Blaine had never been the type to single-mindedly pursue things with an unrelenting fervor. He knew people who were like that - attending a prestigious academy where it was a foregone conclusion that the majority of students would go on to attend Ivy League institutions lent itself to knowing a few such intense personalities - and he didn't dislike them, but he never felt like he really understood that kind of drive. More often than not, he felt as though he was riding in the passenger seat while external forces worked on him to move him in one direction or another: his father, his teachers, his fellow Warblers, Kurt...he could assert himself if he needed to, at least on occasion, but for the most part he tried to go along with what others had mapped out for him. When things got too hectic, too frustrating, felt so much larger than life, he would channel it into his music or find a way to use songs to get himself back on track by acting out what he thought he needed to feel, but that was hardly a genuine dogged pursuit of anything, really. More often than not, he felt as though he had no idea what he was doing, where he was going, what he was meant to seek out next.

Until Kurt wouldn't speak to him.

He wasn't sure when the obsession started, if it was during Kurt's solo at the showcase or if maybe he'd thought about it before. If maybe he'd started wondering why Kurt was okay with things prior to that. He didn't think so - at least, he didn't remember it as anything beyond a passing frustration whenever Kurt would make a move toward him. An exasperated 'Why do I have to be the only one who knows we can't do this?' in the back of his mind before he moved on to panicking about how much he did want it, how he did want to do all the things he knew he shouldn't even be thinking about, let alone want, least of all do. He knew, at the very least, it hadn't been something on his mind after the...after the day he did the series of horrible things. It wasn't until he watched Kurt sing and heard how sad he was, how hurt. How the boy who seemed to have no shame about feeling the way that he did was wrenched not by the illness but by the way Blaine had treated him. And knowing that Kurt wasn't ashamed, wasn't wracked by guilt and terror-

Unless Kurt was a far better actor than even Blaine would have guessed, he wasn't even bothered by his sickness. He didn't spend every minute wishing it would go away, he didn't wake up from dreams every single night feeling like he wanted to die because that was the only way he would ever feel less wrong. He didn't hate himself for not being able to make it go away. He was-...he was happy, even as sick as he was. How was that even possible?

Rather, Kurt had been happy. Not anymore, not after-

Blaine had to get an answer. He needed to know how Kurt was okay, because that was his only chance now. He didn't know how much longer he could take feeling like this, and if he had passed the threshold where even his father - the go-to therapist for treatment of difficult, severe cases in this part of the country - could do anything to help him, then it was either kill himself and end it all...or figure out how Kurt could feel contentment no matter how severe and difficult his case was.

Not that he could know for sure how difficult or severe, just-...From the way Kurt had kept coming to his room, kept making a move to kiss him, kept doing all of the things that Blaine secretly wanted to do but couldn't dare, couldn't let himself want...it felt like he wanted it just as much. Maybe more.

Probably not more, Blaine concluded. Not the way he had practically thrown himself on Kurt in the Commons that day. Not the way Kurt was avoiding him now as though he never wanted to see him again, let alone repeat anything they had previously done.

Blaine wanted to. He wanted it all the time. He wanted everything they had done and then some, he wanted every last disgustingly hot thing his dreams could conjure up.

The urges were perpetual now, the ache constant as though feeling Kurt half-naked beneath him had released a floodgate of hormones and emotions and misfired neurons that made him crave everything he had previously been able to bottle up. Like if a person started crying after holding it in for a long time and couldn't stop. Everything he knew was off-limits was suddenly so much harder to repress, to deny, to tell himself wasn't worth how sick it meant he was.

Which meant he really was beyond help. Which really meant that Kurt's self-acceptance was his only hope. If he could figure out how-...how to see this illness as something livable, the way that some men who had lost legs in the War no longer saw it as a handicap but as a simple part of their existence that didn't doom them to a life locked away from the rest of the world...if he could get to that point, then maybe...maybe...

...maybe he could keep living a little longer. Because maybe then it wouldn't hurt this much just to exist. If he had something to hold onto, some reason that he could feel a little bit better...like Kurt did. Like Kurt had, anyway, before he'd ruined him.

As if he didn't have enough guilt in the first place.

So he had to get answers. He had to figure out a way to ask the questions such that he could get the answers he needed, and he needed to figure out a way to get Kurt to speak to him long enough to answer them - and to have a proper apology.

The latter was proving more difficult than the former.

Kurt wouldn't speak to him. Wouldn't look at him. Had almost tripped over him four times at Warbler practice because he was that seemingly-determined to not look anywhere near him. And he understood why, he understood that what he'd done was...was unforgivable for so many reasons. He just-...he needed Kurt to forgive him anyway. Or at least to look at him long enough to answer the questions that were driving him more crazy by the moment.

He tried to corner the boy after practice, but Kurt shot out of the room like he'd heard Connie Francis tickets were going on sale down the block and he had to be the first one in line. Blaine practically shoved Jeff aside to get through the doors to see Kurt walking quickly down the hall, with as much grace and poise as any person he'd ever seen but still making it very clear to all the world that he was not stopping. That he would not pause for anything, and most certainly not for conversation.

"Kurt!"

Blaine's voice echoed through the corridor, bouncing off hundred-year-old murals and past antique windows and sounding impossibly loud even against the dull roar of post-rehearsal conversation. He didn't realize how loud it would sound, how much it would stand out, and from the way everyone fell silent and stared at him- he cringed. It lasted only a moment, though, as Kurt turned slowly to stare at him, eyes narrow with frustration and thinly-veiled contempt. The boy's eyebrow raised in a 'what do you want?' expression, and Blaine tried to think of what precisely he could say here and now that would prove compelling enough for Kurt not to turn back around and keep walking but not give himself - or both of them - away to the rest of the Warblers, who now looked on at their de facto leader as though he had lost his mind from too much furniture-jumping.

Lacking anything to say that might help him but more determined than ever, he chose action over words and jogged to catch up to Kurt, his loafer slipping slightly as he pushed off. Kurt was already off and walking again by the time Blaine caught up, and he doggedly kept pace. Damn, did Kurt ever walk fast when he wanted to get away from someone. He wondered if maybe this wasn't Kurt trying to get away from him, just making him work for the attention; the boy could be kind of dramatically snobbish sometimes, maybe-

"Go away, Blaine."

Well then. That answered that question.

He wanted to assent, on one hand. He wanted to be respectful where he clearly hadn't been a week ago, to give Kurt his space and his privacy. Maybe Kurt didn't want to talk about any of this any more than he would have wanted to a week ago. Maybe Kurt wanted to forget he had ever felt this way. But on the other hand...The feeling that he would lose his mind if he couldn't figure out a better way to deal with all of this - and fast - was steadily increasing, gnawing at him harder and harder until it felt like he was just a bundle of loose ends that couldn't stop bouncing. He couldn't sleep, he could barely eat, he couldn't be alone with himself because he wasn't sure whether to kill himself or masturbate, or to masturbate and then kill himself from shame. He had to do something about this and that meant he couldn't go away.

"I can't."

That wasn't the answer Kurt was looking for; his eyes narrowed further and his pretty face settled into a hardened glare as he glanced disdainfully at Blaine out of the corner of his eye. "You can. Do."

"No, Kurt, you don't understand. I can't. I can't just go away, I need to-" The flurry of words that threatened were halted as they passed two sophomore boys. Blaine didn't know them, he didn't think Kurt knew them either, but their presence was enough to send an icy claw of fear clamping down on his stomach. They couldn't do this here. Someone would hear them. "Come to my room."

"No." Kurt's response was cold, forceful, thrust from his mouth with an uncharacteristic anger.

"Please." He restrained himself form making a pleading motion with his hands, but only just. "I need to talk to you. Come to my room for a minute."

Kurt stopped walking and turned to look at him for a moment. A hint of curiosity flickered across his face before Kurt clamped down on it, returning to the hard looked that neither expected nor volunteered anything. Blaine's heart leapt when he saw it, just the slightest hint of something that might let him in - just a tiny bit. Just enough for an apology to get him a little further in, because he genuinely was sorry. That had to count for something, didn't it? Kurt crossed his arms firmly over his torso and replied in a tight, high voice, "Fine."

He sounded cold, but it was a start.

The icy demeanor hadn't dissipated by the time they arrived at Blaine's room. "Well," he said as Blaine closed and locked the door behind them - sometimes students wandered into or out of other people's rooms, and they were a school that didn't discourage such action in the interest of being informal with fellow students and fostering a sense of comaraderie, but the last thing Blaine wanted was for anyone to potentially interrupt...or worse, to slip the door open unnoticed and listen until enough juicy bits of information had been revealed that they could make a killing off the blackmail potential alone. "At least you can't run this time. Or if you do, you have to come back eventually."

There was bitterness in Kurt's voice, but it just barely covered the hurt, and Blaine cringed. He had done this. The frozen tundra spanning all four feet of distance between them was his fault, him and his stupid- Well...not entirely stupid. What else was he supposed to have done? Other than ignoring the urges entirely, other than somehow stopping them from happening or stopping himself from wanting the things he wanted...and if he could've done that earlier, he would have, for everyone's sake.

"So," Kurt said in a crisp voice. "What do you want, Blaine?"

Why hadn't it occurred to him until this moment that he would need to be able to actually ask something? There were no words to adequately express what he wanted, no mantra he could repeat over and over again until it somehow materialized, and not even a nice, concrete question he could just ask and put out there. He didn't know what he was supposed to be asking, but there was nothing he could come up with that would even come close to conveying what he needed to.

"I..." He hesitated when words disappeared and tried to start again. "Kurt, I don't know how to..."

Kurt took a step backwards, but his voice softened as he asked, "How to what?", as though every move away from cold indifference had to be paired with a physical move away from the boy who had hurt him. Blaine's heart ached at the thought, which just made it harder to try to find what he wanted to say. It needed to be right, to be easily understood, to be precisely the right question because he might only get one. There was nothing keeping Kurt here except him and he wasn't going to hold the boy hostage or refuse to let him leave, but by the same token...Kurt couldn't leave. Kurt needed to stay and help him and- and how was he supposed to figure out a lifetime's worth of questions and boil them all down to just one?

"Why don't you hate yourself?"

The question seemed to come out of nowhere, flung into the middle of the room so suddenly that neither of them was entirely sure what to say in response. Blaine tried speaking first, since it was his ridiculous, loaded question out there, but it came out a nearly incoherent babble. "I don't know how to do this, what the right way is to-...you are who you are and unless you're much better an actor than I would have guessed, you don't hate it. You don't try to pretend you don't want me and I tried and I can't, so why don't you-"

Kurt drew in a slow breath, and Blaine stopped in case that was a sign Kurt wanted to take mercy on him and answer the question. He felt as though all his well-practiced poise, all the social grace that had been trained into him from such an early age, had been replaced by a froth of frustrating questions he couldn't put words to that kept turning his stomach into tighter and tighter knots until it hurt to breathe, to move, to exist. "Why should I?" Kurt's voice was quiet, the look in his eyes distrustful. But he was speaking, that was a start. "Why should I? Why do you?"

"Why wouldn't I?" Blaine asked. Ordinarily he would have thought answering a question with a question was ridiculous, but he didn't know how to answer it any other way. "Wouldn't anyone?"

"Look, Blaine, as much fun as this would be to just keep going around and around on this conversation here - where I say 'I don't' and ask why you do again, and so on - I have other things to do, so if this was all you wanted to talk about-"

"It's not," Blaine stated firmly. When Kurt stared at him expectantly, waiting for what else he did want to talk about then, Blaine began quietly, "First of all, I wanted to apologize." His words were working for that much, at least, which he took to be a good sing. "I hurt you, and there's no...there's an excuse for that, but not a good one. I'm sorry, Kurt." He tried to meet the boy's eyes - his beautiful, entrancing eyes - but Kurt glanced away, first rolling his eyes up toward the ceiling then looking down at the floorboard near the door, arms crossed more tightly over his chest. "I should never have done what I did to you."

There was a hesitation, then Kurt asked quietly, "Which part?"

"Running out," Blaine stated first, then amended, "All of it. But running out was what hurt you. The rest just made us both more sick, but I guess that's..." He didn't know how to finish that sentence. 'To be expected'? 'Inevitable'? 'Yet another thing we can add to the list of what's wrong with me, be sure to tell my psychiatrist that when I'm institutionalized'? Because in a way it was inevitable, wasn't it? It was what happened when someone who was sick spent time around someone else who was sick, it was...even with something that wasn't directly and pathologically contagious, there was a spreading factor for moral illnesses, too. And the temptation had been so great, just knowing that unlike one of the other guys Kurt wouldn't hurt him for wanting, wouldn't report him to anyone because it would mean having to report himself.

Let alone once he knew how amazing Kurt was in his own right.

The warm wave of want that still passed through him made him feel like he couldn't breathe. He really was helpless to it, wasn't he? And yet he couldn't figure out the questions to ask to get answers to any of it. All he'd managed to figure out was that indeed Kurt didn't care that he was sick; the 'why' remained a mystery.

He half-choked on an odd wheeze that was closer to a sob than he would've liked as he finally finished the statement "...just what happens with this kind of illness, I guess. This severe, at least."

"We're not sick, Blaine." Kurt's voice was quiet but not soft, with a kind of sadness to it as though he wished this could all be different. "No more than anyone else."

Blaine had almost been prepared for an explanation of learning to live with illness, of acceptance of one's disease as an integral - but non-fatal - part of life, but this-...the revelation that it wasn't actually a sickness at all-

He couldn't believe it. It didn't make any sense - of course it was a sickness. It was in the DSM, it was taught in medical school, it was a pathological disease of the brain like- like depression or anxiety or schizophrenia. It was treatable, it was treated. Just because it was difficult to cure didn't mean it wasn't an illness, just like terminal cancer was still an illness. "Of course we are," he said slowly, his voice sounding strange in his ears. Distant. Was it maybe- Oh god, Kurt really didn't know. He'd wondered if maybe that was why Kurt could accept any of this without the enormous levels of guilt, but he hadn't really believed that the boy could be that ignorant of his situation - of their situation. "Kurt, I...I'm sorry to be the one to have to tell you this, but this...what we are, it isn't-"

"First of all, there is no 'we'," Kurt stated with a firmness that suggested he was trying to convince himself as much as he was trying to convince Blaine. "Second of all, we aren't. There's nothing wrong with us. There's-" He drew in a deep breath and took a step forward, gingerly smoothing Blaine's lapel. The feeling of fingertips against his chest made Blaine's breath catch and it took everything in him not to grab Kurt, to hold him closer as he tried to understand all of it - all of this, all the longing and the feelings that were so much stronger than lust and how in the world could Kurt say this was fine? It felt horrible.

"It's not normal," Blaine whispered. It couldn't be, and not just because that would mean that everyone around him was secretly harbouring these same feelings. It couldn't be normal because he refused to believe that everyone else he'd ever seen was this miserable.

Maybe they were. They hid everything else, didn't they?

Kurt stiffened, glancing to the side. "Normal is overrated, Blaine, normal is boring. This...this may not be common, but it's not wrong." He finally looked Blaine in the eye as he whispered, "You're not wrong."

He hated looking Blaine in the eye. Hated seeing him and wanting him and wanting things with him - wanting a life. Wanting soft kisses while they listened to beautiful, grander-than-life songs. Wanting Blaine to touch him in spite of every single ounce of better judgment he had. But Blaine looked so sad, so scared, so confused by it all, as though he couldn't fathom any of this ever being okay.

And as much as he wanted to write the boy off because of it, as much as he was trying to remind himself that Blaine's reluctance to accept it meant that there was no way this could end in anything other than heartbreak and being half-naked on a couch with a look of disgust burning its way into his memory...no one should have to feel like Blaine looked. No one should have to be that hopeless.

"Come with me," he urged quietly.

"Where?" Blaine asked nervously.

"There's something I want to show you. In the library," he added. It sounded surprisingly intimate, like he was exposing some deep, private part of himself. In a way he knew that was ridiculous - it was a report, it was a study that had been published and anyone who went looking for it could find it. Blaine could go find it himself if he knew where to look and wasn't so terrified.

But it was deeper than that, he knew. It wasn't just a report, it was so much bigger, more important.

The library was not as empty as Blaine would have liked; that much was obvious from the moment they stepped inside and Kurt could almost sense Blaine drawing up a little straighter, walking a little prouder, trying to make himself seem a little more together while at the same time attempting to put on a ridiculous air of nonchalance that practically screamed "Don't look at me! I'm not doing anything, I swear, but don't look!"

"Okay, you have to relax," Kurt said quietly with a faint smile and a shake of his head. "I've been here plenty of times and no one has ever noticed - not even the time I knocked over the chair and ran into the wall," he added with a chuckle to himself. Blaine looked at him like he was crazy, too on-edge to find humour even in Kurt's panicked clumsiness, so Kurt simply led him to the reference section. From memory he moved quickly through the stacks and plucked the report off the shelf, his fingers clutching it tightly out of instinct.

"What's that?" Blaine asked as Kurt ran his fingers slowly over the familiar binding; there was an almost Pavlovian comfort response, like the sight of the teddy bear he'd slept with as a child - something reassuring, like this was what meant everything was okay.

"Proof," Kurt stated with a faint smile. It was and it wasn't; it was and it was so much more than that. It was hope, it was the security blanket that had gotten him through the three months between putting a name to his difference and meeting Hiram and Leroy. It had taken him from terrified and despondent and thinking he would always be wrong and alone and miserable, from honestly contemplating castration to cure himself, to imagining a future that didn't just entice him, that wasn't just happy and liberating, but one that made sense to him in ways that everything he'd previously envisioned never had.

"Of what?"

Of everything, Kurt wanted to reply but didn't. Instead he led Blaine to the small table in the back corner, the one where he had pored over medical books until he found his overblown diagnosis, and sat down. "It's a study," he started, and Blaine shot him a look as he sat down, glancing nervously over his shoulders. "It's a study," he began again in a quieter voice, and Blaine looked just a little calmer. "A psychologist at UCLA studied two groups of men - half homosexual, half not. And what they found was that there's no difference. None. They weren't any more crazy, any more likely to be depressed, any more likely to have problems. They weren't sick, Blaine, the only reason anyone thought that was because they were homosexual and that's technically a medical condition, but she even said-" He flipped open to the passage he was looking for; he had it practically memorized now, he'd read the study so often. It wasn't long, only thirty pages, but it held so much. So much promise. "That if they bracketed the fact that the homosexual was, well, a homosexual, there was no mental illness whatsoever. You see?" he pointed to it as he slid the study across the table toward Blaine. "We're not sick. This proves it. We may not be like everyone else, but honestly - if that were how I counted my life, I would've been disappointed a long time ago."

He sat back in his chair, satisfied with himself. This was what Blaine needed. There. He'd done...something. He wasn't sure he could put his finger on what precisely, it wasn't quite fixing Blaine because there was nothing wrong with him - not per se. It was almost like he'd just pointed Blaine in the right direction.

He wasn't sure why that meant he was starting to let the fantasies creep in again.

He knew it was irrational. Blaine had hurt him, and even though he had apologized Kurt was still wary. But at the same time, there was a part of him that wondered if maybe this had been the key. If maybe this was the real problem, and now that he'd helped fix it, maybe Blaine could stop being so skittish. They might have a real shot now, the kind Kurt would envision whenever Blaine wasn't too busy running away because he'd crept too far past some invisible line in the sand. Maybe now things could be different, now that Blaine knew.

And even if they couldn't, at the very least he had given comfort to his friend, someone he cared a lot about. He knew how amazing it had felt to find the report, to find Man #16. He wondered which of the men in the report Blaine might be able to see himself in, to see a future. Maybe Man #50, who placed emphasis on being ordinary and like others but channeled all his differences rather than repressing them - like Blaine and his music. With tenderness but that was subjugated by phallic gratification - that sounded familiar. He thought so, at least. Maybe he should've studied the criteria a little more.

He may have read the report a few too many times if he knew all of the men specified in the report by their number and classifications. He couldn't help himself; it was reassuring. And what other examples did he have to look to before Hiram and Leroy? Where else was he going to find information?

Blaine shook his head gravely. "It doesn't work like that, Kurt."

"What do you mean?"

"You can't just say that decades of science are wrong because you don't like what it says. I wish-" He sighed, resting his forehead in his hand. "I wish it was, but thirty subjects that are meticulously hand-selected don't mean anything in the grand scheme of things. For a study like this you have to have literally hundreds of people, and you can't just take the people who say they aren't sick. It's a skewed sample."

Kurt stared at him, surprised by what he was hearing. Blaine should be over the moon. He should be singing excited songs that made Kurt want to kiss him and never let him out of his sight. He should be jumping up and down on furniture with joy right about now - why wasn't he jumping on furniture? Why was he sitting heavily in his chair and sighing and shaking his head like it was all an elaborate lie aimed at hurting him? "So is every study that says that we're inherently sick," he replied. "They're taking their samples from insane asylums and prisons, of course there's a presumption of mental illness. They're selecting people who are in treatment, it's obvious-"

"That's not the way science works."

"Yes it is," he replied, eyebrows lowering in frustration and confusion. "You find a flaw in the theory, or in the methodology used to get that theory, and you do another experiment. You look for something else, a new theory. You abandon the old, or you modify it - you studied astronomy when you took physics last year, you learned about Galileo-"

"We're not talking about something millions of miles away that we lack the ability to track scientifically. This is observable, it's- it's been observed by psychotherapists for half a century now and every single one of them until this random woman in California have come to the same conclusion. What gives you the right to come in and decide this is what's right?"

Kurt was practically seething as Blaine ripped the report apart, practically shredding the security blanket he'd clung to for what seemed like a hundred years. Obviously Blaine didn't need his help, then, if this was how he was going to react to it. How he was going to respond. He'd thought he could do something, but obviously Blaine wasn't ready. "What gives you the right to say it's wrong?" He stood, pushing away from the table. "I'm sorry you've been so miserable, but maybe this right here is why you hate yourself. And it's why I don't." Shaking his head tightly as he turned to leave, he added, "Do with it whatever you want. But it's why I know I'm not wrong. I'm not sick. Man #16 was like me, and now he has a life and he's happy, and I will be too. And you can't take that from me."