The moving trucks arrived at the house early on the Saturday morning of the move. Kurt had woken to a text from Rachel - whose morning routine started even earlier than the movers - asking him to call her that night as if she was expecting something to happen at the house and she needed Kurt's phone call to let her know it was all ok. Kurt wondered why she didn't ask Finn to call her, but he guessed that she found Kurt more reliable and trusted him to remember to call.

Most of his belongings were already packed away in boxes and cases, ready to be hauled into the truck to take to the new house. He only had an outfit he had picked out for today, some hair and skin products, his bed, and a few other essentials like his toothbrush left out in his side of the basement bedroom that was going to become - what? Someone else's bedroom? A game room? Just a plain old basement where you stored all the stuff that wasn't worthy of a place in the rest of the house? He knew the house had been sold, but he didn't know who had bought it. He supposed he should probably care - this was the house he had grown up in after all, the house in which he'd made many a happy memory with his mom and dad - but he couldn't bring himself to; they could no longer live in this house and knowing who would soon be living within its walls wouldn't make any difference to how he felt.

And he wasn't really sure how he felt. Yes, he had happy memories of here and most of his memories of his mom were in this house, but in the end, it was just a house and his memories would stay with him whether he still lived here or not.

While Finn grumbled about having to get up so early, Kurt quickly showered, did his moisturising routine, and got dressed in what, for him, was a fairly plain outfit: jeans and a red sweater. He was styling his hair by the time his dad appeared to tell Finn to get out of bed and for the pair of them to be upstairs for breakfast in ten minutes.

After packing the last of his things in his suitcase, Kurt stood in the centre of his bedroom and spun around in a slow circle, taking in the room that had been his for as long as he could remember. He hadn't seen around the new house yet as he'd been too busy with school, glee club, and packing, so he had no idea of how his new room compared to this one. He knew it was large and had an en suite bathroom, and he didn't have to share it with Finn, which was a major plus.

Breakfast was rushed and eaten standing around the kitchen counter with the occasional interruption from one of the removal men wanting to know something or another about how they packed everything into the truck. Finn was silent, Burt and Carole were excited and maybe a little stressed, and Kurt was curious - he couldn't wait to see inside the house he had wondered about for so long, to learn the truth behind the weathered wooden front door.

Kurt had never moved before, but it took a lot longer than he expected it to. There was a lot of hanging around watching people move boxes and furniture from rooms, leaving only imprints on carpets and memories of what had previously stood there. He dragged a bored Finn to the Lima Bean with him around mid-morning to kill some time and get some much-needed caffeine.

"Are you still ok with moving to this house?" Finn asked as they sat down at a table.

Holding back a sigh, Kurt stirred his coffee. "Of course I am, it's just a house, Finn, the stories aren't real. We've been over this."

Finn was frowning down at his coffee. "I know that, but..." He hesitated, biting his bottom lip. "What if- what if the stories are real?"

Kurt sat his cup back down on the table and took his time swallowing his mouthful of coffee. "Finn..." he began.

Finn's shoulders hunched, bracing himself against Kurt's rebuff.

"You'll see when we get to the house. Those stories aren't true," Kurt replied gently.

Finn didn't look convinced and remained hunched over his coffee, but he did drop the subject.

When they returned to the house they found that a good proportion of their belongings had been packed up and several rooms now stood startlingly empty with only the echoes of what had once been there. As Kurt walked through his deserted basement bedroom, he thought that this house felt more haunted than the one in the outskirts of Lima. He felt like a ghost of his old self treading the floor of the room that had once been his.

After a few more hours of waiting around with a bored Finn playing games on his phone, the truck was finally packed with all their furniture and all their suitcases were loaded in the cars. Kurt, sick of sitting doing nothing, offered to do the final check of the house and he raced through empty room after empty room, his footsteps echoing off the bare walls and floors.

"Nothing left but an imprint of us," he reported back to his waiting father.

Burt nodded. "Good." He pulled the front door key from his pocket - a lone key now, no longer part of a jingling set hanging on a key ring - and locked the door for the last time. He passed the key to Carole, who placed it on a small metal ring with the back door and garage key, before slipping it into her purse.

"I'll give these to the estate agents later," she said.

Kurt walked over to join his dad, who was standing a few paces back from the front door staring up at their old house. He didn't say anything, just joined him in his silent goodbye to the place they had called home for many years. After a moment, and still without either of them saying anything, they both turned their backs on the house.

Burt and Carole left first in Burt's car with the removal truck following behind them. Kurt and Finn were to follow in the other two cars.

The drive didn't take long and Kurt was soon coasting to a stop outside the old house on Lima's outskirts. A neighbour standing out in their driveway abandoned their pretence of checking their mailbox to send Kurt a look that was almost pitying. When Kurt just ignored them and started to pull bags and cases out of the trunk of his car, he saw them shake their head at him in a way that clearly showed that they thought he and his family were crazy for moving into the haunted house.

Scooping up all the bags he could carry, he trudged up to the house, pausing partway up the once overgrown path (Burt and Carole had visited the house earlier in the week and tidied the weed-infested yard) to examine his new home.

Some of the tiles on the roof were still cracked and mossy, the paintwork was still peeling, the glass in the windows was still slightly dull with accumulated dust and dirt, the walls still looked old and weathered, but the emptiness that had once pressed against the windowpanes was gone, and that - plus the newly tidied yard - made the house look less like something out of a horror movie. Already the stories of ghosts and unearthly presence were looking less believable.

He continued on up to the front door, eager to see inside the house that had intrigued him for months. He ducked out of the way to allow a couple of the moving men past, climbed the steps, and then he was stepping onto wooden floorboards that were warped and shiny with age. He moved further inside the entryway, his eyes darting frantically from side-to-side in a vain attempt to see everything at once.

The wooden floor continued through the entryway to the stairs and then through to what Kurt suspected was a living room at the front of the house. New carpet had been laid on the stairs and the walls had been freshly painted, but everything else in this part of the house was original, from the floorboards to the handles on the doors. His dad had paid people to clean, paint, and re-carpet the house, so there was none of the dust and cobwebs that Kurt imagined had been thriving in the entryway, but the house didn't feel like an old house pretending to be new; it felt like an old house that had just been given a little makeover.

Heavy, shuffling footsteps behind him made him leap off to the side, thinking some movers wanted to pass, but it was only Finn, clutching several cases and looking around nervously.

"It's less...creepy than I imagined," he said after a moment.

Kurt looked at him, fighting back a smirk. "What were you expecting? Skulls displayed on shelves? Dusty suits of armour standing in the corners? Candlelit chandeliers dripping wax from the ceiling?"

Finn didn't seem to notice his teasing. "I don't know what I expected," he replied, his gaze still scanning the hall and rooms leading off it, "but not this. It looks so...normal."

Deciding not to say anything to this, Kurt adjusted his grip on his bags. "Come on; let's find out what rooms are ours."

They started towards the stairs, but before they could reach them Burt appeared, carrying a couple of empty cardboard boxes. Without Kurt having to say anything, he knew what they wanted to know. "Finn, your room is first on the right when you go up the stairs. Kurt, yours is on the far left, just by the door leading up to the attic." And then he rushed off again.

"Don't overexert yourself!" Kurt shouted after him and his dad waved a hand to show he'd heard.

Finn stepped around Kurt and started to climb the stairs with a sudden eagerness that had Kurt blinking at his large back. "I thought you weren't excited about moving here?"

"I still really want to see my new room and I don't have a choice but to live here now," Finn shrugged without looking back at him.

The upstairs landing and hallway wasn't as old looking as downstairs, as it was dominated by the new carpet and paint. Finn disappeared into the first room on the right and Kurt peered into it curiously as he passed by: a fairly large, square room with a window overlooking the front yard and the street, empty except for Finn's bed and a few large cardboard boxes.

Kurt continued down the hall, glancing curiously into each room he passed, until he reached the last room on the left set, like his dad said, by the small door leading up into the attic space. Looking around eagerly, Kurt stepped inside his new bedroom.

The walls were freshly painted in the colour he had chosen and curtains which complemented the shade on the walls hung at a large window overlooking the back yard with its huge oak tree. Doors hid a decent-sized closet and an almost modern-looking bathroom. The room wasn't quite as square as Finn's: there was a shallow alcove on one wall where he could put his vanity and a couple of the walls sloped up to meet the ceiling. He liked it immediately.

His bed, vanity, and some boxes of his belongings had already been brought up, so he dumped his bags and cases in one corner of the room and began to push his furniture into position.

Around twenty minutes later there was a hesitant knock on the door and Kurt looked up from putting away clothes in his closet to see a rather sheepish-looking Finn standing in the doorway. "Hi," he said, walking into the room and looking around. He stopped by Kurt's bed. "I've been looking around the house and gone into all the rooms and-" he broke off, shrugging.

Kurt raised his eyebrows expectantly at him.

"You were right," Finn continued. "It really is just a house." His gaze travelled around the room. "There's nothing weird or spooky and it doesn't feel like those people that viewed the house before we bought it said it felt like."

"None of us ever actually spoke to those people," Kurt pointed out. "All of that was probably made-up, just like all the other stories."

Nodding slowly, Finn let his hand trail absently along the footboard of Kurt's bed. "I feel a bit stupid for believing all of them," he admitted after a while.

Kurt shrugged and turned back to his open suitcase, lifting a button-down shirt out of it and hanging it up. "Most of Lima still believes them, so you're not stupid."

Finn nodded and stood in contemplative silence for a moment as Kurt continued to transfer clothes from his suitcase to his closet. After a minute or two he announced he was going to go and continue unpacking and he left the room, leaving Kurt to work in silence.

Dinner that night was pizza ordered in from the local takeout since no one felt like cooking after the long day of moving. They ate at their kitchen table, which looked a little odd in its new position. The kitchen didn't seem to have been used all that much, and the counters and cabinets, though a bit older than the ones in their old house, looked relatively new.

Kurt had explored the rest of the house after the moving truck had left and had found the downstairs to be as old and beautiful looking as the entrance hall. It was a good deal bigger than their old house in both size and number of rooms and the street it was set on was quieter seeing as how the house was situated at the end of a cul-de-sac.

They worked late into the night unpacking, arranging furniture, and putting things away. By the time Kurt finally collapsed into bed, it was after midnight and he thought he would fall asleep immediately, but he didn't. His bedroom still had that foreign, unfamiliar feel despite having all his furniture and belongings from his old room in it and he was finding it difficult to fall asleep somewhere that still felt strange to him. He was still trying to get to sleep when he checked the clock almost an hour later. Frustrated, he rolled over and started punching his pillow into a more comfortable shape.

There was a sudden thump from above his head. Freezing in the middle of flopping back down onto his pillows again, he glanced up at the ceiling, straining his ears for any further noise. When he didn't hear anything for several minutes, he allowed his tired body to sink back down against the mattress and closed his eyes. It had probably just been the pipework clunking or something.

It was the same every day.

Blaine would wake up to the bleeping of his alarm and drag himself out of bed for another day of torture. He would dress and then go downstairs to the empty kitchen and if the mere thought of food didn't make him feel sick, he would have some breakfast. After a dragged-out walk to school he had to endure a day of goading taunts, hateful slurs, people tripping him up in the hallway, locker shoves, and dumpster tosses - and that was on a good day. Then it was home to a mercifully still empty house to work through his homework in peace until the dreaded door slam.

His parents had taken to spending more time out of the house since he came out to them because they couldn't stand the sight of him. The lack of time they spent in each other's company suited Blaine fine; he would have preferred no time at all.

Being around his parents these days was worse than being at school. They had two different settings that they alternated between when they were around Blaine: ignoring him completely or shouting and verbally abusing him about how he was disgusting and a disgrace to the family. Blaine preferred being ignored, but it was really just as awful being treated as though he didn't exist as it was having obscenities screamed at him. He was left to wallow in his own bitter thoughts when his parents pretended that any space he occupied was empty, thoughts of ‘if I was straight, they would be speaking to me just now' and ‘if I was straight, I wouldn't get harassed at both school and home.' Sometimes those thoughts even drifted towards ending it all - he couldn't live like this, what was the point? - but the knowledge that he would one day be far away from the disapproving glares of his parents and the tormentors at his high school always pulled his mind away from that train of thought. He would be able to start living soon instead of what he was doing now: suffering, surviving, just holding on.

His school was holding a Sadie Hawkins dance this week and Blaine had stupidly asked his friend Eric to go with him. He honestly didn't know what had made him do it. He and Eric were already badly bullied at school for being openly gay and the pair of them showing up at the dance together, even only as friends, would be bound to attract trouble. The faculty had never done anything about what they suffered at the hands of students at school, so Blaine had no confidence that they would prevent anything from happening at the dance.

It was the night before the dance and Blaine was sitting at his desk in his room finishing an essay for English. His phone laid on the desk beside him and he kept starting to reach for it, planning to text Eric and tell him that he couldn't go to the dance anymore, that it was too risky, but he never did it.

At around half past seven he abandoned his essay and went down to the kitchen in search of something for dinner. His parents still weren't home, so he guessed they had gone out for dinner. He didn't know for sure, though, since they never told him about those things anymore.

After staring in the cupboards and fridge for five minutes with nothing jumping out at him, he ended up just making toast and taking it up to his room. He had just sat down when his phone rang. He knew who it was without even having to look at the screen; only one person would ever phone him these days.

"Hey, Eric," he greeted when he accepted the call.

"How's things?" Eric asked.

"Fine," Blaine replied - he never answered questions like that truthfully, people rarely did - "just working on some homework."

Eric hummed in response and then said hesitantly, "Are you still ok for tomorrow night? It's fine if you don't want to go anymore, I'll understand."

Blaine opened his mouth to say that he'd been thinking about it and that maybe it wasn't the best idea, but what came out of his mouth was something else entirely. "No, I still want to go. Why should we let a bunch of homophobic idiots rule where we can and can't go?"

There was a short pause, then, "You're right," Eric said. "I'll let you get back to your homework; I just wanted to make sure you were still happy to go."

"Right," Blaine said.

"I'll pick you up tomorrow night. See you then!"

"Bye," Blaine mumbled.

As he set his phone down he could have kicked himself for saying that he still wanted to go to the dance. But he didn't know just how much he would regret not telling Eric how he really felt about it...

Kurt felt disoriented for a few seconds when he woke up the next morning: he couldn't think why the light was shining into the room differently, why his furniture was positioned differently, or why the walls were painted a different colour. Then he remembered.

He sat up in bed, sighing a little at the boxes stacked against one wall that he still had to unpack, and looked around his new room. It was nice not hearing Finn's snores or having to deal with the questionable smells that sometimes came from his step-brother's half of the room, but a tiny part of him missed his old room; he suspected that was just familiarity.

Slipping out of bed, he checked the time on his cell phone, having not unpacked his clock yet, and found a text from Rachel. Keeping his promise, he had called her last night and let her know that there was no evil spirit waiting to brutally sacrifice whoever dared to live in the house, but she clearly still wasn't convinced that the house wasn't the feature setting in a ghost story.

He rolled his eyes at her text: ‘Just checking you're still alive.'

‘Are you going to do this every day?' he replied.

His phone buzzed with her reply a moment later: ‘Until I get solid proof that your new house isn't haunted.'

Shaking his head at her text, he replaced his phone on the nightstand and quickly washed and dressed before going downstairs to the kitchen, walking a little slower than normal, not yet confident of the layout of the house.

He rummaged through the cupboards to make toast to go with the breakfast he was making and frowned when he pulled out the loaf of bread - there was less than half of it left, he could have sworn...

Footsteps shuffled into the room behind him and he glanced over his shoulder to see his dad entering the room. "Dad," he said, turning to face him, "is this all the bread we've got?" he asked, holding the remainder of the loaf up.

His dad blinked blearily at him, still not completely awake yet. "There was only the one loaf, so, yeah."

Kurt frowned down at the bread in his hands again. "I could have sworn there was more yesterday."

His dad shrugged and began making coffee. "Finn probably ate some as a snack."

Toying with the edge of the plastic bag the bread was in, Kurt walked slowly over to the toaster. "I'll have to tell him to stop doing that," he said. "We'll have to start making daily visits to the grocery store if he keeps eating this much."

His dad chuckled lightly, perking up as the coffee brewed.

Dropping bread into the toaster, Kurt continued to make breakfast. He was just accepting a mug of coffee from his dad when a yawning Finn wandered into the kitchen followed by a much more alert-looking Carole.

"Finn," Kurt said, a hint of annoyance in his tone, "next time you feel like a snack can you not demolish most of the food we need for breakfast?"

Finn looked confused. "What?"

Kurt held up the almost empty bag of sliced bread. "The bread, Finn. You ate almost half a loaf!"

"No, I didn't," Finn protested.

Sighing, Kurt dropped the bread back on the counter. "Well, nobody else did!"

Finn was frowning as he poured himself a cup of coffee. "I'm pretty sure I didn't," he said slowly. "I don't remember eating any bread yesterday..." He paused, his puzzled frown deepening. "But, maybe I did..."

Rolling his eyes at his step-brother, Kurt moved around him to start serving up breakfast. "I can't believe you can't even remember what you ate yesterday." He walked away to give Carole and Burt - who were sitting at the table discussing their plans for the day over coffee - their breakfast, leaving a confused Finn frowning down at his coffee mug.