of this woman, a little girl, had been put down, just because she hadn't had any super powers.
And the blonde didn't care. At all.
Six children in total, apparently (how had she kept up this figure?) and absolutely no emotional attachment. The only reaction being thinking she was superior to her male colleagues for being able to do that. What happened to any of them after they were removed from her body (by Cesarian section of course, who would want to deal with all the unpleasantness and unpredictability of a natural birth? Revolting, really) was of absolutely no cencern to her.
A little girl had been murdered for not being special enough.
And her 'mother' only cared about the way her short existence looked on her resume.
Kurt felt sick at the thought of that callousness and the idea of having any sort of connection to that place was even worse. It just couldn't be true, any of it.
Still there was no hint of a deception, no evidence of any lies. He started digging deeper, trying to find a hidden moment of regret, or maybe just a pang of guilt, any reaction that proved that she either wasn't as terrible a person as it looked right now, or evidence that she was lying, and whatever had happened, he was not a part of that history.
More and more quickly he began sifting through memories, judging and dismissing them, but not finding what he was looking for. She was telling the truth.
Which meant his 'parents' had been lying to him all his life.
He just wished he could go back to believing that lie.
In her mind there was no hidden trauma, no deeply buried emotional reactions, nothing.
When the cold realization came that he wouldn't find any of the things he was looking for and that his entire view of the world had just been turned upside down and all of it was true, he started pulling out of her mind and realized something wasn't quite right there.
The layers didn't feel the way they had when he had breached them. And when he noticed that, he became dimly aware of the sound of screaming somewhere around him.
He had done something wrong while looking through her head, but he wasn't quite sure what. Her conscious thoughts were twirling around in a way that he had never really seen before and it was a little disconcerting to see her formerly so organized thoughts unraveling.
Kurt severed their mental connection so quickly that it made him a little dizzy himself, but when he was back in his own head he could see her looking drastically different, clawing at her hair, mumbling something unintelligible, glasses discarded on the floor.
Most of what he'd always thought to be facts about his life were lies.
And he had just driven the woman who was closest to being his mother most spectacularly insane.
And to be honest,
He wasn't sorry.