The Proper Way to Do What Needs to Be Done

My motto is Just Do It when it comes to doing the things that need doing. Just like the Nike ad... Just do it... If you repeat it to yourself enough times, those words become law...

Kurt stopped dead in his tracks when I pointed to my car in the lot. It was a common reaction when people saw my car for the first time. I twirled my keys around my forefinger and walked around the car to the driver's side. I was just tall enough to see over the top of the car to look at him where he stood frozen on the other side. "Coming?" I asked in an overtly bright tone.  

Kurt looked away from the car to stare at me and remained where he was. "Is that safe to drive?"

"Of course," I grinned, pressing the unlock button on the remote. I pulled open my door and perched myself up on the lip of the car to see him better. "It's safer than safe. Like a tank." I pounded twice on the top with a fist to prove my point.  

Kurt looked doubtful but slowly walked to the passenger door, which was a bright cotton candy pink, unlike the rest of the car, which was painted dull black and dented in several places.

I laughed when Kurt grabbed the handle too delicately, looking for all the world like he'd rather do anything else than touch my junker of a sedan. Once the door popped open, he maneuvered it with only two fingers. I dropped from my perch and swung into my own seat just in time to see him sit himself gingerly down on the lime green colored passenger seat (my seat was a repulsive shade of orange).

"You know you like it," I told him, smiling. His answering look was priceless. I figured that it was probably best that he hadn't been able to see the driver's side of the car, which had HOMOBILE spray painted along the entire length of the car in neon yellow. I was pretty proud of it.

Anything to piss my father off.

"Would you believe it only cost me three hundred bucks?"

He looked with a lemon sucking expression on his face, one that clearly asked, that much, huh? and I laughed.

It got quiet after that.

Kurt didn't speak again until Dalton had long since disappeared from my rearview mirror and I had gone quiet too. The farther away from the school we got, the more I was reminded of what I would be doing the next day.

"Where are we going?" he broke our near fifteen minutes of silence, raising his voice a little to be heard over the rush of the wind. I had rolled the window on my side about half way down. I had been right about the feel of the cool air on my sopping wet hair, it felt amazing.

"Wal-Mart," I answered and saw his eyebrows shoot up from the corner of my eye. "Not what you were expecting, I take it?"

"Why... Wal-Mart?" he asked neutrally but he stumbled over the word Wal-Mart as if it was a hard word to conjure to his tongue. I went out on a total limb and guessed that Wal-Mart wasn't Kurt Hummel's favorite store in the world.

Kurt's question settled between us and debated on how much of myself I was willing to share with him. I shut the window, the flickering blare of the wind suddenly grating on my nerves. I knew in another five minutes I would probably open it again. I was indecisive like that when I was on edge. "I'm going out tomorrow and I have to get some stuff," I said, going with the little-as-possibly policy.

When I didn't say anything else, he twirled his wrist in my direction to urge me to elaborate. I caught the motion in the corner of my eye.

"What?" I asked, playing dumb.

He folded his arms and stared at me, letting his actions speak for themselves.

I couldn't help it. I chuckled. He was just so hot and cold it was hilarious. One minute he was shy and blushed at the slightest effort on my part and the next he was pushy and demanding and more sarcastic than anything. I decided a little more wouldn't do either of us any harm. "Gum and crappy movies."

His chin dropped towards his chest and he deadpanned at me through his lashes. "Seriously? That's what we're getting? Gum and crappy movies?"

"Well, no. We aren't getting gum and crappy movies, I am getting gum and crappy movies. You are here to keep me sane and look hot."

He rolled his eyes and changed the subject. "Can we listen to music or something?"

"Sure," I agreed easily. "My iPod is in the glove compartment if you want to look through it for something you like. Or if you have yours just plug it in. The wire should be in there too."

"In the glove compartment?"

"Yessir."

He opted to play his own music, which didn't really surprise me. The music from Chicago came on, which was a play I didn't particularly care for but I didn't hate it either.

When I got on Route 33 Kurt lowered the music so he could be heard over the first chorus of "We Both Reached for the Gun."

"How far is this place?" he asked, confusion evident in his tone.

"Bellefontaine," I told him. I probably should have mentioned that before we left.

"Why there?"

It was a valid question. Bellefontaine was an hour away, give or take some time, which made little sense when we would pass by quite a few Wal-Marts on the way. There was one in Columbus that was less than fifteen minutes away from Dalton.

"This one is special," I told him with finality and he let the subject drop.

We pulled into the Bellefontaine Supercenter just as Chicago finished and the music from Wicked came on, which was just as well because I hated that play and its music with a passion.

I lead us to the candy section first and examined the selection of Bazooka Gum before picking up the biggest tub I could find and tucking it under my arm. Kurt was frowning at me when I straightened from my crouched position and I grinned sheepishly at him. "Thought I was kidding, didn't you?"

When he didn't respond (not the he had to because the answer was pretty well obvious) I started for the electronics section. Kurt followed beside me and I grabbed his hand, locking our fingers together. He jumped a little at the contact and glanced nervously around the aisles as we passed by for people lying in wait with their disgust. He didn't pull away, but everyone was too wrapped up in their own shit to notice the two boys who holding each other's hands. I wondered what he would have done had they been looking. I liked to think that he wouldn't have pulled away but I wasn't sure.

When we got to the electronics section I let my fingers go lax and gave Kurt's hand a little shake. "Need this back now, gorgeous."

He snorted and pulled his hand away to fold his arms against his chest. "Because I'm the one who grabbed it in the first place," he snarked. His truth fired off in my head as soon as all the words were out of his mouth and I chuckled at him before fishing my phone out of my pocket.

I pulled up the name Bitches in my contacts list and sent a quick message: Get out here.

When I'm good and ready, fuckhead, was her reply. I grinned and stuffed the phone back in my pocket.

Bitches' real name was Santana and she was my kind of best friend. She knew more about me than most people did, anyway, and I liked her. The name Bitches was a private joke between the two of us-it was a reference to her boobs, which we decided to refer to as Bitches after she got her boob job because we had both been completely fucked up drunk at the time and it had seemed truly hilarious to discuss how bitchin' her bitches were. The humor of it wore off with the effects of the alcohol, but the name stuck. 

"Define crappy movie," Kurt's voice reached my ears. He was looking through the movies in the five dollars and under box. He held one of the DVD cases between his thumb and forefinger and was using it to push the others aside. I smiled, shaking my head at him, appreciating how adorable he was, and slipped my arms around his waist from behind. He tensed, but instead of releasing him I moved closer until my front was flush against his back. I reached up on my tip toes to put my chin on his shoulder. I kind of loved how tall he was-tall enough to have those long, sexy legs, but still short enough for me to trace the shell of his ear with my tongue if I wanted. I wondered what he would do if I actually did it. Flip out, most likely. I grinned at the thought.

"They won't bite you, gorgeous," I whispered to him, but kept my tongue to myself.

He shivered a little and removed my arms from around his waist and stepped away. He pinned me with a narrow look when I laughed at him and I held up my hands in surrender to keep him from clawing my face off. "Sorry, sorry," I lied, because I was anything but.

He rolled his eyes and held out the movie that he was holding in his hand for me to see. "Will this suffice?"

I lifted eyebrows at his choice. "Ferngully?" I asked, taking the animated children's movie out of his hands. "No way. This movie is a classic."

Kurt studied me as if he was considering having me committed somewhere and I couldn't help but laugh again.

"Don't give me that look, Hummel. It is," I insisted as I tossed the movie back in the pile. "Besides, Ferngully wouldn't have worked anyway," I told him. "Only movies that have been black listed apply, and movies that the store has in stock or has had in stock in the past won't be on the black list." I shrugged at his questioning look. "It's a thing."

Kurt opened his mouth, presumably to ask how we were supposed to find a movie the store didn't have available for purchase, when something behind me caught his attention. I watched his expression turn annoyed and unpleasant as he stared at whatever it was. Curious, I turned and saw Santana walking towards us, and it took me a couple of second to realize that she wasn't looking at me and that she was the one Kurt was looking at and not the bag lady with frizzy hair and hot pink slippers.  

I noted the How May I Help You written in crisp white on the front of her blue Wal-Mart vest and got momentarily distracted by it. The fact that it actually said How May I Help You? meant that her boss had finally noticed that she had changed the slogan to a simple, but elegantly written Fuck You on the two vests she been given by the company and had replaced them new ones. I figured by next month it would be back to the way she liked it.

"Well if it isn't Lady Lips," she said, looking at Kurt with amusement in her eyes. "Finn told us that you go to Dalton Academy for Homos now, though I can't say I expected you to get friendly with poster boy Blaine. You must be better on your knees than I thought, Hummel."

Kurt glowered at her and I was surprised to see him immediately flip her off.

Santana's answering grin was less snarky and more seductive in a way that probably would have had me popping an instant boner had I swung that way.

"How do you two know each other?" I asked, glancing from one to the other. I wasn't sure who to direct the question to. I'd had it set up in my head that Kurt didn't talk to anyone outside of his family (excluding myself, of course), but he and Santana seemed pretty familiar with each other. Santana even seemed to like him and she hated pretty much everyone on principle.

But Kurt remained silent and it was Santana who answered. "Hummel went to my school. We were on the cheerleading team together."

I grinned at that, turning to Kurt to look him up and down, picturing him in a tightfitting polyester uniform. It was an inviting image. "Re-e-eally?" Now that I could get it up for. Kurt went a little red but maintained his annoyed expression.

Santana rolled her eyes at me. "If you pop a boner in my store I'm kicking your hobbit ass out."

I widened my lips with a shit eating grin. "Better make this quick then."

She snorted and turned away from us to head for the cash register in the photography section. Kurt and I followed.

"I've only got one this month," she said as she bent down to grab something from a shelf unseen behind the register.

I frowned at that. "What do you mean you only have one?"

She poked her head up and shot me an impatient look. "Means I have more than zero and less than two."

I mirrored her expression, but she was back to poking around down below and didn't catch it. "Why don't you try that again without the claws?"

"Suck my dick, Anderson."

"Baby, if you had a dick, I'd be all over it," I said and she snorted again. I glanced over at Kurt to see how he was fairing through all this. He was still standing next to me, so better than most other people, and that was despite the slightly skeptical look he had on his face, as if he couldn't really decide what he ought to do with our behavior. 

Santana stood up finally and slapped a DVD on the counter. I looked at it dismissively before looking back at her. "How am I supposed to make a choice if there's only one movie to choose from?"

She rolled her eyes. "You would have picked this over anything else anyway, so giving you choices would have been a waste of my time. This," she jabbed a finger at the DVD, "is gold."

Leaning heavily on the counter, I picked up the DVD to inspect it. Kurt peered over my shoulder and wrinkled his nose at it. I had to agree that the cover certainly looked awful, but it wasn't anything I hadn't seen before. "Troll 2? What about this is gold?"

"Okay, first of all, it's blacklisted in stores all over the country, not just here. Seriously, nobody stocks this shit except in warehouses, and even they they probably stock it way back in the janitor's closet so he has something other than the floor to sit on when he jerks himself off for kicks. Also, there is no Troll 1."

That caught my attention. "You're kidding."

"Do I look like I'm kidding, Curly Sue?"

I stared at her. "That all?"

"Do you think I'm an amateur?" she asked, offended. "No, that's not all. Jesus." She snatched the DVD out of my hands. "Here's the run down on this shit: there aren't actually any trolls in the movie. These guys"-she pointed to one of the wrinkly faced creatures on the front cover-"are vegetarian goblins who eat people."

"Okay, what? Vegetarians who eat people. Explain that one to me."

"The goblins don't eat the people until they turn them into plants."

Oh my dear god, I thought, beginning to get excited. "Oh, of course not. Continue."

She grinned triumphantly at having captured my interest.

Kurt's wide eyes darted back and forth between the two of us in rapid succession, looking disturbed beyond all reason.

Santana continued. "So the main character is this little kid named James or Jonah or- something with a J-and what's his name goes around trying to defeat the goblins with the help of his dead grandfather's ghost, because why the fuck not, you know? And that's really just minor stuff. I mean, the town in the movie is called Nilbog, if you can believe that, and this chick named Creedance seduces a guy with an ear of corn, which bursts into popcorn when two of them start fucking-" she cut herself off with a hand. "Just-I cannot stress to you how hard this shit sucks. It's so bad it's hilarious."

I grinned dopily at her. "Have I ever mentioned how much I love you?"

She wrinkled her nose in disgust, like I had known she would. "No, and don't start now, or I'm keeping this." She held the DVD away from me.

"Relax, Bitches," I said, grabbing my wallet out of my front pocket with one hand as I pushed the tub of gum to where she could reach it with the other. "How much was the DVD?"

She snorted. "Please. It was like 2 bucks with my discount. Just give me the sixteen-oh-five for the gum," she said before scanning the barcode on the tub's cover.

When everything was bagged up and paid for, I turned to Kurt with a saucy grin. "Wasn't that fun?"

With that disturbed look still on his face, he made a small, barely there humming noise at that back of his throat as if to say, Ioads. I laughed.  

"C'mon, gorgeous, we're done." I grabbed his hand. Santana lifted an eyebrow at the gesture. "See ya, Bitches," I said before she could open her mouth to comment. She kept frowning at us with her sharp eye, but waved her goodbye just the same.

Kurt and I walked back to the car in silence and once again Kurt stopped short when he saw it.

"Oh my god," he moaned.

I watched him read and reread the painted words on the side, studying the look of sheer disbelief on his face. "Awesome isn't it?" I asked.

Kurt whipped his head in my direction so fast it was a wonder he didn't hurt himself.

"Close your mouth, beautiful," I said with a smirk. "Unless you want me to put something in it, that is."

Kurt shut his mouth with an audible snap and scowled viciously at me. "Are you trying to get us killed?" he asked, glaring narrowly at me.

"Nah," I said simply as I grinned and climbed in the car. Kurt followed my lead after a moment's hesitation and long, put upon sigh.

My carefree attitude began to fade as we got farther away from Bellefontaine and closer to Westerville. Once we got back to school Kurt would go to his dorm and I would go to mine where I would spend the rest of the night staring at the ceiling as I tried to force myself to sleep. The thought wasn't an appealing one.

I started to wonder why I put myself through this every month.

"Do you like stars?" I asked suddenly.

We hadn't spoken since we had gotten back in the car and Kurt abruptly stopping humming to West Side Story to look at me, clearly taken aback by the oddity of the question.

"When I was little my brother and I used to look at them for hours." I kept my eyes straight ahead at the road in front of me and gave myself up to the memory. It was also the perfect reminder. "We have this sunroof thing in my kitchen and sometimes, when the sky was clear enough, Cooper would wake me up in the middle of the night and we would lie on top of the island in the kitchen and look up at them." I remembered how his legs used to dangle off the side because he was too tall to fit.

Kurt was looking at me intently. I could feel the heat of his attention on the side of my face. "Why not just go outside?"

I snorted at that. The idea was laughable. "Anderson boys don't lie around in the dirt," I said, imagining my father's voice instead of my own. My father never found out about our midnight stargazing, so he never actually said those words, but if I hadn't known my father better and had been stupid enough to ask for permission, there was no doubt in my mind that he would have said something similar.

I did ask Cooper once why we couldn't just sneak out, though. He said it was impossible to sneak out of our house and that I should never, ever try unless I wanted to get caught. For a long time I had considered those words to be law-until I became desperate and couldn't stop myself. I got caught, just as Cooper had warned me I would.

I've never really looked at the stars, so I wouldn't know, Kurt's truth told me after his soft spoken lie.

"You should. It's nice."

Kurt shifted a little in his seat. "Do you want to talk about it?"

"It," I mimicked softly. "You mean, what's been bothering me these past few days."

"Are you going to tell me?" he asked, letting me know in that clever way of his that I guessed right.

"No," I shook my head. "It's nothing you need to worry about."

"What if I'm worried anyway?" he asked and I couldn't help but pull my eyes from the road to smile at him.

"Getting attached to me, huh?"

He rolled his eyes, but smiled too.

"I'd have to say that it's nice-having someone who worries about me."

I am, his truth told me after he spoke. I don't know why, but I'm worried.

I tried to ignore the knot of feelings hearing that particular statement created in my stomach. "Thanks."

Neither of us spoke again, not even when I waved goodbye to him as we separated to go to our respective dorms. The way his hand slid slowly from mine as we parted, as opposed to him immediately dropping it and abruptly cutting our connection, was more intimate than words would have been anyway. It made me feel like I mattered without forcing me to acknowledge directly that he mattered just as much to me.

Each time I woke up that night I thought about Kurt's smile to guide me back to sleep.

88

It was 6:17 in the morning when I got the call from my father.

"We are ready for you now," was what immediately followed my unenthusiastic hello? He was predictable like that, more reliable than clockwork-in that aspect at least. He was reliable in a few other aspects too, none of them good.

"Right. I'm walking to my car now," I told him, shouldering my backpack with the gum and Troll 2 inside.

"Good. We have Ms. Knox in an interrogation room," was his reply, like it was nothing. Like he was telling me the sky is blue. Like it was something people said every fucking day.

The grip I had on my phone tightened. "Is that really necessary?" I spat as I began walking faster, though I knew it wouldn't make one bit of difference. "I won't be there for another two fucking hours."

"It's not up to me when they get brought in. And honestly, Blaine, you really don't need to use that kind of language."

I wrenched open the door to my piece of shit car and threw my backpack inside, not caring where it landed. The car roared to life with a vicious twist of my wrist that probably wasn't good for the ignition, but I didn't care about that either. "You could have called me soon as SIIPA left for her. Or once she was in custody," I growled the reminder as I sped out of my parking spot.

"I could have," was what he said and I imagined wrapping my hands around his neck when I saw him. Instead I wrung my left hand around the steering wheel and I disconnected the call with my other without saying goodbye. I forced myself to place the phone down on the passenger seat rather than throw it with all my might at the windshield like I wanted to do. I did my best to ignore the name Warren Anderson flashing across the screen and tried to focus on the road instead of how much I hated my father.

It was a long drive to Dayton, almost two hours, and if I hadn't known better I would have thought my father had purposely chosen the location just so I could key myself up on the drive. Some things, however, were out of his control. It didn't seem like it often, but it was true.

I drove in silence. Not the healthiest thing because that left me to my thoughts, but music would have made me cringe. Usually I thought about Cooper on the way to remind myself why I had started doing this in the first place, but that tended to make me feel guilty because while I was doing it for my brother, I was also doing it for myself-because I needed him, because I couldn't give him up.

This time, though, I had Kurt to think about, and I let myself fall into the comfortable rose-colored spot my mind had created for him. I thought about him with a tingle in my stomach; about his too few smiles, about his snarky attitude, about how euphoric it made me feel to hold his hand in mine. I wished I had his hand to hold right then, just to remind myself that there were still good things in this shit world, but that wasn't possible, and it never would be. The last Saturday was a day I would never share with someone other than the people who were already involved. There were some things people shouldn't ever see.

The drive felt a lot shorter that it normally did, which messed with my head because I couldn't decide whether that was a good thing or a bad thing.

I parked in my usual spot and walked up to the impressive building with my backpack slung over my shoulder and my keys clanking together in my hand. The sun in my face made me squint, but I would have been scowling up at the tall building no matter what. I hated how beautiful it looked with its white stone walls, stadium green grass, and pretty flowers. The sidewalks and walkways sparkled in the sunlight. Birds sang in the trees that grew in the grassy lots. It even had a fucking fountain,  huge number that lit up at night. The building and everything around it was so beautiful and inviting that anyone who passed by would look at it and be impressed by its aesthetic charm.

When I was little I asked my father why the Ohio State SIIPA agency looked so inviting if we didn't want regular people to know that SIIPA existed. He told me that its beauty was its camouflage. Creepy warehouses with barbed wires and electric fences drew the wrong kind of attention, a kind of suspicious intrigue that led to even more suspicious questions; who is in there, why are there fences, what is it for? A beautiful building on the other hand, which was surrounded by more beautiful buildings, drew just enough attention to make people smile at its charm and continue driving on by.

Looking at it made me sick. I hurried inside, though the inside was just as much as a farce as the outside was-marble floors, polished everything, and all the right kinds of smoke and mirrors to make people think the agency was a computer company.

I walked over to reception and Jenifer smiled brightly at me from behind her computer. I didn't return the gesture.

"Hi, Blaine," she greeted brightly. "End of the month already?"

I nodded.

She continued on smiling like a programed automaton. "Your father is just upstairs on the fifteenth floor, room 2B. Here is your access card. Just be sure to drop it off here before you leave for the day."

I took the card from her and walked through the arch that would lead me to security check.

Cain, the security guard, didn't smile when he saw me, but he did greet me with his familiar, "Hey, man," in that somber tone I was accustomed to hearing from him. It was the kind of tone I imagined most soldiers would use with their fellow comrades before going into a battle that was expected to have less than favorable odds. Cain was one of the few people in the building who understood that the agency wasn't a nice place and bright smiles didn't belong there. It wasn't a place for dimwitted receptionists with bubbly personalities and too bright teeth.

Wait. Correction: It shouldn't have been a place for dimwitted receptionists with bubbly personalities and too bright teeth. But then, the agency shouldn't have been a lot of things that it was.

But back to Cain.

He was another one of those people I liked well enough not to hate. He spoke to me like we were part of a united team despite the fact that when we had first met I had spent most of my time trying to get him to have sex with me. I had been fourteen, stupid, and quite taken with his well-muscled form and the exotic blend of his features that came from having a Japanese mother and a black father. Cain, who was as straight as they come, thankfully chose to be amused by my sad attempts at seductive flirting rather than offended. He was an okay guy.     

"Hey," I greeted back as I held my arms up so he could scan me for weapons, though he already knew I didn't have anything on me. Not because he knew I wouldn't bring a weapon with me, but because all Cain had to do was look at a person once and he would be able to tell instantly whether or not they had any hidden weapons. He was a D1, and his security check was just another mirror SIIPA used to keep people from knowing the truth.

Normally I would have been a bit more talkative but I kept picturing that poor woman sitting for hours in an interrogation room.

He peeked inside my backpack quick and prodded the insides with a wooden stick to complete the security check and clapped me once on the back. "Tell him hey for me."

"Yeah," I promised.

It's not really important to go through the layout of the building in any great detail. Just know that the interrogation rooms and holding cells are all above ground on various floors. You would expect those rooms to be located somewhere deep under the dirt, but they're not. The reason for that is that there were far uglier things that happened in the agency than locking up a woman whose only crime was protecting her child, and those were the things that were hidden down below where no one would see, not the desperate mother.

Actually, wait again. Before I continue I should tell you about the woman in the interrogation room, whose name is Marissa Knox. Knox is an ex CIA agent with one of the slimmest files out there. For those of you who don't know, a slim file in any government agency pretty much translates to Badass.

Before that day I had never met Ms. Knox, but I had heard her name several times. She had been a particular interest of my father's for months-not because she had an ability, because she didn't, but because her fourteen month old son did. Logan Knox, the fourteen year old son, was IDed as a telekinetic less than an hour after his birth, which immediately brought him under the classification of a D3.

Telekinetic ability is linked to emotion. If a telekinetic is feeling a strong emotion, whether it be anger, sadness, fear-usually something negative-that person's control over his or her ability tends to weaken, and if a telekinetic loses control, it's going to be obvious to everyone around them that they aren't human. Therefore, until it can be determined whether a telekinetic is a possible threat to the exposure of our kind, they are all placed at D3 level classification. Once SIIPA learns more about the individual, their classification may go up or down. Usually they went up.   

In the case of little Logan Knox, it only took him three months to make the whole house shake when he was under strong emotional stress. He was immediately bumped up to a D5. SIIPA was sent out within minutes to collect him, but Knox had been more than capable of incapacitating the three agents and then making a run for it with her son.

Now Logan Knox was missing and Marissa was in SIIPA's custody. Logan needed to be found, and I was the one whose job it was to find him.

We'll continue on with the story now.

I passed 2A which was where Ms. Knox would be sitting in a too bright white room with a single table and opened the door to 2B. There were several people in the room and all of them sat in front of a large television screen that was hooked up to the cameras recording Marissa Knox in 2A. The cameras showed that she was sitting quietly at the table in the other room with her hands folded neatly together on top. The metal of her handcuffs glinted in the light. One of the people in the observation room was my father and I placed all of my attention on him, choosing to ignore Knox for the time being.

My father looked up when I entered and smiled in a way that most people would have deemed kind and warm. "Ah. Blaine. Finally we can get something accomplished." He stood up from his chair and came towards me. He placed a too warm hand on my back in what probably looked like an affectionate greeting between a father and his son to the other occupants in the room. In his other hand was a manila file folder. He would give it to me eventually, but I wouldn't need to open it.

"She's been feeding us nonsense for the past two hours. We think she managed to pass the boy off to someone, a relative maybe. I need to know who has him and where." He put the folder in my hand and clapped me on the back. Unlike when Cain had done it, the action felt cold and indifferent. "See what you can get out of her, hmm?"

I gripped the folder hand and started to walk to the door that would take me to Knox, but my father stopped me before I could get too far with a heavy hand. His fingers curled cruelly into my skin through the fabric of my shirt and I turned quickly in response to the pain. The expression on his face was calm and pleasant. He looked like he was having a grand old time. "If she doesn't talk after five minutes, get it by omission."

I had been expecting him to say that, but my stomach dropped at the command anyway. Still, I jerked my head down once in a nod, and focused most of my effort on keeping the Fuck you that was teetering on the tip of my tongue locked behind my lips where it belonged.

After a few seconds he released me, that damn smile still on his face, and I walked stiffly to the door. Before I twisted the knob I gave myself one last reminder:

Get it done. Cooper needs you.

Marissa Knox looked up at me with red rimmed eyes when I entered the room, and no, her eyes weren't red from crying. They were bloodshot red and dried out as if she had made it a point to stop herself from blinking for a week. Her face was the color of paste and she had several angry red scratches on her cheeks that made her look like a sick patient. Her blonde hair was dirty and falling out of its severe hold in the back. I wondered when the last time she fixed it was. Though she was still beautiful, she looked much older than her thirty-five years.

She straightened up in her chair and pinned me with a cutting expression. "Who are you?"

"Blaine," I told her as I sat down in the chair across from her. I got right to the point. "I need you to tell me where your son is."

Surprise flashed in her eyes before she snorted out a flat, humorless laugh. "You've got to be kidding me. How old are you? Nineteen? Twenty?"

"Sixteen."

That time the surprise stuck, frozen on her face like ice. "Sixteen," she repeated like she had never heard the word before in her life.

"Where is Logan?" I asked again and my voiced seemed to force her to remember the situation she was in and she quickly regained control of her poker face, which was a sight to behold. Like flicking a switch, she had wiped herself completely clean and free of all her feelings. It was interesting to watch, but not a surprise. I had already known that she would be capable of letting this entire interrogation process roll right off her back. She wouldn't tell me anything. A woman who had the balls and skill to evade SIIPA for months wouldn't just give up her son, not to me or anyone else, not under hours of questioning or hours of torture. She would take whatever she knew to her grave, and she would do it gladly, with a smile on her face and a twinkle in her eye. Knox was a fitting name, I decided.

When she spoke, her voice was just as void of emotion as her face. "Do you think I'd be stupid enough to know that information if I truly wanted to keep him safe?"

"I don't know," I shrugged. "Would you be? The fact that you just evaded the question instead of answering it makes me think that you know exactly where he is and who he's with."

She snorted out a curt, disbelieving laugh that was both sardonic and amused at the same time. "This is unbelievable. You're just a kid."

A kid whose five minutes were up.

I haven't mentioned this to you yet, but there is one other way I can detect lies, and that is by omission. Lies are lies, whether they are intentionally kept secret or spoken out loud with a silver tongue. However, the act of lying by omission is very different from lying out loud, and it costs me to be able to detect omitted lies.

Omitted lies are on the very cusp of my lie detector's ability. It's kind of like reaching for something that you can only just barely touch with the very tips of your fingers; you can almost feel the thing you're reaching for, but not quite. So what do you do? You strain to reach it even though the attempt makes you feel restless and trapped inside yourself and hurts like hell. So, yes, I can detect omitted lies, but at a price. On any given day, I can detect one, maybe two if I'm pushing it-any more than that and I risk putting myself into a coma, which happened to me once when I was nine, back when I hadn't known how dangerous it was despite the head splitting pain it caused in my head. But I'm not going to get into that right now. Another time, maybe.

Right now we're talking about me and Knox in the interrogation room.

Just get it done, I told myself.

"I need to know where your son is, and you are going to tell me, or I'll force you to tell me." I clenched as many muscles as I could in preparation. I took a breath. "One last time; where is Logan?"

With that one question, it was done, like breathing in carbon monoxide. The doing is effortless; only the end result is fatal.

Every muscle in her face went tight and suddenly every bit of the rage she felt was clear and evident on her face. Her features painted the picture of a woman who was backed into a corner, not in fear, but in preparation for the fight to come. The determination to come out of the fight alive and victorious was there to see in her blazing eyes. I knew my own face looked the same, and wondered if that was what had prompted her to drop her poker face rather than the threat I had made.

"I don't know what they have on you," she said in a low, dangerous tone. "I'm sure whatever it is, is very bad but believe it when I say I won't give up my son."

Her voice shook with conviction and split into my head. My fingers curled at the pain and my whole body tensed with it, but I rode it out and let her unspoken truth fill me up.

He's in Maine.

It wasn't enough. I needed something more specific. Logan was too young to care for himself. Someone was with him. I needed a name.

I gripped my head with a hand as if that would make it all stop. Over the roaring agony in my head, I struggled to say what I had found out for the camera. "M-Maine. Logan... in Maine."

Knox had me pinned against the wall only seconds later, her forearm tight against my throat.

"You're one of them."

She might have said something else, maybe about me having an ability and selling out my own kind, but I could hardly focus over the whirling in my head.

"Who is Logan with?" I forced the words out, setting a second trap, and my nose started to bleed a steady stream of red that trailed over my lips and got into my mouth.

She grabbed my head and bashed it against the wall. Again, she said something, but the words sounded like nonsense that my fucked up brain couldn't decode.

Her truth, however, was perfectly clear and lapped at the inside of my mind like acid.

I'm pretty sure she bashed my head against the wall again, harder that time, but she didn't make good on her threat to kill me, which I didn't find out about until much later. Apparently, as soon as the words left her lips, SIIPA had swarmed in by my father's orders to come to my rescue. They pulled her off of me with some difficulty, but I don't remember that. I don't remember dropping to the ground like a rock either once Knox was no longer there to hold me up.

I remember my father's hands on my face though, forcing me to look at him and demanding that I respond to the questions he was near shouting at me despite the intense ringing in my ears.

He looked half crazy, and I had to read his lips to figure out what we wanted from me, though even that was a challenge because he kept shaking me, as if that would make talk faster. "Did you get it? Did you get the name?"

Somehow I forced out the name Norman Wilkes.

He let me go once he got what he wanted, rushing off to a place I didn't care to follow. At that point I didn't care about anything but the burn in my skull and one other thing: breathing.

In

Out

In

Out

That was my only reality. 

As I fell unconscious, my mind focused on one last thought: Please let me wake up.