Fic: "Until My Dying Breath", Chapter Thee Part Two -- Kurt/Blaine Vampire AU.
Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapter Four | Chapter Five | Chapter Six | Chapter Seven | Chapter Eight | Chapter Nine | Chapter Ten | Epilogue
Click here to return to the first half of Chapter Three.
--
That night slips by in a horrible swelter of vivid images and cold sweat.
It’s unfair - wrong, even, that the days keep coming and going in the face of this world-ending revelation. That monsters exist, and Blaine is a hunted man. It feels as though the rest of the world should slip away, but it doesn’t. Time continues to try to march on in the face of the impossible.
Blaine tries. He goes through the motions of existing as best he can, tries to fill his days with some farce of meaning. But nothing can take away from the truth of it. The rawness of the fact that Blaine has no idea - none at all - what to do.
There’s no way he’s making the mistake of trying to reach out for help again. (God, no, never again, not after the officers with their drained little bodies and the words on the concrete and the widow on the news with her running mascara and the terrible guilt that pounds in his chest every time he thinks about it, can’t think about don’t think don’t think don’t think.) If Kurt had been trying to teach him some kind of twisted lesson, then damn him if it didn’t work. Blaine has been made very much aware that Kurt will not hesitate in crushingrippingbleeding anyone who gets in his way.
He’s alone. Completely alone, and helpless in all of the worst possible ways. Trapped in a cage like a prisoner awaiting execution. Kurt has every advantage over him, or at least all the advantages that count. He’s stronger, and knows more, and can track him down if he tries to run. If everything Kurt says it to be believed - which is impossible and wrong, but all of this is too close and real and possible not to take at face value - he can wait for things to start going his way far longer than Blaine can.
The idea of years - years spent like this, hiding and frightened and waiting to be caught - leaves Blaine feeling weak-kneed and pointless, like it’s just a matter of time. Like the clock is ticking down until he fucks up, leaves himself defenceless. Until everything ends in a sick twist of blood and pain and purred satisfaction from the monster that won’t leave him alone.
He can’t rationalize out how his life turned into this. How everything got twisted from normal to unthinkable so quickly. How he went from thinking in terms of two, three, five years from now to being unable to force his mind any further ahead than a few days.
Nothing exists past that.
Nothing can.
But Kurt can’t go out when the sun is up. Before, he had hardly noticed full-length window in the apartment hallway just outside his door. Floor-to-ceiling and without curtains or blinds, it lets golden sunlight stream into the hall just outside his door. He had barely even been aware of its existence, before. Now, he suspects this quirk of architecture and location might just save his life.
On Sunday morning, Blaine leaves the house for the first time since that night on the park bench. He goes because he has to, because there isn’t another option. Because there’s almost no food left in the fridge and he needs to eat, stomach growling hard and panging to show that he’s human and alive and desperate to keep on surviving. Because trapping himself between four walls every day for the rest of his life is utterly unfathomable. Because if he ever manages to get out of this alive, he can’t just miss days or weeks of classes and flunk out of grad school. He doesn’t know who he’ll be if he isn’t a lawyer, and his parents will never forgive him, and he can’t just let it all go to waste.
Because if there is a way to stop Kurt - to face him down, to challenge him, to fight - it isn’t to be found in here. And one day, eventually, he’s going to have to go out to discover it. He might as well start now.
When he takes a deep breath and steps outside, Blaine is more than half expecting for Kurt to come charging from nowhere like something out of a nightmare. His theory about sunlight could be wrong, after all; could be made up of nothing but coincidence and old wives’ tales. His whole body is half-tense from the suspicion that he’ll be slammed against the wall before he can even think; pinned there, struggling and screaming as Kurt rips into his throat and bleeds him dry.
But none of it happens. Kurt doesn’t come.
And so, walking as though in a dream, Blaine slowly exits his apartment and walks out into the brightness of the autumn sun.
He buys groceries, first, at the supermarket a few blocks away. Fresh fruit and produce and enormous packages of ground beef and chicken to divide up and freeze, but also food built to last. Pasta and pre-tinned sauce, dried jerky, an enormous bag of rice that his mother would be proud to see him have in his kitchen. Cans upon cans, the likes of which he imagines would have stocked the pantries of Cold War fallout shelters. Tins of tomatoes and asparagus and mushrooms and baked beans, pre-made soup and ravioli and tuna. Can after can, all piled into his shopping cart; storable food, easy food. Food to survive a siege.
When Blaine goes through the checkout, the girl at the till gives his scores of preserved food a sideways eye that makes his face grow inexplicably hot with embarrassment. He stammers out something about stocking up his emergency kit, and how important it is to be prepared. She raises a critical eyebrow, not seeming to buy it for a minute, and he twists under her ambivalent look. She scans his items and announces his total in a bored-sounding voice while an eager young man fills his cloth bags to the brim.
The total is huge, but that doesn’t matter. His parents won’t even look at the record, most likely; after five years in the city, they trust him to figure out his own finances without making too much of a mess of things. He silently thanks his past self for always being so fucking reliable. (All those years, and so fucking reliable, and this is where it gets him.) It takes four big cloth bags to carry his groceries in the end, and every single one is heavy. The three-block walk home takes him almost twenty minutes.
When everything is put away again - with his kitchen looking more well-stocked than it ever has been before, his mother would be so proud - Blaine ventures out one more time in search of weapons.
He doesn’t know what has the potential to work, exactly: the information his internet searches have revealed is all contradictory and cliché by turns, nothing that couldn’t be made up by someone with an overly active imagination. But the new reports on the news about dented bullets being found at the scene of the police officers’ murder let him know that guns, at least, won’t be too much of a help.
Instead, Blaine tracks down the first likely store that sells knives and buys a few. As long as his forearm with solid handles, things that are designed to look decorative but still have decent blades. If push comes to shove, they probably won’t change anything: Kurt is so much stronger than he is, and maybe faster, and an outright physical confrontation probably could only end one way. But the last thing Blaine wants it to go down without any fight at all, hands in the air. He’ll do what he can if it comes down to that.
Afterwards, his new blades still wrapped up and tucked into his book bag (the one Kurt touched, the one Kurt returned to him, why would he do that why why why why why), Blaine heads to a hardware store and purchases six two-inch-by-twelve inch blocks of wood and a whittling knife. Just in case.
That night, Blaine thinks - really thinks - about refusing to wait up for him. About taking a sleeping tablet, or something. About trying to force himself to sleep without hovering like a lapdog for Kurt to arrive. His guilty conscience won’t let him try it, though. A determined voice in the back of his mind warns him that if he isn’t there, Kurt might pound on the door and scream until one of his neighbours opens their own door to yell at him to shut up. They might take a step outside, and then -
It would be all Blaine’s fault.
It doesn’t help, either, that his body physically rebels at the idea of intentionally sending it to sleep. He’s tried staying up for as long as he can to avoid the dreams, but they just keep coming. Every night like clockwork, and so utterly real they leave him gasping and sobbing and twisting in the sweat-soaked covers, begging for mercy and satisfaction and death in the same breath.
There’s something else, too. Something sick and awful and insidious that twists at the corners of his brain and slides along his thoughts. As much as he tries to shut it out and deny it, there is a tiny part of Blaine that wants to hear Kurt’s voice; to be close to him despite everything. It’s insanity, complete insanity, but Blaine can’t make it stop. Can’t smother the part of him that keens and yearns and craves the sound of Kurt’s voice, the touch of his hand - even with everything he knows Kurt would do to him, if he had the chance. It’s like an infected wound inside his head, or a fragment of madness that has embedded itself inside his brain and can’t be removed. It feels wrong, and awful, and not him - but he can’t make it go away.
He has no idea if Kurt has done something to him - put something into his head, twisted him up and broken him inside. Maybe he just has some kind of death wish, he can’t tell. Can’t separate the parts of his brain that are terrified of Kurt from the parts that want Kurt, and it’s driving him slowly insane.
In the end, Blaine winds up perched on the couch with his head in his hands long into the night. Sitting and waiting with every nerve on edge to hear the tell-tale scratching at the door, or the first few sly tones of greeting.
When Kurt finally comes, it’s well past midnight. He says a few things that Blaine barely registers before he’s off again, quick as lightening, back into the night. It is as though he was never there but for his impression left on the hallway like a stain.
It turns out that a whole day’s worth of time to prepare himself for the beauty of Kurt’s voice does nothing to make Blaine feel any less unsettled to his core at actually hearing it. He shivers, and winces, and dreams of bright red eyes and monstrous faces and soft, sweet hands.
--
More than anything, Blaine goes to class on Monday morning because he can’t think of anything else to do.
It’s ridiculous, being worried about school when something wants him dead and bloody and helpless and every night is spent brimming with horrible, life-like dreams that leave him gasping and hard and clutching at his neck when he jolts back awake. But there is simply only so much time Blaine can spend, reading through quasi-respectable journals on folklore he can access through his student ID and desperately hoping for something to jump out at him.
He’s already sent a few e-mails off; asking veiled questions with hand-waveable implications to official-sounding ‘experts’ on folklore and literature, but while he waits for responses there is little he can do but sit in his apartment, staring at the walls and going slowly mad. Trying to catch himself up with assignments and revision is something to keep his mind off everything, at least, even if his concentration is completely shot to hell.
He only has one evening class, on Tuesday and Thursday nights from four to seven. It’s the only one he doesn’t try to drag himself to. It would be nothing less than a death sentence.
Apparently he looks like shit, because everyone seems to ask him if he’s doing all right in every single one of his classes. Fear and uncertainty and lack of sleep must be showing in his face; tangled curls and heavily bagged eyes hidden behind glasses, a complexion more pale and haggard than he’s used to seeing when he looks in the mirror. Even though Blaine feels as though he’s been eating more than usual, externally he looks as though he’s lost weight. His skin looks... gaunter, stretched tighter across his face. It makes him look weak.
Nothing from any of the classes registers properly in his brain, though. While everyone around him leaves each lecture with pages upon pages of notes tucked away in their notebooks or on their computers, Blaine only ever emerges with a few paragraphs of scribbled chicken scratch nowadays. Messy, half-formed notes with the margins full of doodled pictures of distended hands with claws, eyes with heavy lashes, and twisted glimpses of a face that he doesn’t remember drawing.
Blaine tries to live his life. He does. But very day leaves him feeling more worn; frayed, like old rope. He’s coming apart at the seams, and he can’t help it. Can’t do anything to keep himself together.
The first night Kurt doesn’t come, Blaine jerks awake on the couch having fallen asleep waiting. He blinks groggily at the light streaming in through the sheer curtains in confusion, whole body sore from the awkwardness of his position on the couch.
The incredible realization that Kurt didn’t come - that maybe Kurt has actually lost interest, that he won’t be coming back - hits Blaine like a punch to the chest. He goes through the entire day feeling heady and on edge with near-exhilaration, practically buzzing with hope and desperate optimism that maybe - maybe - it’s all over.
It all gets crushed into tiny pieces, however, when Kurt shows up that night.
“Really, sweetheart. I do have a life, you know,” Kurt hums in amusement, a long nail scraping down the doorframe. There are faint lines grooved into the woodwork, now. Blaine has seen them during the day. If he ever gets a chance to move away, he won’t be getting the damage deposit back.
“As much as I’d like to spend every night with you, Blaine, some nights you’re just going to have to find a way to cope on your own. I’d never abandon you, beautiful thing. I’d hoped you’d know that by now.”
After that, the rest of the days grinds by in a slow slide of uncertainty. Stunted and dulled and throbbing like an open wound, time creeps in a slow mockery of what real life should be like. Restless sleep plagued with sick, heated dreams and nails dragging down the wood and all the empty time in between. Gaping and open, with nothing to fill it, because nothing is real outside of when Kurt is around to put his world on edge and make his blood pound in his veins and sick terror clench at his chest.
The rest of Blaine’s life is left barren and tense and hollow, a shade of everything it used to be as he waits for something to go wrong.
--
The music is old-fashioned and understated around them, drifting over their heads and twisting pleasantly around the columns and tables of the hall. Across the table from him, Kurt is sitting with his legs crossed in an almost feminine fashion. His back is straight in his seat, an elbow resting on the table with his head cradled in his own hand. He looks good, Blaine thinks; hair coiffed up into something intricate and from another decade, like a man out of time. Around them, the pleasant conversation of well-dressed men and women dances in the air.
“Really, though,” says Kurt, head cocked in interest as he holds Blaine’s gaze across the table. His bright blue eyes sparkle beneath sweet lashes. “I’m curious. What is it that you’re so scared of, Blaine?”
Humming in contemplation, Blaine picks up his knife and fork and cuts off a piece of food to give himself more time to find the right words. The plate in front of him has pork, he realizes. Crispy leaks piled on top like a crown, the small round of meat is set in the centre of a large, elaborate dish where it rests in an attractively plated underlay of puréed potatoes. It’s fancy and elaborate, the relatively small amount of food drowned out by the expanse of white plate that highlights its beauty.
Blaine picks up the small piece of meat with his fork, swirls it in the potato pureé, and gracefully lifts it to his mouth in the way he has been taught to keep in reserve for formal occasions since he was eleven or twelve. It tastes delicious, the homey warm flavours playing over his tongue as he chews. It’s nice.
All of the food is nice here, he knows. Although he isn’t quite sure how, exactly, he knows that. Blaine doesn’t think he’s ever been to this particular restaurant before.
“I’m not sure,” says Blaine at last, shrugging slightly as he rests his cutlery back down on his plate. He reaches over to take a sip of wine from his glass - white, to match the pork. It’s tart and pleasant, but it serves to make him aware that Kurt doesn’t have any food or drink in front of him. Not even an empty plate; no wine glass. Just a stretch of bare table cloth beneath his elbows.
For an odd moment, Blaine wonders if he should be frightened. He shakes the thought away quickly enough, though, dismissing it as soon as it occurs to him. There’s no reason to be scared: he’s with Kurt.
A few tables over, a woman wearing a full-length evening gown throws back her head and laughs happily at her companion.
“I suppose... the pain of it frightens me, for one.” Blaine takes another bite of his dinner, then straightens the cuffs of his shirt. There are silver cuff links glinting from between the fabric, which is strange. He didn’t think he owned cufflinks. “How much it would hurt. I don’t... I don’t want that.”
“Beautiful, I keep telling you,” lilts Kurt, shifting so that his fingers are twined together and arched with his chin resting delicately on top. He gives Blaine a fond look; eyes sliding over his face, his slicked down hair. Kurt is well-dressed tonight in a way that Blaine has never seen him before. A crisp white shirt beneath an attractive waistcoat, an old-fashioned pocket watch chain leading into his pocket. His collar is left unbuttoned and open, exposing a delicate length of pale neck as he tilts his head. “I can make it so it doesn’t hurt so badly. I can even make it good, if you’ll let me - most of it, at least. You know that.”
Blaine himself is well-dressed too, he notices. He glances down at himself to confirm: sure enough, he is decked out in a well-fitted grey shirt, black slacks, and a jacket. The bright red of his own tie stands out, shiny and seductive against the darkness. Without having to check, he becomes aware that there are matching red suspenders hidden beneath the fabric of his jacket. He hesitates.
“I know,” says Blaine slowly, nodding and shifting slightly in his seat. Something heavy is settling in his chest; a sadness tugging at his heart even as he tries to ignore it. “But...”
The entirety of the hall around them is attractive and well-lit and lovely, red and gold highlights making the smooth white of the marble floors and columns stand out. Leafy green plants with exotic flowers are dotted around in ornate pots, and everyone at the tables around them is well-dressed and chatting contentedly. The music has shifted to something on the violin, sweet and slow and heady.
“But I’m scared of everything being over,” Blaine admits quietly, eyes falling down to the tablecloth. Even asks he speaks about the fear, however, he can’t actually feel it in any way that matters. It’s dull inside; empty and distant. An idea that he can talk about calmly and discuss but not actually experience for himself. Far away. “My parents, my friends... my school. I was supposed to be a lawyer, and now... now I won’t be.”
It doesn’t surprise him at all, somehow, when a hand slides overtop of his in the middle of the table. It’s ever so slightly cooler than his own, but the skin is unbelievably soft to the touch. Blaine glances up. Sure enough, Kurt has reached across the table and is, for all intents and purposes, holding his hand. A thumb swipes over the flesh of Blaine’s palm, making illicit shivers run up and down his spine. There is an unreadable expression on Kurt’s face; in the twist of his lips, the lines of his forehead.
“I don’t know who I’ll be, if you take all of that away,” Blaine whispers, biting down on his lower lip. Kurt’s eyes follow the movement casually, his thumb still tracing unknowable patterns over Blaine’s hand. Blaine lets him do it; doesn’t pull away.
The quiet conversation of the men and women around them seems to have died down somewhat; either that, or Blaine just can’t hear them anymore over the buzzing in his ears.
“This doesn’t have to be the end,” murmurs Kurt, bright blue eyes locked with Blaine’s own. He couldn’t look away if he wanted to; Kurt’s eyes are in fixed in his mind, imprinted on the walls of his brain and never to be scoured away.
“It doesn’t?” asks Blaine in confusion, blinking against the heat of Kurt’s stare. Kurt shakes his head, tongue darting out to lick his lips as he looks down at their twined hands on the table.
“I like you like this,” Kurt admits, sliding his hand up from Blaine’s palm to his wrist. He pushes back his cuffs, stroking over the thin skin there. It’s stretched tight over the bones and veins and sinew beneath. “Complacent. Coherent. It makes for much better conversation.”
“Oh,” Blaine gasps, more at the touch than the sentiment, his breath catching at the tender strokes of Kurt’s thumb over his wrist. It’s sending shocks of heat and pleasure up his arm and down his spine, fuller and brighter and more than the simple touch should be capable of. There is heat pooling in his belly at the light, barely-there brushes.
“I think, though,” Kurt continues, fingers moving up to deftly undo and remove the cufflink one-handed. He places the small metal fixture onto the table. “That I would be disappointed if you gave up so easily. It’s all I want, of course. But... it’s more, like this. Better. Like teasing myself when I’m already desperate for it.”
Smoothly, Kurt’s other hand reaches across the table. In understated, calm movements he rolls back Blaine’s sleeve to fully expose the skin of his wrist. The lines of the rolled-back cuff are neat and even, carefully arranged by Kurt’s steady hands. It makes Blaine shiver; makes his mouth feel suddenly dry.
“I -” Blaine begins unsteadily, but Kurt cuts him off with a firm look. His fingers trail absently over the underside of Blaine’s bare wrist.
“And I’m sorry,” says Kurt after a moment. Evenly, in a neutral voice. His well-shaped eyebrows furrow together lightly in some internal thought. “Because I don’t think you’re going to let it happen like this, beautiful thing. I think you’re going to fight, and hide, and make everything so much more difficult than it has to be.” He smiles, and for a moment Blaine thinks he sees something almost sad in his eyes. “But it is going to happen. No matter what, Blaine. It’s only a matter of how and when.”
Blaine opens his mouth to speak, to say something in return - but Kurt is carefully guiding his arm across the table with gentle hands. Bringing Blaine’s wrist up to his mouth, his fingers barely having to brush over his hand in order to keep him in place. Kurt leans down so that his nose is maybe only an inch away from the thin skin - and inhales, long and deep and careful. Kurt’s eyes roll back in his head in pleasure before his eyelashes flutter closed, moving in closer so that his lips are ghosting over the sensitive skin. Blaine inhales sharply, his whole body reduced to that single perfect touch. Anticipation is twisting at his insides, making him tremble and strain and hold still and steady -
Before Kurt opens his mouth and bites into the delicate skin, making Blaine shout out loud and his head fall back from sudden spike of pleasure-pain jolting through his entire body. He doesn’t try to wrench his arm away, though, or escape. Just lets Kurt take what he wants, like an offering. Giving himself fully over to him.
It hurts, the slice of skin being torn open and blood being sucked back between Kurt’s sweet lips. The pain is dull and sharp all at once, and it draws breathy gasps and whimpers easily out of Blaine’s throat. Kurt seals his lips around the wound and pulls it all in, drawing Blaine deep into his body and keeping him there, cherishing him. His face should be twisted up and gruesome but it isn’t, the hint of bright white fangs the only suggestion of something out of place. Kurt is just as beautiful as ever instead, the angelic lines of his face twisting into pure bliss as he drinks Blaine down.
And amidst the sharp pain, the sharp touch is making Blaine’s whole body light up with waves of heat and pleasure. He gasps, hips straining up mindlessly in his seat and head tipping back as shocks of sweet pressure twist through his body; building up and building up and making him groan wantonly and shake as Kurt drinks, and drinks, and drinks him down.
They’re in the middle of a public place but no one seems to be looking at them as though anything is unusual. Everyone just keeps chatting and talking and continuing on with their meals and conversations as Blaine arches up and moans and the world begins to swirl and dim and careen off helplessly into shocks of pure heat and need and surrender until -
- until Blaine wakes, gasping and crying out in phantom pleasure, hips bucking up into an invisible pressure as his wrist and whole arm lie aching from the sweet ecstasy of being drained.
The world comes back to him slowly, in pieces. Gasping out wordless noise with his limbs tangled up and twisted in the sheets, pupils blown wide and blinking away the cold sweat threatening to sting at his eyes.
For several long, horrible moments Blaine can feel the slick, hot wetness of blood soaking into the sheets beneath his outstretched wrist. But when he actually manages to wrench his eyes over to look, there is nothing. No gaping wound, no torn out skin. He is intact, and whole, and alive. Still alive.
The stickiness between his legs, however, is real.
The heat of humiliation flushes up through Blaine’s face and sweeps over him in a burst. Now that he’s aware of it, he can feel the afterwards buzz along his skin; the very real uncoiling of heat in his stomach, the shiver of the betrayal of pleasure going through the final shudders through him.
Feeling sick with shame and embarrassment at his body’s reaction to the dream, Blaine kicks off the sheets with numb feet and climbs awkwardly out of bed. He strips off his pyjama bottoms and balls them up without looking at them, shoving them into his laundry basket and quickly squeezing over to his dresser to get himself a clean pair. Any kind of pleasure that might have lingered upon his waking is completely gone, now. Washed away by the heat in his face and the sticky shame roiling in his stomach.
What’s wrong with you? Blaine asks himself in horrified disbelief, shuddering at the memory of the flaring heat and sweet drag of the blood leaving his body. Of how good it had felt, watching Kurt wrap his lips around the skin and pull.
He collapses back onto the bed, sitting with his head in his hands and still feeling weak and shaky. Eyes squeezed shut and fingers running through his bed-mussed curls, breathing heavily and trying to bring himself back into the real world.
It’s been over two weeks, now, since Kurt first came knocking at his door - and Blaine is nowhere close to even having a coherent plan put together. He exists from day to day, going to class and eating and reading and sometimes even sleeping, but he can feel himself wearing thin. The exhaustion of being frightened, frightened all the time... it’s overwhelming. Blaine almost feels like a ghost, sometimes. Drifting through life without any impact of meaning, only ever coming to life with the scratch of nails along his door.
Or the dreams. In the dreams, Blaine feels more alive and aware and awake than he does during the rest of his existence.
It doesn’t help that only a few of the people he’d e-mailed with coded words and hidden meanings have responded to his questions and concealed pleas for help. To his disappointment, all of them so far have replied with entirely innocuous, innocent answers that show a complete lack of comprehension of his actual predicament. It’s not real to them, he’s realized. Not real and present and a threat in the same way it is for him. They’re nothing but scholars, studying old legends and stories to comment on how terribly interesting it all is, or the meaning of it all in the context of national identity at the time, or any number of things that are no help to him at all.
Blaine is completely on his own in this; a single man against an onslaught of oncoming tanks.
He wonders how long he can possibly hold out for.
Sitting there on the bed, head in his hands and allowing himself to drift in the hopelessness, it takes Blaine far too long to wonder what, exactly, woke him up.
At first, he had assumed it was the dream. The sudden, rushing heat that wrenched him out of the fantasy world and back into the coldness of reality. But the more Blaine lets his mind drift back, the more a half-waking memory nudges at the edges of his brain. Something... loud. A banging noise that had stolen into the dream and carried on as he awoke, but that he’d forgotten with the shock of waking.
A pounding at the door.
Feeling suddenly cold and very, very awake, Blaine reaches out for the bedside table to grab his glasses. Plucks them up and slides them on with shaking hands before he snags his smartphone off the tabletop and goes to check the time.
He has been meaning to buy a proper alarm clock for ages, but has never managed to find the time to bother. His phone works perfectly well, and it’s not as though there’s ever anyone to impress. It even has an ‘alarm-only’ function that puts any other kind of alert on silent except for the loud beeping noise he wakes up to. Blaine flicks it onto that particular setting every night without even thinking about it; has been woken up by pointless ‘I love you :)’ texts from his mother or ridiculous long-distance calls from David that could all definitely wait until he’s properly awake.
This is why, when he hits the side button to light up the display to check the time, what he sees makes him feel as though the room has been pulled out from under him:
You have:
7 missed calls
4 text messages
He’s shaking hard, fingers clumsy has he hits the button to skip the calls and check the text messages. There are no voicemails, but everything is from Unknown Number and there’s only one person that it could conceivably be.
From: UNKNOWN NUMBER
November 9th, 2016, 2:36am
Pick up the phone, pretty. I want to talk.
From: UNKNOWN NUMBER
November 9th, 2016, 2:40am
Don’t test me, Blaine. Pick up the damn phone.
From: UNKNOWN NUMBER
November 9th, 2016, 2:44am
Understand that I am not messing around. If you don’t pick up the phone right now, you’re going to regret it.
From: UNKNOWN NUMBER
November 9th, 2016, 3:02am
Fine, then.
Heart pounding too hard to hear, Blaine checks the time. It’s half past five, and a quick check of the windows shows that it’s still completely dark outside. Autumn sun, late to rise.
The banging on the door.
Blaine doesn’t hesitate, throwing himself out of bed and scrabbling at the door handle in order to get into the main room. The fake hardwood is cold on his feet but that isn’t why he’s shivering, full-body tremors that make it hard to stand up. He throws out a hand and turns on the overhead light with too much force, scanning frantically around the living room for some sign of him, for Kurt, leaning on the counter or perched on a chair and waiting for him -
But there is no one there. The room is as empty as it has ever been. Blaine stands in his sleep clothes, breathing hard, completely alone.
Relief floods through him, hard and desperate and real, and it feels as though something real and painful is clenching at his heart. Blaine chokes out a grateful noise, clutching at the fabric of his shirt and breathing. He lets out a tiny, weak-sounding laugh at his own idiocy. Kurt can’t come inside. It’s a fact, not something changeable; most all of the lore he’s managed to look up agrees on this point. There is no way Kurt can possibly get inside Blaine’s home without an invitation from someone who lives there.
He’s safe.
Blaine lets out another, heartier laugh as the rush of frightened adrenaline begins to ebb out of his limbs. He is just about to turn around to go back to bed, however, when out of the corner of his eye he catches sight of a small piece of paper on the ground by the door.
His blood runs cold.
Coming closer on unfeeling feet, Blaine looks at the scrap of paper. It’s clearly been slid right underneath the doorframe, tucked into Blaine’s apartment like a love note. It looks... innocent. Unfeeling, he slowly reaches down and picks it up.
The note is on nice stationary; heavy and cream, someone trying to impress. But that isn’t what he notices. Instead, Blaine’s attention is completely focused on its contents. There are no words on the paper at all. Instead, there is a single drawing of a simple, childish heart. Well-formed and neat, the shape clearly drawn with an ordinary red pen.
It doesn’t make any sense at all. Blaine stares at the note for almost an entire minute, running over every possible meaning in his head... before his eyes drag up to look at the door one more time.
It’s still dark out. Kurt could be right outside, and Blaine doesn’t know for sure what could happen without the door between them. But he cannot help himself. He’s a man in a trance, moving before his sluggish brain has any hope of catching up with his body. Slowly, knowing that it’s a stupid idea and terrified of what he’s going to see, Blaine reaches up and unlocks and opens the door.
Kurt isn’t there.
Instead, there is a box.
White and thick and fairly small, the box is completely ordinary. The sort of thing you could ask to have clothes wrapped up in, if you were buying them from a department store and giving them to someone as a present. No ribbons or bows or intricate patterns; just a box with a removable top, sitting right outside Blaine’s door. It must have been left only a few minutes ago, if the banging sound is any indication.
Fingers feeling numb and head distant, Blaine scoops it off the ground and brings it inside his apartment without waiting for anything else to happen. He closes and locks the door behind him, staring down at it as though it might explode. It’s heavy.
When he removes the top, it takes Blaine far longer than it should to realize what, exactly, is inside.
It doesn’t look anything like the surgical, sanitized images he’s familiar with from Valentines cards trying to be edgy or the diagrams they stared at in high school science class. It’s a little larger than a human fist, sitting inside the box as though it belongs there. There’s a large cluster of tube-like things attached to the top, broken off in wrong places and slumped wetly. It isn’t even really red, although it is dotted with bright red slicks that are soaking steadily into the bottom of the box. Instead, it’s mostly white: there is a thick layer of what Blaine realizes after a long moment is fat clinging to the outsides. It’s veiny. Fresh.
A human heart.
And a note, on that same creamy stationary, tucked up next to the heart itself. Clearly legible despite the fingerprint smears of something bright red overtop the words:
She screamed when I tore it out of her.
I didn’t have to do this.
Pick up the phone when I call, sweetheart.
- X
When the box slips from his hands and tumbles to the ground, Blaine watches it fall in a haze of incomprehension. It overturns when it hits, sending the contents onto the floor with an audible squelch. The world tips, and Blaine is on the floor as well. Slumped down in a puddle of limbs and shaking too hard to think or breathe, with a hand clamped over his own mouth to muffle the scream that wants to escape from his lips.
Chapter Four