Glee!fic, fantasy AU: And See Further
I appear to have fixated on two universes! I just don't have the time to write everything in my head anymore, it is super depressing. MAs are really hard work, pray with me that I get to do a PhD next and basically have lots of time to faff and fic? ^^; THIS WILL PROBABLY TAKE A WHILE TO UPDATE. SORRY. (Anyone waiting for an update on FMA will probably hate me for saying that, oh gods ^^;)
And See Further, Glee!fic sequel to In The Dark and Close Your Eyes (do you see what I did with the titling there read too much Calvino I know just shoot me whatever), fantasy AU.
Disclaimer: Even as warped as this, they're still not mine.
Rating: Let's go with my safe old R rating because apparently I don't even *notice* when I drop F-bombs, in rl I seriously use it like a comma =/
Warnings: No spoilers because we're crazy AU. Warnings, I'm not warning for the smut because oh hai it's R-rated fanfic I don't imagine you're upset by smut. But, there is violence. There will actually be a *lot* of in this little probable-trilogy. So, beware of that. Yeah.
Summary: In the North, the nights come quick.
Blaine wakes up under heavy covers, blankets and cloaks piled over him, on some surface hard and warm and moulded to the shape of his body. He lies for a moment with his ear pressed to a slow hollow sound like the sea, and then Kurt's hand lifts and his knuckles run through Blaine's hair. "And are you quite comfortable like that?"
Blaine grins, and nuzzles down closer onto the amazing pillow that Kurt's chest is. "Yes."
Kurt snorts, and whacks his hip. "Off me. You're lucky you're nice and warm or I would have started tying you to the tent pole on a night just to stop you climbing on top of me."
"'m lucky in lots of ways," Blaine mumbles, and yawns, and bundles his arms closer around Kurt.
Other mages are waking in the tent, Quinn sitting and brushing her hair back hiding a yawn behind a hand, Finn climbing for the entrance so he can get outside and stretch like he needs to. Only this morning as he swipes the flap open he says, "Oh - wow -" and they all feel the particular quality of the cold air slipping into their close warm sanctuary.
Blaine sits up over Kurt, who wriggles his shoulders back on the blankets and looks curious and morning-mellow back up at him; Blaine smiles, because he's beautiful and he makes Blaine happy and it always makes Kurt smile back, and then climbs off him - oh air is cool and delicious after this close tent all night - and pokes his head out of the tent flap after Finn.
"Oh, wow."
The snow's still falling, heavy, puffy white flakes like a huge shedding bird is flying overhead, feather-down soft and pale. Blaine ducks his head back in to pull his boots on, quickly grab his thick green cloak while Kurt slips a set of robes on over his head, and Blaine climbs out after Finn delighted, at the forest all turning white. There's not so much settled - little heaps building around and over their tents but only a couple of inches on the ground yet - but it glazes every dark leaf of ivy, paints lines up the scoured tree trunks, makes patterns like lace on the shrivelled skeletons of ferns on the forest floor. Finn laughs out loud.
"Oh," Kurt's voice says breathily behind him, and Blaine turns, beams at him as Kurt shucks his cloak higher around his shoulders, snow touching his hair and glancing off his skin almost as white. "Well, it would have been nice if someone could have predicted this, we really should have thought to bring a seer with us, shouldn't we?"
"Shut up weather is difficult!" Rachel snaps as she climbs out of the tent still tugging a boot on, and skips to grab Finn's arm. But Kurt is smiling, and as the mages tumble from their tents they whoop and play in the snow like dogs let out from a night trapped indoors, not like people who are now going to have to hike through this crap for the rest of the day. Kurt reaches up and brushes a flake from beside Blaine's nose, and kisses him there where it touched so cold; Blaine catches both his hands, closes his eyes, kisses him.
Kurt whispers, white breath to Blaine's mouth, "Goggles."
They're in the tent. He shuffles out again snapping them over his eyes and oh, god, all that tumbling snow sending the magic cascading down with it, caught in its plunge, plummeting tumbling white-hearted drops of gold like it's raining stars. Oh god, no wonder the mages are laughing and playing in it, Quinn, Santana and Brittany holding hands and dancing in a shrieking circle, Mercedes spinning suddenly and catching a spiral of snow and magic upwards above her hands - oh god, it's gorgeous.
Kurt touches his back; Blaine says quietly, "I swear to god, if I'd never met you, I wouldn't have known half of how beautiful the world is."
Kurt puts his arms around him from behind, rests his cheek to the back of Blaine's neck. The aura of his magic is large enough to engulf Blaine entirely, he sees the world now through the constant glow of Kurt's magic like a living shield around them both. He puts his hands over Kurt's, enclosing his waist, and watches the fall of the snow and the magic, gold and white, white and gold.
*
It snows all morning. While they walk the mages wear little shields over their heads, letting the snow slip down behind and beside them, keeping their robes dry. Kurt keeps a shield over Blaine as well, he has more than enough magic to spare to do it, though he does keep hold of Blaine's arm so he doesn't have to worry about Blaine moving unpredictably across the path and Kurt's magic having to keep up. Blaine keeps slipping the goggles up again to steal another peek at the world the mages see, snow and magic like it's raining light.
Kurt's trying to educate him about magic. They trust, now, in staying together, they know there's no parting either of them could bear, which means that Blaine is now a part of the magical world, he can't be just a human, he has to somehow live in Kurt's world too. So Kurt talks, as they walk, about the things he might need to know, and the things he will certainly need to know.
"Usually the most powerful mages are female," Kurt says, lifting a hand and tilting his head thoughtfully, clearly watching his own magic glow around him like an enormous halo. "No-one knows why. Maybe the magic just likes women better."
"Is it sentient? The magic?"
"No-one really knows. There's a lot of argument about it. If each individual particle could have some sort of consciousness, or if all of it together makes some sort of giant . . . I don't know. If it is conscious, I don't think it can be in any way we could understand."
"Do you think it's sentient?"
Kurt looks up, his eyes tracking the snowy sky, the magic he can see falling with it. "Yes. I don't know how, but yes. When - when things are bad you can feel it, feel it around you like a friend, almost. Yes. I do. It has a personality. It likes chaos and high emotions and - and joy. It's alive, in a different way to us, but it's definitely alive."
"So, normally female mages are stronger . . . but you're really powerful."
"Yes," Kurt says with a shrug, and drops his hand again, and smiles. "I am."
Blaine considers it. Kurt embodies dichotomies, breaks down the dichotomies just by existing outside of them; well, no wonder the magic in all its love of cheerful chaos likes him so much. "All the strongest recorded mages have been women," Kurt says, and ticks off on his free hand with the hand crooked through Blaine's arm, "Sepharial, Merlin-"
"Merlin -" Blaine catches his eyes, frowns. ". . . Merlin's a guy?"
"Mm, in the human stories, I know. We have different stories."
"Merlin's a woman?"
"We think she was. The stories are good."
Blaine tugs at his arm. "Tell me one."
"It's a little early for a bedtime story, Blaine."
"Tell meeee," he tugs at Kurt's arm, bumps his hip with his, and Kurt laughs, and bangs his hip back.
"Oh gods, if it'll keep you quiet." He sing-songs, "Once upon a time . . ."
*
Noon sees them pass out of the forest, sees the snow peter out and flurry its last flakes down, and the afternoon brings them within sight of a town. "Likelihood of us sleeping indoors for a change?" Santana says, flipping a hand up and down. "Likelihood of 'em being too chickenshit to tell us to get our witchy butts away from their kids an' property?"
"It's not easy for them." Finn says quietly. "You know what we look like to them."
"They think we're so dangerous, we might as well use it. If we just said that they give us somewhere to sleep or we pop their brain inside their skull -"
Brittany uses a finger to pop her cheek; Kurt looks unamused.
"I could speak to the owner of the inn," Blaine suggests.
"Like an interpreter?"
"Like a messenger boy." Santana stretches her arms overhead, shrugs as she walks. "What-the-hell-ever, I just wanna sleep on a mattress for once, if I have to burn half the cruddy town down to get one."
Closer to the town, on a well-rutted road with cart tracks showing dark through the snow, a man comes running out towards them. At first they begin hugging the edge of the road to let him pass, but it becomes pretty obvious that he's running right at them, and they straggle to a halt in confusion: lone humans do not generally run towards covens of mages without some very particular reason for it. He skids and scrabbles to a halt in the snow, pants there hard and chokes out, "Are any of you - healer?"
Their gazes flick to Kurt who, very uneasily, raises his hand. The man sucks his breath in, wades in past Rachel and Finn and grabs Kurt by the arm, and begins scrambling off again towards the town as Kurt yelps and his boots skid in wheel-rucks and fresh snow. "Brother's wife - two days in labour - midwife says twins -"
"Tw- wait, babies?"
"Good luck Kurt!" Santana calls after him, while Brittany waves. "Enjoy your first vagina!"
Kurt's voice comes back to them in a wail; "Babies?"
Blaine stands feeling oddly bereft, Kurt wrenched away from his side, and Finn pats him awkwardly on the shoulder. "He'll be fine. And I guess for once we're welcome somewhere."
"Yeah," Puck says. "We just tell 'em to give us beds for the night or Kurt'll deliver them lizard babies."
Blaine says, "Does he actually know how to-?"
"I guess he's about to find out," Quinn murmurs, and Mercedes gives her a better him than me look, before they hike their packs higher, and follow Kurt's heel-scraped footprints towards the town.
*
They have time to kill. It's a baker's wife in labour, so there's plenty of fresh bread on offer while Blaine sits mournfully at the bottom of the stairs up to the bedrooms above the shop, hearing the odd moans and keening cries, and the pacing of the anxious baker outside the door. The mages split up, head into the town to barter for supplies - they don't carry money, but they need some thread at least for mending torn robes, and to pick up some more supplies for when they move on. "We can't live off bread," Santana says. "Even if we could, if Kurt fluffs it we ain't getting bread, so."
Finn sits with Blaine, since they're both sort of attached to Kurt by more than coven alone, while Rachel lays cards on the flour-softened surface of the kitchen table, turning them slowly. "A girl and a boy," she says, turning another card, leaving her fingertips on it.
Blaine looks up. "Are they going to be okay?"
Rachel turns a card, turns a card. "Birth is a between," she murmurs. "You can't predict the between points of life and death. You just have to live them out."
Overhead, there's the thin mewl of a baby's first indignant breath in this world and the steps on the landing squeak a floorboard, pause, pick up again more quickly. Blaine stares up the staircase, thinks of Kurt, wants so badly -
Rachel closes her eyes, opens them, turns a card, turns another card. "There's the boy. The girl's being slow."
Blaine says, "What happens - what happens to a healer if-"
Finn looks across at him, and Blaine's saliva feels too thick in his mouth. He swallows, shakes his head. "Nothing."
What happens to a healer if they try to help someone beyond help? If that baby isn't going to make it, and if Kurt tries anyway -
Blaine closes his hands together, props his elbows on his knees, props his head off his hands. Kurt will be fine. Kurt's the strongest mage he knows, and a perfectly capable healer. And he's seen Kurt come through this before, hasn't he? That first time Kurt ever healed anyone, when a faery broke Blaine and Kurt managed to share the break between them, not death but just hard, hard life for them both - he'll be fine. Strongest boy Blaine's ever met. He'll be fine, fine, fine.
Sometimes Kurt's affinity makes Blaine feel cold and sick. To know that Kurt's life will be primarily marked by pain, forever, it almost physically hurts Blaine just to think it. Pain and pain and pain, and scars if Kurt can't heal them, and his body slowly wrecked - but Kurt's so strong, and Kurt doesn't seem to think about it, doesn't seem to fear it, does Kurt know more than him? Or does Kurt just accept it, as part of the bargain of the magic he has?
Since when did Kurt ever just accept anything?
Blaine thinks a prayer through, mostly because the rhythm soothes him. He thinks of Kurt's voice, low and musical, reciting a story to him about mages and knights and a king and a faery. And he listens to the pacing above, and the hiccupping cry of the baby. A door opens overhead and Blaine stands up, isn't even aware of doing it, and there's the murmur of a female voice, and a man's voice chokes something back -
"Hey-" Finn grabs after him but Blaine's already halfway up the stairs, pulled as if by a rope from overhead. The door closes again just as he reaches the top of the stairs and there's the baker, holding a blanket-wrapped baby in one arm and looking like he might cry.
"Son," he croaks at Blaine. "A son-"
There's an animal moan from the room to the side, not a scream, no strength left for a scream, and Blaine can hear the edge of Kurt's voice in a quick-running murmur as he does whatever he does in there. Blaine swallows, and doesn't know what to do or say. He hates not being able to help. He can't bear not being able to help. And not being able to help Kurt of all people, it's like something stuck in his chest, like a stake stabbed in there-
And then the baby wriggles in the baker's arms, eyes still tight-closed, and smacks its little lips almost thoughtfully, and Blaine stares at it sort of mesmerised. It's so tiny. How will it grow into a man-sized man? How is that even possible?
There's a last sobbed groan from that closed bedroom door, and Blaine hears Kurt's voice catch high in something like relief, and then a female voice takes over, businesslike and busy. There's a little thumping noise, and the female voice gets edged with frustration, and after a period of quick, practical noises while that voice scolds continuously, the door opens on a flustered midwife, overheated and overtired, with a baby in her arms. "And a daughter. Someone needs to - you, you're with the mages?" She gives Blaine a frowning look. "Are you their - servant?"
"I'm his -" Blaine starts, and then doesn't know how to finish that sentence, and then realises that he has finished that sentence. "I'm his," he says, and the midwife neither understands nor tries to, just dumps the baby into the now openly weeping father's arms and jerks her head for Blaine to enter the room.
"She's decent, he needs - help. Is there another bed?" The baker is cooing, clearly bewildered by feeling, down at two wriggling and annoyed-looking babies. The midwife's voice raises. "Do you have a bed for the healer?"
"What? Yes! Yes - through there - oh my goodness, look at them. Is she alright?"
"Fine, fine, she'll sleep it off-" the midwife mutters, but Blaine's already slipped past her, into the room where there are soiled bed sheets dumped in a tin bath, where a sweaty, exhausted woman is asleep in the freshened bed, and where sitting on a wooden chair with his arms wrapped around his stomach and his head down is Kurt, silent and very still. Blaine nearly trips up hurrying to him and Kurt lifts his head, gives a tight smile of recognition and squeezes his arms closer around himself.
"I-" he starts, and his breath shudders out. "I can't stand up."
"Okay," Blaine says, mouth running without any requirement of his brain, all his concentration on Kurt and touching Kurt's arms and trying to steel himself to bear Kurt's weight. "Okay okay it's okay, there's a bed through here, everything's okay, you need to-"
Kurt sucks his breath in again, shakes his head. "Not yet. Not-"
"What's wrong? What are you - does it hurt?"
Kurt's face twists sick. "We didn't learn - learn about this in the college, Emma taught us for healing and she never wanted to talk about - about this." He waves a hand at the unconscious woman, the sheets stained in ways Blaine doesn't want to concentrate on, the hot animal smell of the room. "Oh gods I can see why. I can't even - Blaine it's so - brutal. And it's - the blood is not the worst part, oh my gods the blood is not the worst part, I cannot believe women do this. I cannot believe my mother went through this." Kurt rubs his hands over his face, then his breath hitches again and he wraps his arms around his stomach again. "So at least now I know - I know -"
"Know what?" Blaine says soothingly, rubbing his shoulders, while Kurt closes his eyes and chokes a single bitter laugh at the floorboards.
"Know just to try to get everyone through it alive, do not, do not try to help with the - pain. Because." His mouth twists, he squeezes his eyes closed. "I can't stand up."
Blaine tries to understand, and doesn't know if he does or doesn't. "You . . ."
"Don't even ask, don't, don't. Don't." He swallows hard. "And don't tell them. They'll -"
"Okay, okay, of course I won't, of course I won't." He runs a hand over Kurt's head, kisses him there through the hair, thinks of Santana's reaction to what Blaine thinks has happened; no, he is not going to even attempt to tell the coven this. "There's a bed, as soon as you can stand. I'll help you through. It's fine."
"He can't stay there." the midwife announces from just behind Blaine, who lifts his head again and blinks at her while Kurt shifts a little on the chair and makes an unhappy noise under his breath. "She needs to sleep."
"She'll sleep through a carnival, I sincerely doubt she cares." Kurt snaps back, but the midwife puts her hands on her hips, narrows her eyes at him, then looks at Blaine.
"Get his other arm. We'll walk him through."
"No." Kurt says, lifting a finger at her. "No no no not happening-"
She's already got his shoulder and Blaine can either enter into a tug-of-war with her over Kurt's body or just try to keep up so that Kurt can at least lie down. "It's okay," he sings soothingly, taking Kurt's other arm while Kurt makes a quick swallowed shrieking noise and the midwife pulls him to his unresponsive legs from the other side.
"Get your hands off me you-"
Blaine braces Kurt's full weight - Kurt's boots flail aimlessly at the floorboards before he tries to wrench himself in half again around some residual pain - and murmurs, "We'll get you to a bed, you can rest then, just a few seconds and-"
"-harpy I will curse you to the eightieth generation-"
"One foot in front of the other," the midwife says grimly. "Walking's better for the pain anyway."
"The hell would you know about it you sadist-"
Blaine keeps his eyes on the floor, guiding Kurt's dragging feet through the doorway and across the corridor, into some sort of maid's room, a chair and chest of drawers for furniture and a single bed against the wall. The midwife pretty much aims Kurt at it and pushes, and Blaine keeps hold of him to swing him down to sit on the edge, where Kurt folds himself in half again and puts his hands over his face. Blaine's pulled down next to him, one arm still around his back. He touches Kurt's hand, head ducked low to his, and says to him, "Alright, Kurt, do you want to lay down?"
He remembers their audience, then, and that the ease he and Kurt have together in front of the coven is not necessarily as easy in front of other people. He looks up at the midwife ready for some expression he's not currently in any position to counter, not with Kurt like this to mind, but she just shrugs at him like they're nothing she hasn't seen before, says, "God makes us to His own plan." and closes the door behind herself when she leaves.
Blaine contemplates that for a moment, rubbing Kurt's back while he seethes the last of his resentment out and just settles into a slump, exhausted and aching against Blaine's side. Blaine touches his forehead off Kurt's, murmurs quietly, "Kurt? Do you want to lay down?"
Kurt closes his eyes, nods. Blaine touches his back, stands and begins untying Kurt's belt, while Kurt presses his hands over his eyes and whispers, "I cannot believe . . ."
"It's over now."
"I cannot believe."
"It's okay. You did it. It's over."
"I can't . . . I am never doing that again."
"I know."
"Never."
"I know, Kurt."
The first thing he said after the first time he healed anyone, the first time he healed Blaine - it's horrible, and he hates it, and he doesn't want to do it. Kurt's ability to keep on facing up to things that he can't bear makes something catch and hurt in Blaine's throat; he'll keep on saying that 'never' until he does do it again, and then again until the time after that. The fact that he'll do it every time doesn't mean that he doesn't hate it, but the fact that he hates it doesn't mean that he won't do it. Loving Kurt really hurts Blaine sometimes.
He pulls the robes over Kurt's head, kneels to unlace his boots, shuffles Kurt's loose and heavy body under the covers. He means to brush a hand over his head and kiss him there and let him sleep, but Kurt catches his arm, and his breath hushes over Blaine's skin just below his shoulder; "Don't go,"
Blaine hesitates, then kicks his own boots off and swings himself over Kurt's body, pressing himself in the narrow space between Kurt and the wall, tucking Kurt close along himself with an arm around his waist. "I'm right here. I'm always here."
"Cannot believe," Kurt whispers.
"I know. I know, Kurt. Go to sleep, I've got you."
Kurt makes a small noise, tilting himself into the mattress. Blaine watches the room from over his shoulder, his arm gently lifted and lowered by Kurt's slowing, sleeping breaths.
*
They're on the road again the next day. Kurt feels so, so much better for a long sleep in an actual bed, for waking to the sound of babies crying, and Tina creeping in with his and Blaine's bags to put them next to the bed; waking up to Blaine pressed all along his back warm and solid and safe and with a morning erection pressed in a friendly way against Kurt's left buttock. Tina caught his eye and smiled and crept out again, and Kurt watched the thin dawn begin to grow behind the curtains, waking Blaine by gently, slowly, stroking down the tendons in his hands with his fingertips.
Then they had sex because when do they get the chance. Sex in a bed, sex naked, Kurt's magic scraping a chair across the floor to jam underneath the door handle, Blaine pulling the underrobes up over his head, Kurt digging his fingers into Blaine's hair and trying not to whine out loud while he mouthed at his nipple. After that hell Kurt went through, a few more soiled sheets are the last thing this household needs to worry about and yes he did feel entitled. Somewhere in the house babies cried, and Kurt gripped Blaine by the thighs trying to force him on, urge the more they always grasp at out of him, jaw clenched tight with that always-knowledge, when they do that, that Blaine doesn't even know his own name, the only thing Blaine knows in all the world is Kurt and Kurt's body -
And he needed that, restoring to his own body, reminding his body of what it really is. After that. After that, after - pain in parts he does not possess, empathy-pain beyond comprehension - he needed that. Running his hands down Blaine's back afterwards, sweat and Blaine's hot panting breaths on his chest, feeling possessive and still keenly full of want for Blaine while the aftershocks of pleasure ran hot all the way down his thighs. Blaine's breath gasped out and he nosed at the skin of Kurt's chest, and Kurt ran his fingers through his hair, and watched the magic begin to come down from its heaving high over them. When they fuck, it's like they shake the stars loose.
Now they walk along a snow-streaked path, towards the hills. The sky is heavy with the promise of more snow to come, so the coven makes up what time they can with their packs full of bread and pastry in waxed paper. Kurt and Blaine walk side by side, shoulders and hips brushing as they go, lazily close and still feeling too tangled in with each other, and Kurt no longer gives a crap that his entire coven knows that they fucked each other silly this morning. He is Blaine's, and Blaine is his, and everyone already knew that anyway.
Blaine's magic lessons continue. Kurt lifts a finger, catches a single particle of magic, lets it burn brighter so Blaine can see it. White in its heart, softly, brightly white, aura'd in that particular golden glow. They have a sealed jar in the college of magic from some other world, glowing sickly faery-green. Gold is safer.
Blaine squints at it. "How do you - control the individual particles? I mean, how do you concentrate on all of them at once?"
"You don't, really. It's like . . . I don't know. You pour water from a jug, it's a lot of water droplets but they all pour together, it's like that? I don't know, Blaine. It's mostly just instinct."
"But you're really good at it."
"Instinct and my ineffable talent." Kurt glances across at the noise the coven are making - Puck, Mike and Finn (the Artie-owl jiggles helpless and annoyed on his shoulder with every lumbering leap) are tossing a glowing disc of magic around as they walk, catching it on magic and sending it spinning back, picking up momentum so it's always going faster.
Finn calls, "Mike!" and sends it skimming at him, so Mike can catch it, spin and toss it on.
"Puck!"
Kurt scowls at them like they're so childish and he would never do such a thing with Mercedes and Tina and Rachel, and looks back at that one particle of magic glowing so softly warm, softly cool on his fingertip. Blaine is still staring amazed at it as they walk. Kurt says, "You can touch it. It won't hurt you."
Blaine checks his eyes, gives the particle a dubious look and then curiosity takes over, and he reaches out, touches a fingertip to it; Kurt feels a little buzz run all the way down the nerves of his arm, more Blaine than magic. He pulses a little more power into that particle and hands it over to Blaine, to play with amazed between his hands.
"It's all -"
"I know."
Blaine smiles. "- tingly."
He's supposed to be a knight, this boy. Kurt half-stifles his smile, watching his face, when Finn calls, "Blaine!"
Blaine lifts his head. Kurt's magic flares; instinct. He catches that skimming disc of quick-spinning magic shearing in at Blaine's head like a loosed arrow, stopping it and his own breath, his lungs closed in his chest in the same split second, and stands there statue-still with one hand raised, holding that discus of magic in a lethal spin in the air, like a wasp caught mid-flight.
Blaine stares at it all of five inches from his face and swallows, particle of magic dropped and forgotten from his hand. Finn has both hands over his mouth, and mumbles through them, "Sorry, dude, forgot."
Kurt draws a shaky breath in through his nose, closes his eyes for a second, drops his hand and lets the magic burst and tumble away, loose into particles again. "Thank you Finn."
"What . . ." Blaine says, still not looking away from where the magic that almost sawed his head in half was. "What would have happened if that had hit me?"
Kurt tries to blink the image out of his head, and Rachel swoops in with, "Let's not talk about what could have happened, the important thing is that no-one just got their head sheared in half -"
"How the hell can you forget that he doesn't have any magic?" Kurt snarls at Finn, who just looks guiltily stricken while Santana rolls her eyes.
"You bitch when we treat him like a human, bitch when we treat him like a mage-"
"Don't treat him in ways that could get him killed!" Kurt snaps back at her, and she gives him the whatever look and turns after Brittany again. Blaine says, "I'm going to. Walk in the back where I can - see you all. For a bit. Okay?"
"Dude-" Finn drops back with him, mumble-babbling his apologies, while Puck gives Kurt a what, no-one died look and begins spinning a fresh discus of magic alight on one finger. Kurt huffs, stalks ahead, kicking dirty snow ahead of himself. Tina catches him up, catches his arm.
"He didn't mean it. Kurt, it's sort of a good thing, you know? We forget he ever wasn't one of us, sometimes."
Kurt shrugs, awkward with her holding his arm, angrier than he really understands, angry partially at himself. "He's not a mage. He won't ever be a mage. I don't know why it's so difficult to treat him as a person without treating him as a mage."
"Kurt . . ." Her magic touches at his, a hopeful-playful push, and he puts his head back, rolls his eyes. "You'd never let anything hurt him anyway, right? You have more than enough magic for him as well."
"He can take care of himself."
She gives him a look, and he looks away. Fact: Blaine can't take care of himself. Not against magic. Against humans, maybe even against dragons and monsters, but not against magic. Kurt has walked Blaine onto a path between danger and danger, and he knows it, and he knows Blaine doesn't care but gods that doesn't mean that Kurt doesn't, doesn't mean that he doesn't really feel it sometimes. What right did he ever have to fall in love with Blaine in the first place, and then pick him out of his safe life and set him in this one so lethal to him and now they have to stay together and they know it and -
And Kurt knows the choices they'll one day have to make. All he can do, for now, is enjoy the inheld breath of their lives before then.
"Do you ever . . ." Tina squeezes at his arm a little. "Do you ever wish . . ."
He raises an eyebrow for her, and her mouth twist-twitches, and she - presses at his magic with hers, one of those little touches of fondness and friendship, companionable and soothing between coven members. "Don't you ever think . . ." she says quietly, and he has to look away, because he knows what she means. He sees how Mike and Tina settle their magic into a single aura as they walk side by side, sees how Finn and Rachel bat their magic back and forth at each other, sees the lazy way Santana and Brittany's magic intertwines. And he can watch the way the magic moves over Blaine but Blaine doesn't move it, and Blaine can never touch Kurt's magic with his own and make him feel loved without even meeting his eye.
He doesn't need to. Kurt doesn't care. He knows Blaine loves him. He knows it. He doesn't need Blaine to have magic to know that, he doesn't need to feel those touches, so intimate and instinctive. All he needs is to know that Blaine is there. As long as Blaine has a heart to beat he'll love Kurt with it, and Kurt will return it a thousandfold, and wrap Blaine up safe in his own magic's cocoon when they sleep.
"No. I don't wish he was different, not by an eyelash. He's perfect."
He sees the but in Tina's eyes and in her magic, but then she lets it go and squeezes his arm instead. "So no-one has to cook tonight because of all the stuff that baker gave us! So we should totally do something fun before sleeping -"
"Something fun but not deadly, perhaps?"
"I thought we could sing around the fire or something. Dance." She shivers against him. "Keep warm."
"It's going to snow."
"All the more reason to dance."
He bumps her magic with his, and she pokes his back, and it's too hard to try not to laugh.
*
Two more days of walking, up and down those damn hills, and the world is visibly wintry now. The snow's been falling, thick and determined in the night, a struggle to walk through even with magic's help; their robes are wet by the end of each day, their teeth chatter as Puck and Santana steam the water out of them. On the third day the snow doesn't stop, slits spitefully at them in a vicious diagonal wind, and Kurt has to keep a shield over his face so the snow doesn't bite his eyes. He keeps hold of Blaine's hand to keep the shield over him too. Blaine, goggles on, walks slightly ahead of him - shorter but sturdier, he kicks a path ahead of them through the knee-deep snow for Kurt to follow.
Visibility is reduced to a stone's throw ahead. Mercedes' invisible voice comes back to them, caught and savaged by the wind; "Where's Tina?"
From somewhere behind them, "Here! With Mike!"
Kurt squints through the chaos of the snow. "Where are Rachel and Finn?"
"This is insane," Blaine turns to him, and Kurt's concentrating so hard on ploughing through the wind that he walks right into him and they stagger, holding each others' arms. "We can't do this, we'll get - lost and - we need to set up camp."
"In all this?"
"Screw all this," Puck mutters, shuffling over to them through the snow, which sizzles in a continuous angry hiss as it melts against his shield. "Guys! Back here, this is crazy!"
Blaine calls, "Mike! Tina!"
"Mercedes, back here!"
Mercedes grabs onto Puck's arm, waves an arm to shake the snow from her shield, squints at them. "Where's Rachel? Gonna kill that girl for leading us into this."
Kurt narrows his eyes, tries to see through the snow; he tries looking through the magic but it's almost even worse, such a confusion of snow and light that when he blinks, his eyes fracture on tears. He wipes them on the back of his wrist, says, "And the girls, Santana and-"
"Quinn! Quinn!"
Brittany is pulling Santana towards them, Santana yelling, "Quinn! Fuck, that girl-"
Puck is suddenly alert. "Quinn's gone?"
"Saw something ahead an' ran off." Snowflakes hiss on her shield, burning hotter and brighter with her anger and her anxiety. "Stupid bitch, in all this-"
Kurt doesn't know what to do, holds tight to Blaine's hand and is scared, in all this chaos of cold and confusion. Blaine is standing steady, though. "We need to set up camp and some sort of signal. We can't send search parties out until we have somewhere safe to come back to."
Two more visible figures are approaching, Mike and Tina seen in the slots between snowflakes, shields glowing through the snow. Mercedes hurries to them out of sheer relief, and Tina puts her arms around her, but Puck's lit a ball of fire in one hand and is striding away through the snow ahead.
Blaine calls, "Puck! Wait! Not alone, we need-"
"Quinn's out in all this crap, idiot'll freeze to death in -"
"I'm sure that I appreciate your concern so much," Quinn's voice comes back, wind-tossed and irritated. It's a relief to see her walking back towards them, a slight pale aethermage with the winds curling oddly around her, the snow spiralling in orbit around her without landing on her. She's carrying something. As she gets closer, Kurt can see that it's a white hare, and he feels the quick hot running of its heart and walks to her without even thinking, holds a hand in the air over it; female, magical, not hurt but exhausted, like she's been running for her life.
The hare's eyes roll to him, and her nose twitches. "Nothing you can heal, mage."
He realises what he's doing, lifts his hand away embarrassed. "What - Quinn -?"
"I heard her." Quinn says, very simply, like that's the only answer required. She's holding the heavy body of the hare close against herself, arms a little buried in its fur.
"You need to run," the hare says, trying to pick herself up a little in Quinn's arms; Quinn hikes her higher. "It's coming, I felt it moving - it's almost here -"
Tina says, "What's - almost here . . . ?"
Something is dropping in Kurt's chest. "Where are Finn and Rachel?"
Blaine touches Kurt's arm, murmurs to him, "I have actually no idea what is happening right now."
"The-" Blaine can't hear the hare. "The hare was running away from something and we don't know where Finn and Rachel are and-"
Quinn says, "The wind's dying," and Kurt glances at her eyes and knows it's true, because an aethermage said it, but this wind feels like it won't ever stop. He looks up, squints through his shield, realises that the snow is less as well. If the weather will just calm down enough that they can haul themselves together -
And then they hear the scream.
It shocks Kurt fixed to the ground like a nail through him, bang, but Blaine's drawn his sword and Puck's already started running and gods that was Rachel. He can hear Finn's distant, helpless yelling now, skids in the snow and sets off after the running mages - and Blaine, already up ahead with Puck, all of them surging through the snow as fast as they can, shields faltering in their hurry, snow stings Kurt's face and catches in his hair -
Up ahead, across the field of unbroken snow, there's some hunched shape he can't make out as the snow really does begin to die, thinner flakes now, and the wind is freezing but not so spiteful. He can't understand the crouching shape, it's not - is it Rachel and Finn? It -
The magic over it is all wrong. The mages begin to slow, and Blaine hesitates because they do.
And then the crouching shape moves, stands up and something drops like a bundle of heavy fabric to the ground, and mage robes pool across the snow, and the cry gets stuck in Kurt's throat high and horrified and Tina chokes out loud. The standing figure wipes its mouth off on the back of a hand and turns to the pack of mages scrambling to a confused halt, and another dark figure is picking itself out of the snow; Finn, hand to his head, staggering to his feet like he's drunk. Kurt’s healer's instincts twinge it in his own body: head injury, hit sickeningly hard by something. He feels further -
It's Rachel on the floor. He kicks up snow as he starts running again, breath caught in his throat, so far from thinking. His robes slip through Blaine's grabbing hand and then Blaine is charging after him, and that standing figure is stepping back a little, licking its fingers off, giving Kurt plenty of room to fall down at Rachel's side where Finn staggers and drops to one knee, choking at her, "Rachel - Rachel -"
She's on her side, face buried in the snow, and the blood is soaking her robes from the neck down. The rest of the coven are panting up to them now, and Blaine stands over Rachel's body, between Kurt and whatever just opened Rachel's throat, his sword drawn and his body tense in the cold.
"Rachel, Rachel," Kurt whispers, and puts a hand over her neck, blood hot and slick on his skin. "Oh - gods-"
Finn yells at him, "Do something, fix it, help her!"
His hand shakes, but there's never any choice. He closes his eyes and the pain lances in the side of his neck, his head jerks back hard at the same time that a voice he doesn't know laughs softly and says, "Mages, where did you come from? I mean, not that you're not going to make things more interesting but it's a seriously long way to come just to die in the cold, you know?"
The last thing Kurt needs when healing in these shock-tainted circumstances is distracting. The noise leaves his throat, the pain of it - he claps a hand to the side of his neck and it's wet, and Blaine's head flicks to him. Kurt drops his hand, stares at the blood, pants, and white bubbles of light pop in his eyes so he can't really tell if the snow's stopped yet.
"You-" Finn spits, back on his feet - Kurt's healer's sympathies feel how his head grates and lurches with it but Finn's reaching for his magic, ready to throw everything at this man -
There's nothing there to throw. Kurt stays sitting, doesn't have a choice, his legs feel like they've melted to the metal-cold snow, and he looks up dazed. The magic, it's - for a second he thinks he's blind again - where's the magic?
Feeling horrible realisation dawn, he looks at the man standing a little way off, unconcerned by the sword Blaine's holding, smiling a tilted, amused smile at them. There's no magic around him. None. Like he forces it away from himself, like he repels it like it's terrified of him. The magic that fills the air like it is the air is gone, a few loose scared particles drifting distant and useless for them. Kurt looks up at his coven, feels sick with it; whatever null-field that man is surrounded by, it's deadened the magic of Kurt's whole coven, chased all the magic out of the air, they look so naked, just a few bare specks around them. And he knows the name for this, Rachel with her neck opened and all the magic frightened out of the air, he knows what this means and fear dries his throat.
The man bows, raises himself again smirking. "Jesse St James, dhampir. I really wouldn't worry about introducing yourselves, I don't expect to need to use your names that many times."
Kurt touches Rachel's shoulder, feels the beat of her heart and the breath of her lungs, alive but horribly weak - Kurt can't put the lost blood back into her body, even if she can't lose more now. He looks at his own hand, sees the aura of magic still there. The dhampir's appalling magic-dampening effect hasn't left Kurt's insane aura of magic completely dead, just less, so much less, and with all his coven (Blaine) here to be hurt, Kurt's never needed that magic more.
"You - bastard, you -" Finn's near to tears and with nothing, no magic, nothing to throw at him, while Santana's trying to get fire to light in her hands and doing nothing but spitting some weak sparks up, and the dhampir just smiles at him.
"I'm sorry, did she matter to you? How long had you known her, a handful of years? You really should work out that getting attached to mortals is a total waste of your time, they seriously do nothing but die."
"You-" Finn lunges forward and Blaine grabs his arm, sword still raised, and that's when the dhampir's eyes touch Kurt's for the first time, that's when he sees the half-second's confusion before the sneer curls.
He says to Blaine, "Look after Rachel." and stands, strides past him, hears Blaine's, "Kurt-" but there's no time, Kurt gets between his lover and this thing as it glares at him and he lifts his shield, his thin little eggshell shield, which the dhampir walks up to and examines with a tilt of its head. Youngish man, unremarkably handsome but for his eyes pale and vicious and just a little too close together. He lifts a hand and touches a finger to Kurt's shield - Kurt forces it stronger, burning bright in the last trickles of snow wavering down, and the dhampir looks into his eyes and drags his finger down the side of the shield like a claw, shrieking up sparks of magic in its wake. He says, voice flat, "And exactly what kind of abomination of nature are you?"
For a second -
Kurt can't control that second, the second of his guts shrinking to those words, that second of learned shame. But almost in the same second something swells stronger, pride and certainty, no. Because he is not. Because no-one has ever been so right as Kurt loved by Blaine -
The dhampir taps his shield again. "All that magic. All that power, all that strength - and you chose healing. I - I actually don't know what to say, what exactly the hell is wrong with you?" He holds his hands out like he's genuinely trying to make Kurt understand. "You could have this world on its knees and begging and you chose healing?"
Kurt finds some breath, he doesn't know where from, to whisper, "Leave us alone."
"You're the ones who walked onto my territory, healer. With all this." He bangs the shield with the palm of his hand and Kurt's knees jolt, he gasps out loud: it's like being hit by a siege engine, by a battering ram, stronger than that human body should be capable of, but the shield holds. Kurt's stronger than he should be capable of too. "You waltz onto my front garden and interrupt my meal and you're an atrocity, do you know that? I feel a little bit sick just looking at you. All of that power and you chose healing -"
Blaine is standing next to Kurt's shield, saying very quietly, "Get the hell away from him."
The dhampir glances at him. "And what is this, your familiar? Oh sorry, it doesn't have any magic. Your pet?"
Kurt whispers, "Blaine stay back."
Blaine holds his sword steady and pulls the goggles down to hang around his neck, eyes on the dhampir's eyes. "There's something wrong with the magic."
Kurt swallows. "Yes."
"So I'll fight it."
The dhampir's mouth twitches on a little swallowed laugh. Kurt whispers, "Blaine it is inhumanly strong you have no idea-"
"I'll fight it. It's fine. I know what I'm doing."
Kurt drops his shield, grabs Blaine's wrist, hisses to his ear, "Blaine it is inhumanly strong and fast, do you understand-?"
Blaine catches his eye, gives a curt half-nod. His face looks different, all poise and some terrible sort of calm, not the boy who cuddles close and drools on Kurt's shoulder in the night. Kurt's fingers go loose on his arm, his jaw almost too weak to stay closed, and Blaine pushes at him, murmurs to him, "Back." and Kurt does, hands gripping each other not to shake, feet stumbling in the snow, no breath left in his chest: he doesn't have a choice.
Healers can't do aggressive magic. They can put up shields, and their emotions will spark off the same magical reactions any mage's will, but they can't knowingly use magic to hurt someone else. It's no vow they take, no promise they can break, it just becomes a logical impossibility to them, they can't contemplate how it would work. Kurt tries to imagine it, spiking magic through that thing's chest before it can hurt his lover, but he can't properly conceive of how to do it anymore. He heals. It's who and what he is. He can't - he tries to think how he could - he can't. What kind of healer does that? He has to unwrite who he is to attack that thing and he can't do that any more than he can unpick his love for Blaine out of his heart, it is, and all he can do is live with it.
So he stands, breath cold in his throat, with Finn behind him whispering to Rachel and trying not to cry, his coven at his back all still and sick with lack of magic, and Blaine faces the dhampir, sword drawn. The dhampir looks unimpressed, mostly amused, and then flicks his smirk from Blaine to Kurt, a stab in the heart from ten paces away: he means to kill him, and make Kurt watch.
Except that neither Kurt nor Blaine is ever going to let that happen.
Blaine swings his sword in a quick twirl to loosen his wrists and then lunges, fast as a cat. The dhampir sidesteps, smooth as water, and Blaine turns with him so he doesn't get access to his back though Kurt knows, Kurt knows that if he'd really wanted to, the dhampir could have been there faster. The sword loops, bright and clean against the white of the world, and the dhampir skips back again, beginning to smile, while Blaine's eyes are intent and his face is serious and every muscle in his body sings concentration. Kurt's hands squeeze at his sides, and the mages recognise a multiplicity of gods but none they can pray to, something Kurt has never regretted before.
Blaine swings in. The dhampir sidesteps as easily as dancing, spinning in around his back and Blaine whirls with him, faster now, but it's not a dancer's quick grace like the dhampir he moves with, it's the solid, heavy grace of a knight, weighed down with chain mail and that sword Kurt has trouble comfortably lifting. The dhampir laughs, suddenly, and Blaine's breath is visible now, hot with effort, steam slipping past his face as they spin again, quicker, sword just missing the dhampir always half a step ahead and openly grinning and Kurt's hands squeeze so tight they hurt -
The dhampir sidesteps but Blaine's anticipated it, swings his own body in, the sword catches its momentum and comes diagonally down heavy and deadly as a guillotine. The cry sticks in Kurt's throat as the dhampir moves suddenly so fast it's like no movement at all, like a blink Kurt hadn't realised he'd taken; he's holding the sword by the blade, a little blood running from his hand, sluggish and dark down his own wrist. He smiles down at Blaine's face. "Mistake, little pet."
Blaine sinks a dagger into the side of his neck.
At first it doesn't even really register, it clearly doesn't with the dhampir, who merely looks sort of surprised. Kurt realises his hands are now over his mouth but doesn't know when there was the time to put them there. Blaine's face is cold, grim, tight around the mouth, eyes intense on the dhampir's - until the dhampir slaps a hand to its throat, and Blaine wrenches his sword free, falls a few steps back, and Kurt hears the breath leave him in a rush.
The dhampir reaches up, jerks the dagger out and drops it. The blood doesn't spray loose but runs out sleepy and sullen, thick down his throat before Kurt sees the skin knit back together, healing quicker than Kurt could have done it and apparently without feeling a thing. The dhampir shakes his hand out and stares at the blood on it, then looks down at his shirt, wipes at it a bit - it's stuck down to his chest with blood - and back up at Blaine, eyes narrowing. "Do you have any idea how hard it is to find a decent shirt in my size in this dump of a nowhere?"
Kurt can feel Blaine's heart running faster, and squeezes his hands at his sides again, draws his breath in.
The dhampir says, "No more games." and -
Its two running steps are as quick as blinks. Blaine gets the sword up to counter but Kurt can see how heavy that arm will fall, that sword will break, and he gets there first. The magic flares, the shield only has to be the size of a plate; the dhampir's arm strikes it and Blaine's breath bursts white with surprise, but it only takes him half a second, he knows his lover. While the dhampir gives a curse, Blaine ducks, swings. The dhampir has to kick itself out of the way, ungainly for the first time, and it stares across the snow at Kurt, who lets his breath out long and slow, a stream of white into the air, while his body throbs from the blow and his hands squeeze at his sides.
The dhampir scowls at him, nose wrinkling. "You seriously want to do this, healer?"
Blaine swings the sword, keeping his wrists loose, and murmurs, "Kurt?"
"It's fine." Kurt keeps his eyes on the dhampir, through a last falling flurry of the dying snow. "We can do it."
Blaine trusts him. His body sways back for a second, gathering to spring and giving Kurt warning, and then he's off. The first blow the dhampir manages to angle itself back from, the blow that should fall on Blaine's shoulder Kurt catches on a shield, Blaine quickly turns the sword in his hands and on the whirl of momentum swings in at its other side. The dhampir has to catch it on the side of its fist, hissing in frustration, and its flashing hand strikes a shield before it can stab Blaine's eyes. Blaine kicks it in the stomach.
It staggers back with the force of it but as Blaine swings the sword down it's already upright and catching it on a forearm; it has no breath to be lost and doesn't need to waste time in recovering it. It aims for Blaine's throat and gets a shield instead, and Blaine bulls forward elbow-first, knocking it back and cracking his sword-hilt into the side of its face. Its frantic returning blow hits another shield.
Kurt isn't aware of breathing, isn't aware of anything but his eyes on the way that monster moves and everywhere it might be next. He has to anticipate its movements, the only reason he can get a shield there in time is that Blaine's got it on the back foot and defending as best it can. He doesn't blink, doesn't dare to, stares at the fight and every blow to a shield thumps somewhere inside him, heavy on his bones, but it's something to worry about later: now the magic, and Blaine's life. His hands are bloodless with how tight they're fisted. Later, his arms will hurt.
"Little-" the dhampir hisses, and its voice strangles a snarl of frustration as it snatches at Blaine's sword and its fingers strike off a shield, and Blaine punches it in the side of the head.
It staggers right around him, Blaine turning with it, its back to Kurt now and Kurt's eyes widen - he needs to see its hands - as Blaine swings the sword in around with himself and the dhampir skips back so quickly -
So quickly it blurs.
Kurt hears Tina shriek but there's no time for him to make a sound, no time for any magic. There's shock and his head is hauled back tight and there's a cold, blood-clotted hand around his throat, and he stares at the dhampir's face and the white of the sky while it fists a hand in his hair and hisses down at him, "What kind of game do you think I'm playing, exactly how much patience for the inane time wasting of a freak like you do you think I have?" His hand tightens and Kurt feels it press in hard to the quickening pulse, and he hears Blaine make a noise, wounded and barked and desperate, like an animal hurt. "You will live," the dhampir tells him, lowering his face, cold over Kurt's with his body bent back like a bow by its deadening, overwhelming strength, "just long enough to regret this."
No, Kurt thinks, with a hand around his throat and Blaine right there. No no no -
He's tossed sideways by the hair, a shield flaring up on instinct between shoulder and snow as he hits but the breath's still punched out of him. He hears Blaine yell, tries to haul himself up on an elbow to see what's happening as Mercedes grabs his shoulders, steadies him as he slips and his breath wrenches on a body-jerking cough, and then footsteps scuff-crunch the snow and Blaine drops to his knees next to him, his eyes so dark with his face so white. "Kurt -"
The word gasps in his throat. "Dhampir-"
"Gone. Just, ran so fast it vanished." Mercedes grips tighter to his arms. "Damn that thing's - it's fast."
Blaine's breath shakes out, and he touches Kurt's face. "Oh god I thought - oh god I -"
Kurt blinks out across the snow where there's no dhampir, nothing to kill them, just open white, more hills edging the plain, trees behind them. He makes himself swallow, and a few not-enough breaths turn into more body-wrenching coughs. He closes his eyes for a second - his own beating heart is such a surprise to him right now that it's hard to think how to talk around it - and swallows again, gets out, "I'm okay."
"I thought-" Kurt puts a hand over Blaine's hand on his cheek because he looks so vulnerable still, and Kurt realises that he's never seen Blaine scared before. "I thought - because you were concentrating on me-"
"No, Blaine, no, he -" His breath sounds ill and wheezy and undignified, and Kurt struggles out of Mercedes' hands to sit, and Blaine gets both hands around his face now, sword dropped at his side. Kurt holds his wrists there, holds his eye. "He could've done that from the beginning." Kurt wets his lips, closes his fingers around Blaine's. "He could've killed all of us at any second, before we knew it happened, it couldn't be your fault."
Blaine murmurs, "That doesn't make me feel better."
Kurt closes his eyes, feels through his body for the damage. Nothing much, bruises mostly, and he winces as he fixes what he can, enough so he can stand up with Blaine's help. He blinks, at the magic shivering its way back into the air - he can see which direction the dhampir left in by the disturbed magic following its path. Santana with Brittany close at her shoulder snaps her fingers a few times until she can get a flame alight, says in a very dry voice, "Damn. That thing just - damn."
Finn's still crouching by Rachel, trying to lift her off the snow and onto his lap. Quinn crouches next to him, letting the hare down onto the snow where it steps delicately over the dark spatter of Rachel's blood and wrinkles its snout. "Now you see why I was running, mages."
"Rachel?" Finn slurs at her. "Hey, Rachel, c'n you hear me . . . ?"
Kurt picks himself out of Blaine's grip with some difficulty, Blaine is gripping his arm tight, walks to Finn's side, puts a hand on his stepbrother's head. Then his shoulder bangs something again and he doesn't understand what's happened until he does, while Finn groans, "Crap. Thanks, man." and Blaine's holding Kurt up with his arms around his shoulders, growling at him, "I wish you wouldn't do that, I wish you wouldn't-"
Kurt puts a hand to his head, swallows. Too much all at once, and his magic isn't returned to full strength yet, it's still thin in the air, drizzle instead of a storm. He takes a confused moment to work out where his body is - on his knees, slumped sideways into Blaine - and works out what happened, and hell, at least Blaine caught him.
He tugs on Blaine's sleeve, mumbles, "Thank you."
Blaine ducks his head closer to Kurt's, whispers, "I wish you wouldn't . . ."
"What do we do?" Tina says, holding Mike's hand tightly. "Without Rachel we don't even know which direction to go in, and - and that thing -"
Blaine helps Kurt back to his wobbly feet again and Kurt holds onto him, startled by how weak his legs have gone. Blaine kisses the side of his head for one sweet second, and then his voice is all practicality and authority again. "We need to get somewhere sheltered and set up camp. We're going to need sentries all night, in case it comes back. At least two at a time. It's too fast to risk one."
Finn bundles Rachel's body closer into his arms. "Rachel-"
"We can't do anything but let her rest," Kurt says, holding onto Blaine's arms with his knees threatening to drop him again. "Finn, believe me, if I could help I would."
"I'll read up on dhampirs. Like, now." the Artie-owl promises, and Puck picks it off Finn's shoulder, checks its face, sticks it in the pocket of his robes. He squeezes Finn's shoulder, a little uncomfortably.
"C'mon, help me make a stretcher out of one of these tents. Mike, lend a hand."
Blaine's fingers stroke back through Kurt's hair. "Can you walk?"
Kurt nods, and swallows, and looks across the open basin of snow they stand in. The sun is beginning to swing too low, the sky dark over the exposed white land, and the magic creeping back. The particles float back uncertain and scared and Kurt thinks in their low-dipping movements ashamed for leaving the mages like that. He touches his magic outwards, feels the aura of it grow. I don't blame you, he thinks, pressing at it. I really couldn't. I wouldn't stay to fight him either, if I had a choice or any sense.
"So this is what we came all this way to fight," Santana says, wrapping her hand around Brittany's, and there's little real bite in her voice for once. "Last time I follow that dwarf anywhere, seriously."
Blaine's hand stays at the back of Kurt's slumped neck. Kurt closes his eyes and feels his magic slowly grow, as the light slowly fades.
Part II
And See Further, Glee!fic sequel to In The Dark and Close Your Eyes (do you see what I did with the titling there read too much Calvino I know just shoot me whatever), fantasy AU.
Disclaimer: Even as warped as this, they're still not mine.
Rating: Let's go with my safe old R rating because apparently I don't even *notice* when I drop F-bombs, in rl I seriously use it like a comma =/
Warnings: No spoilers because we're crazy AU. Warnings, I'm not warning for the smut because oh hai it's R-rated fanfic I don't imagine you're upset by smut. But, there is violence. There will actually be a *lot* of in this little probable-trilogy. So, beware of that. Yeah.
Summary: In the North, the nights come quick.
Blaine wakes up under heavy covers, blankets and cloaks piled over him, on some surface hard and warm and moulded to the shape of his body. He lies for a moment with his ear pressed to a slow hollow sound like the sea, and then Kurt's hand lifts and his knuckles run through Blaine's hair. "And are you quite comfortable like that?"
Blaine grins, and nuzzles down closer onto the amazing pillow that Kurt's chest is. "Yes."
Kurt snorts, and whacks his hip. "Off me. You're lucky you're nice and warm or I would have started tying you to the tent pole on a night just to stop you climbing on top of me."
"'m lucky in lots of ways," Blaine mumbles, and yawns, and bundles his arms closer around Kurt.
Other mages are waking in the tent, Quinn sitting and brushing her hair back hiding a yawn behind a hand, Finn climbing for the entrance so he can get outside and stretch like he needs to. Only this morning as he swipes the flap open he says, "Oh - wow -" and they all feel the particular quality of the cold air slipping into their close warm sanctuary.
Blaine sits up over Kurt, who wriggles his shoulders back on the blankets and looks curious and morning-mellow back up at him; Blaine smiles, because he's beautiful and he makes Blaine happy and it always makes Kurt smile back, and then climbs off him - oh air is cool and delicious after this close tent all night - and pokes his head out of the tent flap after Finn.
"Oh, wow."
The snow's still falling, heavy, puffy white flakes like a huge shedding bird is flying overhead, feather-down soft and pale. Blaine ducks his head back in to pull his boots on, quickly grab his thick green cloak while Kurt slips a set of robes on over his head, and Blaine climbs out after Finn delighted, at the forest all turning white. There's not so much settled - little heaps building around and over their tents but only a couple of inches on the ground yet - but it glazes every dark leaf of ivy, paints lines up the scoured tree trunks, makes patterns like lace on the shrivelled skeletons of ferns on the forest floor. Finn laughs out loud.
"Oh," Kurt's voice says breathily behind him, and Blaine turns, beams at him as Kurt shucks his cloak higher around his shoulders, snow touching his hair and glancing off his skin almost as white. "Well, it would have been nice if someone could have predicted this, we really should have thought to bring a seer with us, shouldn't we?"
"Shut up weather is difficult!" Rachel snaps as she climbs out of the tent still tugging a boot on, and skips to grab Finn's arm. But Kurt is smiling, and as the mages tumble from their tents they whoop and play in the snow like dogs let out from a night trapped indoors, not like people who are now going to have to hike through this crap for the rest of the day. Kurt reaches up and brushes a flake from beside Blaine's nose, and kisses him there where it touched so cold; Blaine catches both his hands, closes his eyes, kisses him.
Kurt whispers, white breath to Blaine's mouth, "Goggles."
They're in the tent. He shuffles out again snapping them over his eyes and oh, god, all that tumbling snow sending the magic cascading down with it, caught in its plunge, plummeting tumbling white-hearted drops of gold like it's raining stars. Oh god, no wonder the mages are laughing and playing in it, Quinn, Santana and Brittany holding hands and dancing in a shrieking circle, Mercedes spinning suddenly and catching a spiral of snow and magic upwards above her hands - oh god, it's gorgeous.
Kurt touches his back; Blaine says quietly, "I swear to god, if I'd never met you, I wouldn't have known half of how beautiful the world is."
Kurt puts his arms around him from behind, rests his cheek to the back of Blaine's neck. The aura of his magic is large enough to engulf Blaine entirely, he sees the world now through the constant glow of Kurt's magic like a living shield around them both. He puts his hands over Kurt's, enclosing his waist, and watches the fall of the snow and the magic, gold and white, white and gold.
*
It snows all morning. While they walk the mages wear little shields over their heads, letting the snow slip down behind and beside them, keeping their robes dry. Kurt keeps a shield over Blaine as well, he has more than enough magic to spare to do it, though he does keep hold of Blaine's arm so he doesn't have to worry about Blaine moving unpredictably across the path and Kurt's magic having to keep up. Blaine keeps slipping the goggles up again to steal another peek at the world the mages see, snow and magic like it's raining light.
Kurt's trying to educate him about magic. They trust, now, in staying together, they know there's no parting either of them could bear, which means that Blaine is now a part of the magical world, he can't be just a human, he has to somehow live in Kurt's world too. So Kurt talks, as they walk, about the things he might need to know, and the things he will certainly need to know.
"Usually the most powerful mages are female," Kurt says, lifting a hand and tilting his head thoughtfully, clearly watching his own magic glow around him like an enormous halo. "No-one knows why. Maybe the magic just likes women better."
"Is it sentient? The magic?"
"No-one really knows. There's a lot of argument about it. If each individual particle could have some sort of consciousness, or if all of it together makes some sort of giant . . . I don't know. If it is conscious, I don't think it can be in any way we could understand."
"Do you think it's sentient?"
Kurt looks up, his eyes tracking the snowy sky, the magic he can see falling with it. "Yes. I don't know how, but yes. When - when things are bad you can feel it, feel it around you like a friend, almost. Yes. I do. It has a personality. It likes chaos and high emotions and - and joy. It's alive, in a different way to us, but it's definitely alive."
"So, normally female mages are stronger . . . but you're really powerful."
"Yes," Kurt says with a shrug, and drops his hand again, and smiles. "I am."
Blaine considers it. Kurt embodies dichotomies, breaks down the dichotomies just by existing outside of them; well, no wonder the magic in all its love of cheerful chaos likes him so much. "All the strongest recorded mages have been women," Kurt says, and ticks off on his free hand with the hand crooked through Blaine's arm, "Sepharial, Merlin-"
"Merlin -" Blaine catches his eyes, frowns. ". . . Merlin's a guy?"
"Mm, in the human stories, I know. We have different stories."
"Merlin's a woman?"
"We think she was. The stories are good."
Blaine tugs at his arm. "Tell me one."
"It's a little early for a bedtime story, Blaine."
"Tell meeee," he tugs at Kurt's arm, bumps his hip with his, and Kurt laughs, and bangs his hip back.
"Oh gods, if it'll keep you quiet." He sing-songs, "Once upon a time . . ."
*
Noon sees them pass out of the forest, sees the snow peter out and flurry its last flakes down, and the afternoon brings them within sight of a town. "Likelihood of us sleeping indoors for a change?" Santana says, flipping a hand up and down. "Likelihood of 'em being too chickenshit to tell us to get our witchy butts away from their kids an' property?"
"It's not easy for them." Finn says quietly. "You know what we look like to them."
"They think we're so dangerous, we might as well use it. If we just said that they give us somewhere to sleep or we pop their brain inside their skull -"
Brittany uses a finger to pop her cheek; Kurt looks unamused.
"I could speak to the owner of the inn," Blaine suggests.
"Like an interpreter?"
"Like a messenger boy." Santana stretches her arms overhead, shrugs as she walks. "What-the-hell-ever, I just wanna sleep on a mattress for once, if I have to burn half the cruddy town down to get one."
Closer to the town, on a well-rutted road with cart tracks showing dark through the snow, a man comes running out towards them. At first they begin hugging the edge of the road to let him pass, but it becomes pretty obvious that he's running right at them, and they straggle to a halt in confusion: lone humans do not generally run towards covens of mages without some very particular reason for it. He skids and scrabbles to a halt in the snow, pants there hard and chokes out, "Are any of you - healer?"
Their gazes flick to Kurt who, very uneasily, raises his hand. The man sucks his breath in, wades in past Rachel and Finn and grabs Kurt by the arm, and begins scrambling off again towards the town as Kurt yelps and his boots skid in wheel-rucks and fresh snow. "Brother's wife - two days in labour - midwife says twins -"
"Tw- wait, babies?"
"Good luck Kurt!" Santana calls after him, while Brittany waves. "Enjoy your first vagina!"
Kurt's voice comes back to them in a wail; "Babies?"
Blaine stands feeling oddly bereft, Kurt wrenched away from his side, and Finn pats him awkwardly on the shoulder. "He'll be fine. And I guess for once we're welcome somewhere."
"Yeah," Puck says. "We just tell 'em to give us beds for the night or Kurt'll deliver them lizard babies."
Blaine says, "Does he actually know how to-?"
"I guess he's about to find out," Quinn murmurs, and Mercedes gives her a better him than me look, before they hike their packs higher, and follow Kurt's heel-scraped footprints towards the town.
*
They have time to kill. It's a baker's wife in labour, so there's plenty of fresh bread on offer while Blaine sits mournfully at the bottom of the stairs up to the bedrooms above the shop, hearing the odd moans and keening cries, and the pacing of the anxious baker outside the door. The mages split up, head into the town to barter for supplies - they don't carry money, but they need some thread at least for mending torn robes, and to pick up some more supplies for when they move on. "We can't live off bread," Santana says. "Even if we could, if Kurt fluffs it we ain't getting bread, so."
Finn sits with Blaine, since they're both sort of attached to Kurt by more than coven alone, while Rachel lays cards on the flour-softened surface of the kitchen table, turning them slowly. "A girl and a boy," she says, turning another card, leaving her fingertips on it.
Blaine looks up. "Are they going to be okay?"
Rachel turns a card, turns a card. "Birth is a between," she murmurs. "You can't predict the between points of life and death. You just have to live them out."
Overhead, there's the thin mewl of a baby's first indignant breath in this world and the steps on the landing squeak a floorboard, pause, pick up again more quickly. Blaine stares up the staircase, thinks of Kurt, wants so badly -
Rachel closes her eyes, opens them, turns a card, turns another card. "There's the boy. The girl's being slow."
Blaine says, "What happens - what happens to a healer if-"
Finn looks across at him, and Blaine's saliva feels too thick in his mouth. He swallows, shakes his head. "Nothing."
What happens to a healer if they try to help someone beyond help? If that baby isn't going to make it, and if Kurt tries anyway -
Blaine closes his hands together, props his elbows on his knees, props his head off his hands. Kurt will be fine. Kurt's the strongest mage he knows, and a perfectly capable healer. And he's seen Kurt come through this before, hasn't he? That first time Kurt ever healed anyone, when a faery broke Blaine and Kurt managed to share the break between them, not death but just hard, hard life for them both - he'll be fine. Strongest boy Blaine's ever met. He'll be fine, fine, fine.
Sometimes Kurt's affinity makes Blaine feel cold and sick. To know that Kurt's life will be primarily marked by pain, forever, it almost physically hurts Blaine just to think it. Pain and pain and pain, and scars if Kurt can't heal them, and his body slowly wrecked - but Kurt's so strong, and Kurt doesn't seem to think about it, doesn't seem to fear it, does Kurt know more than him? Or does Kurt just accept it, as part of the bargain of the magic he has?
Since when did Kurt ever just accept anything?
Blaine thinks a prayer through, mostly because the rhythm soothes him. He thinks of Kurt's voice, low and musical, reciting a story to him about mages and knights and a king and a faery. And he listens to the pacing above, and the hiccupping cry of the baby. A door opens overhead and Blaine stands up, isn't even aware of doing it, and there's the murmur of a female voice, and a man's voice chokes something back -
"Hey-" Finn grabs after him but Blaine's already halfway up the stairs, pulled as if by a rope from overhead. The door closes again just as he reaches the top of the stairs and there's the baker, holding a blanket-wrapped baby in one arm and looking like he might cry.
"Son," he croaks at Blaine. "A son-"
There's an animal moan from the room to the side, not a scream, no strength left for a scream, and Blaine can hear the edge of Kurt's voice in a quick-running murmur as he does whatever he does in there. Blaine swallows, and doesn't know what to do or say. He hates not being able to help. He can't bear not being able to help. And not being able to help Kurt of all people, it's like something stuck in his chest, like a stake stabbed in there-
And then the baby wriggles in the baker's arms, eyes still tight-closed, and smacks its little lips almost thoughtfully, and Blaine stares at it sort of mesmerised. It's so tiny. How will it grow into a man-sized man? How is that even possible?
There's a last sobbed groan from that closed bedroom door, and Blaine hears Kurt's voice catch high in something like relief, and then a female voice takes over, businesslike and busy. There's a little thumping noise, and the female voice gets edged with frustration, and after a period of quick, practical noises while that voice scolds continuously, the door opens on a flustered midwife, overheated and overtired, with a baby in her arms. "And a daughter. Someone needs to - you, you're with the mages?" She gives Blaine a frowning look. "Are you their - servant?"
"I'm his -" Blaine starts, and then doesn't know how to finish that sentence, and then realises that he has finished that sentence. "I'm his," he says, and the midwife neither understands nor tries to, just dumps the baby into the now openly weeping father's arms and jerks her head for Blaine to enter the room.
"She's decent, he needs - help. Is there another bed?" The baker is cooing, clearly bewildered by feeling, down at two wriggling and annoyed-looking babies. The midwife's voice raises. "Do you have a bed for the healer?"
"What? Yes! Yes - through there - oh my goodness, look at them. Is she alright?"
"Fine, fine, she'll sleep it off-" the midwife mutters, but Blaine's already slipped past her, into the room where there are soiled bed sheets dumped in a tin bath, where a sweaty, exhausted woman is asleep in the freshened bed, and where sitting on a wooden chair with his arms wrapped around his stomach and his head down is Kurt, silent and very still. Blaine nearly trips up hurrying to him and Kurt lifts his head, gives a tight smile of recognition and squeezes his arms closer around himself.
"I-" he starts, and his breath shudders out. "I can't stand up."
"Okay," Blaine says, mouth running without any requirement of his brain, all his concentration on Kurt and touching Kurt's arms and trying to steel himself to bear Kurt's weight. "Okay okay it's okay, there's a bed through here, everything's okay, you need to-"
Kurt sucks his breath in again, shakes his head. "Not yet. Not-"
"What's wrong? What are you - does it hurt?"
Kurt's face twists sick. "We didn't learn - learn about this in the college, Emma taught us for healing and she never wanted to talk about - about this." He waves a hand at the unconscious woman, the sheets stained in ways Blaine doesn't want to concentrate on, the hot animal smell of the room. "Oh gods I can see why. I can't even - Blaine it's so - brutal. And it's - the blood is not the worst part, oh my gods the blood is not the worst part, I cannot believe women do this. I cannot believe my mother went through this." Kurt rubs his hands over his face, then his breath hitches again and he wraps his arms around his stomach again. "So at least now I know - I know -"
"Know what?" Blaine says soothingly, rubbing his shoulders, while Kurt closes his eyes and chokes a single bitter laugh at the floorboards.
"Know just to try to get everyone through it alive, do not, do not try to help with the - pain. Because." His mouth twists, he squeezes his eyes closed. "I can't stand up."
Blaine tries to understand, and doesn't know if he does or doesn't. "You . . ."
"Don't even ask, don't, don't. Don't." He swallows hard. "And don't tell them. They'll -"
"Okay, okay, of course I won't, of course I won't." He runs a hand over Kurt's head, kisses him there through the hair, thinks of Santana's reaction to what Blaine thinks has happened; no, he is not going to even attempt to tell the coven this. "There's a bed, as soon as you can stand. I'll help you through. It's fine."
"He can't stay there." the midwife announces from just behind Blaine, who lifts his head again and blinks at her while Kurt shifts a little on the chair and makes an unhappy noise under his breath. "She needs to sleep."
"She'll sleep through a carnival, I sincerely doubt she cares." Kurt snaps back, but the midwife puts her hands on her hips, narrows her eyes at him, then looks at Blaine.
"Get his other arm. We'll walk him through."
"No." Kurt says, lifting a finger at her. "No no no not happening-"
She's already got his shoulder and Blaine can either enter into a tug-of-war with her over Kurt's body or just try to keep up so that Kurt can at least lie down. "It's okay," he sings soothingly, taking Kurt's other arm while Kurt makes a quick swallowed shrieking noise and the midwife pulls him to his unresponsive legs from the other side.
"Get your hands off me you-"
Blaine braces Kurt's full weight - Kurt's boots flail aimlessly at the floorboards before he tries to wrench himself in half again around some residual pain - and murmurs, "We'll get you to a bed, you can rest then, just a few seconds and-"
"-harpy I will curse you to the eightieth generation-"
"One foot in front of the other," the midwife says grimly. "Walking's better for the pain anyway."
"The hell would you know about it you sadist-"
Blaine keeps his eyes on the floor, guiding Kurt's dragging feet through the doorway and across the corridor, into some sort of maid's room, a chair and chest of drawers for furniture and a single bed against the wall. The midwife pretty much aims Kurt at it and pushes, and Blaine keeps hold of him to swing him down to sit on the edge, where Kurt folds himself in half again and puts his hands over his face. Blaine's pulled down next to him, one arm still around his back. He touches Kurt's hand, head ducked low to his, and says to him, "Alright, Kurt, do you want to lay down?"
He remembers their audience, then, and that the ease he and Kurt have together in front of the coven is not necessarily as easy in front of other people. He looks up at the midwife ready for some expression he's not currently in any position to counter, not with Kurt like this to mind, but she just shrugs at him like they're nothing she hasn't seen before, says, "God makes us to His own plan." and closes the door behind herself when she leaves.
Blaine contemplates that for a moment, rubbing Kurt's back while he seethes the last of his resentment out and just settles into a slump, exhausted and aching against Blaine's side. Blaine touches his forehead off Kurt's, murmurs quietly, "Kurt? Do you want to lay down?"
Kurt closes his eyes, nods. Blaine touches his back, stands and begins untying Kurt's belt, while Kurt presses his hands over his eyes and whispers, "I cannot believe . . ."
"It's over now."
"I cannot believe."
"It's okay. You did it. It's over."
"I can't . . . I am never doing that again."
"I know."
"Never."
"I know, Kurt."
The first thing he said after the first time he healed anyone, the first time he healed Blaine - it's horrible, and he hates it, and he doesn't want to do it. Kurt's ability to keep on facing up to things that he can't bear makes something catch and hurt in Blaine's throat; he'll keep on saying that 'never' until he does do it again, and then again until the time after that. The fact that he'll do it every time doesn't mean that he doesn't hate it, but the fact that he hates it doesn't mean that he won't do it. Loving Kurt really hurts Blaine sometimes.
He pulls the robes over Kurt's head, kneels to unlace his boots, shuffles Kurt's loose and heavy body under the covers. He means to brush a hand over his head and kiss him there and let him sleep, but Kurt catches his arm, and his breath hushes over Blaine's skin just below his shoulder; "Don't go,"
Blaine hesitates, then kicks his own boots off and swings himself over Kurt's body, pressing himself in the narrow space between Kurt and the wall, tucking Kurt close along himself with an arm around his waist. "I'm right here. I'm always here."
"Cannot believe," Kurt whispers.
"I know. I know, Kurt. Go to sleep, I've got you."
Kurt makes a small noise, tilting himself into the mattress. Blaine watches the room from over his shoulder, his arm gently lifted and lowered by Kurt's slowing, sleeping breaths.
*
They're on the road again the next day. Kurt feels so, so much better for a long sleep in an actual bed, for waking to the sound of babies crying, and Tina creeping in with his and Blaine's bags to put them next to the bed; waking up to Blaine pressed all along his back warm and solid and safe and with a morning erection pressed in a friendly way against Kurt's left buttock. Tina caught his eye and smiled and crept out again, and Kurt watched the thin dawn begin to grow behind the curtains, waking Blaine by gently, slowly, stroking down the tendons in his hands with his fingertips.
Then they had sex because when do they get the chance. Sex in a bed, sex naked, Kurt's magic scraping a chair across the floor to jam underneath the door handle, Blaine pulling the underrobes up over his head, Kurt digging his fingers into Blaine's hair and trying not to whine out loud while he mouthed at his nipple. After that hell Kurt went through, a few more soiled sheets are the last thing this household needs to worry about and yes he did feel entitled. Somewhere in the house babies cried, and Kurt gripped Blaine by the thighs trying to force him on, urge the more they always grasp at out of him, jaw clenched tight with that always-knowledge, when they do that, that Blaine doesn't even know his own name, the only thing Blaine knows in all the world is Kurt and Kurt's body -
And he needed that, restoring to his own body, reminding his body of what it really is. After that. After that, after - pain in parts he does not possess, empathy-pain beyond comprehension - he needed that. Running his hands down Blaine's back afterwards, sweat and Blaine's hot panting breaths on his chest, feeling possessive and still keenly full of want for Blaine while the aftershocks of pleasure ran hot all the way down his thighs. Blaine's breath gasped out and he nosed at the skin of Kurt's chest, and Kurt ran his fingers through his hair, and watched the magic begin to come down from its heaving high over them. When they fuck, it's like they shake the stars loose.
Now they walk along a snow-streaked path, towards the hills. The sky is heavy with the promise of more snow to come, so the coven makes up what time they can with their packs full of bread and pastry in waxed paper. Kurt and Blaine walk side by side, shoulders and hips brushing as they go, lazily close and still feeling too tangled in with each other, and Kurt no longer gives a crap that his entire coven knows that they fucked each other silly this morning. He is Blaine's, and Blaine is his, and everyone already knew that anyway.
Blaine's magic lessons continue. Kurt lifts a finger, catches a single particle of magic, lets it burn brighter so Blaine can see it. White in its heart, softly, brightly white, aura'd in that particular golden glow. They have a sealed jar in the college of magic from some other world, glowing sickly faery-green. Gold is safer.
Blaine squints at it. "How do you - control the individual particles? I mean, how do you concentrate on all of them at once?"
"You don't, really. It's like . . . I don't know. You pour water from a jug, it's a lot of water droplets but they all pour together, it's like that? I don't know, Blaine. It's mostly just instinct."
"But you're really good at it."
"Instinct and my ineffable talent." Kurt glances across at the noise the coven are making - Puck, Mike and Finn (the Artie-owl jiggles helpless and annoyed on his shoulder with every lumbering leap) are tossing a glowing disc of magic around as they walk, catching it on magic and sending it spinning back, picking up momentum so it's always going faster.
Finn calls, "Mike!" and sends it skimming at him, so Mike can catch it, spin and toss it on.
"Puck!"
Kurt scowls at them like they're so childish and he would never do such a thing with Mercedes and Tina and Rachel, and looks back at that one particle of magic glowing so softly warm, softly cool on his fingertip. Blaine is still staring amazed at it as they walk. Kurt says, "You can touch it. It won't hurt you."
Blaine checks his eyes, gives the particle a dubious look and then curiosity takes over, and he reaches out, touches a fingertip to it; Kurt feels a little buzz run all the way down the nerves of his arm, more Blaine than magic. He pulses a little more power into that particle and hands it over to Blaine, to play with amazed between his hands.
"It's all -"
"I know."
Blaine smiles. "- tingly."
He's supposed to be a knight, this boy. Kurt half-stifles his smile, watching his face, when Finn calls, "Blaine!"
Blaine lifts his head. Kurt's magic flares; instinct. He catches that skimming disc of quick-spinning magic shearing in at Blaine's head like a loosed arrow, stopping it and his own breath, his lungs closed in his chest in the same split second, and stands there statue-still with one hand raised, holding that discus of magic in a lethal spin in the air, like a wasp caught mid-flight.
Blaine stares at it all of five inches from his face and swallows, particle of magic dropped and forgotten from his hand. Finn has both hands over his mouth, and mumbles through them, "Sorry, dude, forgot."
Kurt draws a shaky breath in through his nose, closes his eyes for a second, drops his hand and lets the magic burst and tumble away, loose into particles again. "Thank you Finn."
"What . . ." Blaine says, still not looking away from where the magic that almost sawed his head in half was. "What would have happened if that had hit me?"
Kurt tries to blink the image out of his head, and Rachel swoops in with, "Let's not talk about what could have happened, the important thing is that no-one just got their head sheared in half -"
"How the hell can you forget that he doesn't have any magic?" Kurt snarls at Finn, who just looks guiltily stricken while Santana rolls her eyes.
"You bitch when we treat him like a human, bitch when we treat him like a mage-"
"Don't treat him in ways that could get him killed!" Kurt snaps back at her, and she gives him the whatever look and turns after Brittany again. Blaine says, "I'm going to. Walk in the back where I can - see you all. For a bit. Okay?"
"Dude-" Finn drops back with him, mumble-babbling his apologies, while Puck gives Kurt a what, no-one died look and begins spinning a fresh discus of magic alight on one finger. Kurt huffs, stalks ahead, kicking dirty snow ahead of himself. Tina catches him up, catches his arm.
"He didn't mean it. Kurt, it's sort of a good thing, you know? We forget he ever wasn't one of us, sometimes."
Kurt shrugs, awkward with her holding his arm, angrier than he really understands, angry partially at himself. "He's not a mage. He won't ever be a mage. I don't know why it's so difficult to treat him as a person without treating him as a mage."
"Kurt . . ." Her magic touches at his, a hopeful-playful push, and he puts his head back, rolls his eyes. "You'd never let anything hurt him anyway, right? You have more than enough magic for him as well."
"He can take care of himself."
She gives him a look, and he looks away. Fact: Blaine can't take care of himself. Not against magic. Against humans, maybe even against dragons and monsters, but not against magic. Kurt has walked Blaine onto a path between danger and danger, and he knows it, and he knows Blaine doesn't care but gods that doesn't mean that Kurt doesn't, doesn't mean that he doesn't really feel it sometimes. What right did he ever have to fall in love with Blaine in the first place, and then pick him out of his safe life and set him in this one so lethal to him and now they have to stay together and they know it and -
And Kurt knows the choices they'll one day have to make. All he can do, for now, is enjoy the inheld breath of their lives before then.
"Do you ever . . ." Tina squeezes at his arm a little. "Do you ever wish . . ."
He raises an eyebrow for her, and her mouth twist-twitches, and she - presses at his magic with hers, one of those little touches of fondness and friendship, companionable and soothing between coven members. "Don't you ever think . . ." she says quietly, and he has to look away, because he knows what she means. He sees how Mike and Tina settle their magic into a single aura as they walk side by side, sees how Finn and Rachel bat their magic back and forth at each other, sees the lazy way Santana and Brittany's magic intertwines. And he can watch the way the magic moves over Blaine but Blaine doesn't move it, and Blaine can never touch Kurt's magic with his own and make him feel loved without even meeting his eye.
He doesn't need to. Kurt doesn't care. He knows Blaine loves him. He knows it. He doesn't need Blaine to have magic to know that, he doesn't need to feel those touches, so intimate and instinctive. All he needs is to know that Blaine is there. As long as Blaine has a heart to beat he'll love Kurt with it, and Kurt will return it a thousandfold, and wrap Blaine up safe in his own magic's cocoon when they sleep.
"No. I don't wish he was different, not by an eyelash. He's perfect."
He sees the but in Tina's eyes and in her magic, but then she lets it go and squeezes his arm instead. "So no-one has to cook tonight because of all the stuff that baker gave us! So we should totally do something fun before sleeping -"
"Something fun but not deadly, perhaps?"
"I thought we could sing around the fire or something. Dance." She shivers against him. "Keep warm."
"It's going to snow."
"All the more reason to dance."
He bumps her magic with his, and she pokes his back, and it's too hard to try not to laugh.
*
Two more days of walking, up and down those damn hills, and the world is visibly wintry now. The snow's been falling, thick and determined in the night, a struggle to walk through even with magic's help; their robes are wet by the end of each day, their teeth chatter as Puck and Santana steam the water out of them. On the third day the snow doesn't stop, slits spitefully at them in a vicious diagonal wind, and Kurt has to keep a shield over his face so the snow doesn't bite his eyes. He keeps hold of Blaine's hand to keep the shield over him too. Blaine, goggles on, walks slightly ahead of him - shorter but sturdier, he kicks a path ahead of them through the knee-deep snow for Kurt to follow.
Visibility is reduced to a stone's throw ahead. Mercedes' invisible voice comes back to them, caught and savaged by the wind; "Where's Tina?"
From somewhere behind them, "Here! With Mike!"
Kurt squints through the chaos of the snow. "Where are Rachel and Finn?"
"This is insane," Blaine turns to him, and Kurt's concentrating so hard on ploughing through the wind that he walks right into him and they stagger, holding each others' arms. "We can't do this, we'll get - lost and - we need to set up camp."
"In all this?"
"Screw all this," Puck mutters, shuffling over to them through the snow, which sizzles in a continuous angry hiss as it melts against his shield. "Guys! Back here, this is crazy!"
Blaine calls, "Mike! Tina!"
"Mercedes, back here!"
Mercedes grabs onto Puck's arm, waves an arm to shake the snow from her shield, squints at them. "Where's Rachel? Gonna kill that girl for leading us into this."
Kurt narrows his eyes, tries to see through the snow; he tries looking through the magic but it's almost even worse, such a confusion of snow and light that when he blinks, his eyes fracture on tears. He wipes them on the back of his wrist, says, "And the girls, Santana and-"
"Quinn! Quinn!"
Brittany is pulling Santana towards them, Santana yelling, "Quinn! Fuck, that girl-"
Puck is suddenly alert. "Quinn's gone?"
"Saw something ahead an' ran off." Snowflakes hiss on her shield, burning hotter and brighter with her anger and her anxiety. "Stupid bitch, in all this-"
Kurt doesn't know what to do, holds tight to Blaine's hand and is scared, in all this chaos of cold and confusion. Blaine is standing steady, though. "We need to set up camp and some sort of signal. We can't send search parties out until we have somewhere safe to come back to."
Two more visible figures are approaching, Mike and Tina seen in the slots between snowflakes, shields glowing through the snow. Mercedes hurries to them out of sheer relief, and Tina puts her arms around her, but Puck's lit a ball of fire in one hand and is striding away through the snow ahead.
Blaine calls, "Puck! Wait! Not alone, we need-"
"Quinn's out in all this crap, idiot'll freeze to death in -"
"I'm sure that I appreciate your concern so much," Quinn's voice comes back, wind-tossed and irritated. It's a relief to see her walking back towards them, a slight pale aethermage with the winds curling oddly around her, the snow spiralling in orbit around her without landing on her. She's carrying something. As she gets closer, Kurt can see that it's a white hare, and he feels the quick hot running of its heart and walks to her without even thinking, holds a hand in the air over it; female, magical, not hurt but exhausted, like she's been running for her life.
The hare's eyes roll to him, and her nose twitches. "Nothing you can heal, mage."
He realises what he's doing, lifts his hand away embarrassed. "What - Quinn -?"
"I heard her." Quinn says, very simply, like that's the only answer required. She's holding the heavy body of the hare close against herself, arms a little buried in its fur.
"You need to run," the hare says, trying to pick herself up a little in Quinn's arms; Quinn hikes her higher. "It's coming, I felt it moving - it's almost here -"
Tina says, "What's - almost here . . . ?"
Something is dropping in Kurt's chest. "Where are Finn and Rachel?"
Blaine touches Kurt's arm, murmurs to him, "I have actually no idea what is happening right now."
"The-" Blaine can't hear the hare. "The hare was running away from something and we don't know where Finn and Rachel are and-"
Quinn says, "The wind's dying," and Kurt glances at her eyes and knows it's true, because an aethermage said it, but this wind feels like it won't ever stop. He looks up, squints through his shield, realises that the snow is less as well. If the weather will just calm down enough that they can haul themselves together -
And then they hear the scream.
It shocks Kurt fixed to the ground like a nail through him, bang, but Blaine's drawn his sword and Puck's already started running and gods that was Rachel. He can hear Finn's distant, helpless yelling now, skids in the snow and sets off after the running mages - and Blaine, already up ahead with Puck, all of them surging through the snow as fast as they can, shields faltering in their hurry, snow stings Kurt's face and catches in his hair -
Up ahead, across the field of unbroken snow, there's some hunched shape he can't make out as the snow really does begin to die, thinner flakes now, and the wind is freezing but not so spiteful. He can't understand the crouching shape, it's not - is it Rachel and Finn? It -
The magic over it is all wrong. The mages begin to slow, and Blaine hesitates because they do.
And then the crouching shape moves, stands up and something drops like a bundle of heavy fabric to the ground, and mage robes pool across the snow, and the cry gets stuck in Kurt's throat high and horrified and Tina chokes out loud. The standing figure wipes its mouth off on the back of a hand and turns to the pack of mages scrambling to a confused halt, and another dark figure is picking itself out of the snow; Finn, hand to his head, staggering to his feet like he's drunk. Kurt’s healer's instincts twinge it in his own body: head injury, hit sickeningly hard by something. He feels further -
It's Rachel on the floor. He kicks up snow as he starts running again, breath caught in his throat, so far from thinking. His robes slip through Blaine's grabbing hand and then Blaine is charging after him, and that standing figure is stepping back a little, licking its fingers off, giving Kurt plenty of room to fall down at Rachel's side where Finn staggers and drops to one knee, choking at her, "Rachel - Rachel -"
She's on her side, face buried in the snow, and the blood is soaking her robes from the neck down. The rest of the coven are panting up to them now, and Blaine stands over Rachel's body, between Kurt and whatever just opened Rachel's throat, his sword drawn and his body tense in the cold.
"Rachel, Rachel," Kurt whispers, and puts a hand over her neck, blood hot and slick on his skin. "Oh - gods-"
Finn yells at him, "Do something, fix it, help her!"
His hand shakes, but there's never any choice. He closes his eyes and the pain lances in the side of his neck, his head jerks back hard at the same time that a voice he doesn't know laughs softly and says, "Mages, where did you come from? I mean, not that you're not going to make things more interesting but it's a seriously long way to come just to die in the cold, you know?"
The last thing Kurt needs when healing in these shock-tainted circumstances is distracting. The noise leaves his throat, the pain of it - he claps a hand to the side of his neck and it's wet, and Blaine's head flicks to him. Kurt drops his hand, stares at the blood, pants, and white bubbles of light pop in his eyes so he can't really tell if the snow's stopped yet.
"You-" Finn spits, back on his feet - Kurt's healer's sympathies feel how his head grates and lurches with it but Finn's reaching for his magic, ready to throw everything at this man -
There's nothing there to throw. Kurt stays sitting, doesn't have a choice, his legs feel like they've melted to the metal-cold snow, and he looks up dazed. The magic, it's - for a second he thinks he's blind again - where's the magic?
Feeling horrible realisation dawn, he looks at the man standing a little way off, unconcerned by the sword Blaine's holding, smiling a tilted, amused smile at them. There's no magic around him. None. Like he forces it away from himself, like he repels it like it's terrified of him. The magic that fills the air like it is the air is gone, a few loose scared particles drifting distant and useless for them. Kurt looks up at his coven, feels sick with it; whatever null-field that man is surrounded by, it's deadened the magic of Kurt's whole coven, chased all the magic out of the air, they look so naked, just a few bare specks around them. And he knows the name for this, Rachel with her neck opened and all the magic frightened out of the air, he knows what this means and fear dries his throat.
The man bows, raises himself again smirking. "Jesse St James, dhampir. I really wouldn't worry about introducing yourselves, I don't expect to need to use your names that many times."
Kurt touches Rachel's shoulder, feels the beat of her heart and the breath of her lungs, alive but horribly weak - Kurt can't put the lost blood back into her body, even if she can't lose more now. He looks at his own hand, sees the aura of magic still there. The dhampir's appalling magic-dampening effect hasn't left Kurt's insane aura of magic completely dead, just less, so much less, and with all his coven (Blaine) here to be hurt, Kurt's never needed that magic more.
"You - bastard, you -" Finn's near to tears and with nothing, no magic, nothing to throw at him, while Santana's trying to get fire to light in her hands and doing nothing but spitting some weak sparks up, and the dhampir just smiles at him.
"I'm sorry, did she matter to you? How long had you known her, a handful of years? You really should work out that getting attached to mortals is a total waste of your time, they seriously do nothing but die."
"You-" Finn lunges forward and Blaine grabs his arm, sword still raised, and that's when the dhampir's eyes touch Kurt's for the first time, that's when he sees the half-second's confusion before the sneer curls.
He says to Blaine, "Look after Rachel." and stands, strides past him, hears Blaine's, "Kurt-" but there's no time, Kurt gets between his lover and this thing as it glares at him and he lifts his shield, his thin little eggshell shield, which the dhampir walks up to and examines with a tilt of its head. Youngish man, unremarkably handsome but for his eyes pale and vicious and just a little too close together. He lifts a hand and touches a finger to Kurt's shield - Kurt forces it stronger, burning bright in the last trickles of snow wavering down, and the dhampir looks into his eyes and drags his finger down the side of the shield like a claw, shrieking up sparks of magic in its wake. He says, voice flat, "And exactly what kind of abomination of nature are you?"
For a second -
Kurt can't control that second, the second of his guts shrinking to those words, that second of learned shame. But almost in the same second something swells stronger, pride and certainty, no. Because he is not. Because no-one has ever been so right as Kurt loved by Blaine -
The dhampir taps his shield again. "All that magic. All that power, all that strength - and you chose healing. I - I actually don't know what to say, what exactly the hell is wrong with you?" He holds his hands out like he's genuinely trying to make Kurt understand. "You could have this world on its knees and begging and you chose healing?"
Kurt finds some breath, he doesn't know where from, to whisper, "Leave us alone."
"You're the ones who walked onto my territory, healer. With all this." He bangs the shield with the palm of his hand and Kurt's knees jolt, he gasps out loud: it's like being hit by a siege engine, by a battering ram, stronger than that human body should be capable of, but the shield holds. Kurt's stronger than he should be capable of too. "You waltz onto my front garden and interrupt my meal and you're an atrocity, do you know that? I feel a little bit sick just looking at you. All of that power and you chose healing -"
Blaine is standing next to Kurt's shield, saying very quietly, "Get the hell away from him."
The dhampir glances at him. "And what is this, your familiar? Oh sorry, it doesn't have any magic. Your pet?"
Kurt whispers, "Blaine stay back."
Blaine holds his sword steady and pulls the goggles down to hang around his neck, eyes on the dhampir's eyes. "There's something wrong with the magic."
Kurt swallows. "Yes."
"So I'll fight it."
The dhampir's mouth twitches on a little swallowed laugh. Kurt whispers, "Blaine it is inhumanly strong you have no idea-"
"I'll fight it. It's fine. I know what I'm doing."
Kurt drops his shield, grabs Blaine's wrist, hisses to his ear, "Blaine it is inhumanly strong and fast, do you understand-?"
Blaine catches his eye, gives a curt half-nod. His face looks different, all poise and some terrible sort of calm, not the boy who cuddles close and drools on Kurt's shoulder in the night. Kurt's fingers go loose on his arm, his jaw almost too weak to stay closed, and Blaine pushes at him, murmurs to him, "Back." and Kurt does, hands gripping each other not to shake, feet stumbling in the snow, no breath left in his chest: he doesn't have a choice.
Healers can't do aggressive magic. They can put up shields, and their emotions will spark off the same magical reactions any mage's will, but they can't knowingly use magic to hurt someone else. It's no vow they take, no promise they can break, it just becomes a logical impossibility to them, they can't contemplate how it would work. Kurt tries to imagine it, spiking magic through that thing's chest before it can hurt his lover, but he can't properly conceive of how to do it anymore. He heals. It's who and what he is. He can't - he tries to think how he could - he can't. What kind of healer does that? He has to unwrite who he is to attack that thing and he can't do that any more than he can unpick his love for Blaine out of his heart, it is, and all he can do is live with it.
So he stands, breath cold in his throat, with Finn behind him whispering to Rachel and trying not to cry, his coven at his back all still and sick with lack of magic, and Blaine faces the dhampir, sword drawn. The dhampir looks unimpressed, mostly amused, and then flicks his smirk from Blaine to Kurt, a stab in the heart from ten paces away: he means to kill him, and make Kurt watch.
Except that neither Kurt nor Blaine is ever going to let that happen.
Blaine swings his sword in a quick twirl to loosen his wrists and then lunges, fast as a cat. The dhampir sidesteps, smooth as water, and Blaine turns with him so he doesn't get access to his back though Kurt knows, Kurt knows that if he'd really wanted to, the dhampir could have been there faster. The sword loops, bright and clean against the white of the world, and the dhampir skips back again, beginning to smile, while Blaine's eyes are intent and his face is serious and every muscle in his body sings concentration. Kurt's hands squeeze at his sides, and the mages recognise a multiplicity of gods but none they can pray to, something Kurt has never regretted before.
Blaine swings in. The dhampir sidesteps as easily as dancing, spinning in around his back and Blaine whirls with him, faster now, but it's not a dancer's quick grace like the dhampir he moves with, it's the solid, heavy grace of a knight, weighed down with chain mail and that sword Kurt has trouble comfortably lifting. The dhampir laughs, suddenly, and Blaine's breath is visible now, hot with effort, steam slipping past his face as they spin again, quicker, sword just missing the dhampir always half a step ahead and openly grinning and Kurt's hands squeeze so tight they hurt -
The dhampir sidesteps but Blaine's anticipated it, swings his own body in, the sword catches its momentum and comes diagonally down heavy and deadly as a guillotine. The cry sticks in Kurt's throat as the dhampir moves suddenly so fast it's like no movement at all, like a blink Kurt hadn't realised he'd taken; he's holding the sword by the blade, a little blood running from his hand, sluggish and dark down his own wrist. He smiles down at Blaine's face. "Mistake, little pet."
Blaine sinks a dagger into the side of his neck.
At first it doesn't even really register, it clearly doesn't with the dhampir, who merely looks sort of surprised. Kurt realises his hands are now over his mouth but doesn't know when there was the time to put them there. Blaine's face is cold, grim, tight around the mouth, eyes intense on the dhampir's - until the dhampir slaps a hand to its throat, and Blaine wrenches his sword free, falls a few steps back, and Kurt hears the breath leave him in a rush.
The dhampir reaches up, jerks the dagger out and drops it. The blood doesn't spray loose but runs out sleepy and sullen, thick down his throat before Kurt sees the skin knit back together, healing quicker than Kurt could have done it and apparently without feeling a thing. The dhampir shakes his hand out and stares at the blood on it, then looks down at his shirt, wipes at it a bit - it's stuck down to his chest with blood - and back up at Blaine, eyes narrowing. "Do you have any idea how hard it is to find a decent shirt in my size in this dump of a nowhere?"
Kurt can feel Blaine's heart running faster, and squeezes his hands at his sides again, draws his breath in.
The dhampir says, "No more games." and -
Its two running steps are as quick as blinks. Blaine gets the sword up to counter but Kurt can see how heavy that arm will fall, that sword will break, and he gets there first. The magic flares, the shield only has to be the size of a plate; the dhampir's arm strikes it and Blaine's breath bursts white with surprise, but it only takes him half a second, he knows his lover. While the dhampir gives a curse, Blaine ducks, swings. The dhampir has to kick itself out of the way, ungainly for the first time, and it stares across the snow at Kurt, who lets his breath out long and slow, a stream of white into the air, while his body throbs from the blow and his hands squeeze at his sides.
The dhampir scowls at him, nose wrinkling. "You seriously want to do this, healer?"
Blaine swings the sword, keeping his wrists loose, and murmurs, "Kurt?"
"It's fine." Kurt keeps his eyes on the dhampir, through a last falling flurry of the dying snow. "We can do it."
Blaine trusts him. His body sways back for a second, gathering to spring and giving Kurt warning, and then he's off. The first blow the dhampir manages to angle itself back from, the blow that should fall on Blaine's shoulder Kurt catches on a shield, Blaine quickly turns the sword in his hands and on the whirl of momentum swings in at its other side. The dhampir has to catch it on the side of its fist, hissing in frustration, and its flashing hand strikes a shield before it can stab Blaine's eyes. Blaine kicks it in the stomach.
It staggers back with the force of it but as Blaine swings the sword down it's already upright and catching it on a forearm; it has no breath to be lost and doesn't need to waste time in recovering it. It aims for Blaine's throat and gets a shield instead, and Blaine bulls forward elbow-first, knocking it back and cracking his sword-hilt into the side of its face. Its frantic returning blow hits another shield.
Kurt isn't aware of breathing, isn't aware of anything but his eyes on the way that monster moves and everywhere it might be next. He has to anticipate its movements, the only reason he can get a shield there in time is that Blaine's got it on the back foot and defending as best it can. He doesn't blink, doesn't dare to, stares at the fight and every blow to a shield thumps somewhere inside him, heavy on his bones, but it's something to worry about later: now the magic, and Blaine's life. His hands are bloodless with how tight they're fisted. Later, his arms will hurt.
"Little-" the dhampir hisses, and its voice strangles a snarl of frustration as it snatches at Blaine's sword and its fingers strike off a shield, and Blaine punches it in the side of the head.
It staggers right around him, Blaine turning with it, its back to Kurt now and Kurt's eyes widen - he needs to see its hands - as Blaine swings the sword in around with himself and the dhampir skips back so quickly -
So quickly it blurs.
Kurt hears Tina shriek but there's no time for him to make a sound, no time for any magic. There's shock and his head is hauled back tight and there's a cold, blood-clotted hand around his throat, and he stares at the dhampir's face and the white of the sky while it fists a hand in his hair and hisses down at him, "What kind of game do you think I'm playing, exactly how much patience for the inane time wasting of a freak like you do you think I have?" His hand tightens and Kurt feels it press in hard to the quickening pulse, and he hears Blaine make a noise, wounded and barked and desperate, like an animal hurt. "You will live," the dhampir tells him, lowering his face, cold over Kurt's with his body bent back like a bow by its deadening, overwhelming strength, "just long enough to regret this."
No, Kurt thinks, with a hand around his throat and Blaine right there. No no no -
He's tossed sideways by the hair, a shield flaring up on instinct between shoulder and snow as he hits but the breath's still punched out of him. He hears Blaine yell, tries to haul himself up on an elbow to see what's happening as Mercedes grabs his shoulders, steadies him as he slips and his breath wrenches on a body-jerking cough, and then footsteps scuff-crunch the snow and Blaine drops to his knees next to him, his eyes so dark with his face so white. "Kurt -"
The word gasps in his throat. "Dhampir-"
"Gone. Just, ran so fast it vanished." Mercedes grips tighter to his arms. "Damn that thing's - it's fast."
Blaine's breath shakes out, and he touches Kurt's face. "Oh god I thought - oh god I -"
Kurt blinks out across the snow where there's no dhampir, nothing to kill them, just open white, more hills edging the plain, trees behind them. He makes himself swallow, and a few not-enough breaths turn into more body-wrenching coughs. He closes his eyes for a second - his own beating heart is such a surprise to him right now that it's hard to think how to talk around it - and swallows again, gets out, "I'm okay."
"I thought-" Kurt puts a hand over Blaine's hand on his cheek because he looks so vulnerable still, and Kurt realises that he's never seen Blaine scared before. "I thought - because you were concentrating on me-"
"No, Blaine, no, he -" His breath sounds ill and wheezy and undignified, and Kurt struggles out of Mercedes' hands to sit, and Blaine gets both hands around his face now, sword dropped at his side. Kurt holds his wrists there, holds his eye. "He could've done that from the beginning." Kurt wets his lips, closes his fingers around Blaine's. "He could've killed all of us at any second, before we knew it happened, it couldn't be your fault."
Blaine murmurs, "That doesn't make me feel better."
Kurt closes his eyes, feels through his body for the damage. Nothing much, bruises mostly, and he winces as he fixes what he can, enough so he can stand up with Blaine's help. He blinks, at the magic shivering its way back into the air - he can see which direction the dhampir left in by the disturbed magic following its path. Santana with Brittany close at her shoulder snaps her fingers a few times until she can get a flame alight, says in a very dry voice, "Damn. That thing just - damn."
Finn's still crouching by Rachel, trying to lift her off the snow and onto his lap. Quinn crouches next to him, letting the hare down onto the snow where it steps delicately over the dark spatter of Rachel's blood and wrinkles its snout. "Now you see why I was running, mages."
"Rachel?" Finn slurs at her. "Hey, Rachel, c'n you hear me . . . ?"
Kurt picks himself out of Blaine's grip with some difficulty, Blaine is gripping his arm tight, walks to Finn's side, puts a hand on his stepbrother's head. Then his shoulder bangs something again and he doesn't understand what's happened until he does, while Finn groans, "Crap. Thanks, man." and Blaine's holding Kurt up with his arms around his shoulders, growling at him, "I wish you wouldn't do that, I wish you wouldn't-"
Kurt puts a hand to his head, swallows. Too much all at once, and his magic isn't returned to full strength yet, it's still thin in the air, drizzle instead of a storm. He takes a confused moment to work out where his body is - on his knees, slumped sideways into Blaine - and works out what happened, and hell, at least Blaine caught him.
He tugs on Blaine's sleeve, mumbles, "Thank you."
Blaine ducks his head closer to Kurt's, whispers, "I wish you wouldn't . . ."
"What do we do?" Tina says, holding Mike's hand tightly. "Without Rachel we don't even know which direction to go in, and - and that thing -"
Blaine helps Kurt back to his wobbly feet again and Kurt holds onto him, startled by how weak his legs have gone. Blaine kisses the side of his head for one sweet second, and then his voice is all practicality and authority again. "We need to get somewhere sheltered and set up camp. We're going to need sentries all night, in case it comes back. At least two at a time. It's too fast to risk one."
Finn bundles Rachel's body closer into his arms. "Rachel-"
"We can't do anything but let her rest," Kurt says, holding onto Blaine's arms with his knees threatening to drop him again. "Finn, believe me, if I could help I would."
"I'll read up on dhampirs. Like, now." the Artie-owl promises, and Puck picks it off Finn's shoulder, checks its face, sticks it in the pocket of his robes. He squeezes Finn's shoulder, a little uncomfortably.
"C'mon, help me make a stretcher out of one of these tents. Mike, lend a hand."
Blaine's fingers stroke back through Kurt's hair. "Can you walk?"
Kurt nods, and swallows, and looks across the open basin of snow they stand in. The sun is beginning to swing too low, the sky dark over the exposed white land, and the magic creeping back. The particles float back uncertain and scared and Kurt thinks in their low-dipping movements ashamed for leaving the mages like that. He touches his magic outwards, feels the aura of it grow. I don't blame you, he thinks, pressing at it. I really couldn't. I wouldn't stay to fight him either, if I had a choice or any sense.
"So this is what we came all this way to fight," Santana says, wrapping her hand around Brittany's, and there's little real bite in her voice for once. "Last time I follow that dwarf anywhere, seriously."
Blaine's hand stays at the back of Kurt's slumped neck. Kurt closes his eyes and feels his magic slowly grow, as the light slowly fades.
Part II