2. Shifted
So, welcome to everybody who's managed to fight their way into reading this story; I hope you can stay with me until the end! I'm going to jump right into the action without a ridiculously long Author's Note, but before I go, a quick reminder. Please take the time to leave me a review once you've finished reading! Feedback is invaulable, it gives me the encouragement to carry on and to improve my writing as I do so. With regards to updates, I attempt to add new chapters within a week, but it depends on how well the story is receieved by all of you. Enjoy!
This story is not written for profit, neither does the author claim intellectual rights for the characters or references within relating to 'Glee'. Written for f.58 by 'Howard'.
Blaine was impressed, he had to admit. The room practically stunk of wealth, far greater than his own gatherings. The floor was carpeted in a shag pile rug so thick his polished shoes sunk completely into it, coloured a deep, blood red to contrast the cream coloured walls and the gold gilding on the oversized mirror, the mantelpiece, and just about every other fitting in sight. The gilding even extended to the light switches, he noticed with amusement. Truly this apartment was a triumph of money over common sense. Much like its owner, he reflected. Mrs K, as she'd introduced herself, was currently reclining on the sofa which stretched the entire length of one wall, watching him like a hawk as he surveyed his surroundings. She was dressed for the occasion, wearing an evening gown of a startling red, presumably chosen to accompany floor rug, or perhaps to accompany her thin lips, which were painted with the precision of a micrometer in the same shade. These lips jutted beneath a hooked nose and deeply set eyes, crinkled with age and accented with a smattering of eyeliner. Altogether, the woman gave off the impression of being a scrawny but ferociously rich bird, currently preparing for her next meal. Blaine supposed darkly that she must have been a vulture in a lower plane, and waited for her to make the next move.
"You know of course, what I want to assess" she finally announced, voice scratching like nails on glass. Blaine fought the urge to roll his eyes. It was always the same with the rich ones; they had none of the actual work to do, none of the danger or the responsibility, yet here they were acting like they were committing the act themselves.
"Your future opportunities" he said. She nodded, and the discussion was complete; time for the sacrifice. At some hidden signal, the door at the far end of the room opened to admit two men. Identically dressed in sharp black suits, he guessed that they were henchmen of Mrs K, and almost groaned at the cliché. A rich aging woman, surrounded by piles of money and smartly dressed thugs to do her dirty work. Nevertheless, he knew the reason they were present and got to work immediately. Discarding his dinner jacket gently on to the floor he took great care to undo each of the buttons on his shirt properly. Blaine was fastidious about this kind of thing; presentation mattered to him. Besides, if he had walked into one of the richest apartment buildings in Ohio looking only marginally less wealthy than he actually was, somebody was bound to have suspected that something was up and that would have been really bad news.
Blaine hated doing what he was about to do. Sure enough, he didn't mind the process too much now that he'd been doing it for years, it was a struggle and definitely took its toll on his body but the amazing sensation of slipping between the planes never grew old. No, it was the law-breaking that he minded. Not only was plane-shifting highly illegal and punishable by a fifteen year minimum jail sentence, it was also extremely rare. Participating in a rare crime made him all the more notorious in the crime circles of the state, and being more notorious inevitably made him more likely to get caught. Blaine hated the feeling of guilt that bubbled up in his stomach as he neatly folded his shirt on top of his jacket and sunk down to sit on the carpet. After taking a glance at the hungry look on Mrs K's face, however, his doubts were banished. She wanted this opportunity so badly that she was willing to pay good money for it. Very good money, actually.
The two men now stepped forward, one of them attaching a pair of sterilised pads and leads to both sides of Blaine's chest. His accomplice inserted the other end of the cables into a unobtrusive looking box, which Blaine knew would allow them to monitor his heart rate over the coming few minutes. Mrs K watched the entire process with eager eyes, and stepped forward once Blaine had made himself comfortable sitting cross-legged on the carpet.
"The details you require" she declared, passing him an envelope. He opened it, being careful to hold it close to his chest and out of view of the suited men whilst he read the contents of the paper within. He knew why she had enclosed it an envelope; the details it contained were highly personal and she would not have risked her henchmen overseeing them. After a few moments of tense silence during which the atmosphere crackled with tension against Blaine's skin, he had finished memorising them. They weren't particularly complex, but even if they had been he doubted he'd have had that much trouble with them. Long ago he had gotten very good at memorising things quickly, as soon as he realised that it was impossible to see anything in his own plane when he was engaged in another. The envelope was returned to Mrs K with the paper safely inside it, Blaine shut his eyes, and the process began.
Focussing on taking deep, even breaths, he imagined a small white dot in his mind. With the rush of the sugar he had consumed in spoonfuls earlier, coupled with the tense atmosphere in his current surroundings, Blaine doubted he'd ever get his mind to be sufficiently blank enough for the task unless he used this technique. It was tried and tested, and it had never failed him yet. With the dot vividly clear in his head, he imagined it getting smaller and smaller until it was no bigger than a pinprick, focussing all of his mental energy on making it so small that it eventually petered out into nothing, leaving his mind blank and his energy harnessed. Now came the difficult part. Having shut down his mental processes, he allowed his emotions to fill his mind. The anger came first, as it always did, a rush of heat across his skin, searing the inside of his eyelids as it passed, then the joy, equally powerful but somehow intangibly different. After that things always became a little blurry. Blaine knew that there were no definable edges to an emotion, and they chased each other across the blank canvas of his mind so fast now that they were impossible to make out. He experienced a second of what might have been despair, but it was quickly washed away by something that felt like hope and then something else that seemed close to nostalgia. Finally, the emotions slowed to a trickle and eventually , one last emotion squeezed through before they ceased, the strongest of all, but he had no name for it. Blaine knew that the moment had arrived; he was directly in contact with his soul.
When he was younger and still a pre-pubescent boy eager to learn the secrets of the world, Blaine's grandfather had explained as much as he knew about the soul. Even though the sum of that knowledge wasn't much, it was enough to guide Blaine in his endeavours between the planes. He had never forgotten his Grandad's deep voice intoning the words of wisdom to him as he listened in deep concentration.
"My boy, the soul is not a physical object, if you were to try and find a trace of it, you could not". Blaine had interrupted at this point with a flood of questions, but had been politely refused by Grandad's patiently raised hand.
"The soul is, as far as I can make out, a gap. A gap, in the very fabric of the universe. It is a still point in time, it has no matter, no energy, it is simply a meeting place, for nothing and everything". He intoned this words with a look of grave sincerity, urging his young grandson to acknowledge the weight of the knowledge he was imparting. "Now of course you know about the planes…" he paused, waiting for Blaine's nod "…well the soul is the doorway to the planes. Because each soul is a gap in every plane, so it must also be a doorway to every plane. But only" (here he looked unusually forbidding and Blaine fidgeted) "for those who know how to use them. Leaving your plane is a difficult and dangerous business".
"But how do I use them?" Blaine had questioned impatiently, and Grandad chuckled.
"You'll know how to use them when you're ready, my boy. I can't explain it to you, because I haven't got the words. Once you find your soul, the rest is up to you. Your soul will guide you and will be your anchor".
"Once I find my soul?"
"Now that's something I can teach you" Grandad had said, sounding marginally less serious. He had gone on to explain meditation techniques and suchlike, followed by assigning his impatient grandson hours of 'solitary time' in which to practice walking the road to his soul.
Since that distant conversation, Blaine noticed that the road to his soul had become ever shorter. In his present situation, he was able to walk it in a matter of minutes. He could feel the presence of his soul in his mind; there were no real words to describe it, language simply didn't come close. He had tried to explain it once and failed utterly. The only describable sensation that came of it was the sense of vitality. There was no pounding heartbeat or flexing muscles, just an all-encompassing sense of being alive. Allowing his soul to fill his mind, he reached for the planes. There they were, reaching towards the soul from multiple directions, all jagged angles and edges, like subtly shifting shards of glass.
Searching for the right one had taken quite a bit of practice. At first he had tried to remember the shape of the edge of a particular plane, to picture the outline of it so that he had a point of reference, but it seemed that the edges were constantly growing, moving, changing, and memorising them was useless. After many frustrated weeks, a conversation with Grandad had once again revealed the answer. The planes weren't recognisable by sight, or smell, or anything associated with the senses. As Grandad was always reiterating, "The soul is a construction of emotion, my boy. Nothing more and nothing less". Blaine realised that each plane was definable by the subtle emotion it conjured up. The easiest one for him to grasp was his current plane because it was so familiar. The emotion didn't have a name, Blaine supposed there'd have to be infinite words to describe all the possible combinations of emotions, but it was clearly recognisable. It was best described as the feeling he got when he woke up on a summer's day, with the sun shining and the birds singing and an empty day ahead of him. The promise of a productive day with Nature's blessing.
This evening, however, he wasn't here for himself. He was here on behalf of Mrs K, attempting to find the plane only one above them both. Conjuring up the appropriate emotion (a surprisingly complex one, best described as the feeling he experienced when he was having a nightmare and he woke up from it to find himself safe in bed), he waited. After a short pause, he felt one of the planes calling him, one of the jagged edges beckoned. Readying himself for the shift, he seized the plane with his conscience, and drew it towards his soul. The instant the very tip of the shard made contact with his soul, he was thrown onto the plane, powerless to resist.
He opened his eyes.
The instant the boy opened his eyes, the tension in the room broke. Mrs K was not stupid, she knew that the most difficult part was over for now. She barked orders to the suited men, who ran over Blaine's vitals. His body remained cross legged, with wide, staring eyes, but otherwise completely normal. To the untrained eye, the boy simply looked like a typically healthy young adult and the box interpreting the readings from the chest pads would agree with that assessment. However, something about his eyes spoke differently. Whereas a person normally has a depth and sparkle to them, Blaine's were now blank. It is often quoted that the eyes are 'the windows to the soul'. Perhaps this is better interpreted as 'the eyes are the most visible outlet of the soul'. There is nothing definable in the eyes to recognise as the soul, but it is immediately apparent when the soul's not present in them. Mrs K was a tough woman, used to fighting for her money in whatever ways she could, but even she shuddered to look at Blaine's vacant eyes and his creepy, still breathing body.
About five minutes passed and the occupants of the room remained largely silent. The men checked and re-checked the boy's vital signs whilst Mrs K looked on impassively, disguising her impatience. If this had been any other person, they wouldn't have bothered with the vitals, indeed they'd be doing their very best to extinguish them by now. But they knew their employer needed the boy back alive and if that was what she wanted, that was what would happen. Nobody crossed Mrs K if they valued their life.
She checked her watch, and looked down at the boy on the rug. Something about his pale torso standing out vividly against the rich red colouring of the rug reminded her of a ritual sacrifice. He was lightly muscled without an ounce of unnecessary weight; somebody who looked after their body, but didn't obsess. She reasoned it was probably something to do with his line of work, the mechanics were pretty simple really. The boy required energy to shift between the planes and whilst he was in another plane, he kept drawing energy from his body. She'd heard that it was physically demanding and that it became harder the further away the plane was. She'd even heard of one case where somebody wanted to reach a far off plane and the boy had died before he could return to his body. That was the reason for the careful monitoring of Blaine's body; Mrs K was not going to this trouble for nothing.
Another couple of minutes passed in silence, Mrs K tapped her blood red nails against her wristwatch. Suddenly, there was a noise. Blaine's body groaned quietly, shattering the atmosphere in the room like a china vase. A second later, his mouth opened carefully and enunciated two words with a distant air, as if the speech was causing him great effort.
"I'm through" he said.
Well, this was interesting. Blaine was hovering about sixty feet up in the air, looking down at, well, a forest. A pretty extensive forest too, by the looks of things. Of course it was exactly the same time of day on both planes, so Blaine couldn't make out much more than the vague outlines of tree tops. The absence of streetlamps, car headlights or glowing windows, however, told him that he was a long way from civilisation. It never failed to surprise him how different things could be across the planes. Even though the world remained essentially the same, people's decisions always led them down different paths, he supposed. When he'd left the other plane he'd been in Avenny, the largest city in the state. Here, he could be anywhere. Evidently nobody had seen the same potential for development in the area on this plane as they had in the other.
Blaine sighed in disappointment; Mrs K was really not going to be happy about this one. He focused on speaking, and enunciated "I'm through" carefully, for her benefit. Of course his body was on a different plane and there was no way he could hear himself speaking, so it made sense to form the words carefully. Otherwise the result of his efforts was an unintelligible mush of syllables spewing from his body somewhere on another plane and that was no use for anybody.
Taking care not to deviate from his position in the darkness, Blaine sank directly downwards towards the forest below, the treetops rising up to meet his bodiless spirit. He was glad of his impartiality to weather on this plane; although he could not feel it the wind was whipping the tree branches into a frenzy, tossing them back and forth like the crest of an ocean roller in a tropical storm. He continued his steady descent, filtering through the lashing foliage until suddenly he was free of the leaves and branches and found himself descending into a natural clearing between the tree trunks and beneath him, standing stock still and gazing at his watch with intensity, stood a man.
He was younger than Mrs K, but it wasn't very noticeable from a distance. As Blaine floated down to eye level, he noticed the man's curiously waxen face, lined as if with age but somehow not as deep set as Mrs K's. He was wearing a trenchcoat of the kind worn by gangsters in old mafia flicks and Blaine snorted, knowing the sound would emit from his body on the other plain. Just because he was involved in heavy stuff didn't mean he'd lost his sense of humour. After all, what kind of a crime lord (he had no doubt Mrs K's father was a crime lord, all of her contacts were) actually dressed like a gangster? That would be like opening a fake Rolex factory next door to a police station.
The man stopped gazing at his watch as the minute hand passed the '3' symbol, his head snapped upright and he began to talk.
"Well, I don't know if you're here but I know how these things work and here's your proof of who I am" he said, looking right ahead at nothing in particular as he talked to Blaine. His voice held an Ohio accent, but it was strangely clipped and precise, like a country bluegrass player accompanied by a metronome. Somehow his voice gave the impression of being strangled, just as his waxen face gave the impression of strangling his expressions. Blaine doubted that this man would ever feel much remorse about having carried out his numerous crimes. He held out his arm and tattoed into the skin of his wrist was a series of letters and numbers, a code, matching the code which he had memorised on Mrs K's piece of paper a few minutes before. Information was invaluable, and Mrs K had to be satisfied that he'd found the right man.
"So the situation as I see it…" he announced to the thin air around him, then paused to gather his thoughts, before launching into a complicated series of details which appeared to Blaine (now floating by the man's left arm) to contain most of the criminal events of the surrounding states over the last four years. Taking a deep breath, he began to repeat the sentences in his mind as the man spoke them, knowing that back on the other plane, he body would be faithfully relaying the messages to Mrs K and her pet bullies.
It shocked Blaine a little when he thought of how familiar he was with this whole process. It was a system devised many thousands of aeons ago, to cheat the Great Divide. Every four years at only a few precise locations across the entire planet, a Shifter breaks through onto the plane above and carries back any messages required to their original plane. The system had been in place longer than anybody could possibly remember; there were even records of the ancient Egyptians using it! Mind you, Blaine thought to himself, there had been so many of his kind around back then that every location would have been swarming with them at the four-year point, whereas nowadays they were such a rare breed that just finding one took a monumental effort in itself. If Blaine had been in the same spot a few hundred years ago, he would not have been surprised to have found the air thick with Shifters from his own plane, and the vacant bodies of others currently engaged in the next one up.
For some inexplicable reason, this system had always been exploited by the criminal underworld for their nefarious purposes. Whereas once it had been commonplace for minor drug lords or jewellery thieves to have their own Shifter, nowadays they were an extremely rare and valuable commodity. Blaine knew that he would never have been trusted with the secrets he was currently relaying to Mrs K if it hadn't been for his rarity. Right now he was very glad of the fact that Mrs K needed him in the future; it was his security. He imagined the sensation of cold steel sliding between the ribs of his body and mentally shuddered.
Twenty minutes later, the man was finished. He closed his lips firmly together and without missing beat, turned around and strode off into the nearest gap in the tree trunks, his trenchoat blending into the darkness perfectly. In seconds, he was gone without a trace. Blaine started in surprise. He'd become so used to relaying back the clipped messages the man was spouting that he been playing games with himself, zipping in and out of the tree trunks and the wind howled through them, enjoying the feeling of completely weightlessness that came from being free of a physical body. At the time the man finished he was zooming round and round the broad trunk of an oak tree, being glad that he currently had no carefully gelled hair to mess up. By the time he'd made his tenth circuit, the man had left.
Blaine finished relating the last of the messages and came to a rest hovering in the now-deserted clearing. The darkness was all-encompassing, but Blaine found it strangely calming, floating through the outlines of the trees. He reckoned that he must have been on this plane for about twenty-five minutes. Certainly he didn't think he'd be that tired when he returned. Having eaten several spoonfuls of sugar to provide his body with an extra energy rush before arriving at Mrs K's apartment, he was confident of his strength. Besides, he could normally last up to about two hours without exhausting his body. The thrill of the plane beckoned to him, and Blaine was glad to answer. It had been a while since he had Shifted and right now, he had no desire to return to his employer's company. Floating off surprisingly rapidly between (and sometimes through) the tree trunks, he went exploring.
A few minutes passed and Blaine was enjoying himself immensely. Flying through the trees without any impediment, he could pretend he was captain of a spaceship, or a dolphin effortlessly riding the waves. True, he was eighteen years old now, but what was life without a little fun? He didn't have any worries about getting home because he would be pulled back to his body wherever he was and besides, he didn't think Mrs K would mind now that he had delivered his messages. She would be too busy plotting her future career of crime and fabulous riches to miss him.
The sniff cut through Blaine's conscience like a knife through butter. He was speeding along when he heard it, almost lost amongst the howling wind and the creaking branches, but nevertheless a very human sniff. He spun around in alarm, searching for the source of the sound. Logically he knew nothing could harm him here, but he really didn't like the idea of being in close proximity to someone without knowing where they were.
There was another sniff, followed by a broken sob. Blaine followed the sound warily, drifting out of the trees and onto a track which wound through them. Parked by the side of the track was a large car and behind the car was…
Blaine was certain that if he'd been in his body, his breath would have caught in his throat. As it was, his mental processes slowed to a crawl as he processed what he was seeing before him. A golden-haired vision of a boy was sitting with his back up against the nearest tree trunk. His head was bowed and a faint radiance glimmered from his crown of wavy blonde hair, looking so inviting to the touch that Blaine floated over to get a closer look. As he approached, he realized the extent of the boy's despair. He was crying his heart out, sobs racking his lithe frame, resting his forehead on his knees as his shoulders shook. Blaine felt a stab of pity to his core and wished so badly that he could have been here in the flesh. It was torture to him to see anybody in despair, let alone this beautiful creature.
Agitatedly he floated backwards and forwards a bit, wondering why he felt so affected. It was no secret that he was only interested in men. On his plane, that was accepted as perfectly normal, just a fact of life. In some cases it was even admired. On this plane however, he understood things to still be very different. Conflicted, he continued to gaze at the stranger on the roadside, wondering what on earth could have made him so sad. About five minuted passed, but Blaine couldn't really say he noticed it. He was engrossed in studying the stranger's body with a kind of rapt fascination. Eventually he was startled by a sharp trilling noise which cut through the noise of the wind. The stranger was surprised too, but at least he knew where the noise was coming from. Reaching into the pocket of his dark jeans (Blaine couldn't really see any of his clothes in detail because of the darkness and he lamented that fact), he dug out a slightly battered-looking iPhone.
As he went to look at the screen he raised his head and Blaine felt himself gasp on the other plane. He had been wondering whether the stranger's face would live up to the promised beauty of his slender frame and golden crown of wavy hair. It was definitely a face worth waiting for. A rounded chin hung beneath sensual, feminine lips and a pointed nose, highlighted by the light from the phone screen. Hair flopped over the boys forehead and almost down to his pin-sharp eyebrows, but it was his eyes that captivated Blaine. From what he could see they were an unusual shade, a sort of cross between a moody, grey storm cloud and the soft blue found in the shallow coves of the Mediterranean coasts. Blaine positioned himself directly in front of the boy's face, between his face and the iPhone. The light from the phone screen passed through him, highlighting the stranger's eyes. Blared simply hovered and stared.
Evidently whatever message the boy had received had been significant, because he sighed heavily and made to stand up. Blaine got out of his way; passing through a living organism was really not the most pleasant of experiences. The stranger wiped his eyes fiercely, seeming frustrated by his own weakness, then stretched his shoulders, dropped his phone back into his pocket and stumbled round to the door of his car. Once again, Blaine felt powerless. He wanted nothing more than to be able to wrap his arms around the boy, let him lean of his shoulder and rub his back until he felt better. He knew that he should be returning back now. He'd been out an hour or so already he reckoned and Mrs K would be beginning to get suspicions as to where he was. The problem was, he just couldn't bring himself to leave the beautiful, oddly feminine boy with his obvious distress. He wanted to know why he'd been crying, what could possibly have made him so upset and, most of all, he wanted to be able to help.
Common sense won in the end. As the stranger started his engine hesitantly and began to pull back onto the forest track again, Blaine caught himself. He was so tempted to follow, to see where the boy was going and what he was doing. He was fascinated by the beautiful creature he'd stumbled upon, but he realised the dangers of lingering on the plane a second longer. Mrs K, although willing to trust him with a degree of information in return for his services, would not tolerate him exercising her hospitality any further. It was only the thought of being able to return to this plane at some point soon when he was on his own that stopped him from following the boy then and there and ignoring Mrs K. He told himself firmly that he must leave immediately and taking one last, wistful look at the tail-lights of the car now dwindling into the distance along the track, he turned to face the trees once more. Concentrating on clearing his thoughts, he allowed his emotions to flood through his conscience once more. Going back was always easier - it was as if his soul was willing him to be connected to his body once again. The emotions slowed to a trickle, the last un-named one slipped through and he was there, touching the warm, comforting presence of his soul. A few moments later, he was being thrown back onto his original plane and feeling, for the first time in his life, no sense of relief.