“Tina!” shouts Blaine, half-crazed in his panic. “Tina, come quick!”

Tina rushes out of the pantry, brow furrowed worriedly.

“What is it? What's happened? Wha – why are you only wearing one shoe?”

“I – I don't know, I must have lost it somewhere. That's not the point. I've put Kurt in danger again, and all of McKinley, too! What do I do?”

Tina takes hold of his arm and steers him to a stool.

“Let's just take this one step at a time, shall we? What happened, exactly?”

She watches intently as he tells her, growing graver by the second. He tells her about the dances, and how well they connected, even though Blaine knew they shouldn't, knew exactly the risk he was taking, being so himself. He just…couldn't help it. He couldn't stand there and know exactly how to make Kurt smile that big, beautiful smile of his and not act on it. It was foolish of him to think that he could.

He tells her about meeting the king and queen, and about Kurt's vow.

“I never plan to marry,” Kurt said – or, well, confessed – and there was such bitterness, such sorrow in his eyes that Blaine put there and would do anything to take away. It was all Blaine could do not to throw off his mask and make his own confession.

He tells her about Hunter. He tells her how naked he felt the moment his mask slipped away, and how his stomach dropped right to the floor. He tells her how he ran out of the palace and all the way home, because Brittany's magic expired just exactly as she described, and there was nothing waiting for him but a giant pumpkin and a few white mice.

He feels no better for getting it out. If anything, he feels worse, having relived his own stupidity and felt, once again, the very moment he knew his heart had broken.

Tina doesn't waste time with reassurances.

“Pack your things,” she says, and Blaine immediately feels the tug to obey.

“Where will I go?”

“I'll come with you. We'll find work as cooks or – or tailors, or minstrels, I don't know. We'll figure it out. Hurry.”

Blaine runs to his room, starts throwing things into an old carpet bag. It won't take long – he doesn't have much.

He hears the door open downstairs, and the murmur of voices. He stops, closes his eyes. They'll never make it out now. He wrestles off his jacket and trousers, made no less fine by his desperate run home, and throws on his tattered servants' wear. He rubs a sooty sleeve across his cheek and runs his fingers through his hair until it's loose and curling over his forehead. It's not a disguise, but it's something, at least.

Marley appears at his door, twisting her fingers nervously. “It's the prince,” she says. “He wants to see everyone.”

Blaine doesn't move.

Marley giggles and holds out her hand. “He won't eat us. At least, I hope not. Come on!”

Blaine follows her. He has no choice. His mind races, trying to find a subterfuge that will save them all. His heart drums against his ribs.

Kurt and his company of knights and ladies are in the hall, watching carefully as the entire household filters in. Blaine slips behind the tallest manservant, grateful, for once, for his slight stature, but Kurt and his company are soon walking amongst them. Blaine ducks his head and turns away, desperately hoping that the appearance of bashfulness will deter them from looking too closely.

Lady Rachel is the one who finds him.

“Here is a young man,” she calls, voice carrying clear as a bell above the buzz of chatter. She pulls Blaine forward by the wrist, and the room falls silent. All eyes are on him. He feels a spike of shame at allowing Kurt to see him like this, in filthy rags, with his hair a mess. It's stupid and silly, considering what is at stake, but he can't help it.

Kurt rushes to him.

“Blaine! Blaine, why are you dressed like that?” It's concern coloring his voice, not disdain, and Blaine suddenly feels himself on the verge of tears. He can't meet Kurt's eyes.

“Your Highness, I – ” he starts, pitching his voice lower, but he knows that any doubts Kurt had as to his identity have been resolved on hearing him speak.

Fortunately, Hunter steps in, all too eager to aid and abet Blaine's deception.

“That's just Cinders, the scullion,” he says, with an oily smile. “Sire, would you care for a refreshment, now that you're here?”

Blaine could kick him. Hunter doesn't even feel the remotest attraction for men, but he would wed the prince in a trice. He's a power-hungry meathead who doesn't deserve to lick Kurt's Daltonian leather boots.

Kurt furrows his brow. He hasn't taken his eyes off of Blaine's face.

“He's a scullion?”

“Yes, a scullion, no one of account. Our cook, Tina, however, makes cakes fit for a prince.”

Hunter flutters his eyelashes in what Blaine assumes is an attempt at flirtation. Kurt glances at him, bemused.

There's a door close enough for Blaine to slip through if he's quick enough. He tries to pull his hand away, but Lady Rachel has a stronger grip than he expected, and his attempt catches the attention of Kurt's company. Sir Finn moves to block the door.

Kurt takes Blaine's other hand, causing Rachel to let go and step away. Their fingers fit together just as well as they always have, and Blaine takes in a deep, shuddering breath. He wants to kiss him so very badly.

“You don't have to be afraid,” Kurt is saying. His tone is soft, cautious, like he's worried Blaine will spook. “I promise. Whatever they've done to you, it's over. They can't hurt you anymore.”

Oh, but they can. And there's nothing Kurt can do to stop it.

Kurt produces a shoe from somewhere, Blaine's shoe that he should never have worn, because of course Kurt's recognized it. A shoe made of glass is difficult to forget.

“This shoe belonged to Blaine,” says Kurt, more loudly. “It will fit no one but him, whether he is a scullion or a duke.”

Blaine curses his stupid, tiny fairy feet. Why couldn't his fairy blood give him the ability to disappear into thin air instead?

“Oh, that's my shoe!” says Hunter, with poorly-acted surprise. “I'm always losing it because it keeps slipping off my foot.” He giggles girlishly.

“Your feet are too big,” blurts Sugar. “My feet are tiny, and awesome.”

Kurt ignores that. He looks at Hunter, unimpressed.

“Try it,” he says flatly.

Hunter has a brief moment of uncertainty, to his credit, but bravado soon takes over. He makes a show of taking off his own shoe, the pungent odor more familiar to Blaine than he would like, and makes a valiant attempt. He can barely wedge his toes in.

“Ooh! My turn!” trills Sugar.

“It's a men's shoe,” grits out Hunter.

“So? I bet it totally fits me.”

She sticks out her lower lip in a pout and makes those obnoxious grabby fingers of hers, but Kurt only stares at her incredulously.

“I feel like I'm in crazytown,” he mutters. “Has no one ever said no to you?”

Sugar blinks. “No.”

Blaine bites his lip against a laugh. He sobers soon enough, though, because Kurt turns to him, shoe in hand and a look of devastating hope on his face.

Blaine reluctantly removes his shoe, the too-big shoe whose toes he has to stuff. Kurt smiles at him reassuringly and guides the glass shoe onto his foot. It fits perfectly, of course.

Blaine feels a wave of despair wash over him. Kurt must be able to see it, because he stiffens. He takes Blaine's hand again, and squeezes.

“You don't have to be Blaine if you don't want to be,” he says.

Blaine can see how much it pains him to say it, how much it costs him.

“I'm not,” chokes out Blaine. Tears spill over and slip down his cheeks, in spite of his very best efforts. Kurt takes Blaine's face in his hands and wipes away his tears with trembling thumbs. Blaine looks into his eyes, for the first time since he left the palace at a run. He's so beautiful, so…hopeful, still. Blaine lets out a sob.

Realization dawns over Kurt's face.

“That letter was a lie, a trick. I know it was.” He sends an icy-cold glare to Hunter, then re-focuses his attention on Blaine. “Tell me how you really feel,” he says urgently. It's an order. “Do you love me?”

“I do,” whispers Blaine. He feels as much relief to say it as he does grief. He just wishes he could enjoy Kurt's look of elation.

“Then marry me,” says Kurt, as if it's simple.

Another order.

Blaine nods. The tears are still streaming, unstoppable, down his cheeks.

“Don't marry him, Blaine,” says Hunter immediately, giving away Blaine's identity once and for all.

Blaine musters up the strength to pull away. Maybe Hunter's selfishness will be what saves them.

“I can't,” says Blaine, through the painful lump in his throat.

“Hunter, don't be an idiot,” snaps Mama Sue. “Don't you want to be stepbrother to the king's consort and make him give you whatever you want?” She smiles dangerously at Blaine. “His Highness is kind enough to want to marry you, Blaine.”

It's starting, just as Blaine knew it would. The curse will make Sue and Hunter as powerful as they've ever dreamed, and it will give Sugar endless wealth. It will turn Blaine into a weapon.

Kurt is looking at him like the key to his life's happiness rests in Blaine's hands. He doesn't realize that Blaine also holds the key to his destruction. A dagger in his back, poison in his wine glass, a push right off the edge of the castle's tallest parapet. State secrets, penned in Blaine's hand, delivered in the dead of night to McKinley's greatest enemy.

“Marry me, Blaine,” breathes Kurt. “Say that you'll marry me.”

It isn't a royal command, issued by the crown prince. It's just Kurt and Blaine. Blaine wishes to the stars and back that he could say no, like anyone else in the world. He wishes his yes could be his choice. He wouldn't hesitate, then, would listen to his heart and his soul and his body, all straining desperately for Kurt, and he'd sing it from the rooftops.

But it isn't his choice, and it won't ever be. He can't say yes, can't give in. Kurt is too precious to harm, too precious to marry, too precious to betray, too precious to obey.

The words rise up like bile – yes, yes, yes, I'll marry you, please, yes – but Blaine bites his tongue, and he swallows them right back down to his roiling stomach. He's starting to go dizzy, and his head is starting to pound, but it doesn't matter. The complaints of his body have never mattered less.

He feels a hand on his shoulder – Kurt, looking deeply alarmed. Blaine can't find it in himself to reassure him, can't open his mouth without risking it all. His vision blurs, and he closes his eyes, attention turned to the battle within.

He remembers it all, remembers every single order he's ever been given, every moment of fear, and rage, and helplessness. He can see it now – Brittany, smiling beatifically at Blaine, no more than a newborn wailing in her arms, “My gift to Blaine is obedience.” Tina, ordering him offhandedly to eat his birthday cake. His father, looking at him the way he looks at merchandise, “You're no good to me here. You'll go to military school with Sue's brat and make connections that may actually be of use to me.” Hunter, forbidding him to be friends with Sam. SEEf the ogre smirking down at him, “No need to sing this one to sleep, friends. It'll cook itself if we tell it to.” He can see Sue standing over him while he scrubs the courtyard until his hands are cracked and bleeding, Sugar counting his coins, Hunter watching him with beady eyes as Blaine pushes his own mother's pianoforte into Hunter's bedchamber.

He's been a puppet his entire life. He ate the cake, did push-ups until his arms gave out, left Sam without so much as a goodbye. He slaved for his stepmother, gave up the piano, let Sugar suck him dry. He let other people control his life, his decisions, his body, let them take whatever they wanted.

He won't let them have this. They can't have Kurt.

Be obedient. End this. Listen to your heart and say yes, yes, yes.

No.

There's pain in his head, and his stomach, and pain in his tongue from biting it so hard. It feels as if his throat is being ripped to shreds – it dawns on him that he's sobbing, the sound of it muffled through his clamped-shut jaw.

He opens his mouth. Oh, god. He can't stop it.

He claps a hand over his mouth and snaps it shut, the force of it scraping his teeth against his tongue so hard that it bleeds. His yes is trapped.

He thinks of Kurt. He remembers seeing him at Blaine's mother's funeral, solemn and compassionate, remembers joining their voices in a quiet song of mourning that made Blaine feel even better than crying his eyes out under the weeping tree. He remembers standing together in the low light of the Royal Fashion Museum's exotic fabrics exhibit, Kurt's eyes lit up warm as he promised to make Blaine a bow tie out of gnomic silk. He remembers Kurt binding SEEf's feet, eyeing the ogre with disgust even as he dealt his knights a sharp tongue-lashing. “They can't help their nature. They deserve to be treated humanely.” He remembers Kurt's wit, his terrible, wonderful jokes that no one laughed at but him, his acerbic assessment of Blaine's doltish military school peers. He remembers Kurt's full-bodied laughter, high and delirious, as they danced in a storage closet to music they made up on the spot, remembers the color in his cheeks and the luster in his eyes, the flop of his hair over his forehead as the exertion shook it from its style. He remembers Kurt's failed attempts to regain his dignity when the door flew open to reveal Blaine's father. He remembers Kurt's kindness to a lad of no account, attending his first ball. He remembers King Burt, smiling at his son, the hope and future of McKinley.

Blaine wants so badly to say yes. Say yes and live, say yes and be happy. Obey. Say yes. Marry him.

No. No, no, no, no, no.

He loses the sense of it, then. The feeling, it's too big for words. It rocks him back and forth, the yes ready to burst through his skin, and the force of his will pushing it back. He rears forward and reels back, a ship trying to resist the inexorable pull of the tides. It's only a matter of time before the curse will take him over. He's holding on to control of his own body by the barest thread.

No.

He digs in his heels, sinks further inside himself. He searches blindly for some sort of anchor, something – anything – to hold on to. He finds it, buried deep down beneath everything, beyond the pain and the chaos and all the white noise.

The single, solitary truth.

He doesn't need magic to break the curse. He never has. He holds the power to save Kurt, save himself, save everyone. He just has to believe it.

He takes a moment to breathe with the knowledge, let it live in his bones. He gathers every ounce of the determination he's forged over long years of necessity, finds a strength he's never needed for a lesser cause. He feels it sing through him. He finds his voice.

“No!” he cries, eyes flying open. “No, I won't marry you, I won't do it. No one can force me.”

He leaps to his feet, ready to defy anyone.

“Who would force you?” says Kurt, shocked.

“It doesn't matter who. They can't make me, no one can. I won't marry you.”

Sugar laughs. “He'll marry you. You told him to, so he has to listen. Marry him, Blaine, and give me all your gold!”

“No! Stop ordering me to!”

He feels elated, invigorated. He did it. He feels wild with it. Kurt will live, he can live and prosper and be happy.

Now, though, he just looks confused.

“He doesn't have to marry me if he doesn't want to,” he says to Sugar, plainly. He's trying to hide his hurt, but he can't, not from Blaine. Blaine wants to go to him, kiss him, reassure him that it isn't what he thinks, whatever that is.

“Yes, Sugar, do hush,” cuts in Hunter. “Blaine, go to your room. His Highness can have no further need of you.” He throws Kurt a simpering smile.

“I have great need of him,” says Kurt indignantly.

“You hush, Hunter. I don't want to go to my room.” Blaine gives into his instinct, and he throws his arms around Kurt, who doesn't look particularly unhappy about it. He kisses Kurt square on the lips, and he beams at him. “I won't marry you,” he says dreamily, because it's the most romantic thing he can think of, not marrying the prince. Some part of him is aware that he must seem touched.

“Go to your room!” barks Hunter, and he's probably turned red as a brick, the vein in his forehead popping. Blaine doesn't know for sure, because he can't take his eyes off of his love, who is more his than ever.

Kurt ignores Hunter, too.

“Why won't you marry me?” he asks carefully. “Why not, if you love me?”

“I'm cursed. You would never be safe if you married me.”

Blaine breathes in sharply. It's the first time he's said the words since he was eight years old and Santana Lopez ordered him to lose their supposed-to-be-friendly singing contest. They'd gotten into a bitter argument that ended when Tina caught Santana shouting, “Go stick your head in a blackberry bramble!” His mother issued one of her rare orders, after that, and forbid him from telling anyone else.

Did someone order him to tell? His memory of the last ten minutes is fuzzy, but he knows that no one did. So how, then, did he…

He takes stock of himself. He feels…lighter, more whole, as if all the disparate, conflicting parts of himself have been united. There's nothing left to fight, nothing weighing him down.

He feels as if he's sprouted wings.

“You're free, Blainey,” says Tina, suddenly at his side. “You've done it. You've broken the curse.” She's crying she's so happy, the tears streaming, unheeded, down her face. Blaine breaks away from Kurt and lets her throw her arms around him. He squeezes back just as tight. “You rescued yourself,” she says in his ear. “I'm so proud of you.”

It's over. Forever. He belongs to himself, and only himself. His choices are his.

He wipes at his face, probably leaving behind streaks of soot, and turns back to Kurt, who's looking at him with something like awe. He has a wet spot on his nose from Blaine's soggy cheeks. Blaine drops into a bow.

“Kurt,” he says, savoring the feel of it on his tongue. “When you asked for my hand a few minutes ago, it still wasn't mine to give.” Kurt laughs helplessly at the reminder of their letters, and the feeble joke that carried them through their longing. Today, it belongs to Rolf, our gardener's golden retriever, who spent so long licking it I feared it would turn into a paw. Blaine kneels down on one knee. “Now that I have it back, all I want to do is offer it to you. I've known since the first time we touched that our hands were meant to hold each other, fearlessly and forever. Will you – ”

Kurt doesn't let him finish. “Yes,” he breathes, and he pulls Blaine into a kiss.

Blaine smiles into it. He can't help it.

This must be what flying feels like.

&&&&&

And they lived happily ever after.