Quinn arrived an hour after Blaine to the empty parking lot behind the abandoned building where they usually hung out. Her mother had decided to have another talk about how she used to be a good girl and how much she had changed before she left home, so she was running later than usual.

Quinn looked stunning as always, in a grunge sort of way. She was wearing a seriously tattered long sleeved gray shirt with a huge rip at the neck and lots of smaller tears. Over it she wore a black hoodie with a square cut leather jacket, and her legs were encased in slim leather motorcycle pants tucked into a pair of old military-style boots with many buckles, straps and laces. In order to cover her blood shot eyes, she had worn a pair of sunglasses that seemed to give her an even more bold appearance as she walked in Blaine's direction with heavy steps.

Blaine didn't look up when he noticed his friend coming closer. Instead, he remained seated on the ground, smoking and looking fixedly at his newest act of vandalism covering the dirty wall in front of him. As if looking at the red words he had painted on the wall would somehow help him to understand the confused feelings that were boiling up inside of him.

"What's with the beanie?" Quinn asked teasingly, messing with the old gray beanie covering Blaine's curls as she sat beside him.

"I was cold," he answered, leaning until he was supporting his head on her shoulder. He was still staring at the wall.

"What happened?" his best friend asked him, looking at the empty cans of spray paint lying on the ground. Scattered around next to them were some empty alcohol bottles.

Well, it looks I missed all the fun, Quinn thought before she carefully read the words that Blaine had sprayed on the wall and felt her heart tighten in her chest.

I feel stupid and contagious

I am a creep I am a weirdo... What the hell am I doing here?

All the love gone bad turned my world to black

The words were from self-hate songs that Quinn knew played constantly inside of her best friend's head.

"I came out to Walter," Blaine muttered, feeling all the anger he had felt when he was screaming at his dad boiling in his stomach again, this time accompanied by shame and embarrassment.

He knew that he was gay, and that there was nothing wrong with that, and he spent his days telling himself that he shouldn't feel ashamed of anything, but in times like those, when Blaine was forced to expose his sexuality and deal with the shocked looks in other people's eyes, Blaine couldn't help but feel wrong…he felt like a freak.

"And how did that go?" Quinn asked, lighting one of her mint flavored cigarettes. Soon, the sweet and slightly sickening smell of nicotine and mint filled the air. As it mixed with the smell of fresh spray paint and alcohol, it created a familiar and somehow comforting atmosphere around them.

"I am sitting in this stupid parking lot and the wall is covered with manifestations of my own self-hate. How do you think it went?" Blaine asked, letting out a humorless laugh as he rolled his eyes.

"Sorry. That was a stupid question," Quinn said, taking off her sunglasses and looking down and hugging her knees. She didn't know what to say. She had never been very good with words. Blaine was the smart one. She was just the stupid girl who had gotten knocked up her junior year of high school.

"Quinn," Blaine breathed, guilt washing over him in waves at seeing the look in his best friend's eyes. He wanted to punch himself for being so rude to her. "You don't need to be sorry. It wasn't a stupid question. I'm just having a bad day," he murmured apologetically. "It's just that Walter had this look on his face…like he was shocked and dazed when I told him, and I know that look too well, Q. That's the kind of look that always turns into a disgusted or disappointed one."

"I didn't look at you differently when you came out to me," Quinn said, trying to comfort him.

Blaine had come out to her in their junior year of high school, before she had gotten pregnant. When they weren't screwed up kids or the freaks of the school. Quinn was the head cheerleader and Blaine the adorably dapper boy. He had confessed to her that he had a crush on one of his friends, Ted, a stupid jock that later the same year punched Blaine and called him a fag after discovering he had a crush on him.

"You're the exception, Quinnie. My friends, my mother, everyone. You remember when Barbara caught me kissing that guy, Liam? She spent the whole week after that looking at me weird and then when she finally talked to me again, it was to tell me to not bring my "tall girlfriend" home again without warning her first."

"Liam did have kind of a girly hair cut," Quinn said, half-heartedly trying to defend Barbara.

"Yeah, he did, but Liam was a boy. Everyone could see that. Barbara just chose not to see it because it was easier for her deal with me having a tomboy girlfriend than having to fucking admit that she had caught me making out with a boy," Blaine said bitterly, remembering how Barbara had obviously tried to fool herself, pretending not to see all the signals that pointed to the fact that he was gay.

"Well, now she'll have to accept the fact that you're gay. You told Walter, didn't you? He'll tell her sooner or later," Quinn said.

"Giving them another damn reason to judge me…" Blaine trailed off. "Why was Cooper the one that died?" he whispered brokenly, burying his face in his palms. He was so tired of disappointing other people and being left behind. Why did Cooper have to go and not him? That would have been so much easier for everyone. His parents would have the perfect son that they had always wanted. The one who dated blonde cheerleaders and didn't cause them problems and Blaine would forever be remembered as the sweet dapper boy who wore bow ties.

Quinn slapped Blaine across his face. The sharp sound of the sudden impact echoed in the empty parking lot as pain spread through Blaine's head.

"Ouch! What that was for?" the boy hissed, before meeting Quinn's tear filled eyes.

"Don't you dare say that crap ever again!" she cried, tears blurring her vision and running down her cheeks, causing black streaks as her heavy makeup smeared.

"Quinn-" Blaine started to say, suddenly regretting his words as he took in the pained look in his friend's eyes.

"You wish you were dead? You wish that fucking Cooper was here instead of you?" she yelled. "What would Cooper have done when I got pregnant? Would he have defended me like you did when everybody at school gave me nothing but crap? Would he have had held me while I cried for hours or fought with my dad after he kicked me out of the goddamn house? No, he wouldn't have!" she shouted, looking right into Blaine's eyes.

Blaine held this stupid misconception that he was useless and that Cooper had been perfect and that no one would miss him if he died. But that wasn't true. Quinn didn't know what she would do if she lost him. He was the only man who loved her and took care of her without asking for anything in exchange. Every other man in her life had abandoned her like her father had when she got pregnant or used her for her beauty and body like some she was some sort of trophy, not caring about her feelings.

"I'm sorry, Q, I-I was…I'm sorry" Blaine said, wrapping his arms around his best friend in an attempt to make up for his words.

"I hope you are! Don't give me any more shit about how you wish you were the one who died!" Quinn hissed in a warning tone before leaning into the warmth of Blaine's arms as he hugged her. "And stop being such a self-centered jerk," she whispered childishly, making Blaine chuckle a little.

"If you stop being so damn bossy," Blaine answered back, laughing as Quinn punched him lightly. They sat there wrapped in each other arms, until Quinn's phone buzzed with an incoming call.

"So is that your phone or are you just happy to see me?" Blaine asked his friend playfully, feeling Quinn's phone vibrating against him.

"Fuck you, Anderson!" Quinn retorted with a giggle, hearing a "Nah, I'm not in the mood today," before picking up her phone.

"Hey, babe, I have the house free today. How about you bring some movies over and we don't watch any of them?" a cocky and familiar voice said, sending shivers down her spine. It was Puck.

"S-sure, mom, I'm coming," Quinn lied, stuttering a little as she felt Blaine's eyes on her.

"The hobbit's there with you, isn't he?" Puck mocked. Quinn bit her lower lip and glanced nervously at her best friend.

"Yeah, mom, I'm on my way. I'll see you soon," she said before hanging up, not giving Puck a chance to make an offensive comment about Blaine.

"I-I have to go. Um, my mom needs my help with, um, things," she said, causing Blaine to sigh heavily. It was obvious she was lying.

She stood quickly and fixed her make-up and hair before murmuring, "See you later, B," and turning her back on her friend. She couldn't even look into his eyes.

"Quinn!" he hissed, making her turn in his direction as he wrote new words in the walls.

Girl with the broken smile, you know you are incapable of lying to me, right? was what he wrote. "Girl with the broken smile" was the nickname he had given Quinn after he had sung "She Will Be Loved" to her a countless amount of times, trying to make her feel better about herself.

Shame washed over Quinn in waves. She read the words written before her in fresh wet paint and knew she didn't trust herself to speak without breaking down. She just looked at her best friend silently, eyes pleading for him not to judge her before she she turned away from him again and walked away. She knew what she was doing was wrong and self-destructive, but she needed to feel loved so badly. So, so badly.

And no matter how good Blaine was to her, she needed love in a way that Blaine would never be able to give her.

"And she will be loved…" Blaine sang hopelessly at the sight of Quinn driving away.

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"Walter...would you like to talk about what happened?" Penny asked, seeing Walter ramble aimlessly through the remaining evidence at Burt's house without really paying any attention to what he was doing. His mind was far away from work. He was still thinking about his son, about how little he knew about the boy. He never even considered that his younger son could be gay.

"Blaine always looked so normal," he unconsciously whispered, giving voice to the thoughts filling his head.

"Walter," Penny sighed, hearing her partner's words. She understood why Walter was thinking that way, but she had to change his mind.

"There's no such thing as normal. Normal doesn't exist. Every single person on the planet is entirely different from every other person on the planet. Which means you can be average. You can be typical," she said, looking straight into her partner's eyes. "But kids don't end up killing themselves, taking guns to school, or behaving in a self-destructive way because they want to be typical. They want to be normal, and more than anything else, they want to fit in. Because society builds this stupid concept of normality that only makes people feel bad about things that make them unique, like their talents, their bodies, their sexuality..."

"But, Penny-"

"Why do you think I wore short skirts, leather jackets and spent my nights out breaking things when I was younger? Because I was angry, Walter. I was so, so, so mad because everyone else besides me seemed to be normal, fitting all the standards of society, while I was this weird and nerdy girl, the skinny ginger that everyone mocked for not having big enough breasts and not being pretty enough," Penny said as her mind filled with memories about how she used to hate herself for not looking like the other girls.
She remembered the nights that she would cry herself to sleep after spending hours looking at her reflection in the mirror, feeling ashamed of her small breasts and tiny hips. Those days, she didn't feel desirable and that make her feel rejected and furious. Why couldn't she be like the other girls? Pretty and attractive? Apparently, Penny had been born to be an outsider with her skinny body and her nerdy ways.

And all this angriness, this rejection and self-hate poisoning her heart and mind were the reasons why Penny would wake up one day and cut all her clothes, making her skirts shorter and her shirts tighter. She would show all those who mocked her how desirable she could be.

She dyed her red hair black, got a piercing and began to hang out with the others that, like her, also weren't good enough to be considered "normal." They broke things, drank alcohol and fought with others crowds of self-destructive teens. And when Penny wasn't with them or vomiting everything she had eaten in some dirty toilet to feel better, she fooled around with the boyfriends of the prettiest girls in school; the boyfriends of the same girls who used to bully her, saying that she was ugly and unattractive.

At first, doing those kinds of things felt good because the popular jocks were cheating on their perfect girlfriends, the prom queens and cheerleaders, with her, the freak of the school.

"Who's the ugly one now? Who isn't good enough?" she used to think, feeling proud.

But soon, these thoughts and the feeling of pride seemed to not last long enough, and after she was done with the boys, the feelings of dirtiness and repulsiveness began to kick in. She was repulsed by herself, with her body and with the way she had let herself be treated, like the school whore. She had almost reached the point of doing something that she couldn't turn back from.

But then one day while Penny was choosing her outfit for another day at school, Charles, her dad showed up in her room. Expecting a lecture about her skirt, or another speech about how much she was disappointing him, she had sighed and rolled her eyes, snippily asking him what he wanted. But surprisingly, Charles, a big man with a red mustache covering his small lips, didn't lecture or yell at her, he just looked at her with sad green eyes.

"What happened to my little girl, Penelope? Where is my little freckled princess that kept saying that she wanted to be a mermaid like Ariel?" he had asked her. And that was it. Seeing the tears streaming down her dad's face and seeing how her actions were hurting him made her realize how much she was hurting herself. She had gone so low just so she could feel pretty and loved, trying to get revenge on the girls that had hurt her.

That day, Penny didn't go to school or show up to the date she had set up with the quarterback of the football team. Instead, she had cried in her father's arms, promising to change and to give him his little princess back.

After that, Penny changed schools, bought new clothes and dyed her hair back to its natural color. It was hard give up some of her self-destructive habits, but she worked hard. She finally understood that normal didn't exist and that everyone was different and special in their own way. She understood that there wasn't anything wrong with her, the nerdy girl with the red hair.

"I-I…You're right, what kind of father am I? My son is gay and here I am calling him abnormal," Walter said, burying his face on his palms. He felt horribly ashamed.

"You're human, Walter, and like any other human you sometimes screw things up and you fail. But you're recognizing your mistakes now, and that's what matters. You want to make up for them, don't you?" Penny asked him.

"More than anything " Walter said, raising his eyes to meet Penny's. They were filled with so much care and comfort that Walter couldn't avoid the warm feeling spreading through his chest.

When had Penny become the mature one here? Walter thought, placing his hand over hers and giving the girl a smile.

"Then I assure you, you'll work things out with Blaine. You'll help him through this phase and you will have your little boy back," Penny said, flashing him a comforting smile as she laced her fingers with Walter's, squeezing his hand in a confident way.

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When Blaine finally got home after spending his afternoon covering walls with spray paint and breaking things, he was surprised for several reasons. First of all, the place was clean. Like, really clean. The gross box of Chinese food wasn't anywhere to be found. Strangely though, it was freaking hot inside of that apartment. Turning the thermostat to a reasonable temperature, Blaine began to look around, calling out for Kurt. But the boy wasn't replying.

"Maybe he went out," Blaine considered before entering his room. He let his bag fall to the ground with a loud thud at the sight of a weird figure curled up in his bed. It didn't take him too long to realize that it was Kurt as he approached bed.

Seeing Kurt curled up in the covers with his eyes shut, Blaine attempted to push away the memories from the last time he had gotten close to the other boy while he was asleep. He tried to convince himself that the weird feeling he had gotten when he had touched Kurt was just a side effect of all the alcohol he had ingested.

"Hey, Ice Queen! Get off my freaking bed!" Blaine grunted as he tried to pull the covers off of Kurt. "Besides being stupid, are you deaf, too? Wake the hell up!" he yelled before he finally noticed that there was something definitely wrong with Kurt. His skin looked slightly blue and that couldn't be a good thing.

"Hey! Kurt? Are you okay?" Blaine inquired, starting to feel worried.

As soon he touched the boy's shoulder he jerked away. Kurt's skin felt as cold as ice.

"Oh my God! Kurt!" he screamed, hovering over Kurt, his hands clenching the other boy's clothes and fiercely shaking him in a desperate attempt to wake him up.

"Kurt! Kurt! Kurt!" he cried, despair overtaking him, seeing the way the boy remained immobile.

Blaine's eyes filled with tears. Kurt felt so cold, so unbelievably cold. The last time he had felt such coldness was during his brother's funeral when he had touched Cooper's hands for the last time.

"It's time to say goodbye to him, dear," were the words his mother had said to him that day. They echoed in Blaine's mind and he shook his head. No, he wasn't ready to say goodbye to anyone again, not so soon…

"Kurt, please wake up!" Blaine cried, holding the boy against his chest.

Kurt couldn't be dead. He had been fine just that morning, when he had been smiling and mocking Blaine. Kurt had to wake up. He had to open his unbelievably blue eyes again and give Blaine a bitchy glare, telling him to stop ruining his clothes or something like that. He just couldn't be dead. Blaine wouldn't be capable of handling another sudden death.

"Please, please wake up," Blaine murmured in Kurt's hair tightening his embrace even more as tears streamed down his face.

It was like Cooper's death all over again, the inexplicability, the abruptness. Once more, something that had brought some kind of warmth to Blaine's heart was roughly being taken away from him, without any explanation.

That couldn't be happening, not again.

"B…Bl—" an almost inaudible voice mumbled, causing Blaine to stop his desperate sobs and look down at the other boy's face. Kurt's eyes were slightly open and they we fixed on him.

Feeling Blaine's body heat, Kurt was stirred back to consciousness. The older boy was holding him so tightly, so desperately, his lingering scent invading Kurt's senses in such a way that it forced the android's body to fight against the cold feeling shutting down his system.

"Thank god," Blaine muttered. Kurt was alive.

Even though Kurt's eyes were only barely open, the android was capable of seeing Blaine's hazel eyes looking so beautiful and so desperate. Those two pools of golden honey were filled with worry, bright with fear.

"Y-you found m-me" Kurt said, clenching Blaine's jacket.

"Yes, I found you," Blaine whispered, still feeling terrified. His hands were all over Kurt, clinging eagerly to him as though he would lose him if he let go.

"Just stay with me, okay? I'll call for help. Just please, please, please keep your eyes open. Just keep your eyes open," Blaine told Kurt as he felt the boy beginning to slip back into unconsciousness. He was losing his strength and turning even colder.

Blaine grabbed his phone from his pocket and began to punch in his dad's number. He wasn't thinking rationally, but somehow he knew he had to call Walter.

"Walter! There's something wrong with Kurt! He—" Blaine began to say into his phone the second his dad answered the call.

Kurt heard Blaine's screaming and begging for someone to hurry, but he seemed so far away. Kurt was feeling so weak already.

"Blaine? Why are you calling? Shouldn't you be in school-?" Walter tried saying, but Blaine interrupted him.

"IT'S KURT! THERE'S SOMETHING WRONG WITH HIM!" Blaine cried.

"What happened to Kurt?" Walter inquired, his voice sounding worried.

"I don't know, but he's really cold and isn't breathing properly. He's so, so cold, dad," Blaine tried to explain, but the words were coming out harsh and erratic as the despair building in his chest made it difficult for him to form coherent sentences. "Please, dad, I don't know what to do but I have to do something!"

"Blaine, calm down, I'm almost home. Just keep him awake and warm. I'll be right there!" his dad assured him before hanging up the phone.

Waves of light tremors were spreading through Kurt's body and his eyelids felt heavier and heavier as the seconds passed by.

"Please, Kurt, please don't close your eyes. I've got you, I'm here. And I promise everything will be alright," Blaine whispered in what he hoped was an assuring tone, making promises he had no idea if he was going to be able to keep.

Kurt felt safe at the sound of Blaine's promises. Even with all the confusion and dizziness coursing through his body, the android could still feel Blaine warm and solid against him. Blaine was holding on to him, and that was all he needed that moment.

"Y-you're still gonna to be punished you know, you broke a rule," Blaine said in an attempt to keep Kurt awake. "You were in my bed– I told you that the bed was mine d-didn't I-I?" Blaine said, forcing the words to come out of his throat. The lumps were making him stutter and speaking was painful as he tried to suppress sobs, but Blaine composed himself, closing his eyes and focusing on what he had to do. He had to keep Kurt awake.

"I-It's better, you have to get better soon, you little elf. Y-you have a hell of a punishment waiting for you," he added, making Kurt twist his lips slightly in an almost unnoticeable way before he closed his eyes and began to be overtaken by darkness.

"No, no, no, open your eyes! Kurt! Kurt! Please, open your eyes!" Blaine screamed before hearing Walter's and Penny's footsteps entering the living room. Blaine looked around impatiently.

"Walter's here, Kurt, just hold on, keep holding on," Blaine ordered, holding on to Kurt tightly.

And these were the last words the android heard before feeling a strange wave of coldness wash over him as Walter's strong hands took him away from Blaine's warmth.

TBC...