Fic: 31 Magic Moments- Missing Pieces
Title: 31 Magic Moments- Missing Pieces
Fandom: Glee
Characters (Pairings): Kurt, Puck; (Kurt/Puck)
Genre: Supernatural, AU
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Violence
Spoilers: Blanket through season 2, to be safe
Word Count: 9,674
Challenge: 31 Days of Puckurt in January 2012
Summary: Kurt wakes on a May 8th that’s really a November 12th. Oh, and also, he can make chairs float with his brain now. So, that’s normal.
Disclaimer: I do not own Glee.
Author’s Note: One of the mini-verses. This one really wasn’t meant to happen (oops). Apologies for the poorly-explained elements, which are many.
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Day 20- Memory
‘There’s nothing wrong with me,’ Kurt thinks frantically, moving through the halls just slow enough to be able to call it walking. ‘There is nothing wrong with the way my eyes just started glowing or the way that chair just sort of floated off the floor for a minute there. Nothing. Oh, God.’
He forces himself to stop, to take a deep breath and try not to hyperventilate in the middle of the school hallway because people are in classrooms on either side of him and if he doesn’t calm down they’re going to hear him freaking out. And if they find out…
‘Oh my God they’re not going to be happy when they see my eyes and they’re going to send me off to some government lab or something and doctors are going to dissect me and my skeleton is going to be on display in some research laboratory and some 40-year-old guy is going to impress his son by telling him about the freak of nature and the condition he got to name because he was the one in charge of the experiments oh fuck oh God.’
He whips around when a bang sounds off to his left and finds that one of the lockers has been blown open and smashed against the one next to it. ‘No no no.’ A teacher pokes his head out of one of the classrooms and glances around, finding only Kurt.
“Keep it down, please,” the man says sternly. “My class is taking a test.”
“Uh, sorry,” Kurt says, giving him a shaky smile until he closes the door again. Thank God, his eyes must have stopped glowing for the moment. His eyes… glowing…
‘Oh, fuck.’
He needs to get out of here. He needs to go home and lock himself in the basement until things stop moving around him when they’re not supposed to.
It takes him a couple of minutes to fish his keys out of his pockets with the way his hands keep shaking, even though he’s made it out to the parking lot already and he’s probably safe, but eventually he manages to pull them out and fumbles for the right key.
“Hey, Ku- Oof!”
“Puck!”
Puck is lying sprawled on the ground, raising himself up on an elbow and rubbing his face. There’s a brick lying beside him.
‘Where the hell…’ Kurt turns his head carefully toward the school and nearly whimpers when he sees the empty spot where the brick had been before it shot itself out of the building and into Puck’s stomach.
“Jesus, Puck, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” He’s babbling, hoping his eyes are still normal because he doesn’t think he could explain the glowing.
“What the hell did you do that for?” Puck grumbles, but he accepts Kurt’s offered hand and hauls himself onto his feet.
“I didn’t!” Kurt says. “It just… it just shot out of… the building…” Lame, lame and terrible and there’s no way Puck’s going to believe him but how could he believe it was Kurt? Don’t let him find out; please, please don’t.
“Yeah, like I don’t know what this shit looks like?” Puck says. “Your eyes are still white. Don’t bullshit me. The hell did I do wrong, anyway?”
His eyes are white. Oh, God, they’re glowing again and Puck’s going to tell someone because this is way too freaky for him to keep it to himself no matter how much Kurt begs.
“Hey, are you okay, babe?” Puck says, leaning in close and finally looking more worried than annoyed. “You look like you’re gonna pass out or something.” He reaches out a hand and grabs Kurt’s shoulder, steadying him with the strong grip.
“Don’t tell anyone,” Kurt says, breathing hard. “Please don’t. I don’t know what- It just happened and I don’t know what’s going on but you can’t tell anyone, okay? Please.” He can’t deal with this. He moved a chair with his eyes (or something) less than ten minutes ago and already he’s been found out, and he’s still not thinking straight so he has no idea how to convince Puck to keep this a secret, and there’s his skeleton again, locked in a glass cabinet in the office of some professor who got tenure over this. Is that how tenure works?
“Don’t tell anyone what? That you knocked me over? Yeah, I think I’ll be keeping that one to myself.” Puck grinned. “Seriously though, babe, you’re starting to freak me out.”
“Well, of course I’m freaking you out. I’m freaking myself out, too, because I just pulled a brick out of a building with my mind and how are you not shocked by this? And… and why the hell are you calling me ‘babe?’” Kurt slumps further and further as he yells, and by the end of it, Puck can’t keep him upright anymore. He sinks to the ground, back pressed against one of the tires of his car and fists curling into the fabric of his pants.
“Kurt,” Puck says slowly. “Kurt, look at me.”
He can’t, though, because he was having a perfectly normal afternoon just fifteen minutes ago and he doesn’t understand what went wrong. He doesn’t understand the way Puck cups his head carefully in those large hands and forces him to look up.
“What happened?” Puck says.
“I don’t know,” Kurt says, still slightly hysterical. “I was just… One minute I was in the bathroom and then my eyes started glowing in the mirror and then this chair just sort of lifted up off the ground. And then I slammed a locker and sent a brick flying at you and you said my eyes were white, just like before.”
“Right,” Puck says, looking more confused now. “So?”
“So?” Kurt’s yelling again. “So, what the fuck is going on, Puck? Why doesn’t this surprise you more? Because I am freaking out over here and trying to understand it and you still haven’t told me why you were calling me ‘babe!’”
“But that’s…” Puck trails off, searching his eyes and looking more horrified by the second. “You don’t remember?”
“Remember what?” Kurt says tiredly, energy vanishing under Puck’s intense stare.
“I don’t know,” Puck says finally. “Me? I guess?”
“I remember you, Puck. I know your name, don’t I?”
“Yeah, but…” Puck sighs. “Okay, so here’s what we’re gonna do. You’re gonna come with me and we’re gonna figure something out, because your head is fucked up right now. Come on.”
“Wait!” he says when Puck pulls him to his feet and starts them toward his truck. “What- How do you know… anything?”
Puck turns to him, and, just for a second, his eyes glow white.
Kurt stares.
“Yeah,” Puck says. “So come on, Kurt.” With that, he grabs Kurt’s hand and starts walking, but Kurt tugs his hand back just as quickly, confused.
He starts walking to the truck on his own to avoid the hurt on Puck’s face.
What day is it?” Puck says quietly once they’re in the truck.
“Uh, May 8th?” he tries, but he can tell by the look on Puck’s face that he didn’t get it right.
---
Day 21- Barriers
Backlash.
That’s the word they’ve all been repeating ever since some man Kurt’s never seen before sat down in front of him, pressed a hand to his forehead, and went into his mind.
It had taken them about five minutes to convince Kurt that was possible, and another twenty to get him to agree to do it, though the way the man’s eyes glowed white was vaguely comforting for some reason he couldn’t place. It felt… weird. His thoughts refused to focus while the man was rummaging through them, and he kept picking up flashes of emotion from one or the other, so quickly that he felt like he was being flung back and forth between extremes.
Then everything blurred and they hit some point of blank nothingness that scared Kurt more than anything he’d seen so far today.
Backlash.
There are about eight or ten people huddled in a circle, talking quietly and rapidly, and from the way they’ve been throwing out names of people who aren’t here, he’d guess they’re not the only ones. The more he thinks about it, the more he wants to scream at them to explain who the hell they are and how they all know him and why their eyes all glow.
Puck’s hand on his wrist holds him back.
Which, normally, he wouldn’t care about, but Puck has been the only one who actually seems concerned about him and not this ‘backlash’ thing that they all seemed to think was a problem for them, when he was the one with no memory of… Actually, no one had bothered to tell him what the date was, so he really wasn’t sure.
“Puck,” he says quietly, pulling the boy’s angry gaze away from the whispering group.
“What?”
“What day is it?”
Puck fidgets, fingers twitching slightly against his wrist. “It’s fine,” he says. “They can fix it and then you’ll remember the day anyway.”
“Puck…”
“Alright, boys.” Kurt jumps, whirling to find that the group has finally broken up and one of the men is speaking to them. “Here’s the problem. You both accepted an unspoken contract of sorts and-”
“What the fuck?” Puck growls. “We didn’t accept anything. We just woke up one day with our eyes glowing and got dragged out of our houses to have you guys tell us about your freaky society or whatever.”
Suddenly, Kurt finds himself very distracted from the question of what was wrong with his memory in the face of finally getting some information about where the glowing came from.
“They did it?” he tries to ask, but his voice is nearly lost when the man speaks up again.
“You did,” he informs them calmly. “We sent out the signal, yes, but it only enters willing bodies that it finds compatible, as we have explained. Part of you felt its offer and said yes, and therefore you did accept the contract and agreed to become a part of this. You should know how important this is.”
“Yeah, you said.” Puck’s hand tightens around Kurt’s wrist. “I get that. But it’s not like we knew, okay? And what is this shit?”
He gestures to Kurt with his free hand and Kurt’s immediate reaction, frankly, is to raise a disbelieving eyebrow. Why the hell is Puck so worried about this if he thinks that badly of him, if he wonders why they would ever want to include Kurt in this in the first place? It’s probably ridiculous to feel offended when he doesn’t even know what this is, but it’s an instinctive reaction.
“Sorry,” Puck says quickly when he sees Kurt’s look. “I meant your memory and stuff.” He turns back to glare at the man again. “Someone did something to him, right? You never told us there would be people targeting us for this. You should have told us.”
‘Nevermind,’ Kurt thinks. ‘This is only getting more confusing. Can’t they just skip to fixing my brain?’
The man looks at him hard. “We can’t, actually.”
“W-what?”
Oh, right. They read minds. God, how did he get himself involved in this?
“That’s what I’ve been saying,” the man continues. “No one did anything to him.”
“Uh, yeah they did. ‘Cause he thinks it’s May 8th, okay?”
“No. He did this to himself.”
Puck doesn’t seem to have anything to say to that.
“It’s called backlash.” There’s that word again. “It’s been known to happen in moments of distress. The power builds up and doesn’t have anywhere to go, so it fires back against its maker’s own mind.” The man looks upset as he repeats: “He did this to himself.”
“Why?”
“How should we know? There’s a giant hole in his mind. All we know is that it was self-carved. And this is a problem for us.”
“For you?” Puck nearly shouts, and Kurt’s hand is nearly numb by now.
Carefully extracting his wrist from Puck’s grasp and ignoring the startled look the boy shoots him, Kurt takes a step forward and tries, desperately (though he hopes it doesn’t come across like that), to take back some kind of control.
“Why is it a problem?” he asks.
“Because we’ve spent months training you-” Months? God. “-And, apparently, nothing to show for it. And that is not something we can afford right now. We needed both of you.”
“So find more people!” Puck says. “If we’re so important, can’t you just stick this crap in a bunch of other kids? Then you’ll have plenty of people to fight in your war.”
Kurt startles at the word ‘war.’ What the hell did he get himself into?
“We can’t,” the man says sternly. “Do you know how rare it is to find people who accept what we can offer? We send the signal once a year, and more often than not get nothing back. This year, we got three answers: you two, and a girl who wants nothing to do with this and rejected the power before it could even attempt to bond with her. So yes, Puck, you are important, you are necessary, and we need to deal with this now.”
“Can’t you fix it?” Kurt says carefully. “I mean, if you have mind powers… Right? That’s what this is? I mean, you read my mind and I moved things without touching them, so. Yeah.”
“We could try,” says a woman who has been hanging toward the back of the crowd until now, “but you wouldn’t want us to. Your memories, and most of your powers, are bound up tightly behind every possible defense your mind could construct. It’s a defense mechanism. If we tried to break past it, there’s every chance your mind would shatter before we could get close.”
“So, what, I’m stuck like this?”
“Unless you manage to pull down some of the barriers, yes. Unfortunately, the tools that would help you with that are locked away.”
“Well then why the hell can I still move things around?” Kurt says, a little more frantically than before.
“Telekinesis is the least complex element, and the least threatening. It’s not surprising it slipped through. It’s not an infrequent occurrence in cases like yours.”
“Fuck you.” That’s probably stupid, but he doesn’t care anymore. He doesn’t want to be a case; he wants to be better. He leaves, storming out of the building and trying to hold in a panic attack whenever he starts to consider what could have happened to make this seem like the best option.
He sits on the sidewalk, curling his hands in his hair and breathing hard. When a hand comes down on his shoulder a minute later, he looks up.
“Let’s just go, Puck, okay?” he says wearily when he sees who it is. “And you really should tell me the date, so my dad doesn’t freak out when I don’t remember basic information.”
“Yeah, okay,” Puck says. He still looks angry. “Come on.” He pulls Kurt up from the ground, and this time, when he takes Kurt’s hand to lead him to the car, Kurt doesn’t pull away.
He doesn’t want to see that hurt on Puck’s face again, but he also doesn’t want to know why it would be there, or why Puck seems so upset every time he’s reminded of what Kurt doesn’t remember.
When they’re in the car and Puck still hasn’t bothered to tell him the date, Kurt gives up and pulls out his cell phone to check the numbers at the top of the display.
It’s November 12th.
---
Day 24- Familiarity
Kurt tosses his notebook down onto the table in front of him and lets his head fall into his arms, groaning.
Even though he can’t see it, he’s entirely sure Puck is smirking when he says, “Having some trouble there, Kurt?” He can hear it in his damn, smug voice.
“Shut up,” he mumbles, “and help me.”
“Say please.”
Raising his head a couple of inches off his folded arms, Kurt glares at Puck, who, sure enough, is smiling at him from across the table. “Fine. Please wipe that annoying smirk off your face and come over here to help me with the one subject you inexplicably excel in despite skipping the class for at least two consecutive years to take naps and have sex with slutty cheerleaders.”
Puck rolls his eyes. “Well, when you ask so nicely…” He stands up and grabs his chair to move around the table anyway.
It’s incredibly unfair that Puck manages to be so good at math with so little effort, just like it’s unfair that Kurt dropped almost a semester’s worth of school out of his head for no reason (he’s been assured there is a reason, yes, but he refuses to acknowledge it without proof of its existence). Thankfully, through some process that was explained to him as being because there are different sorts of memory and that affect the way they’re stored, most of the things he learned are still accessible in his mind even though the memories of how got mashed up into a ball in the back of his brain.
Physics concepts stuck with him, even most of the equations fit into place once he read over them once, though application is harder. It’s hard to tell if he remembers history, because they teach the same thing every year so maybe he just knew it already, but it works either way, and he just had to “re-read” a couple of books to get caught up in English. French words fell into his head easily, he was delighted to find. But math… Well, he’s never been good at math. Which makes the physics hard, too, and that’s a lot when he’s already preoccupied with not slipping up around his family.
That got easier pretty fast. The first week or so was nerve-wracking, and he stumbled constantly trying to fake familiarity with things that happened “just two days ago,” but with time passing came the building of new memories and conversation was easier. Still, he likes to escape as often as he can, which is why he’s at the library at 6:00 pm on a Tuesday with Puck, who has insisted on following him practically everywhere for the last three weeks.
Puck drops the chair down next to him just loud enough to make the girl studying at the next table over glare and slam her book shut pointedly, standing up to move to a quieter area and leaving them alone in their little corner.
“Okay so you’re doing what, now?”
Pulling his notebook reluctantly back toward him, Kurt points out the problem he’s been struggling with. “Log functions.”
“Seriously? Those are boring.”
“Yes. They’re boring and stupid, but I don’t understand them and I need to do well in the class, because I’m trying to go to college and have some kind of functional career besides ‘saving the world with my awesome superpowers,’ or whatever they’re calling it. Especially since I seem to be so spectacularly bad at that.”
Also because he’s still not totally sure what this whole ‘saving the world’ thing really entails. It’s nothing to do with his missing memory; Puck doesn’t know either, because neither of them are every really told anything. Words like ‘war’ and ‘humanity’ and other dramatic things get thrown around, but basically Kurt is getting the idea that they’re some kind of reserve team, patiently waiting around to get called in when or if some specific threat ever pops up.
Okay, so he figures they probably have the right to some of those dramatics, because the powers, which he’s slowly learning again even though he only has access to something like a tenth of what they should be, are pretty amazing, so there’s probably a suitably incredible threat that goes along with them. It’s just that he doesn’t ever know what it is and that makes the whole thing rather anticlimactic. Puck seems to agree with him.
The only thing that makes it more real is the way they keep discussing whether his backlash thing might be connected to this unnamed threat (which he figures is unlikely, given that it’s happened before to other people and it’s usually triggered by something normal, from what they tell him), and the way Puck has basically become his bodyguard.
When he got home at the end of that day that turned out to be a totally different day than he’d thought it was, exhausted and confused, he peeled off his shirt and his scarf to find the ache he’d been feeling wasn’t just in his mind. Bruises littered his chest and ringed his arms and, scarier than the rest put together, stained a dark purple circle around his neck.
He hasn’t mentioned this to Puck. They’re gone by now, anyway.
“Alright you are totally doing the graph wrong,” Puck informs him, reaching for the paper and brushing against Kurt’s arm as he does so. “Here.”
Kurt is paying attention. He’s paying very close attention to the explanation about a boring math function and not at all allowing himself to be distracted by the way Puck’s chair is so close to his that their thighs brush together every time one of them shifts a little.
It’s a little astonishing how suddenly Puck has jumped into his life. Though, he supposes, it wasn’t really all that sudden, it just seems like it was because it happened during the six months he’s lost. Puck had been perfectly comfortable with him even before this, anyway, and tended to spend time at his house ever since he reconciled with Finn.
Once, a day or two after he found himself very suddenly in November, Kurt asked Puck why he felt the need to follow him everywhere. Puck had shrugged and replied, “Just don’t want it to happen again, dude.” At Kurt’s raised eyebrow, he continued. “We kinda got closer, with the whole superpower thing, you know?”
“Mutual inclusion in a secret society is one way to forcibly strengthen a friendship, I suppose,” Kurt said, and Puck just shrugged again, avoiding his eyes in favor of leering at one of the new freshman Cheerios strutting past.
It’s weird, sometimes. Puck will slump onto the couch in a way that kind of makes him slump on Kurt, too, or he’ll throw an arm around Kurt’s shoulder, but he almost always jerks himself away a second later. For a while, Kurt worried that maybe Puck managed to find out about the bruises somehow. Now, he just worries for Puck’s sanity. And his own, sort of, because his heart beats right through his chest whenever that happens and he can’t even think of a better way to get it broken.
It’s that thought that spurs on his next decision, because, hell, if he’s going to insist on doing this, he’s going to do it right instead of letting it fester like he did with Finn (and, boy, isn’t that something he never wants to do ever again).
To his left, Puck is still pointing at the paper and explaining something Kurt’s never going to remember because, okay, he’ll admit that he’s really not paying any attention at all, not when the way Puck’s lips move to form the words is far more interesting than the words themselves, and Kurt realizes he doesn’t even have to lean in at all because they’re already right next to each other so he just takes a deep breath and hopes he’s reading at least some of the signs right.
“Puck,” he says, waiting until the speech about logarithmics and asymptotes stops and hazel eyes flicker up to meet his. “Don’t freak out, okay?”
Puck stares at him for a split second and then he grins, wide and brilliant and disbelieving. “That’s what you said the first time,” he says, just barely, because the moment the last syllable leaves his mouth, Kurt moves forward and kisses him.
It’s not until he’s wrapping an arm around Puck’s neck and opening his mouth to the swipe of Puck’s tongue against his lips that he registers the words “first time” and what they might imply, but it seems incredibly unimportant compared to the strong hand gripping his waist tightly to pull him even closer.
He keeps kissing Puck, not because it feels so oddly familiar (like the physics formulas he’s re-learned but so impossibly different), but because it makes warmth gather in his chest and lights explode behind his eyelids.
---
Day 25- Attempts
“It just sounds like a really crappy idea, Kurt.”
“It’s not, though. I keep telling you. It’s my mind; shouldn’t I know how it works?”
“Well, yeah, but…”
“Exactly. So, stop arguing, okay?”
“Kurt.”
“Puck. At least until after school, alright? Unless you want to broadcast everything to anyone who happens to be bored enough to listen in on our conversation.”
Scowling, Puck snaps his mouth shut around any further protests.
“Alright,” Kurt says, trying his best to form a smile that’s more reassuring than apprehensive, though he isn’t sure how well it goes. “So, physics?”
“Yeah.”
Hopefully, he’s done the right thing telling Puck at the start of the day and leaving him time to think instead of springing it on him last-minute. They’re forced into mutual silence by the crowds of students around them all day, which is either going to give Puck time to accept the necessity of the plan or allow him to simmer quietly and wall himself into his initial opinion. Kurt’s kind of hoping for the first of those two possibilities.
It’s too late to change his mind now, anyway, since he’s already done his best to explain and they’re walking to physics before the bell rings, carefully maintaining their six-inch rule at all times. Puck’s hand is doing that weird twitching thing that it’s been doing… well, pretty much ever since he started forming memories again, but now he actually knows what it is, recognizes the aborted gesture.
He’s walking pretty blindly on the assumption that they had a good reason not to tell anyone the first time around, and that it applies to this, too. Even if Puck isn’t talking about it.
But when they’re sitting at the same table in class, he lets his fingers brush against the back of Puck’s hand, out of sight of everyone else in the room. Hopefully the gesture, at least, comes across as reassuring in a way he’s sure his voice couldn’t quit manage.
The rest of the day is spent drifting in and out of classes, ignoring the looks he gets in the hallways (easier today than any other day before) and paying attention for a grand total of about five minutes in history.
-
Puck is leaning against his car when he gets out at the end of the day; which, really, is less overbearing than the usual, because Puck’s fallen into the habit of waiting at the door of his 8th period class and walking him either to Glee or the parking lot. Kurt generally lets it slide, because it’s not like there’s no reason for the paranoia. Today, he supposes, Puck wanted an extra minute or two to think.
Maybe even more than a minute or two, since Puck doesn’t say anything even when Kurt unlocks the doors and lets them into the car, and the drive home is long and quiet.
“Okay,” Puck says finally, when they’re standing in Kurt’s bedroom, door closed against the completely empty house that Kurt planned out in advance. “Just so we’re clear: this is stupid.”
“Maybe,” Kurt admits, “but-”
“Definitely.”
“But,” Kurt continues, glaring, “it’s not like there are a lot of non-stupid options lying around for us to try first.”
“They said you should do it yourself.”
“And I have been trying for weeks! Don’t you think maybe that’s a sign that it’s not working?” He lets himself fall onto the bed, huffing. “I can’t do it myself, alright? I think they were wrong. I think I’m too close to fix anything.”
“Yeah,” Puck says, “but staying like has gotta be better than things going wrong, right? I mean, they were saying something about your mind, like, breaking. I don’t even know what that means!”
“Puck, it’s okay,” Kurt tries to assure him, tries to pretend he’s not shaking a little bit himself at the thought of what that phrase implies. “If it looks bad, you can… You can pull back, or something, but I still think we should try, okay? I’m tired of missing things.”
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” Puck warns.
“But you know me. That counts.”
Puck runs a hand over the stripe of his hair, sighing. “Okay, fine. But warn me as soon as it’s pushing too much or… or if it starts hurting or something.”
“I think it’s supposed to hurt at least a little,” Kurt says, but at Puck’s glare, he continues. “No, okay, sorry. I’ll let you know.”
“Okay.” Puck sits down in front of him on the bed while Kurt tries to shift himself around so he’s actually leaning back onto the pillows, just in case he needs the support. Awkwardly, Puck raises a hand, then puts it back down, then picks it up again. “Am I supposed to touch you or something? ‘Cause the other guys, they did it once or twice, but I dunno if it’s just for show or what.”
“Couldn’t hurt,” Kurt says, trying to will his breathing steady. ‘This will work,’ he tells himself. ‘This will work just fine.’ One hand comes up and toward his head. “Don’t mess up my hair,” Kurt reminds him, and Puck lets out a short, startled laugh before redirecting the hand to rest against Kurt’s cheek.
After a moment, Puck closes his eyes, then his face scrunches up oddly and he opens them again. “I look at you, right?” he says. “Probably should keep my eyes open. Yeah?”
“How would I know?”
“This feels weird,” Puck sighs, and he shifts himself half an inch closer on the bed. “I mean, seriously? We have no idea what the hell we’re doing with this. They’ve only been teaching us the easy stuff. Are you sure we should be fucking with this kind of thing?”
“How did we get to the point where I’m the one saying ‘go for it’ and you’re the one being cautious? It’s my mind, okay? You’re not supposed to be nervous about it.”
“Yeah, but if something goes wrong then it’s my fault.”
Fighting the urge to yell to just get on with it already (because, honestly, this whole confident attitude thing isn’t going to last much longer), Kurt takes a deep breath and reaches over to take the hand that’s not cupping his face and rub his fingers along the tan skin. “I’ll tell you if you need to stop, really. I’m trusting you, Puck, with a lot. So trust me too, okay?”
He knows how easily it can go wrong. His mind has been pulling up images of just how bad it can get and some things that are probably worse, ever since he let the silly idea gain any weight in his head.
But he can’t stand this state of not knowing anymore, can’t keep being scared of something he can’t even put a name to, because he blocked it out himself.
And he hates what he’s unintentionally been putting Puck through for over a month, now; making him rebuild their relationship from halfway to scratch, from a casual friendship based mostly on proximity to… whatever they were before November 12th, something that he can’t remember. This is bad for both of them. It’s just harsh luck that means he has to ask even more of Puck in order to fix it.
He’s sure this is the right decision, though. He has to be, otherwise everything falls apart.
“Okay,” Puck says, finally. “Okay, ready?”
“Yes.”
He doesn’t close his eyes, but Puck’s gaze bores into his until his vision clouds and he stops feeling the scarf around his neck, the sheets beneath his bare feet, the fingers linked with his own…
---
Day 26- Crack
It’s incredibly different from the last time someone read his mind, Kurt think. It isn’t a flood of thoughts and emotions zooming by too fast to register each one; it’s something much slower and gentler, because Puck is trying to be careful and doesn’t know what he’s looking for.
He should probably be concerned with the way his body seems to have shut down around the invasion. His eyes are burning slightly from staying open so long, but he can’t see anything out of them. It’s probably fine, he tells himself, he just reacted differently to this one. He’s obviously still conscious, and feels no less sane than he did a minute ago, so he counts himself as fine.
The weirdest part is how he can feel Puck poking around in one corner after another, searching for that ball of trapped memory that they know is in here somewhere. It’s an oddly visceral experience that he didn’t have enough time to properly pay attention to before. There’s a sharp prod somewhere in the back of his brain and he’s shot with a flash of-
-bright sunny afternoon it’s finally stopped raining go outside now that’s not the way you play this game laughter warm learning happy-
-not what they’re looking for. He gives Puck a gentle shove away from the memory.
“That’s not it,” he says, or maybe he doesn’t. It’s ridiculously difficult to tell.
Before long, he’s starting to feel anxious, and it stick around long enough that he knows-
-yelling screaming anger-
-it’s not from something Puck poked at. He knows, mostly, where things are in his mind, but Puck seems to be just-
-just one story before bed you always choose that one it’s my favorite snuggle close-
-wandering around aimlessly, and Kurt’s having a hard time trying to direct him. The most he can do is sort of give little pushes in the right direction.
He can feel-
-warm lips on his so familiar duck shush the librarian’s coming back to my place laughing softly-
-the hole, dark and wide and frightening. It’s so glaringly obvious to him, but Puck takes a while to find it. Finally, though, he stumbles into the right area and Kurt feels him stop for a minute or two, just scoping out the-
-dark empty shouldn’t be there nothing nothing nothing wrong where did it go there’s nothing there-
-space that’s been scooped neatly out of his mind.
There’s a faint trail running from the pit, toward somewhere deeper in Kurt’s brain. “Feel that?” he thinks he asks, and he might feel Puck nod. He lets out a sigh of relief when Puck starts following that trail, the odd markers left over from something being dragged away.
If he’d been asked before this, he probably would never have guessed that the mind was such a physical sort of place.
That being said, things are obviously shifting around, and they pass things Kurt knows were elsewhere just a few minutes ago on the way. Even the path itself twists and jerks to the side on occasion, but it’s like a thread connecting the stored memories to where they’re meant to fit, and it doesn’t ever break.
When they get there, it’s… impressive.
He knew that, of course, has spent plenty of time trying and failing to break through the doors, but it feels more real when he feels Puck beside him, staring at the same barriers and letting some of his nerves jump up into his throat before he swallows back down.
“Found it,” Kurt hears, faint and far away. “Tell me if it gets bad.”
There is a pause, a deep breath, Puck trying to make sure he is doing exactly the right thing even though he doesn’t know what that is, and then a sharp push.
With that first push, Kurt feels his mind jolt around him.
It’s a whirling paradox of familiarity and invasion. He knows Puck; he wants to let Puck in, but something deeper than that instinctively defends against any attempts at getting in.
Puck keeps pushing, a little harder now, past testing the resistance and trying harder to just get through, and Kurt hears the first tiny crack.
Get it OUT.
‘Don’t,’ he tells himself, trying to sooth the part of his mind that’s starting to panic at the rush of this pushing pushing pushing against things that shouldn’t be played with.
‘Don’t,’ he thinks carefully, ignoring the absurdity of trying to appeal to the logic of another part of his own mind. ‘I know him. I know him. He’s not trying to hurt; he’s just trying to help.’
Shouldn’t, defends his mind. Shouldn’t be trying, shouldn’t be digging, shouldn’t be going in there at all ever ever; no, get out.
Puck pushes harder and the crack widens, still small but starting to stretch the barrier, and the first jab of pain smashes into Kurt like a hammer.
“Kurt?”
‘Keep going,’ he tries to say. Maybe he actually does.
He focuses on being open, on spreading himself as thin as possible over the defenses, on shushing that protesting voice that screams at him with every crack and hurt.
Don’t let him in, it begs. Don’t let him in don’t let him in don’t let-
‘-him in let him in let him in…’
Warm fingers holding tight to his own, either a memory or a reality from somewhere outside his mind, out of focus. He holds onto it, shoves the image toward the barrier as proof.
‘He’s helping. He wants to help. He’s not going to-’
-hurt it’s going to hurt it always hurts. Don’t open it there’s only pain. Don’t do it don’t ever ever.
“Are you still okay?”
Pressure falls away just slightly from the door and Kurt panics because they need to do this once and who cares about taking it slowly? He jerks forward (down? sideways?) and pushes: against the door, against Puck, urging him to continue. Puck listens.
Crack.
Pain.
They won’t know until it’s over, just how bad of an idea this might have been. For now there’s just pushing and pushing back and arguments overlapping each other until he’s run out of thoughts to express himself coherently. He can’t draw up images of Puck being safe anymore so he just grabs a hold of the shadow defending the door, hooks his arms tight around it and pulls back, and another, wider crack appears where the barrier has been left open.
Something is seeping through the cracks, spiderwebbing all over the doors and pushing through. It’s close; it has to be close because Kurt can see what they were talking about, now. His mind is starting to feel broken.
But Puck is smashing through the barrier faster than he’s shattering Kurt’s mind, and all they need to do is stay ahead of the curve.
He holds tighter to his mind’s own defender, and there’s screaming cracking breaking something new.
It’s for your own good, the shadows remind him. No.
‘It’s for your own good.’
SMASH.
Broken.
-
He only recognizes one of them, but the look on each of their faces is something he’d know anywhere.
Daniels is smirking with a group of three other boys, each of whom looks a couple of years older than him. One of them has the same big ears as Daniels does, unhidden by his short-cropped hair that’s so similar in color. Kurt tries to remember, thinks he recalls hearing that Daniels has a brother in at the local college.
That would make sense, considering that another of the boys is wearing a jacket that proudly proclaims the name of that college. Of course, none of this is all that important compared to the way their eyes are narrowing as they stalk toward him, and Kurt bemoans the fact that he told Puck to go on home while he ran back into the building for his forgotten notebook.
He has the notebook, now, but he’s starting to feel like it wasn’t worth it. Conveniently, he’s already standing right next to the dumpster.
“Hello, Daniels,” he says wearily, sighing as they close in around him, but Daniels isn’t the first to step forward. The boy who looks like his brother is the one to take the lead, not even breaking his stride as he moves right in and slams a fist into Kurt’s face.
Gasping, Kurt stumbles backward, stunned by the sudden violence.
“Don’t talk to him,” the boy (presumably also ‘Daniels,’ but Kurt doesn’t have the mindset for that right now) snarls.
“Geez, Rick,” Daniels mutters, and Kurt has the bizarre urge to thank him for providing a unique name, but maybe that’s because of the way his head is swimming just a little after that punch.
It’s nothing compared to the way he feels after the boy - Rick - stalks forward again to grab him by the arm and his hair and smash his head into the wall once, twice. Oh, God, he’s going to vomit. Maybe.
Three times, and that’s once too many, and he falls boneless to his knees to be sick on the pavement.
The nausea remains settled in his stomach even after he’s done heaving, and he thinks it has something to do with hating himself for giving up this easily, for falling down in front of them after the first couple hits.
But he wasn’t expecting this, wasn’t prepared to have to fight against it, and Rick knew what he was doing when he went straight for a head injury. He isn’t messing around; he has a purpose, and Kurt just wishes he knew what it was.
That thought only lasts long enough for someone (Rick?) to start kicking him in the chest, and then he’s mostly wishing for it to stop.
Sparks of pain shoot across his chest as he tries and fails to curl himself into something impenetrable, and he’s shaking when it stops.
Someone pulls away and there’s finally air on either side of him; he breathes deep and ignores the muted yelling a few feet away. It occurs to him: he could defend himself.
As soon as the thought is there, his mind is already building, piling up power it’s barely begun to learn how to use and safe in the knowledge that he doesn’t need physical strength to fight back, just a bit of concentration and anger to spur it on.
‘No,’ he tries to tell himself. ‘That’s not the way to do it; you can’t use that on them.’ They’re just people. They’re not what this is meant for.
The way the power collects is frightening, too, because it’s true that all he needs is concentration, but he doesn’t really have that. His brain still feels too jumbled from smashing against the wall, and the build is wild and sloppy, and he doesn’t know what it will do if it’s released. So he beats it back down, tells himself they’ll leave, and it works right up until the moment a hand closes around his arm and tugs him into something resembling a sitting position, though he leans heavily against the brick wall.
“-just-” he hears, among a scattering of sounds that would be hard to identify even if he cared enough to try. “-finish-”
Hands.
Hands around his throat, oh God, he can’t breathe. Panic flares up again, and with it comes the rise of power, shooting through channels in his mind to form something he doesn’t want to let loose, but it’s hard to think about that when he’s not breathing.
“Stop!” he would yell, if he could at all. Instead he chokes and writhes beneath the hands holding him down, claws at the fingers tightening against his skin, beats back the power for reasons he can’t quite remember by now.
Stop.
Stop. Stop. Stop breathing. Stop fighting. Stop everything don’t let it through.
And then there’s a moment of complete silence, and the power, collected and ready and angry, shoots out, only to rebound against his own will and punch back into his mind.
And this is pain he’s never felt before.
He’s screaming, silently at first and then out loud when hands release from his throat and skitter away, and-
“Jesus what the fuck are you doing? What… what did you do?”
What did he do?
He struggles, but he can’t fight against this, accepted it when he told himself it couldn’t be allowed outside so it had to stay inside.
“Kurt!”
What was that?
Everything’s breaking tearing ripping and there’s a pounding of footsteps somewhere outside that fades away fast while his mind collapses around him. And suddenly there’s an out, a shadow that hisses quick hide it away and he feels a tiny brush of relief and follows it blindly.
Pain pain pain follow the shadow the release and bind it shut-
“Kurt!”
Rushing rushing through and pain ebbing away and why was it there in the first place?
“Kurt!”
Don’t know.
-
“Kurt!”
He looks up to find Puck staring back at him, frantically calling his name. The awareness in his eyes must be noticeable, finally, because Puck stops yelling and lets out a long, shaky breath.
Slowly, Kurt becomes aware of the soft mattress beneath him, the arm wrapped around his chest to hold him back from falling over the edge of the bed, the phantom pains shooting through his neck. He searches his mind to find the hole filled in, and breathes a sigh of relief that nearly chokes him.
“Are you okay?”
It’s softer than he would have expected, but he doesn’t question it because he has no idea what he looked like up until a few seconds ago.
He doesn’t know what he looks like now, either, memories swirling through his mind; not just that last one of pain but everything from those missing six months. Everything good and exciting and Puck’s skin against his, but nothing overshadows the harshness of reliving November 11th (after he blocked himself away, he stood up shakily, drove himself home and went to bed, and woke up the next day in a blur of May 8th).
“I’m okay,” he says quietly, barely forming the words with his fumbling tongue. “Did you see it?”
Puck nods, just barely within his field of vision.
It feels so… dull. So anticlimactic that after all of this - the mind-reading and the powers they got from a signal and the unnamed threat that everyone was so worried about and pushing through the barrier - it was four boys, all perhaps two years older than him and attending community college (except for Daniels, who was a year below Kurt at McKinley).
Just one boy, really. He might be majoring in business, or biology.
After everything he’s had to relearn in the last month, it feels much too normal.
He can’t understand why it still scares him.
A tear slips free from his eye and he tries to raise a shaking hand to wipe it away, but Puck’s arms are curling tight around him where he lies sprawled on the bed, trapping his arms and holding him as still as possible. Encouraged by the moisture left on his cheek and the fingers trailing soothingly across his back, more tears follow, and it’s shocking how quickly Kurt gives up. Again.
He draws himself in close to Puck’s body and stops fighting.
---
Day 27- Perception
For the fifth time this week, Kurt finds himself yelling at Puck in the middle of a school day.
“What were you thinking?”
“Dude, I didn’t do anything wrong!”
“Oh, really? So that black eye Daniels is walking around with this morning came from someone else?”
Puck frowns. “Whatever.”
“No, Puck. Not whatever. We talked about this.”
“Look, it’s not like I hunted the dick down. We have practice together. Sometimes guys get hit in the face. Total accident.”
“Puck…” Kurt sighs, glancing around the empty hallway. He’s missing history class for this. “Seriously. You can’t do this.”
“That’s bullshit,” Puck growls.
“Don’t.”
“Those guys could’ve killed you, Kurt! And your plan is just to sit back and let them get away with it, and see how long it takes before they try again?”
“And your plan is to go after them in a way that’s only going to get you in trouble? I can’t prove anything by now, if I ever could have. It’s been over a month and there aren’t even any bruises left.” He’s repeated this speech too many times over the past three days. “On the other hand, they could prove quite a lot if they report it while they’re still bleeding.”
“I’m not gonna let him-”
“Daniels wasn’t even the problem,” Kurt says. “It was his brother; you know it was. So, yes, him I’ll be careful to stay away from. And I won’t be wandering around alone after school anymore, okay?”
Puck certainly does not look okay. He’s standing there with his hands clenched at his sides, seething with anger, just like the last four times Kurt’s caught him considering acts of violence.
“If I could do something about it, I would,” Kurt assures him. “But it’s been much too long now. What am I supposed to say? ‘I couldn’t report it before today because I locked the memories up in my mind and we only just broke them out a few days ago?’ Even if they believed it, which they wouldn’t, don’t you think they might ask why I never bothered to tell anyone about the memory loss?”
“Jesus. Fine. Do what you want.” Puck turns and walks away, waving a hand as if to brush Kurt off his shoulder with a harsh, jerky motion.
Kurt doesn’t try to stop him. These discussions have a tendency to end in the same way every time.
They’re still working on the ‘communication’ part of their relationship. He supposes that makes sense, considering it’s only been about two weeks. Or, four and a half months with a break in the middle, depending on what definition he’s going by today. It jumps back and forth.
He figured, naturally, that getting back the memories of May 8th through November 12th would make everything simpler, that it would just slot that period back into the empty spot in his mind and it would all fit together like adding the last piece to a jigsaw puzzle. That’s how people always talk about this sort of thing: puzzle piece metaphors.
In reality, it just seems to complicate things.
As often as he can, Kurt reminds himself that it’s only the third day after a large-scale change inside his head, and he’ll probably adjust to it in no time. He repeats the reassurance over and over, silently, as he finally turns away from staring at the corner around which Puck disappeared and heads to history class.
Mr. Lam glances over when he slips into the room five minutes late, but he doesn’t comment. He seems to be under the impression that Kurt is sick and forcing himself to keep going to school despite the illness, and Kurt hasn’t bothered to correct him. It’s a good cover, and it’s not like he doesn’t look the part, what with the bags under his eyes and the lack of concentration and the way he constantly has to hold a hand to the side of his head whenever the dizziness starts becoming unmanageable.
Sometimes, it’s set off by the simplest of things. Today, for example, he’s just trying to write a date next to the notes he’ll be taking in class, but his mind rebels against the attempt. He wants to write ‘Dec. 19th,’ but just as much of him is tied up in the idea that it was the middle of November just a couple of days ago.
The flood of memories stuck him in two places at once. It’s all so fresh, newly reformed, that a good chunk of his mind is firmly convinced that it happened ‘yesterday.’ Frankly, it’s terrifying.
However many times he’s talked Puck down, he’ll admit (not to Puck) how very much it bothers him not to be able to do anything about this. Especially with the experience replaying itself in vivid detail, sending echoes of pain shooting through his body with every hit. As it turns out, the memory loss didn’t grant him a pass for the standard fear and paranoia after an attack like that; he just got it a month late.
‘It’s over,’ he reminds himself forcefully, barely registering Mr. Lam’s lecture (something about the early 1800’s?). ‘It’s been over a month and nothing else has happened. Nothing else is going to happen.’
‘It’s been three days,’ he can’t help but think. ‘Only three days and there’s plenty of time to panic.’
And then the part of his brain that hasn’t quite accepted it isn’t somewhere in June joins in, and his head drops straight down onto the desk, which really doesn’t help the headache.
Mr. Lam shoots him a sympathetic look at the end of class, and Kurt nearly runs out the door to avoid the inevitable suggestion that he visits the school nurse. If Kurt thought she would have any idea of how to deal with this sort of thing, he would head down there in a second.
A second later, he’s regretting his wild dash out of the classroom when he almost runs into Finn, who looks down at him, concerned.
“Uh,” Finn starts, clearly wondering what had him moving so fast. “Hi.”
“What are you doing here?” Kurt asks wearily. ‘And where’s Puck?’ he wants to add, but doesn’t. It’s odd, though, because this probably counts as the first time Puck has left him alone in… weeks.
“Puck asked me to come get you. Guess he needed a break from the bodyguard thing,” Finn shrugs. Oh, yes, people have definitely noticed.
“Ah.”
“He still won’t tell me why,” Finn continues, shooting Kurt a short glare that doesn’t do a good job of convincing him to explain.
“He’s paranoid.”
Finn walks him to class.
Kurt tries not to bump into the people passing on either side, walking in Finn’s wake to minimize the resistance and wading through the swirls of thought in his mind. Every thought, memory, emotion he had for six months has been thrust into his head at once, and he keeps finding himself angry or depressed or giddy for no discernible reason.
It’s fading, pieces sliding back into place against each other, rubbing just a little off the edge to make themselves fit. It’s just unbearably slow, and he’s taken so much aspirin in the last few days that he actually went online and looked up the toxic dosage, just in case.
-
Puck corners him in the parking lot after school - though he shouldn’t have to, considering it’s been him avoiding Kurt all day, not the other way around - and sends Finn off with a sharp look.
“I’m sorry,” Kurt says before Puck can even open his mouth. He’s just so tired and his mind has two and a half different versions of Puck fighting for dominance every time he looks at him. “You hit him, whatever. Got it out of your system. I should probably take that as a good thing.”
“I’m not mad at you,” Puck mutters, which is probably as close to ‘sorry’ as Kurt’s going to get in return, and better than he would’ve hoped for. It feels like a little bit of release, more than he’s had in days, and he slumps against the side of the car, just enough to brush Puck’s side with an arm.
“This sucks,” he says, and it’s true. It’s worse, not better, than it was before they broke that piece out of his mind, at least until he resets himself again. “Everything’s… weird.” He can’t think of adjectives. “And I’m sorry you had to see it.”
“I didn’t.”
Kurt stares. “What are you talking about? You said-”
“I didn’t lie or anything, I’m just saying… I didn’t just see it, y’know? I mean, how would that even work? It’s not like you know what it looked like from the outside.” Puck sighs, a deep heave that brings his body just half an inch closer to Kurt’s when it relaxes again. “I saw what you did. I felt it.”
He felt- Oh.
Somehow, the idea that it wouldn’t make much sense for Puck to be able to see the scene as an outside observer never really occurred to him. But it doesn’t, really; it doesn’t make sense. It would only seem logical that, if Puck got a memory, he got exactly the same one that was stored in Kurt’s head. It also explains the tendrils of emotion he’s been catching on Puck for the last couple of days, threaded though some connection they made when they buried themselves deeply in their overlapping psyches.
Puck, Kurt realizes, is scared.
Because Puck remembers the feeling of life being squeezed out of him by rough hands clamped onto his throat. This isn’t the reaction of a boy who’s been objectively told someone tried to hurt a person he cares about; this is a boy knowing, very intimately, how close it came to something that couldn’t be fixed.
And, he remembers, this is Puck realizing that he drove off and missed it by five minutes.
“I’m okay,” he says, but he’s still flip-flopping between timelines and he’s pretty sure Puck can feel the confusion that surrounds everything he says.
If he does, he certainly doesn’t mention it, just drags Kurt home with him without a word. They sit on the couch and ignore each other’s shaking fingers, and watch some reruns that Kurt’s already seen three months and yesterday ago.
Fandom: Glee
Characters (Pairings): Kurt, Puck; (Kurt/Puck)
Genre: Supernatural, AU
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Violence
Spoilers: Blanket through season 2, to be safe
Word Count: 9,674
Challenge: 31 Days of Puckurt in January 2012
Summary: Kurt wakes on a May 8th that’s really a November 12th. Oh, and also, he can make chairs float with his brain now. So, that’s normal.
Disclaimer: I do not own Glee.
Author’s Note: One of the mini-verses. This one really wasn’t meant to happen (oops). Apologies for the poorly-explained elements, which are many.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Day 20- Memory
‘There’s nothing wrong with me,’ Kurt thinks frantically, moving through the halls just slow enough to be able to call it walking. ‘There is nothing wrong with the way my eyes just started glowing or the way that chair just sort of floated off the floor for a minute there. Nothing. Oh, God.’
He forces himself to stop, to take a deep breath and try not to hyperventilate in the middle of the school hallway because people are in classrooms on either side of him and if he doesn’t calm down they’re going to hear him freaking out. And if they find out…
‘Oh my God they’re not going to be happy when they see my eyes and they’re going to send me off to some government lab or something and doctors are going to dissect me and my skeleton is going to be on display in some research laboratory and some 40-year-old guy is going to impress his son by telling him about the freak of nature and the condition he got to name because he was the one in charge of the experiments oh fuck oh God.’
He whips around when a bang sounds off to his left and finds that one of the lockers has been blown open and smashed against the one next to it. ‘No no no.’ A teacher pokes his head out of one of the classrooms and glances around, finding only Kurt.
“Keep it down, please,” the man says sternly. “My class is taking a test.”
“Uh, sorry,” Kurt says, giving him a shaky smile until he closes the door again. Thank God, his eyes must have stopped glowing for the moment. His eyes… glowing…
‘Oh, fuck.’
He needs to get out of here. He needs to go home and lock himself in the basement until things stop moving around him when they’re not supposed to.
It takes him a couple of minutes to fish his keys out of his pockets with the way his hands keep shaking, even though he’s made it out to the parking lot already and he’s probably safe, but eventually he manages to pull them out and fumbles for the right key.
“Hey, Ku- Oof!”
“Puck!”
Puck is lying sprawled on the ground, raising himself up on an elbow and rubbing his face. There’s a brick lying beside him.
‘Where the hell…’ Kurt turns his head carefully toward the school and nearly whimpers when he sees the empty spot where the brick had been before it shot itself out of the building and into Puck’s stomach.
“Jesus, Puck, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” He’s babbling, hoping his eyes are still normal because he doesn’t think he could explain the glowing.
“What the hell did you do that for?” Puck grumbles, but he accepts Kurt’s offered hand and hauls himself onto his feet.
“I didn’t!” Kurt says. “It just… it just shot out of… the building…” Lame, lame and terrible and there’s no way Puck’s going to believe him but how could he believe it was Kurt? Don’t let him find out; please, please don’t.
“Yeah, like I don’t know what this shit looks like?” Puck says. “Your eyes are still white. Don’t bullshit me. The hell did I do wrong, anyway?”
His eyes are white. Oh, God, they’re glowing again and Puck’s going to tell someone because this is way too freaky for him to keep it to himself no matter how much Kurt begs.
“Hey, are you okay, babe?” Puck says, leaning in close and finally looking more worried than annoyed. “You look like you’re gonna pass out or something.” He reaches out a hand and grabs Kurt’s shoulder, steadying him with the strong grip.
“Don’t tell anyone,” Kurt says, breathing hard. “Please don’t. I don’t know what- It just happened and I don’t know what’s going on but you can’t tell anyone, okay? Please.” He can’t deal with this. He moved a chair with his eyes (or something) less than ten minutes ago and already he’s been found out, and he’s still not thinking straight so he has no idea how to convince Puck to keep this a secret, and there’s his skeleton again, locked in a glass cabinet in the office of some professor who got tenure over this. Is that how tenure works?
“Don’t tell anyone what? That you knocked me over? Yeah, I think I’ll be keeping that one to myself.” Puck grinned. “Seriously though, babe, you’re starting to freak me out.”
“Well, of course I’m freaking you out. I’m freaking myself out, too, because I just pulled a brick out of a building with my mind and how are you not shocked by this? And… and why the hell are you calling me ‘babe?’” Kurt slumps further and further as he yells, and by the end of it, Puck can’t keep him upright anymore. He sinks to the ground, back pressed against one of the tires of his car and fists curling into the fabric of his pants.
“Kurt,” Puck says slowly. “Kurt, look at me.”
He can’t, though, because he was having a perfectly normal afternoon just fifteen minutes ago and he doesn’t understand what went wrong. He doesn’t understand the way Puck cups his head carefully in those large hands and forces him to look up.
“What happened?” Puck says.
“I don’t know,” Kurt says, still slightly hysterical. “I was just… One minute I was in the bathroom and then my eyes started glowing in the mirror and then this chair just sort of lifted up off the ground. And then I slammed a locker and sent a brick flying at you and you said my eyes were white, just like before.”
“Right,” Puck says, looking more confused now. “So?”
“So?” Kurt’s yelling again. “So, what the fuck is going on, Puck? Why doesn’t this surprise you more? Because I am freaking out over here and trying to understand it and you still haven’t told me why you were calling me ‘babe!’”
“But that’s…” Puck trails off, searching his eyes and looking more horrified by the second. “You don’t remember?”
“Remember what?” Kurt says tiredly, energy vanishing under Puck’s intense stare.
“I don’t know,” Puck says finally. “Me? I guess?”
“I remember you, Puck. I know your name, don’t I?”
“Yeah, but…” Puck sighs. “Okay, so here’s what we’re gonna do. You’re gonna come with me and we’re gonna figure something out, because your head is fucked up right now. Come on.”
“Wait!” he says when Puck pulls him to his feet and starts them toward his truck. “What- How do you know… anything?”
Puck turns to him, and, just for a second, his eyes glow white.
Kurt stares.
“Yeah,” Puck says. “So come on, Kurt.” With that, he grabs Kurt’s hand and starts walking, but Kurt tugs his hand back just as quickly, confused.
He starts walking to the truck on his own to avoid the hurt on Puck’s face.
What day is it?” Puck says quietly once they’re in the truck.
“Uh, May 8th?” he tries, but he can tell by the look on Puck’s face that he didn’t get it right.
---
Day 21- Barriers
Backlash.
That’s the word they’ve all been repeating ever since some man Kurt’s never seen before sat down in front of him, pressed a hand to his forehead, and went into his mind.
It had taken them about five minutes to convince Kurt that was possible, and another twenty to get him to agree to do it, though the way the man’s eyes glowed white was vaguely comforting for some reason he couldn’t place. It felt… weird. His thoughts refused to focus while the man was rummaging through them, and he kept picking up flashes of emotion from one or the other, so quickly that he felt like he was being flung back and forth between extremes.
Then everything blurred and they hit some point of blank nothingness that scared Kurt more than anything he’d seen so far today.
Backlash.
There are about eight or ten people huddled in a circle, talking quietly and rapidly, and from the way they’ve been throwing out names of people who aren’t here, he’d guess they’re not the only ones. The more he thinks about it, the more he wants to scream at them to explain who the hell they are and how they all know him and why their eyes all glow.
Puck’s hand on his wrist holds him back.
Which, normally, he wouldn’t care about, but Puck has been the only one who actually seems concerned about him and not this ‘backlash’ thing that they all seemed to think was a problem for them, when he was the one with no memory of… Actually, no one had bothered to tell him what the date was, so he really wasn’t sure.
“Puck,” he says quietly, pulling the boy’s angry gaze away from the whispering group.
“What?”
“What day is it?”
Puck fidgets, fingers twitching slightly against his wrist. “It’s fine,” he says. “They can fix it and then you’ll remember the day anyway.”
“Puck…”
“Alright, boys.” Kurt jumps, whirling to find that the group has finally broken up and one of the men is speaking to them. “Here’s the problem. You both accepted an unspoken contract of sorts and-”
“What the fuck?” Puck growls. “We didn’t accept anything. We just woke up one day with our eyes glowing and got dragged out of our houses to have you guys tell us about your freaky society or whatever.”
Suddenly, Kurt finds himself very distracted from the question of what was wrong with his memory in the face of finally getting some information about where the glowing came from.
“They did it?” he tries to ask, but his voice is nearly lost when the man speaks up again.
“You did,” he informs them calmly. “We sent out the signal, yes, but it only enters willing bodies that it finds compatible, as we have explained. Part of you felt its offer and said yes, and therefore you did accept the contract and agreed to become a part of this. You should know how important this is.”
“Yeah, you said.” Puck’s hand tightens around Kurt’s wrist. “I get that. But it’s not like we knew, okay? And what is this shit?”
He gestures to Kurt with his free hand and Kurt’s immediate reaction, frankly, is to raise a disbelieving eyebrow. Why the hell is Puck so worried about this if he thinks that badly of him, if he wonders why they would ever want to include Kurt in this in the first place? It’s probably ridiculous to feel offended when he doesn’t even know what this is, but it’s an instinctive reaction.
“Sorry,” Puck says quickly when he sees Kurt’s look. “I meant your memory and stuff.” He turns back to glare at the man again. “Someone did something to him, right? You never told us there would be people targeting us for this. You should have told us.”
‘Nevermind,’ Kurt thinks. ‘This is only getting more confusing. Can’t they just skip to fixing my brain?’
The man looks at him hard. “We can’t, actually.”
“W-what?”
Oh, right. They read minds. God, how did he get himself involved in this?
“That’s what I’ve been saying,” the man continues. “No one did anything to him.”
“Uh, yeah they did. ‘Cause he thinks it’s May 8th, okay?”
“No. He did this to himself.”
Puck doesn’t seem to have anything to say to that.
“It’s called backlash.” There’s that word again. “It’s been known to happen in moments of distress. The power builds up and doesn’t have anywhere to go, so it fires back against its maker’s own mind.” The man looks upset as he repeats: “He did this to himself.”
“Why?”
“How should we know? There’s a giant hole in his mind. All we know is that it was self-carved. And this is a problem for us.”
“For you?” Puck nearly shouts, and Kurt’s hand is nearly numb by now.
Carefully extracting his wrist from Puck’s grasp and ignoring the startled look the boy shoots him, Kurt takes a step forward and tries, desperately (though he hopes it doesn’t come across like that), to take back some kind of control.
“Why is it a problem?” he asks.
“Because we’ve spent months training you-” Months? God. “-And, apparently, nothing to show for it. And that is not something we can afford right now. We needed both of you.”
“So find more people!” Puck says. “If we’re so important, can’t you just stick this crap in a bunch of other kids? Then you’ll have plenty of people to fight in your war.”
Kurt startles at the word ‘war.’ What the hell did he get himself into?
“We can’t,” the man says sternly. “Do you know how rare it is to find people who accept what we can offer? We send the signal once a year, and more often than not get nothing back. This year, we got three answers: you two, and a girl who wants nothing to do with this and rejected the power before it could even attempt to bond with her. So yes, Puck, you are important, you are necessary, and we need to deal with this now.”
“Can’t you fix it?” Kurt says carefully. “I mean, if you have mind powers… Right? That’s what this is? I mean, you read my mind and I moved things without touching them, so. Yeah.”
“We could try,” says a woman who has been hanging toward the back of the crowd until now, “but you wouldn’t want us to. Your memories, and most of your powers, are bound up tightly behind every possible defense your mind could construct. It’s a defense mechanism. If we tried to break past it, there’s every chance your mind would shatter before we could get close.”
“So, what, I’m stuck like this?”
“Unless you manage to pull down some of the barriers, yes. Unfortunately, the tools that would help you with that are locked away.”
“Well then why the hell can I still move things around?” Kurt says, a little more frantically than before.
“Telekinesis is the least complex element, and the least threatening. It’s not surprising it slipped through. It’s not an infrequent occurrence in cases like yours.”
“Fuck you.” That’s probably stupid, but he doesn’t care anymore. He doesn’t want to be a case; he wants to be better. He leaves, storming out of the building and trying to hold in a panic attack whenever he starts to consider what could have happened to make this seem like the best option.
He sits on the sidewalk, curling his hands in his hair and breathing hard. When a hand comes down on his shoulder a minute later, he looks up.
“Let’s just go, Puck, okay?” he says wearily when he sees who it is. “And you really should tell me the date, so my dad doesn’t freak out when I don’t remember basic information.”
“Yeah, okay,” Puck says. He still looks angry. “Come on.” He pulls Kurt up from the ground, and this time, when he takes Kurt’s hand to lead him to the car, Kurt doesn’t pull away.
He doesn’t want to see that hurt on Puck’s face again, but he also doesn’t want to know why it would be there, or why Puck seems so upset every time he’s reminded of what Kurt doesn’t remember.
When they’re in the car and Puck still hasn’t bothered to tell him the date, Kurt gives up and pulls out his cell phone to check the numbers at the top of the display.
It’s November 12th.
---
Day 24- Familiarity
Kurt tosses his notebook down onto the table in front of him and lets his head fall into his arms, groaning.
Even though he can’t see it, he’s entirely sure Puck is smirking when he says, “Having some trouble there, Kurt?” He can hear it in his damn, smug voice.
“Shut up,” he mumbles, “and help me.”
“Say please.”
Raising his head a couple of inches off his folded arms, Kurt glares at Puck, who, sure enough, is smiling at him from across the table. “Fine. Please wipe that annoying smirk off your face and come over here to help me with the one subject you inexplicably excel in despite skipping the class for at least two consecutive years to take naps and have sex with slutty cheerleaders.”
Puck rolls his eyes. “Well, when you ask so nicely…” He stands up and grabs his chair to move around the table anyway.
It’s incredibly unfair that Puck manages to be so good at math with so little effort, just like it’s unfair that Kurt dropped almost a semester’s worth of school out of his head for no reason (he’s been assured there is a reason, yes, but he refuses to acknowledge it without proof of its existence). Thankfully, through some process that was explained to him as being because there are different sorts of memory and that affect the way they’re stored, most of the things he learned are still accessible in his mind even though the memories of how got mashed up into a ball in the back of his brain.
Physics concepts stuck with him, even most of the equations fit into place once he read over them once, though application is harder. It’s hard to tell if he remembers history, because they teach the same thing every year so maybe he just knew it already, but it works either way, and he just had to “re-read” a couple of books to get caught up in English. French words fell into his head easily, he was delighted to find. But math… Well, he’s never been good at math. Which makes the physics hard, too, and that’s a lot when he’s already preoccupied with not slipping up around his family.
That got easier pretty fast. The first week or so was nerve-wracking, and he stumbled constantly trying to fake familiarity with things that happened “just two days ago,” but with time passing came the building of new memories and conversation was easier. Still, he likes to escape as often as he can, which is why he’s at the library at 6:00 pm on a Tuesday with Puck, who has insisted on following him practically everywhere for the last three weeks.
Puck drops the chair down next to him just loud enough to make the girl studying at the next table over glare and slam her book shut pointedly, standing up to move to a quieter area and leaving them alone in their little corner.
“Okay so you’re doing what, now?”
Pulling his notebook reluctantly back toward him, Kurt points out the problem he’s been struggling with. “Log functions.”
“Seriously? Those are boring.”
“Yes. They’re boring and stupid, but I don’t understand them and I need to do well in the class, because I’m trying to go to college and have some kind of functional career besides ‘saving the world with my awesome superpowers,’ or whatever they’re calling it. Especially since I seem to be so spectacularly bad at that.”
Also because he’s still not totally sure what this whole ‘saving the world’ thing really entails. It’s nothing to do with his missing memory; Puck doesn’t know either, because neither of them are every really told anything. Words like ‘war’ and ‘humanity’ and other dramatic things get thrown around, but basically Kurt is getting the idea that they’re some kind of reserve team, patiently waiting around to get called in when or if some specific threat ever pops up.
Okay, so he figures they probably have the right to some of those dramatics, because the powers, which he’s slowly learning again even though he only has access to something like a tenth of what they should be, are pretty amazing, so there’s probably a suitably incredible threat that goes along with them. It’s just that he doesn’t ever know what it is and that makes the whole thing rather anticlimactic. Puck seems to agree with him.
The only thing that makes it more real is the way they keep discussing whether his backlash thing might be connected to this unnamed threat (which he figures is unlikely, given that it’s happened before to other people and it’s usually triggered by something normal, from what they tell him), and the way Puck has basically become his bodyguard.
When he got home at the end of that day that turned out to be a totally different day than he’d thought it was, exhausted and confused, he peeled off his shirt and his scarf to find the ache he’d been feeling wasn’t just in his mind. Bruises littered his chest and ringed his arms and, scarier than the rest put together, stained a dark purple circle around his neck.
He hasn’t mentioned this to Puck. They’re gone by now, anyway.
“Alright you are totally doing the graph wrong,” Puck informs him, reaching for the paper and brushing against Kurt’s arm as he does so. “Here.”
Kurt is paying attention. He’s paying very close attention to the explanation about a boring math function and not at all allowing himself to be distracted by the way Puck’s chair is so close to his that their thighs brush together every time one of them shifts a little.
It’s a little astonishing how suddenly Puck has jumped into his life. Though, he supposes, it wasn’t really all that sudden, it just seems like it was because it happened during the six months he’s lost. Puck had been perfectly comfortable with him even before this, anyway, and tended to spend time at his house ever since he reconciled with Finn.
Once, a day or two after he found himself very suddenly in November, Kurt asked Puck why he felt the need to follow him everywhere. Puck had shrugged and replied, “Just don’t want it to happen again, dude.” At Kurt’s raised eyebrow, he continued. “We kinda got closer, with the whole superpower thing, you know?”
“Mutual inclusion in a secret society is one way to forcibly strengthen a friendship, I suppose,” Kurt said, and Puck just shrugged again, avoiding his eyes in favor of leering at one of the new freshman Cheerios strutting past.
It’s weird, sometimes. Puck will slump onto the couch in a way that kind of makes him slump on Kurt, too, or he’ll throw an arm around Kurt’s shoulder, but he almost always jerks himself away a second later. For a while, Kurt worried that maybe Puck managed to find out about the bruises somehow. Now, he just worries for Puck’s sanity. And his own, sort of, because his heart beats right through his chest whenever that happens and he can’t even think of a better way to get it broken.
It’s that thought that spurs on his next decision, because, hell, if he’s going to insist on doing this, he’s going to do it right instead of letting it fester like he did with Finn (and, boy, isn’t that something he never wants to do ever again).
To his left, Puck is still pointing at the paper and explaining something Kurt’s never going to remember because, okay, he’ll admit that he’s really not paying any attention at all, not when the way Puck’s lips move to form the words is far more interesting than the words themselves, and Kurt realizes he doesn’t even have to lean in at all because they’re already right next to each other so he just takes a deep breath and hopes he’s reading at least some of the signs right.
“Puck,” he says, waiting until the speech about logarithmics and asymptotes stops and hazel eyes flicker up to meet his. “Don’t freak out, okay?”
Puck stares at him for a split second and then he grins, wide and brilliant and disbelieving. “That’s what you said the first time,” he says, just barely, because the moment the last syllable leaves his mouth, Kurt moves forward and kisses him.
It’s not until he’s wrapping an arm around Puck’s neck and opening his mouth to the swipe of Puck’s tongue against his lips that he registers the words “first time” and what they might imply, but it seems incredibly unimportant compared to the strong hand gripping his waist tightly to pull him even closer.
He keeps kissing Puck, not because it feels so oddly familiar (like the physics formulas he’s re-learned but so impossibly different), but because it makes warmth gather in his chest and lights explode behind his eyelids.
---
Day 25- Attempts
“It just sounds like a really crappy idea, Kurt.”
“It’s not, though. I keep telling you. It’s my mind; shouldn’t I know how it works?”
“Well, yeah, but…”
“Exactly. So, stop arguing, okay?”
“Kurt.”
“Puck. At least until after school, alright? Unless you want to broadcast everything to anyone who happens to be bored enough to listen in on our conversation.”
Scowling, Puck snaps his mouth shut around any further protests.
“Alright,” Kurt says, trying his best to form a smile that’s more reassuring than apprehensive, though he isn’t sure how well it goes. “So, physics?”
“Yeah.”
Hopefully, he’s done the right thing telling Puck at the start of the day and leaving him time to think instead of springing it on him last-minute. They’re forced into mutual silence by the crowds of students around them all day, which is either going to give Puck time to accept the necessity of the plan or allow him to simmer quietly and wall himself into his initial opinion. Kurt’s kind of hoping for the first of those two possibilities.
It’s too late to change his mind now, anyway, since he’s already done his best to explain and they’re walking to physics before the bell rings, carefully maintaining their six-inch rule at all times. Puck’s hand is doing that weird twitching thing that it’s been doing… well, pretty much ever since he started forming memories again, but now he actually knows what it is, recognizes the aborted gesture.
He’s walking pretty blindly on the assumption that they had a good reason not to tell anyone the first time around, and that it applies to this, too. Even if Puck isn’t talking about it.
But when they’re sitting at the same table in class, he lets his fingers brush against the back of Puck’s hand, out of sight of everyone else in the room. Hopefully the gesture, at least, comes across as reassuring in a way he’s sure his voice couldn’t quit manage.
The rest of the day is spent drifting in and out of classes, ignoring the looks he gets in the hallways (easier today than any other day before) and paying attention for a grand total of about five minutes in history.
-
Puck is leaning against his car when he gets out at the end of the day; which, really, is less overbearing than the usual, because Puck’s fallen into the habit of waiting at the door of his 8th period class and walking him either to Glee or the parking lot. Kurt generally lets it slide, because it’s not like there’s no reason for the paranoia. Today, he supposes, Puck wanted an extra minute or two to think.
Maybe even more than a minute or two, since Puck doesn’t say anything even when Kurt unlocks the doors and lets them into the car, and the drive home is long and quiet.
“Okay,” Puck says finally, when they’re standing in Kurt’s bedroom, door closed against the completely empty house that Kurt planned out in advance. “Just so we’re clear: this is stupid.”
“Maybe,” Kurt admits, “but-”
“Definitely.”
“But,” Kurt continues, glaring, “it’s not like there are a lot of non-stupid options lying around for us to try first.”
“They said you should do it yourself.”
“And I have been trying for weeks! Don’t you think maybe that’s a sign that it’s not working?” He lets himself fall onto the bed, huffing. “I can’t do it myself, alright? I think they were wrong. I think I’m too close to fix anything.”
“Yeah,” Puck says, “but staying like has gotta be better than things going wrong, right? I mean, they were saying something about your mind, like, breaking. I don’t even know what that means!”
“Puck, it’s okay,” Kurt tries to assure him, tries to pretend he’s not shaking a little bit himself at the thought of what that phrase implies. “If it looks bad, you can… You can pull back, or something, but I still think we should try, okay? I’m tired of missing things.”
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” Puck warns.
“But you know me. That counts.”
Puck runs a hand over the stripe of his hair, sighing. “Okay, fine. But warn me as soon as it’s pushing too much or… or if it starts hurting or something.”
“I think it’s supposed to hurt at least a little,” Kurt says, but at Puck’s glare, he continues. “No, okay, sorry. I’ll let you know.”
“Okay.” Puck sits down in front of him on the bed while Kurt tries to shift himself around so he’s actually leaning back onto the pillows, just in case he needs the support. Awkwardly, Puck raises a hand, then puts it back down, then picks it up again. “Am I supposed to touch you or something? ‘Cause the other guys, they did it once or twice, but I dunno if it’s just for show or what.”
“Couldn’t hurt,” Kurt says, trying to will his breathing steady. ‘This will work,’ he tells himself. ‘This will work just fine.’ One hand comes up and toward his head. “Don’t mess up my hair,” Kurt reminds him, and Puck lets out a short, startled laugh before redirecting the hand to rest against Kurt’s cheek.
After a moment, Puck closes his eyes, then his face scrunches up oddly and he opens them again. “I look at you, right?” he says. “Probably should keep my eyes open. Yeah?”
“How would I know?”
“This feels weird,” Puck sighs, and he shifts himself half an inch closer on the bed. “I mean, seriously? We have no idea what the hell we’re doing with this. They’ve only been teaching us the easy stuff. Are you sure we should be fucking with this kind of thing?”
“How did we get to the point where I’m the one saying ‘go for it’ and you’re the one being cautious? It’s my mind, okay? You’re not supposed to be nervous about it.”
“Yeah, but if something goes wrong then it’s my fault.”
Fighting the urge to yell to just get on with it already (because, honestly, this whole confident attitude thing isn’t going to last much longer), Kurt takes a deep breath and reaches over to take the hand that’s not cupping his face and rub his fingers along the tan skin. “I’ll tell you if you need to stop, really. I’m trusting you, Puck, with a lot. So trust me too, okay?”
He knows how easily it can go wrong. His mind has been pulling up images of just how bad it can get and some things that are probably worse, ever since he let the silly idea gain any weight in his head.
But he can’t stand this state of not knowing anymore, can’t keep being scared of something he can’t even put a name to, because he blocked it out himself.
And he hates what he’s unintentionally been putting Puck through for over a month, now; making him rebuild their relationship from halfway to scratch, from a casual friendship based mostly on proximity to… whatever they were before November 12th, something that he can’t remember. This is bad for both of them. It’s just harsh luck that means he has to ask even more of Puck in order to fix it.
He’s sure this is the right decision, though. He has to be, otherwise everything falls apart.
“Okay,” Puck says, finally. “Okay, ready?”
“Yes.”
He doesn’t close his eyes, but Puck’s gaze bores into his until his vision clouds and he stops feeling the scarf around his neck, the sheets beneath his bare feet, the fingers linked with his own…
---
Day 26- Crack
It’s incredibly different from the last time someone read his mind, Kurt think. It isn’t a flood of thoughts and emotions zooming by too fast to register each one; it’s something much slower and gentler, because Puck is trying to be careful and doesn’t know what he’s looking for.
He should probably be concerned with the way his body seems to have shut down around the invasion. His eyes are burning slightly from staying open so long, but he can’t see anything out of them. It’s probably fine, he tells himself, he just reacted differently to this one. He’s obviously still conscious, and feels no less sane than he did a minute ago, so he counts himself as fine.
The weirdest part is how he can feel Puck poking around in one corner after another, searching for that ball of trapped memory that they know is in here somewhere. It’s an oddly visceral experience that he didn’t have enough time to properly pay attention to before. There’s a sharp prod somewhere in the back of his brain and he’s shot with a flash of-
-bright sunny afternoon it’s finally stopped raining go outside now that’s not the way you play this game laughter warm learning happy-
-not what they’re looking for. He gives Puck a gentle shove away from the memory.
“That’s not it,” he says, or maybe he doesn’t. It’s ridiculously difficult to tell.
Before long, he’s starting to feel anxious, and it stick around long enough that he knows-
-yelling screaming anger-
-it’s not from something Puck poked at. He knows, mostly, where things are in his mind, but Puck seems to be just-
-just one story before bed you always choose that one it’s my favorite snuggle close-
-wandering around aimlessly, and Kurt’s having a hard time trying to direct him. The most he can do is sort of give little pushes in the right direction.
He can feel-
-warm lips on his so familiar duck shush the librarian’s coming back to my place laughing softly-
-the hole, dark and wide and frightening. It’s so glaringly obvious to him, but Puck takes a while to find it. Finally, though, he stumbles into the right area and Kurt feels him stop for a minute or two, just scoping out the-
-dark empty shouldn’t be there nothing nothing nothing wrong where did it go there’s nothing there-
-space that’s been scooped neatly out of his mind.
There’s a faint trail running from the pit, toward somewhere deeper in Kurt’s brain. “Feel that?” he thinks he asks, and he might feel Puck nod. He lets out a sigh of relief when Puck starts following that trail, the odd markers left over from something being dragged away.
If he’d been asked before this, he probably would never have guessed that the mind was such a physical sort of place.
That being said, things are obviously shifting around, and they pass things Kurt knows were elsewhere just a few minutes ago on the way. Even the path itself twists and jerks to the side on occasion, but it’s like a thread connecting the stored memories to where they’re meant to fit, and it doesn’t ever break.
When they get there, it’s… impressive.
He knew that, of course, has spent plenty of time trying and failing to break through the doors, but it feels more real when he feels Puck beside him, staring at the same barriers and letting some of his nerves jump up into his throat before he swallows back down.
“Found it,” Kurt hears, faint and far away. “Tell me if it gets bad.”
There is a pause, a deep breath, Puck trying to make sure he is doing exactly the right thing even though he doesn’t know what that is, and then a sharp push.
With that first push, Kurt feels his mind jolt around him.
It’s a whirling paradox of familiarity and invasion. He knows Puck; he wants to let Puck in, but something deeper than that instinctively defends against any attempts at getting in.
Puck keeps pushing, a little harder now, past testing the resistance and trying harder to just get through, and Kurt hears the first tiny crack.
Get it OUT.
‘Don’t,’ he tells himself, trying to sooth the part of his mind that’s starting to panic at the rush of this pushing pushing pushing against things that shouldn’t be played with.
‘Don’t,’ he thinks carefully, ignoring the absurdity of trying to appeal to the logic of another part of his own mind. ‘I know him. I know him. He’s not trying to hurt; he’s just trying to help.’
Shouldn’t, defends his mind. Shouldn’t be trying, shouldn’t be digging, shouldn’t be going in there at all ever ever; no, get out.
Puck pushes harder and the crack widens, still small but starting to stretch the barrier, and the first jab of pain smashes into Kurt like a hammer.
“Kurt?”
‘Keep going,’ he tries to say. Maybe he actually does.
He focuses on being open, on spreading himself as thin as possible over the defenses, on shushing that protesting voice that screams at him with every crack and hurt.
Don’t let him in, it begs. Don’t let him in don’t let him in don’t let-
‘-him in let him in let him in…’
Warm fingers holding tight to his own, either a memory or a reality from somewhere outside his mind, out of focus. He holds onto it, shoves the image toward the barrier as proof.
‘He’s helping. He wants to help. He’s not going to-’
-hurt it’s going to hurt it always hurts. Don’t open it there’s only pain. Don’t do it don’t ever ever.
“Are you still okay?”
Pressure falls away just slightly from the door and Kurt panics because they need to do this once and who cares about taking it slowly? He jerks forward (down? sideways?) and pushes: against the door, against Puck, urging him to continue. Puck listens.
Crack.
Pain.
They won’t know until it’s over, just how bad of an idea this might have been. For now there’s just pushing and pushing back and arguments overlapping each other until he’s run out of thoughts to express himself coherently. He can’t draw up images of Puck being safe anymore so he just grabs a hold of the shadow defending the door, hooks his arms tight around it and pulls back, and another, wider crack appears where the barrier has been left open.
Something is seeping through the cracks, spiderwebbing all over the doors and pushing through. It’s close; it has to be close because Kurt can see what they were talking about, now. His mind is starting to feel broken.
But Puck is smashing through the barrier faster than he’s shattering Kurt’s mind, and all they need to do is stay ahead of the curve.
He holds tighter to his mind’s own defender, and there’s screaming cracking breaking something new.
It’s for your own good, the shadows remind him. No.
‘It’s for your own good.’
SMASH.
Broken.
-
He only recognizes one of them, but the look on each of their faces is something he’d know anywhere.
Daniels is smirking with a group of three other boys, each of whom looks a couple of years older than him. One of them has the same big ears as Daniels does, unhidden by his short-cropped hair that’s so similar in color. Kurt tries to remember, thinks he recalls hearing that Daniels has a brother in at the local college.
That would make sense, considering that another of the boys is wearing a jacket that proudly proclaims the name of that college. Of course, none of this is all that important compared to the way their eyes are narrowing as they stalk toward him, and Kurt bemoans the fact that he told Puck to go on home while he ran back into the building for his forgotten notebook.
He has the notebook, now, but he’s starting to feel like it wasn’t worth it. Conveniently, he’s already standing right next to the dumpster.
“Hello, Daniels,” he says wearily, sighing as they close in around him, but Daniels isn’t the first to step forward. The boy who looks like his brother is the one to take the lead, not even breaking his stride as he moves right in and slams a fist into Kurt’s face.
Gasping, Kurt stumbles backward, stunned by the sudden violence.
“Don’t talk to him,” the boy (presumably also ‘Daniels,’ but Kurt doesn’t have the mindset for that right now) snarls.
“Geez, Rick,” Daniels mutters, and Kurt has the bizarre urge to thank him for providing a unique name, but maybe that’s because of the way his head is swimming just a little after that punch.
It’s nothing compared to the way he feels after the boy - Rick - stalks forward again to grab him by the arm and his hair and smash his head into the wall once, twice. Oh, God, he’s going to vomit. Maybe.
Three times, and that’s once too many, and he falls boneless to his knees to be sick on the pavement.
The nausea remains settled in his stomach even after he’s done heaving, and he thinks it has something to do with hating himself for giving up this easily, for falling down in front of them after the first couple hits.
But he wasn’t expecting this, wasn’t prepared to have to fight against it, and Rick knew what he was doing when he went straight for a head injury. He isn’t messing around; he has a purpose, and Kurt just wishes he knew what it was.
That thought only lasts long enough for someone (Rick?) to start kicking him in the chest, and then he’s mostly wishing for it to stop.
Sparks of pain shoot across his chest as he tries and fails to curl himself into something impenetrable, and he’s shaking when it stops.
Someone pulls away and there’s finally air on either side of him; he breathes deep and ignores the muted yelling a few feet away. It occurs to him: he could defend himself.
As soon as the thought is there, his mind is already building, piling up power it’s barely begun to learn how to use and safe in the knowledge that he doesn’t need physical strength to fight back, just a bit of concentration and anger to spur it on.
‘No,’ he tries to tell himself. ‘That’s not the way to do it; you can’t use that on them.’ They’re just people. They’re not what this is meant for.
The way the power collects is frightening, too, because it’s true that all he needs is concentration, but he doesn’t really have that. His brain still feels too jumbled from smashing against the wall, and the build is wild and sloppy, and he doesn’t know what it will do if it’s released. So he beats it back down, tells himself they’ll leave, and it works right up until the moment a hand closes around his arm and tugs him into something resembling a sitting position, though he leans heavily against the brick wall.
“-just-” he hears, among a scattering of sounds that would be hard to identify even if he cared enough to try. “-finish-”
Hands.
Hands around his throat, oh God, he can’t breathe. Panic flares up again, and with it comes the rise of power, shooting through channels in his mind to form something he doesn’t want to let loose, but it’s hard to think about that when he’s not breathing.
“Stop!” he would yell, if he could at all. Instead he chokes and writhes beneath the hands holding him down, claws at the fingers tightening against his skin, beats back the power for reasons he can’t quite remember by now.
Stop.
Stop. Stop. Stop breathing. Stop fighting. Stop everything don’t let it through.
And then there’s a moment of complete silence, and the power, collected and ready and angry, shoots out, only to rebound against his own will and punch back into his mind.
And this is pain he’s never felt before.
He’s screaming, silently at first and then out loud when hands release from his throat and skitter away, and-
“Jesus what the fuck are you doing? What… what did you do?”
What did he do?
He struggles, but he can’t fight against this, accepted it when he told himself it couldn’t be allowed outside so it had to stay inside.
“Kurt!”
What was that?
Everything’s breaking tearing ripping and there’s a pounding of footsteps somewhere outside that fades away fast while his mind collapses around him. And suddenly there’s an out, a shadow that hisses quick hide it away and he feels a tiny brush of relief and follows it blindly.
Pain pain pain follow the shadow the release and bind it shut-
“Kurt!”
Rushing rushing through and pain ebbing away and why was it there in the first place?
“Kurt!”
Don’t know.
-
“Kurt!”
He looks up to find Puck staring back at him, frantically calling his name. The awareness in his eyes must be noticeable, finally, because Puck stops yelling and lets out a long, shaky breath.
Slowly, Kurt becomes aware of the soft mattress beneath him, the arm wrapped around his chest to hold him back from falling over the edge of the bed, the phantom pains shooting through his neck. He searches his mind to find the hole filled in, and breathes a sigh of relief that nearly chokes him.
“Are you okay?”
It’s softer than he would have expected, but he doesn’t question it because he has no idea what he looked like up until a few seconds ago.
He doesn’t know what he looks like now, either, memories swirling through his mind; not just that last one of pain but everything from those missing six months. Everything good and exciting and Puck’s skin against his, but nothing overshadows the harshness of reliving November 11th (after he blocked himself away, he stood up shakily, drove himself home and went to bed, and woke up the next day in a blur of May 8th).
“I’m okay,” he says quietly, barely forming the words with his fumbling tongue. “Did you see it?”
Puck nods, just barely within his field of vision.
It feels so… dull. So anticlimactic that after all of this - the mind-reading and the powers they got from a signal and the unnamed threat that everyone was so worried about and pushing through the barrier - it was four boys, all perhaps two years older than him and attending community college (except for Daniels, who was a year below Kurt at McKinley).
Just one boy, really. He might be majoring in business, or biology.
After everything he’s had to relearn in the last month, it feels much too normal.
He can’t understand why it still scares him.
A tear slips free from his eye and he tries to raise a shaking hand to wipe it away, but Puck’s arms are curling tight around him where he lies sprawled on the bed, trapping his arms and holding him as still as possible. Encouraged by the moisture left on his cheek and the fingers trailing soothingly across his back, more tears follow, and it’s shocking how quickly Kurt gives up. Again.
He draws himself in close to Puck’s body and stops fighting.
---
Day 27- Perception
For the fifth time this week, Kurt finds himself yelling at Puck in the middle of a school day.
“What were you thinking?”
“Dude, I didn’t do anything wrong!”
“Oh, really? So that black eye Daniels is walking around with this morning came from someone else?”
Puck frowns. “Whatever.”
“No, Puck. Not whatever. We talked about this.”
“Look, it’s not like I hunted the dick down. We have practice together. Sometimes guys get hit in the face. Total accident.”
“Puck…” Kurt sighs, glancing around the empty hallway. He’s missing history class for this. “Seriously. You can’t do this.”
“That’s bullshit,” Puck growls.
“Don’t.”
“Those guys could’ve killed you, Kurt! And your plan is just to sit back and let them get away with it, and see how long it takes before they try again?”
“And your plan is to go after them in a way that’s only going to get you in trouble? I can’t prove anything by now, if I ever could have. It’s been over a month and there aren’t even any bruises left.” He’s repeated this speech too many times over the past three days. “On the other hand, they could prove quite a lot if they report it while they’re still bleeding.”
“I’m not gonna let him-”
“Daniels wasn’t even the problem,” Kurt says. “It was his brother; you know it was. So, yes, him I’ll be careful to stay away from. And I won’t be wandering around alone after school anymore, okay?”
Puck certainly does not look okay. He’s standing there with his hands clenched at his sides, seething with anger, just like the last four times Kurt’s caught him considering acts of violence.
“If I could do something about it, I would,” Kurt assures him. “But it’s been much too long now. What am I supposed to say? ‘I couldn’t report it before today because I locked the memories up in my mind and we only just broke them out a few days ago?’ Even if they believed it, which they wouldn’t, don’t you think they might ask why I never bothered to tell anyone about the memory loss?”
“Jesus. Fine. Do what you want.” Puck turns and walks away, waving a hand as if to brush Kurt off his shoulder with a harsh, jerky motion.
Kurt doesn’t try to stop him. These discussions have a tendency to end in the same way every time.
They’re still working on the ‘communication’ part of their relationship. He supposes that makes sense, considering it’s only been about two weeks. Or, four and a half months with a break in the middle, depending on what definition he’s going by today. It jumps back and forth.
He figured, naturally, that getting back the memories of May 8th through November 12th would make everything simpler, that it would just slot that period back into the empty spot in his mind and it would all fit together like adding the last piece to a jigsaw puzzle. That’s how people always talk about this sort of thing: puzzle piece metaphors.
In reality, it just seems to complicate things.
As often as he can, Kurt reminds himself that it’s only the third day after a large-scale change inside his head, and he’ll probably adjust to it in no time. He repeats the reassurance over and over, silently, as he finally turns away from staring at the corner around which Puck disappeared and heads to history class.
Mr. Lam glances over when he slips into the room five minutes late, but he doesn’t comment. He seems to be under the impression that Kurt is sick and forcing himself to keep going to school despite the illness, and Kurt hasn’t bothered to correct him. It’s a good cover, and it’s not like he doesn’t look the part, what with the bags under his eyes and the lack of concentration and the way he constantly has to hold a hand to the side of his head whenever the dizziness starts becoming unmanageable.
Sometimes, it’s set off by the simplest of things. Today, for example, he’s just trying to write a date next to the notes he’ll be taking in class, but his mind rebels against the attempt. He wants to write ‘Dec. 19th,’ but just as much of him is tied up in the idea that it was the middle of November just a couple of days ago.
The flood of memories stuck him in two places at once. It’s all so fresh, newly reformed, that a good chunk of his mind is firmly convinced that it happened ‘yesterday.’ Frankly, it’s terrifying.
However many times he’s talked Puck down, he’ll admit (not to Puck) how very much it bothers him not to be able to do anything about this. Especially with the experience replaying itself in vivid detail, sending echoes of pain shooting through his body with every hit. As it turns out, the memory loss didn’t grant him a pass for the standard fear and paranoia after an attack like that; he just got it a month late.
‘It’s over,’ he reminds himself forcefully, barely registering Mr. Lam’s lecture (something about the early 1800’s?). ‘It’s been over a month and nothing else has happened. Nothing else is going to happen.’
‘It’s been three days,’ he can’t help but think. ‘Only three days and there’s plenty of time to panic.’
And then the part of his brain that hasn’t quite accepted it isn’t somewhere in June joins in, and his head drops straight down onto the desk, which really doesn’t help the headache.
Mr. Lam shoots him a sympathetic look at the end of class, and Kurt nearly runs out the door to avoid the inevitable suggestion that he visits the school nurse. If Kurt thought she would have any idea of how to deal with this sort of thing, he would head down there in a second.
A second later, he’s regretting his wild dash out of the classroom when he almost runs into Finn, who looks down at him, concerned.
“Uh,” Finn starts, clearly wondering what had him moving so fast. “Hi.”
“What are you doing here?” Kurt asks wearily. ‘And where’s Puck?’ he wants to add, but doesn’t. It’s odd, though, because this probably counts as the first time Puck has left him alone in… weeks.
“Puck asked me to come get you. Guess he needed a break from the bodyguard thing,” Finn shrugs. Oh, yes, people have definitely noticed.
“Ah.”
“He still won’t tell me why,” Finn continues, shooting Kurt a short glare that doesn’t do a good job of convincing him to explain.
“He’s paranoid.”
Finn walks him to class.
Kurt tries not to bump into the people passing on either side, walking in Finn’s wake to minimize the resistance and wading through the swirls of thought in his mind. Every thought, memory, emotion he had for six months has been thrust into his head at once, and he keeps finding himself angry or depressed or giddy for no discernible reason.
It’s fading, pieces sliding back into place against each other, rubbing just a little off the edge to make themselves fit. It’s just unbearably slow, and he’s taken so much aspirin in the last few days that he actually went online and looked up the toxic dosage, just in case.
-
Puck corners him in the parking lot after school - though he shouldn’t have to, considering it’s been him avoiding Kurt all day, not the other way around - and sends Finn off with a sharp look.
“I’m sorry,” Kurt says before Puck can even open his mouth. He’s just so tired and his mind has two and a half different versions of Puck fighting for dominance every time he looks at him. “You hit him, whatever. Got it out of your system. I should probably take that as a good thing.”
“I’m not mad at you,” Puck mutters, which is probably as close to ‘sorry’ as Kurt’s going to get in return, and better than he would’ve hoped for. It feels like a little bit of release, more than he’s had in days, and he slumps against the side of the car, just enough to brush Puck’s side with an arm.
“This sucks,” he says, and it’s true. It’s worse, not better, than it was before they broke that piece out of his mind, at least until he resets himself again. “Everything’s… weird.” He can’t think of adjectives. “And I’m sorry you had to see it.”
“I didn’t.”
Kurt stares. “What are you talking about? You said-”
“I didn’t lie or anything, I’m just saying… I didn’t just see it, y’know? I mean, how would that even work? It’s not like you know what it looked like from the outside.” Puck sighs, a deep heave that brings his body just half an inch closer to Kurt’s when it relaxes again. “I saw what you did. I felt it.”
He felt- Oh.
Somehow, the idea that it wouldn’t make much sense for Puck to be able to see the scene as an outside observer never really occurred to him. But it doesn’t, really; it doesn’t make sense. It would only seem logical that, if Puck got a memory, he got exactly the same one that was stored in Kurt’s head. It also explains the tendrils of emotion he’s been catching on Puck for the last couple of days, threaded though some connection they made when they buried themselves deeply in their overlapping psyches.
Puck, Kurt realizes, is scared.
Because Puck remembers the feeling of life being squeezed out of him by rough hands clamped onto his throat. This isn’t the reaction of a boy who’s been objectively told someone tried to hurt a person he cares about; this is a boy knowing, very intimately, how close it came to something that couldn’t be fixed.
And, he remembers, this is Puck realizing that he drove off and missed it by five minutes.
“I’m okay,” he says, but he’s still flip-flopping between timelines and he’s pretty sure Puck can feel the confusion that surrounds everything he says.
If he does, he certainly doesn’t mention it, just drags Kurt home with him without a word. They sit on the couch and ignore each other’s shaking fingers, and watch some reruns that Kurt’s already seen three months and yesterday ago.