Disclaimer: I don't own Glee or any of these characters… if I did, Karofsky wouldn't exist anymore, Jesse wouldn't have been such an asshole (albeit one I believe legitimately fell for Rachel), and there would be a LOT more Blaine.

A/n: Yes, I decided to fix the ending of this story. I've felt bad about the cop-out ending I left all of you with back during the summer, and I've intended to fix this the whole time. I think I just needed a break, and a chance to go back over what I'd written and formulate new ideas. So, here you go… a real ending for this story! And no, it probably won't be happening in this chapter.

Also, I'm not going to change my chronology or ages just because RIB suck at maintaining continuity. For my purposes, Blaine is still roughly a year older than Kurt. In other stories I'll go with the canon, but this was started long before they screwed with Blaine's age and I want there to at least be continuity within what I've written!

Being at Dalton was overwhelming, even if it was only for a visit as his family worked at packing up his things. With a school full of teenaged boys, there was a ridiculous amount of noise and confusion that Blaine wasn't fully prepared to process. It had only been a little more than a month since his attack; while the headaches were finally gone, trying to focus on anything for too long still exhausted him.

"Are you okay?" Blaine turned towards Kurt as he heard the boy speaking to him. Blaine only knew that it was Kurt because the younger boy had come to sit with him since Blaine couldn't go up to his dorm room himself because of the stairs. There was an elevator somewhere, of course, but it was just easier on everyone for Blaine to camp out on a couch on the ground floor of the building where someone could keep an eye on him while his parents worked on his room.

"Just tired… there's too much going on, and I think the batteries are starting to die," Blaine replied, reaching up towards his hearing aids with his right hand. While he had gotten a new, less restrictive cast on his broken arm, Blaine was still struggling with tasks that required him to use his left arm as well. Everyone just seemed to assume that it was a product of the brain damage that had compromised his motor skills, something that would get better with time as he was able to actually work on it in his sessions with the physical therapist.

"Too much background noise?" Blaine nodded. "We don't have to talk, if it's tiring you out. We can just sit here… I'm just happy to be able to sit here and hold your hand."

"I miss being able to just talk to you… to not have to worry about whether or not my hearing-aid batteries are going to die on me or if it's going to be too loud in the room for me to be able to understand what you're saying. And I miss not having to try to read people's lips just so that I can make sure that I'm not missing something vital, even though I suck at it and I just end up making things harder on myself than I really have to most of the time. I miss being able to hear and understand my own voice. And I miss being able to sing without making everyone in the vicinity plug their ears…"

"You don't sound that bad."

"You're just being nice, Kurt. I miss hearing your voice… really hearing it, the way you actually sound and not the bastardized version of it I get through these stupid things." Blaine closed his eyes as he felt Kurt starting to play with his hair. "I want my life back, Kurt. My memories, all of it. I want things to be normal again."

"I know. But I think at this point you have to learn to accept what happened to you and figure out how to move on with your life." Blaine sighed.

"I know that's what I need to do… but I'm having a really hard time understanding why this all has to be so unfair. I didn't do anything to those boys. They didn't even know who I was, except for Karofsky…"

"He was there?" Kurt asked. Blaine had forgotten that he hadn't filled Kurt in on all of the details of the things he had begun to remember, including the fact that he had seen the football player that night.

"At the gas station, before… I don't know if he was here, at Dalton. I don't remember that much of the actual attack. But he was with them, before I got here."

"Then he was probably with them when they attacked you…" Kurt began.

"There were four of them… but I only remember three of them actually hurting me. He may not have been responsible…"

"Blaine, if he was with them, he's just as culpable as they are because he didn't stop them! Please tell me you gave the police his name…"

"I didn't remember at the time," Blaine replied. "And I never saw him, Kurt… there's no way for them to prove that he actually did anything to me. Or that he even came to Dalton with them." Blaine did his best to straighten up so that he could turn to look at Kurt. "I told them I saw him at the gas station, but not when I was being attacked, after I remembered."

"He wasn't arrested, was he?" Blaine shook his head.

"There's no proof… they arrested the three I could identify. I guess none of them would tell who the fourth guy was. I don't know many of the details about the investigation, okay? I don't really want to know them. I'm… I'm afraid that if I know the details it will only make things worse. That there might be some details they left out to spare me the pain of having to remember. And I know it's stupid, because my mom told me everything they knew after I woke up. But… I'm not sure I want to know if there's anything else missing from that night."

"You don't want to remember?"

"Why would anyone want to remember something like that, Kurt? It would be so much easier if I could just skip this whole year, not remember anything until all of it's over and I can move on with my life."

"Forgetting a whole year won't help you get over this, Blaine."

"It would make my life so much easier if it did. If I didn't have to remember and deal with all of this."

"We wouldn't be together now if this hadn't happened… your memory loss took away every reason why you didn't think it was a good idea to be with me. Every single thing that stood in the way of our getting together went away when you couldn't remember me and you were forced to rely on your gut feelings about everyone in your life."

"But there's still so much missing, Kurt… no matter how much I love being able to say that you're mine, it doesn't replace all of the memories that are gone and that I don't think I'm going to be able to get back. I don't remember the day we met. I remember bits and pieces of getting coffee with you, but I'm pretty sure it's not all from the same day. I don't even remember going to McKinley to talk to Karofsky with you… I only know that happened because you told me after the police started asking questions about that day." Blaine closed his eyes as Kurt leaned over and pressed a kiss against his lips.

"I know you're upset, okay? But you shouldn't focus on the bad things or the things you miss about the way your life used to be… it isn't going to help anything."

"It's hard not to focus on that… I'm forced to deal with parts of it every day. And I'll have to keep dealing with all of it for the rest of my life. It's only going to get worse as I get older, and one day I won't be able to hear anything at all no matter how much it's amplified."

"And by then, I'm sure they'll have come up with some fantastic solution that will make it easier for you to hear. They already have all sorts of implantable devices that help people with profound hearing loss… or we could always learn sign language. And you're learning to read lips…"

"I'm tired, Kurt. I'm so tired of being forced to adapt. And I don't know how much longer I can keep doing this."