A/N: HEAVY TRIGGER WARNING! This is a story I wrote because I'm kind of in a mood. Sometimes I write things to get over events, and I share them in the hopes of helping others. That said, this is a short narrative about Kurt struggling to get over sexual assault. It's an AU where Dave actually raped Kurt (and I apologize to all Karofsy fans. I happen to be a huge Karofsky fan, but for the purposes of this story it was just easy to use him as a scapegoat.) No graphic assault. Mention of Blaine. Warning for drug use and angry/aggressive/comfort sex.
Some days are better than others.
It didn't start out that way, but time made it easier to bear. Not because time heals all wounds, but because after enough time goes by there is more distance between him and the pain. Most days Kurt can push it aside, but that doesn't make it disappear. There is always a specter of it following him around, always looking over his shoulder. Actually, he's surprised that no one sees it. He can imagine it standing huge and imposing, looming in torn back robes, faceless, built up piece by piece with his anger, humiliation, and fear.
The fear is the worst part. It sneaks up on him when he least expects it. It's with him when he walks backstage in the April Rhodes Auditorium by himself and every creak of the floor puts him on edge. It's with him when Glee practice runs late and he has to walk across the dark parking lot to his Navigator alone. It's even with him when he has the house to himself and the wind outside knocks on his window. Sometimes he hides beneath his comforter until his heart slows back to a normal pace. Once or twice it has driven him into his closet with his cell phone, crying in hysterics, waiting till someone comes home.
Kurt thought it would get better when David was finally arrested. He breathed in deep, the smile that he had locked away lighting up his face like the sun rising back into his life - a shadow of his prior self lured out into the open, his sense of security returning and his future bright for the first time in months.
It lasted exactly four short days. Four days of bliss. Four days of feeling lighthearted and carefree. Four days until a young woman was attacked in the Breadstix parking lot, another McKinley High School student raped, this time by an entirely different person. A transient. A homeless man passing through looking for the remains of a hot meal.
That's when Kurt realized that just because his attacker had been put in jail that there weren't more rapists out there.
Just because David couldn't hurt him didn't mean someone else wouldn't.
The light went out, the fear returned, and Kurt became a prisoner once more.
Blaine knows. Everyone knows, really. The attack was kept quiet at first, but after David's arrest the story of Kurt's rape and assault was all over the news.
Blaine tries to help. He teaches Kurt to box. They meet in the gym after school and Blaine spars with him, but sometimes hitting the punching bag isn't enough. Sometimes he goes after Blaine too hard. Sometimes he wants to hurt him and Kurt doesn't understand exactly why.
After one particularly violent outburst, which leaves Blaine with a bloody nose and Kurt apologizing through enraged tears, Kurt gets into his Navigator and goes for a drive, circling the city three times before he ends up at the Lima Bean and has the misfortune of running into Sebastian Smythe. Instead of putting Kurt down on sight like he always does, Sebastian sees the swollen eyes and the tracks of his tears and buys Kurt a coffee, because apparently the news of his rape reached Westerville, too.
Kurt hates being pitied – by his neighbors, his friends, by students in the halls at school who've never even spoken to him before - but pity from Sebastian is literally too much to bear. He wants to run away from Sebastian's pity, but Sebastian convinces him to stay. That is how Kurt finds out the secret behind Sebastian's acerbic attitude and his constant sardonicism - the only difference is the man who raped him was a friend of the family, and Sebastian was only thirteen at the time.
From then on, Kurt and Sebastian get together regularly to work through their issues.
Blaine teaches Kurt how to fight, but Sebastian becomes his punching bag.
Blaine is there for Kurt when he needs to be held.
Sebastian is there when he needs more - when he needs to be fucked and fucked hard, fucked till it hurts. Fucked until Sebastian's cock pounding into his ass, his nails scratching down Kurt's back, his teeth biting marks into Kurt's shoulder help make the scars of David's violation fade.
Sebastian understands when Kurt cries during sex. He understands when Kurt screams. He gets it when Kurt hits him and curses and tells him he hates him.
Sebastian knows he doesn't mean it.
Sebastian never thought he had the patience to put someone back together, but for Kurt he makes an exception.
"You know, it's never going to really go away," Sebastian says as they sit together on his bed, naked, Kurt's eyes red-rimmed from crying and Sebastian's chest clawed completely raw. "A piece will always be with you."
"How do you deal with it?" Kurt asks between great heaving sobs, sobs so all-encompassing they burn in his chest and threaten to swallow him up whole.
"Ahhh," Sebastian says, reaching over to his bedside table and pulling out an elaborate looking pipe - long and thin and beautifully ornate, scrolled and carved out of bone with a tiny cup at the end. "This is a little trick I learned when I was abroad."
Kurt watches Sebastian curiously as he opens a desiccated looking pod and puts a pinch of something organic from it into the cup. He pulls out a lighter and sets the substance on fire, then blows it out quickly, letting it simmer into small ember.
"What? You smoke weed?" Kurt asks, unimpressed by the plan Sebastian has come up with.
"No, Kurt. Weed is what you smoke when you want to feel good - when you want to be giddy and stupid and carefree. But you and I, our problems will never go away and we will never truly be free."
"So, what…"
He watches Sebastian suck in through the narrow end, his eyes fluttering shut as he pulls at the pipe and the smoke rushes into his lungs. He sucks in deep and then pulls the pipe away. He holds his breath, his body silent, his face serene, until he can't hold his breath any longer. His mouth and eyes open and a delicate string of white smoke curls up from his lips.
"It's opium," Sebastian explains, passing the pipe over to Kurt, and Kurt, hands shaking, takes it, willing to try anything at this point to make the pain go away. "It doesn't make you giddy or stupid. Smoke this and you'll disappear."
The pipe is light in Kurt's hands and magical in an artistic way. Someone put a great deal of time and effort into creating it, and Kurt has to appreciate that Sebastian doesn't do anything in halves. No stained metal spoons or flimsy glass pipes for Sebastian. He went the full nine yards and bought an authentic, probably insanely expensive, opium pipe. Kurt puts the pipe to his lips and Sebastian watches him carefully. Kurt drags on the pipe, expecting to cough and gag the way he sees first-time smokers on television do, but this thin, white smoke slips into his body unnoticed, filling his lungs as unobtrusively as the air around him, as if his body needs this like oxygen to keep going.
Kurt imagines that some people do.
He wonders if he's about to become one of them.
Kurt closes his eyes and holds his breath, holds it until he feels his body rebel, and when it becomes too much, he lets go. The effect isn't immediate. Sebastian takes another hit before he sets the pipe down on his table and pulls Kurt into his arms. They settle together against the pillows on the bed and wait for the euphoria to hit.
"So what do we do now?" Kurt asks, curling against Sebastian's body beneath the safety of the arm wrapped around his shoulders.
"We wait to become ghosts," Sebastian says slowly, gazing off with dreamy, unfocused eyes into the distance. Kurt begins to feel it, too. His mind starts to disconnect from his body, leaving behind the anxiety, the agony, and the shame. "And in a minute," Sebastian whispers, low and soft so as not to shatter the spell, "we won't exist."