A/N: She's alive! And comes bearing a super long chapter in apology! I'm sorry for the wait, my lovely readers–I'm afraid this chapter and I had a showdown, and the chapter ended up beating me mercilessly, multiple times, until I cried "Uncle!" with what was left of my mouth and let it do what it wanted. What it wanted was apparently bipolar mood-swings and a hell of a lot of angst. Next chapter, hopefully Kurt and Blaine will stop being repressed angst!whores and let me add the humor back in. So much for keeping this story light. I hope the unavoidable appearance of the angst isn't a turn-off! In apology, I'm posting both parts of this chapter at once, so make sure you press "next" after you read today's update!
The first thought that ran through his head after he shook off the cobwebs in his mind was: I can't believe I slept in this. It was coupled with a wave of disappointment in himself, and a few hopeless smoothing motions with his hands. Steaming the cashmere would take hours. He hadn't slept in his clothes since—
That was when the second thought came upon him.
The second thought was: AGHSDGH!
…Well, that wasn't the entirety of the thought. There was a "Blaine" and an "alien" and a few expletives in there somewhere, but it all rushed at him in one gigantic tidal wave and Kurt could only hold his breath and try not to swallow any of it as it crashed down upon him. He jerked up to a sitting position, his eyes darting helplessly around the room.
The third thought probably would have been something about how he was lying on the couch and it was no wonder Blaine woke up so early because his back would never be the same again—or whether or not it was dusk or dawn outside because it was definitely not late afternoon anymore—but it didn't have time to form, instead being interrupted by an "Oh, you're up!"
Kurt blinked and turned around to find Carole in the entranceway to the kitchen, a spatula held carelessly in her left hand as if she had forgotten it was there.
"I was just about to wake you! Blaine told me you just collapsed on the couch when you got home, and he didn't have the heart to move you. Your dad will be home soon, and Finn and Puck just came home, so I thought I'd make dinner." Kurt was too busy trying to figure out whether Blaine's story to Carole was a story or the truth to reply properly, and so instead he found himself nodding dumbly. He turned to search the room.
Carole gave him a warm and knowing smile. Kurt had no idea what it was she thought she knew.
"Blaine's upstairs, honey," she told him, turning back to head into the kitchen. Then, calmly, as if she didn't realize the enormity of the information she was about to impart to him: "I think he's with Puck and Finn."
Kurt choked on a breath as Carole tended what looked like a pork roast. Oh no, Blaine alone with those boys? Who knew what trouble they were getting into?
A jolt of dread shot through his spine.
Blaine.
Blaine was alone with Puck and Finn.
Blaine, who had potentially used some kind of alien power to force Kurt to sleep after Kurt had discovered what he was (kind of). Blaine, who had just been almost killed by a mysterious boy via weird twisting hand motions (unless Kurt had dreamed that part). Blaine, alien/magician/star-trek-character extraordinaire-who-might-actually-be-a-normal-boy-and-Kurt-was-just-hallucinating-maybe—who had left him to sleep on the couch in cashmere (the demon!)—he was alone with Puck and Finn.
Kurt thanked Carole, heart thudding. He didn't know who he was more frightened for. (He also didn't really understand what was going on and he was still tired, goddamnit, which was ridiculous because he had just woken up from a very long and utterly unneeded nap.) He settled for racing upstairs to Finn's room in as dignified a manner as he could. He was sure he was going to have to rescue someone.
…He just didn't know who.
Shouts and a lot of heavy banging emanated from Finn's room, so loud Kurt could hear it from the stairwell landing. Panic swallowed him as a cry suddenly rang out.
"No!" someone bellowed—Finn, it sounded like—"Get away! Blaine!"
Kurt's stomach fell out and he tore up the stairs, taking them two at a time. Oh, god. Oh god! Blaine was doing something, he was—!
"Get away!" came the cry again—and then a louder "NO!" Kurt burst through the half-closed door, his heart strangling as—
Blaine's head snapped around to stare at Kurt with widened, worried eyes. His grip loosened around whatever he'd been holding and it dropped to the ground with a dull thud. Kurt stared.
A controller.
A videogame controller.
You've got be kidding, Kurt Hummel. You have got to be kidding right now.
There wasn't even any incriminating blood on it to suggest he had been short on murder weapons and had settled for something hard and plastic instead.
"What are you doing, what are you doing?" Finn's shouting burst through the haze in Kurt's mind. Kurt looked up to see half of the small television screen on Finn's floor black out. "Oh, no, come on! No!" Finn's agonized wail was punctuated by Puck's disturbing victory dance of success ("Oh yeah! That's right! Puckzilla's a beast and all the rest of you are losers!").
"Dude, why'd you bail?" Finn bemoaned to Blaine, whose face skipped lightly over lost before settling into bemused. "We almost had him!"
"Sorry," Blaine half-laughed. "I was a little distracted."
It was then that Puck and Finn seemed to finally notice Kurt standing in the doorway.
"Oh hey, man, you're up!" Finn grinned. Kurt tried to look calm, and not like he had just barged into Finn's room in a panic for absolutely no reason. "Wanna play two on two? Puck needs a teammate."
"Hey! I work alone, Hudson!"
"Actually," Blaine interrupted before things turned ugly, getting up off the bed. "I think I'm out. I need to talk to Kurt. If you guys don't mind?"
Finn looked disappointed, but Puck just shrugged and turned back to the little TV. "Not a problem, bro," he said absently, resetting the game. "Let's go, Hudson. This time, no hiding behind coma boy's rookie moves; I'm gonna beat you mano a mano."
"Dude, don't start speaking Italian just to distract me from your bad playing," Finn started, and Kurt flinched as Blaine grabbed his elbow and led him out the room.
"We'll leave them to it, shall we?" Blaine murmured by his ear. Kurt's breath hitched in something that was only halfway terror. Blaine led him down the hallway, his grip warm and strong—and somehow reassuring. Kurt felt himself relaxing as they walked further away from the door, Finn and Puck's muted shouts of revenge piercing the silence that blanketed them.
They ended up in Kurt's room. Blaine led Kurt to the edge of the bed, and Kurt immediately sank down onto it. Blaine let go.
He grabbed the chair by the vanity and pulled it up to the bed, sitting down directly across from Kurt and closer than Kurt was normally comfortable with. If he or Blaine shifted forward just slightly, their knees would be touching. Kurt didn't really mind it at the moment. He felt a little ridiculous for having been so terrified earlier—there was something so comforting about Blaine. Really, nothing to be scared of.
Blaine shifted forward to reach out for his hands, knees brushing Kurt's, fingers—
Kurt jerked away, scrambling backward on the bed. He stared horrified at the boy in front of him.
"Don't touch me!" he hissed, the panic and terror slamming back into him like a heavy brick wall. "I don't want you touching me!"
Something that might have been hurt flickered over Blaine's face before it smoothed out into a sympathetic concern. He slowly raised his hands in surrender.
"Okay," Blaine said, leaning back in his chair. "I won't touch you." Blaine's eyes darted to the end of the bed, as if to imply Kurt should move back there.
Kurt watched him warily, and decided to stay where he was. Blaine tensed a little. Kurt prepared himself for excuses.
"You probably have a lot of questions," Blaine announced.
Kurt blinked in surprise.
"Oh," he said. "I wasn't expecting you to be so forthright about it."
Blaine frowned. "What else would I have done?"
"You could have pretended it didn't happen. Convinced me it was a dream."
If anything, Blaine looked even more mystified than before. "Why would I…?"
"You told Carole I fell asleep," Kurt stated flatly.
"That's highly different than convincing her it didn't happen. You did fall asleep," Blaine pointed out.
"But you put me to sleep!"
Blaine's eyebrows rose, as if to say 'your point?'
Kurt huffed out a sigh."Never mind," he muttered. Rearranging himself into a position that he felt was more dignified, Kurt cleared his throat. "I do have questions." He looked up to find Blaine wearing a small, fond sort of smile. His heart tripped before settling back into its rhythm. Kurt cleared his throat again. "Um," he started, suddenly feeling self-conscious. "Earlier. It was you that put me to sleep, right?"
Blaine's head gave an apologetic half-nod. "I'm sorry about that," he said. He did sound apologetic. "I lost control. I meant to just calm you down a little."
"So you can make me feel things," Kurt stated. He wondered if everything he had felt when with Blaine had been some sort of artificial construct of the boy's. All those moments of inexplicable happiness, or that feeling of safety, comfort… if it had all been fake.
Something about his tone must have clued Blaine in to what he was thinking, because Blaine's smile wilted a little (or Blaine was a mind-reader. And that most definitely just became his next question). "I can influence your mood, but I don't do it often," he insisted earnestly. "I'd never used it with you until today."
"You used it with Finn," Kurt realized, thinking back to that weird moment in the kitchen. "When he got down about Rachel." Blaine looked uncomfortable.
"Only a little. Sometimes… it can get a little overwhelming," he said hesitantly. Kurt cocked his head.
"You said that earlier today, too. That I was overwhelming you. What was so overwhelming?" he asked.
Blaine's left leg bounced a little before he stilled it, and Kurt glanced at it in surprise. He looked at Blaine more closely, picking out details he hadn't noticed before. Tightly clasped hands. The tongue that darted out to lick his lips.
Oh.
Blaine was nervous. Kurt found himself leaning back against the headboard in surprise at the revelation. Blaine seemed to take a breath at the exact time Kurt started reeling, and Kurt's eyes widened.
"You don't read minds, do you?" he rushed to ask, holding back his horror. Because that would have been something he would have liked to have known before he had started planning elaborate dates in his mind whenever in Blaine's presence.
Blaine sent him a half-smile and shook his head.
"No," he said, self-deprecation woven darkly through his voice. "No mind-reading."
Kurt sighed in relief.
"Well…" he abruptly corrected. "Kind of."
Kurt tensed.
"What do you mean, 'kind of'?" he asked tightly. Blaine made an abortive move as if to reach out to him, but instead sat back in his chair. Kurt refrained from squirming as Blaine studied him.
"I can… feel things," he said tentatively, "that other people feel."
Kurt was pretty sure his eyebrows had disappeared into his hairline.
"I'm sorry, what?" he squeaked. "You—? Like, all the time?"
"Not all the time, no!" Blaine assured him quickly. Then seemed to reconsider. "Well—"
"Okay, you need to stop doing that," Kurt said firmly. "Choose an answer. You either do or you don't."
"I don't," Blaine asserted. "Or, I didn't. Until—or, maybe I still don't, I—" Blaine let loose a noise from the back of his throat that Kurt in no way found ridiculously sexy (because there was a time and place for everything and now was certainly not the time and place for having sexual fantasies about a mysterious stranger who can influence how you feel). "It's more complicated than just yes or no, Kurt," Blaine attempted to explain. Kurt was unimpressed.
"What's complicated about it?" he asked flatly. "Do you feel things all the time or do you not?"
"I don—didn't, before, but—I guess—I—now I do. I think."
Blaine looked as hopelessly confused about what he was trying to say as Kurt was.
"You do feel things from other people all the time."
"I—unless today is just a fluke, and I'll…" Blaine heaved a frustrated sigh and ducked his head, rubbing the back of his neck. "I don't know," he mumbled.
Kurt studied him carefully. "Does this have something to do with that boy from earlier?"
Blaine glanced up at him. "Flint," he said darkly. "Yeah, probably."
Kurt felt like he was trying to navigate a frozen lake, not knowing where, or even if, it was going to crack. Blaine's silently screaming face filled the crevices of his mind, contorted in—was it pain? What would have happened had Kurt not been there to interrupt?
"What was he doing to you?" he asked softly. "It looked like he was hurting you."
Blaine stared vaguely down at Kurt's red comforter, letting the question dissolve into the fragile quiet now surrounding them. Kurt wondered what he saw there.
"He was trying to take me back to Dalton." Blaine's voice was crystallized glass. Kurt couldn't stop himself from moving closer.
"Dalton?" he breathed, afraid of breaking the air with the too-sharp clarity of his voice.
"What I ran away from," came the quiet confession. "He didn't like that I had left. So he… tried to convince me to return."
"How?" Kurt was almost at the edge of the bed. A devastatingly urgent need to touch the boy in front of him, to understand what was going through his head, bubbled up from his stomach and twined around his arms.
Blaine shrugged lightly. "It's hard to explain in words…"
"So show me."
– The hell?
Where had that come from?
Blaine's head snapped up, eyes wide and lips parted with a mirroring shock. "What?" his voice cracked. Kurt could take it back, right now, deny he had said anything. …But…
He moved swiftly to the end of the bed before Blaine could move away, and shifted forward, their knees touching. Blaine jumped at the contact and tried to lean backward, but the chair had been placed too close and he was effectively trapped. "Kurt—"
"Show me," Kurt said again, firmer this time, reaching for Blaine's hands. And there was something wrong with him, obviously, there had to be something wrong with him to want Blaine to demonstrate on him whatever it was the Flint kid had been trying to do. Blaine had been screaming—or trying to scream—he couldn't scream, nothing had come out of his mouth, but Kurt had seen his face and he had been screaming… And Kurt had just stood there. He needed to feel that. He needed to know what it was that could make you scream and yet be so silent; to scream so that no one knows you're screaming. He needed that.
He had no idea where this was coming from. In the section of his mind devoted to logical thought, he knew that it was a bad, insane, crazy idea. This wasn't something to want. This was a bad idea. But he… (a wink. leering.)
Blaine's face, contorted into silence.
To scream without screaming.
Kurt's hands closed firmly around tanned wrists, and he slowly brought Blaine's hands up to his chest. They were trembling.
"What made you scream?" he asked on air. "Show me."
"I don't—" Blaine tried to move away, but it was so weak Kurt didn't even have to hold him in place. "I don't—"
Blaine could feel what Kurt was feeling, he had said. So Kurt didn't need to explain—Blaine knew the consuming want that was scraping inside of him—was feeling that want himself. Kurt brought his eyes up to lock with Blaine's.
"Kurt, this—" Blaine's eyes were a thunderstorm of emotion even as he pressed his hands firmly against Kurt's skin. "You don't know— I can't—"
Kurt tightened his hold on Blaine's wrists and focused on needing. Blaine sucked in a fast breath, his hands turning to fists against Kurt's chest as fingers of yearning stretched around Kurt's heart. Their eyes stayed like magnets on each other.
"Do you feel that?" Kurt asked. Blaine's mouth opened and the air he had taken in lightly danced across Kurt's cheeks.
"Don't do that," he whispered.
"Am I overwhelming you?" Kurt shifted closer. Thought please. Thought must. Thought want. He watched as it echoed in Blaine's eyes. He felt it tear at his throat and watched as it quickened Blaine's breath. "You said you get overwhelmed. Is this what you meant?"
"Kurt," Blaine breathed, but he didn't continue. His chest rose and fell in uneven waves. Kurt knew his was doing the same.
"Show me," Kurt pleaded. "Please!" He moved even closer, thought even harder, and felt, he felt—
Blaine was suddenly twisting his hands around the material of Kurt's shirt, violently, rough, fast, too fast for Kurt to see, and a sudden spike of terror tore through his throat as—!
All of the need bled out of him. Red, and stinging, dragging in strings from the pads of his fingers, up his arms, across his chest and out—into Blaine, who…
There. There! Those eyes, amber, bolting him in place but showing him an endlessly captivating forever, they were real, they were—
Then Blaine was gone, out of the chair and at the other end of the room.
And Kurt sat struggling to restrain the tears that begged passage out his eyes.
The quiet was oppressive. Only the sound of their uneven breath, no longer an in sync acapella of noise and all the more out of time for it, littered the air. With the need gone, all Kurt felt was repulsion. What kind of person would—want—to be hurt like that? So badly? To force it on Blaine in the way he had… and Kurt had always thought himself relatively selfless.
"I'm sorry," he whispered. He was granted nothing back, save the shaking in Blaine's breath. Kurt drew himself in, setting his jaw. Okay. Fine. He deserved that. Gathering the pieces of himself he had flung messily around the room, he got up to walk to the door.
"You're already screaming," Blaine said from his corner. His voice was like a stop sign, clear and insistent in Kurt's ears. Matter-of-fact. Quiet. Kurt was frozen by it. "All the time. You're screaming. I think you've been screaming for so long you don't even hear yourself anymore. But you don't need me to show you how to do it."
Words flew away when Kurt tried to use them. That wasn't…
"You feel so deeply, Kurt. I think you underestimate how powerful that is. I don't think you believe anyone can hear you, but you're the clearest thing I've been able to hear since I got here."
It felt like Blaine had punched him in the stomach. Kurt wasn't sure he was able to breathe anymore.
"What you… what you were trying to do…"–the faltering confidence in Blaine's voice was like a slap, all the more shocking for the utter lack of genuine feeling that permeated the rest of his speech–"What Flint was trying to do... It was their favorite game at Dalton," Blaine said. "I was the only one that could feel it. So they would see what they could get me to do. If they really hated something, would I hate it too? If violence bubbled out of them like a cancer, would I kill something for them? If they wanted something enough…" Blaine turned to look at Kurt then, smiling wistfully. "My dad once tried to convince me I wasn't gay by hiding a pair of straight boys in the next room and surrounding me with a bunch of Playboy magazines. It was…" he huffed a quiet laugh and shook his head in what could only be fondness. "Inventive."
It was like he was telling Kurt about the weather. Kurt didn't understand. A muffled hum of happiness would have hit his heart as the word 'gay' fell from Blaine's lips, had it not already been swallowed up in an engulfing horror. It had been such an easy and obvious choice a few minutes ago. He wanted it, and Blaine wanted it, so it made sense to make him do it–for the both of them.
But that had been a half-truth, and Kurt knew it. It wasn't 'he wanted, and Blaine wanted'. It was 'he wanted, so Blaine wanted'. And despite his inner rationalizations, he had known that when he was forcing his feelings on Blane. He had used that. He had used that against Blaine. Was he even allowed to be disgusted, horrified, at what Dalton had done? Kurt had done the exact same thing.
He stood unmoving, lost, not knowing what to do or what to say or what to think. Worried the slightest interruption would cause Blaine to dam up this sudden stream of confession. Worried the stream would turn into a flood that he wouldn't be able to handle. He wanted Blaine to keep talking. He wanted Blaine to shut up.
"I hated it. So I built myself walls," Blaine continued in the same straightforward, amiable tone, and Kurt didn't understand. "And they couldn't do it anymore." He shrugged. "And they worked fine until I ran away, and I felt you through them, and I crashed into your backyard."
Kurt swallowed against the lump in his throat. "Why did you feel me?" he rasped. Blaine shook his head.
"I don't know. But ever since I did, my walls have been flickering in and out. And then Flint decided to be an idiot and went all East Berlin on me and they've been crumbled to pieces since." Without even realizing what he was doing, Kurt opened his mouth to point out the incompatibility of that metaphor–and snapped his jaw shut (time and place, Kurt). He blinked hard against an approaching storm of tears.
"I'm so sorry," he said, his voice small.
"I know," Blaine said easily. And he was so sincere that Kurt couldn't believe he didn't mean it, no matter how much he tried. "I'm not blaming you for feeling too deeply, Kurt," Blaine said softly. "You're only human."
His eyes were shaded normal, that weird eternity no longer brimming golden in their depths. But Kurt knew it was still there, just underneath the surface. He felt his heart squeezed by tiny fingers of dread.
"And you?" he asked. "What are you?"
Blaine grinned and Kurt held his breath.
Oh god, this was real.
Blaine was ET.
Blaine looked at Kurt and those familiar amber hallways filled his eyes.
"Magic," he said.
Kurt's remorse flew out of his mouth and up into the air with his eyebrows.
… What?