Kurt lay curled on his bed. His fluffy white comforter surrounded him like a nest. His body was bowed around a fashionable faux-leather messanger bag, which contained his book. The book that had told him what he was and showed him what he wanted. He hoped to show the book to the people at this meeting. He hoped they could answer his questions, clarify some things that were still cloudy. He really hoped that maybe he could show the book to that boy from the library, if he had in fact decided to go, and maybe the book could show the boy what he wanted too.

Kurt turned in his bed and made a dismissive sound in his throat. Maybe not.

Kurt felt that if he was about to take such a monumental risk as to attend this... resistance, he simply had to take as many precautions as possible. From his boots (tall, black, matte faux-suede, with thick, soft rubber soles) to his phone, ( tucked away safely under his mattress) to the information written in the crease of his elbow (where it wouldn't be seen and therefore tracked, it had taken him hours to find a marker) to the rest of his outfit ( Black, light absorbing materials, easy to move in, nothing so attention grabbing as the rest of his wardrobe) even his hair was hidden under a black beanie (He felt it completed the ensemble). Kurt was ready for a night of crime.

As it were, he was still very much a teenager, with his parental units to answer to before he ever got the chance to tango with any real authority. Signs of life buzzed through the house still, ticking at Kurt's ears and preventing him from slipping away. And so he lay in his nest, staring at the time written sloppily on his arm and watching as the minutes on his digital clock flashed ever later, calculating how much longer he had until he would be late. He huffed in annoyance and shifted again in his bed.

After laying in his bed for far too long and a spectacularly failed attempt to bend time to his own will with only a particularly distasteful glare, Kurt finally heard the house quiet. He listened as the voices of his family migrated closer to him, to each of their respective bedrooms, he listened as they stumbled about inside the rooms to prepare for sleep, and he listened to the weight of their bodies settling into their mattresses. And despite his urge to run and speed to make up for lost time, he waited still.

Only when he was certain beyond a reasonable doubt that all of the others had fallen asleep, did he finally remove himself from his nest of pristine, white sheets and blankets. Kurt stood, straight and tall, and spread his arms out to either side. He stretched to remind his body of itself, and he thought it best to be limber and nimble for his figurative impending flight. He hummed happily at the delightful pop of his spine. He'd been laying in wait for some time, after all.

He twisted to either side and bent to touch his toes quickly before he turned and pulled a small, red, gel pack from under his pillow. He bent the pack in half several times and rubbed it between his hands until he felt it start to grow warm. He then slipped it under the case of his body pillow and arranged it under the duvet to look like his sleeping form. The heatpak would produce roughly the same amount of heat as his sleeping body, and would prevent any monitors from reporting his absence.

He stepped back from the bed and admired his handiwork. Kurt secretly counted himself very clever.

The time on the clock caught his eye then. The lateness shocked him, and he jumped into action. He took a final look around the room to make sure everything was in order. Kurt was nothing if not meticulous. He considered his messanger bag where it lie on the floor slumped against his bedside table, he thought of the book inside and how he felt it was such a part of himself, how it had become so very sacred to him. He decided that he couldn't bare that part of himself to these strangers, not even to the boy from the library, not yet. He tensed and turned away, leaving the bag and the book lying there on the floor. He held his breath as he crossed the room and opened his door and moved quietly across the carpeted floor.

He made it to the garage without incident, thankful for his intimate knowlege of every creaky spot in the old floorboards. He smiled again in thanks, for his father the mechanic. He crossed the garage and considered the many little black fobs hanging on the rack, he hummed when he decided and his slender fingers selected the fob of his choice, the red light at the bottom of the small device switched to a pleasant cool blue when it recognized his thumbprint. He smiled and tucked into his hip pocket.

The vehicle that belonged to the little key was tucked into the back of the garage. It was a small, bloody red vehicle, with one wheel. It was rarely driven. Kurt's father disliked the new unibikes with a passion, they had not been around in his youth and he didn't trust their singular wheel and open design. He kept it around for collector's sake, Kurt was glad for it, the unibikes were sleek, quiet and ridiculously fast, he would get there in half the time and the bike's small frame would be easy to tuck away. Kurt pulled his helmet over his head, wincing as he swore he could feel it flattening his hair.

He swung his leg up over the bike and settled into the memory foam seat. With the press of only a few buttons, he was out on the street, the electric engine of the bike was whisper quiet, just a gentle hum to Kurt's ears, and the fob in his pocket allowed him to pass through the force-field barrier that left the garage open-air and still prevented theft, or at least outside party theft.

The night air whipped across his face as he darted through the streets, careful not to linger in the yellow bath of a streetlight too long. He leaned forward on the unibike, willing it to strain itself, to go faster. His eyes flickered from the road to the little clock on the dash too often to be considered safe. He would be late.

The streets were empty for the late hour, he had that at least, he had only the occasional driverless cargo truck to share the long expanses of highway with. He reached the city in record time. The tall buildings greeted him in the distance as he drove into thicker traffic. There was no implied curfew here and he was glad to blend in with the flow of vehicles. He felt lighter, any stalker his paranoia had imagined couldn't follow him now.

He turned away from the traffiic after coasting through it for a while. He steered his unibike toward the warehouse district. The area was dark, the buildings were brick and windowless and contrasted sharply with the chrome and glass of the rest of the city. He was back to only the company of the cargo trucks. He drove around them and eventually left even they behind as he powered toward the older, more dilapitated, long-term storage warehouses. The address on his arm told him this was where the meeting would be.

He wove through the grid of buildings. Slowing to a crawl so that he could read the numbers posted near the large old-fashioned metal garage doors. Twenty-three, twenty-two, twenty-one.

He stopped his bike, Twenty-one was his destination, the number written on the inside of his elbow, the number the boy had called out to his friend in the library. He dismounted the unibike and wheeled it into a dark alley between the buildings numbered twenty-one and twenty-two. He leaned the vehicle back to rest on its stand, then shucked his helmet and hung it on one of the handlebars by the chin strap. He ran his fingers through his hair trying to restore some of it's previous hight. He refused to make a first- impression while sporting helmet-hair. He righted the beanie back on to his head, hoping that it would cover some of the mess.

He ran lightly on his thick rubber soles toward the single person door on the side of the building that he had passed. It too was marked with a large numerical "21".

Kurt reached out and turned the cool metal door knob. He couldn't help but feel he was on the edge of another precipice. He didn't know what part of him, even in his tardiness, felt it necessary to perscribe such importance to the simple twist of his wrist. He couldn't put a name to how he was feeling, how on an instinctual level, his body urged him forward almost magnetically, yet every action felt as though it must be slow and deliberate and frustratingly profound.

The heavy metal door swinging open presented him with general darkness. A distant hint of a glowing light allowed him to make out the shapes of large crates just inside the door. It was not dark enough though, that he could not find the walkway that was arranged carefully into the stacks.

He took a final breath before entering, preparing himself for whatever lie in that labrinth, for the images that primitive phobias caused to swirl through the back of his mind and promised to reside within the small, dark space. His rational self told him there was nothing to fear, that he was mearly making his way toward sane and friendly people that would help him to discover some sort of meaning.

Still, Kurt felt dangerous. It was exciting. He was at this dingy warehouse to resist against his opressive government. There was real danger surely, but not the kind that hid in the shadows.

He reminded himself of that adorable boy from the library, and how he surely waited for him on the other side of his maze.

Kurt felt remarkably like Alice, following that attractive little creature down the rabbit hole.

The light grew less and less dim and he could hear the quiet, hushed rabble of secretive voices as he continued on his pilgrimage through the maze of boxes. He splayed his palms out over the makeshift walls to guide his path, and he stepped carefully. He was getting close, he could make out individiual words almost, and he thought, the light was as bright as it was going to get. His heart pumped faster in excitement and the danger of his situation zipped through him like electricity. His strides quickened toward the source of the voices and the yellow light. He was sure there would be people just around the corner.

In all his excitement, his careful, calculated steps lost their importance.

His foot caught on a crate that rebelliously jutted out from the wall. The corner of it jabbed into a tender spot on his shin, and against his will, Kurt cried out in surprise and pain. He stumbled forward, just around the corner, and he was awash in light and he felt the sting of two dozen pairs of alerted eyes trained on him. He'd never felt more like an intruder.

Kurt looked around the clearing frantically, his eyes wide like a deer caught in the headlights. His gaze rested on a pair of big amber eyes that were regarding him only curiously, not alarm as the others were. Kurt focused on amber eyes and allowed his brain to calibrate. His tunnel vision faded and he was embarassed to find that he had been staring down the boy from the library for a long moment. He blushed and made to step forward, faux pas and public embarassment aside, he was determined to make the boy's aquaintence.

He didn't see the two large men that were suddenly positioned on either side of him. Their strong grip on his arms jerked him back before he was able to take even the first step. It was the first human touch he'd felt since childhood. It was rough and it was jarring and it was not what he'd thought he wanted. He jerked against their hold and it only made them hold him tighter. Kurt thrashed and strained against the two men like a fish in a net. He lost any awareness of his surroundings and escape became his only goal. Which is why he didn't realise when a woman with a mess of curly hair that matched him inch for inch stepped in front of him, raised her hand, and brought it across his face. The sound of the slap rung throughout the warehouse and everything went still and quiet.

It sounded like he was underwater at first. The curly haired woman spoke urgently and he could hear the shouts of "Is he a spy?" coming from behind her, but the words seemed muddy and distant. Kurt turned his head and arched his neck and willed himself into thinking properly. He was acutely aware of a pair of hands, roaming up and down his body unforgivingly and uninvited, they opened his jacket and hiked up his sweater to look at his bare chest, they wormed into pockets and crevices and places Kurt never even thought about being touched. The hands made his unaccostomed synapses twitch, but his mind was still cloudy from the shock of the woman's slap. He couldn't will himself into reacting.

The hands left him. His twitchy nerves calmed, yet he still felt the need to itch and scratch at the path that the intruder's hands had left on him.

They continued to question him, they seemed convinced that he was a spy, no matter how many times he would plead to them that he had simply been unavoidably tardy. Their inquiries all suddenly seemed to culminate in one question: how had he learned of their cause.

A pair of terrified blue eyes met a pair of incredibly curious amber ones, and a slender, elegant finger raised to point at the owner of the warmer eyes. "I just went to the address he said, I heard him talking to his friend about... all this. I shouldn't have heard, it- it wasn't meant for me but I wanted to know him... I needed- I needed to touch and to learn and to feel and to fight. So I came to the address he'd said." His eyes narrowed and his gaze shifted from the library boy's eyes to those of the severe-looking, curly haired woman. "I wasn't expecting the good guys to greet me so unkindly."

The woman's brown eyes narrowed and her nostrils flared. She grabbed him tightly around the arm in the same place that the large men had already bruised him and yanked him forward. Kurt winced and wondered bitterly if these people were even capable of touching others kindly. He stumbled after her as she pulled him toward the circle of crates, she stopped suddenly and Kurt bumped into her as he skidded to a stop himself. He might've sworn she growled at him before she thrust him down onto the particular crate she'd stopped in front of.

Once he'd situated himself into an upright seated position, he looked at the other person sharing the crate. It was library boy. Of course. Wide amber eyes seemed impossibly huge from so close and he found it all the more difficult to look away from them.

The curly haired woman wouldn't have that. She reached out and gripped each of their chins and wrenched them up, forcing the two boys to look at her. She couldn't do anything about their eyes, which continued to strain to look at eachother.

She growled in aggrivation. "Listen here. Since you two seem to be in cohorts and I'm not really sure if I can trust that, you're both going to be responsible for eachother. That means, gentlemen, that if one of you fucks up, you both pay the piper. Are we clear?" The two boys nodded as much as her hands on their chins would allow. She smiled icily. "Splendid. I suggest you both make sure the other is on his very best behavior." She turned away from them and addressed the whole room rhetorically. "Now is anybody else going to wander in, or can we start the fucking meeting finally?" Every pair of eyes in the room avoided her glare.

The woman walked away from Kurt and the library boy. She strode to the front of the room and slumped down onto a tattered old couch that appeared to be reserved for the people in charge, in spite of the fact that Kurt wouldn't touch that old thing if he were paid.

Kurt turned from watching the frightening woman and was met with those big, beautiful eyes again. This time he allowed his gaze to roam over the rest of the boy's features. They were every bit as beautiful as his eyes. The boy's plush lips parted and he spoke and Kurt found that even his voice was beautiful.

"My name's Blaine."

Kurt gasped minutely. A lovely name for a lovely boy. He was glad he could throw that 'library boy' nonsence out the window.

"Kurt."

The li- Blaine smiled and Kurt swore the chilly warehouse grew just a little warmer. Blaine lifted his hand in some sort of offer to Kurt and Kurt just stared not sure of what to do, and not all that fond of the previous touching he'd recieved so far. Somehow Blaine's smile grew even brighter, and he whispered, " it's called a handshake. Some of the people do it here, it's like a greeting. Put your hand in mine."

Kurt had read about handshakes. They'd never caught his attention as anything special. His attentions had always been focused on later parts, where people were kissing and sexing. He placed his hand over Blaine's open palm, and felt the other boy's fingers close around his hand. And he gasped audibly because this feeling had never been described in his books, but how could they have left this part out? Kurt's skin felt like it was singing. He met Blaine's eyes with his own and would've been willing to bet - had they been a gambling culture- that the other boy was feeling the exact same effects from their electrified 'handshake' as Kurt was.

At the center of the circle, where Kurt and Blaine weren't paying a lick of attention to her, a small red-headed woman had just finished rigging up some sort of old-fashioned electronic device. Music filled the dusty warehouse air, it had scandalous lyrics and it sounded slightly tinny, be it the sub-par speakers or if it was just the style of music they didn't know. But it wrapped Kurt and Blaine up in their little moment more than they had been before, and both of them being music students, song worked it's way into their memories and made itself at home there.

Imma get your heart racing
In my skin-tight jeans
Be your teenage dream
Tonight.