Blaine slides home, sheathed entirely in Kurt, his body wrapped up in his limbs and his heat, his forehead resting down against Kurt’s. He breathes out as he settles, and when he inhales again Kurt’s mouth follows the air, their lips sinking into familiar connections.

They move slowly, barely pulling away before they collide again, gentle and sure. Everytime Blaine pulls back, he feels Kurt struggling to keep him in, his muscles clinging to whatever he can reach, to every inch of Blaine. Blaine is only too happy to return, taking his time and relaxing down onto his elbows, hands stroking over Kurt’s cheeks and neck and hair, smoothing away beading sweat and absorbing the velveteen feeling of Kurt’s skin.

“Are you mine?” Kurt asks, his voice tremulous and high, his eyes flickering between Blaine’s own, as though looking for the truth between them. Blaine kisses his forehead sweetly.

“Yours,” he says, resisting the urging of Kurt’s heels on his lower back, maintaining his drowsy pace and savoring the feeling of Kurt clenching around him.

“Tell—tell me about after,” Kurt pleads, stammering and thrashing beneath Blaine, pulling him in and trying to quicken his thrusting. “What will it be like when we leave?”

“We’ll be able to do this whenever we want,” Blaine whispers. “We’ll be able to hold hands, and kiss, and hold each other, and no one will come between us. No Sebastian. No slavery. Just us.”

“Please—Blaine, I need you—”

“Shhh,” Blaine says, kissing Kurt’s lips. “We’ll find a new place to live. We’ll get a house and we’ll have our own bed and you’ll finish school. I’ll get a job and we’ll cook dinner together every night, and you’ll yell at me for making you dance in the kitchen, but you’ll secretly love it. And then you’ll get a job at a fashion house or a magazine or in a theater, and every night we’ll relax in the bath and I’ll rub your back and we’ll talk about our days. And I’ll kiss you everytime you get close to me and we’ll make love before we go to sleep, and when we wake up, and we’ll sneak out at lunch and make out and hope we don’t get caught by our bosses. Your dad will visit for Thanksgiving and Christmas, and we’ll have our friends over for drinks on the weekends. I’ll beg you for a dog and you’ll keep saying no. And one day I’ll buy a ring and I’ll try to plan the perfect proposal but I’ll end up just blurting it out one night when we’re right in the middle of having sex and you’ll tease me before you say yes. And we’ll be happy.”

Kurt nods, pressing his eyes against Blaine’s neck, and Blaine feels a wet warmth trickling down from them.

“I want that,” Kurt admits, holding Blaine hard. “I want it so much.”

“We’ll have it,” Blaine promises. “Even if I have to bribe someone to give me a fake identity and you have to call me Barney for the rest of our lives—”

Kurt laughs and looks up at Blaine, his eyes red and shining.

“When?” he asks brokenly. “When can we have it? I don’t know how much longer I can take this. I feel like he’s getting to me—”

“He isn’t,” Blaine assures, his hands drifting down Kurt’s chest and sides before settling on his tiny waist. “He can’t get you. Just remember this—” He squeezes Kurt’s sides. “Remember you’re really mine.”

He finally speeds his hips, and Kurt sobs and throws his head back, matching Blaine’s movements, undulating under him and seeking what he needs. Blaine gives him all he can, pulling him down when he slides up the bed, gripping his thighs and making him bite down against a scream when he finds the perfect angle.

“Love you,” Kurt gasps, tensing more and more with each jolt. “God, I love you, Blaine, love you—ah!”

He comes between them, smearing both of their stomachs with white, and Blaine kisses him and swallows the sounds he makes and he fucks him through it, slowing down to a crawl once more, hips pumping steadily through Kurt’s oversensitivity, his ears straining to hear the perfect little whimpers that Kurt tries to hide.

“I love you too,” Blaine says, into the darkness in Kurt’s eyes when he recovers and starts moaning again. “We’ll have it soon. I promise.”

—

The next morning, Blaine has a churning feeling in his stomach as he stands in the bathroom and listens to Sebastian’s groans as Kurt wakes him. He’s tired, certainly—he and Kurt had been up half the night making love, and he’d been unable to join Kurt in sleep afterward for the plans swirling in his head. So he’d held Kurt, and watched the little movements of his eyes as he dreamed, the flutter of his lashes and the twitch of his mouth. He’d wondered what Kurt was dreaming, making up stories of their future that he hopes Kurt is seeing. He’d drifted off at one point, but not for long—the alarm woke them and it was time to get ready for their master.

He hadn’t watched as Kurt crawled onto the bed and started to serve Sebastian, instead heading straight for the bathroom, setting up hurriedly. Something in him wants to get this day over with as quickly as possible, and waiting now is a torture that has him fidgeting until he hears Sebastian speaking and has to compose himself for Sebastian’s entrance.

“Busy day today,” Sebastian says as he walks in and sinks into the tub with a satisfied sigh. “I’m going to need several things from you—”

Blaine relaxes as he memorizes Sebastian’s schedule and what paperwork he’ll need. There’s a new shipment of slaves ready from one of Sebastian’s farms up in Maine, and Sebastian wants to look over them, as well as the progress reports from the other farms. It’s a lot to process, and Blaine will have to work with Trent to get it in order for Sebastian to peruse later.

“I’ll need you in my office at noon,” Sebastian says in conclusion, as Blaine finishes straightening out his unusually casual clothes—a pair of loose jeans and a t-shirt he selected himself, rather than the jacket and tie combination that Blaine chooses. The weird feeling in his gut returns, having been assuaged by the tedium of memorizing a normal day for his master. It hits him full force, sending a wave of nausea through him.

Maybe he needs to eat something. He and Kurt barely ate the night before.

“You’re dismissed.”

Sebastian strides out, and Blaine follows at a more sedate pace, feeling as though he might actually be dragging his feet for how heavy and exhausted he feels.

It was worth it, though. It was worth every second, to make love to Kurt and dream and talk and lie with him, and to watch him in the only place he feels safe.

He finishes with the paperwork for the morning late, with only about an hour to spare before he has to go to Sebastian. He hurries back to the harem, intending to find Kurt and shovel down some lunch with him before he’s needed.

But he can’t find Kurt.

He’s not in his room or the bathhouse, or Blaine’s own room. He checks the kitchen, and then heads out to the gym, where he runs into Nick using the pool.

“Is Kurt here?” he asks.

“No,” Nick says. “I thought he was with you.”

“I just got back from the normal business,” he clarifies. “I haven’t seen him since he was waking Sebastian up; he left before I came back out. It’s been hours since he should’ve returned.”

“I don’t know,” Nick replies. He hangs onto the edge of the pool, wiping water from his face. He looks up at Blaine, concerned. “I haven’t seen him.”

“Where’s Jeff?” he asks. Maybe Nick just missed Kurt, maybe they managed to just pass each other by—

“In bed, he’s not feeling well.” Nick shakes his head and starts to rise from the pool. “Look, Blaine—”

“Could Kurt be with him?”

Nick’s brow furrows, and his expression is questioning.

“I don’t know, Blaine, he wasn’t when I left, but he could’ve since. Is something going on—”

“I’ll go check,” Blaine says, his worry overriding his manners. “If you see him, let him know I’m looking for him? I’m going to Sebastian’s office soon, but if I don’t catch him by then, I shouldn’t be long.”

—

Kurt’s not in Jeff’s room either.

He’s not with Jesse or with Hunter, both of whom all but ignore him when he asks. The only thing he gets is out of Jesse, and it sends a bolt of fear through him.

“Maybe he’s where he should be,” he says, and leaves it at that, heading out of the harem with a smug glance but no other words.

There’s something very wrong.

Blaine heads to Sebastian’s office early. He can’t stand this uncertainty, this dread, and maybe Sebastian will know where Kurt is. Maybe he sent him on an errand and just didn’t say anything, maybe—

“Please, no—ahhh!”

Kurt’s voice rises from behind the door of the office. It is accompanied by a sharp sound that Blaine recognizes all too well—a faint whistle, followed by a crack.

Blaine tries the doorknob. It’s locked, so he takes the only option available to him, knowing that he’d never be able to bash the heavy door in. He knocks.

“Ah, Blaine,” Sebastian says, opening the door. “Right on time.”

He pulls Blaine in by the arm and shuts the door behind them, locking it firmly. And then, before he can take in the room, he’s dragged behind the desk and shoved into the chair. He falls back, gripping the arms of the chair to steady himself as he lands, his bottom aching where it hits. And then he sees what’s in front of him.

Kurt is kneeling on the floor in front of him, facing him, still only dressed in the briefs he wore to wake Sebastian that morning. His wrists are tied to his ankles, and he’s hunched over as far as he can go, his head bowed toward the floor, and Blaine suspects that he’s only upright because his arms restricted like that keep him from tipping over completely. He’s completely drenched with sweat, drops of it falling from his hair when Sebastian walks by him and lands a kick on his thigh, jolting him and ripping a pained groan out of him. He doesn’t lift his head; he seems incapable. And when Sebastian takes up a stance behind him, whip in hand, Blaine realizes why.

He can’t see Kurt’s back very well, but he can see just down his shoulders. They’re crossed with welts, most of them placed with enough skill that the skin is a hard, red, raised ridge, but Blaine can see at least one place where the skin has broken, a tiny trickle of blood beading from the wound.

He didn’t walk in on the first strike, or the second, or any of dozens of others. He didn’t stride in just in time to save Kurt from the agony. And Kurt has been missing for hours.

Oh god, he thinks, and it’s a constant litany of pure horror running through his veins. His vision blurs around the edges, his ears roaring with the phantoms of screaming and his mouth drying against an intrusion that only exists in memory. Oh god oh god ohgodohgodohgod no nononono—

“Kurt,” he whispers, rocking forward, intending to bolt from the chair, but Sebastian raises the whip.

“Ah, ah,” he chides. “No, you’ll sit down. Or I might get a little sloppy with my strokes. How do you think he’d take it if I exposed his spine?”

Blaine sits back slowly, deliberately, raising his hands when he settles and trying to catch his breath. It’s obvious they’ve been caught—Blaine has never seen Sebastian employ the whip himself, preferring far more personal and intimate means of punishment that require less recovery time, at least physically. But he doesn’t need to care for recovery time here. It’s expected that he’ll sell the temptation of his favorite.

But why is Kurt the one under the lash? Why is Blaine not the one knelt over and barely conscious from the pain? Why is he being treated like the favorite again?

“Master,” he says, entreating, “what’s going on?”

Sebastian lowers the whip, but he keeps it tense at his side.

“You love him.”

The little prickle of fear that’s been with him since he gave in to Kurt washes over his body, stabbing him like a thousand shards of ice, embedding in his skin and sinking to his bones.

They’ve been caught.

“Admit it,” Sebastian snarls. “Admit you love him.”

“Master,” Blaine breathes, hoping he can save the situation, even through his confusion. “I love only—”

“Him!” Sebastian interrupts. “You love him. You think I don’t know?”

He nods to the desk, and Blaine turns to look.

Sebastian’s computer is on, and there’s a video waiting, paused.

“Hit play.”

Blaine follows Sebastian’s instruction, clicking the little triangle carefully. The video starts, the timer on the bottom about halfway through.

Kurt sits in the desk chair in what Blaine recognizes to be his own room. Blaine is bending down behind him, whispering in his ear.

“—do you think of that?” he hears coming from his own mouth, just the day before. And he remembers it all too well. “Do you want me like that?”

“Yes,” Kurt gasps, his face flushing, his eyes glazed. Blaine hand slides down his torso and starts working below the frame of the video.

Blaine pulls Kurt’s chair out a bit after a long moment filled with high little noises from Kurt’s mouth, and slips in front of him, kneeling.

“Keep watching,” Blaine instructs. 

There’s a rustle, and Blaine recalls pulling down Kurt’s underwear at this point, his cock springing free. He’d licked his own lips, and then—

“Love you,” he says, and Kurt’s mouth falls open as Blaine’s head sinks.

Sebastian is in front of him, pausing the video and looming over him.

“You can’t lie to me anymore, Blaine,” Sebastian says. “You love him. We both heard it clear as day. And you can’t tell me this time that it was in the heat of the moment like with that floppy-haired mess I took care of last time. You never planned to escape with him.”

He pulls the thumb drive from the computer and tosses it aside violently, and Blaine flinches as he hears it snap against the wall. Sebastian leans down, invading his space, his face inches from Blaine’s own. Blaine shivers, a flash of Sebastian’s cock plunging into his mouth as he listens to his lover’s cries burning behind his eyes, and he shivers.

Will Sebastian make him kneel before him while he whips Kurt? Will Blaine have to actually feel the leather cutting through the air above him before it cuts into Kurt’s flesh? Will he be gagged against mimicking Kurt’s cries of pain, while Sebastian rips his soul just as easily as though it were beneath the whip instead?

“You shouldn’t have done this,” Sebastian repeats. “Did you really think your feeble plan would work? Did you think I wouldn’t catch you?”

He grips Blaine’s chin with one hand and tilts it up, locking eyes with Blaine.

“You. Are. Mine.” He tugs Blaine’s chin with every word, shaking him. “I thought I taught you that years ago. But it appears you forgot the lesson.”

Sebastian kisses him, biting his bottom lip brutally. Blaine cries out in pain, pulling back, and Sebastian lets him go, circling back to Kurt.

“You would do well to watch closely,” he says. “Maybe this time the truth will stick.”

With the final word, he lashes out with the whip, laying it across Kurt’s back once more with a loud crack. Kurt’s head snaps up and he cries out, his face contorted in pain, his mouth open to catch breaths that are harder and harder to take. Blaine shifts in his chair again, wanting with everything he is to go to him and hide him from the abuse.

But Sebastian has the power right now. He could land a blow that would incapacitate Kurt further, maybe even injure him permanently. He knows that Sebastian knows what he’s doing—all slave dealers are trained with the whip, to leave the most effective scars on the work slaves, or to strike delicate but intensely painful welts that never leave a permanent mark on the pricey bodies of bed slaves. Sebastian could easily write off Kurt as a loss and switch to the former technique anytime he wants, and Blaine might just have the power to prevent that, at the very least.

“Master, please,” Blaine begs. “I only—”

“Stop,” Sebastian says. “Whatever comes out of your mouth is going to be a lie, isn’t it? It was last time. Otherwise, this wouldn’t have happened!”

He snaps the whip again, and Kurt cries out. Blaine finds himself standing, before he can even think about the action and its possible consequences.

“Stop!” he cries. “Sebastian, please.”

Sebastian’s eyes widen at the use of his name, and he stares at Blaine. Blaine stares right back, his hands up placatingly.

“Sebastian, I’m sorry,” he says softly. “I never meant to hurt you. I didn’t know you still wanted me.” He gathers himself. “If I’d known, I wouldn’t have sought his comfort.”

“I don’t believe you,” Sebastian snaps.

“It’s true,” Blaine insists. “I thought you were done with me. You’ve had many favorites over the years, I thought you’d…forgotten me.”

“And yet I kept you,” Sebastian says, and his voice is still firm, but there’s a little bit of doubt sneaking into his expression. “Your words are pretty, Blaine, but they’re sloppy—”

“I thought I was useful,” Blaine says, and this, at least, is very true. “I thought you kept me because I was good at running the harem and I saved you the time and effort. You stopped using me regularly, and I thought you’d moved on.”

Sebastian lowers the whip and walks over to him, his eyes intense on Blaine’s own. He crowds into Blaine and Blaine resists the urge to back away, instead forcing himself to relax into the proximity. He can do his best to play into Sebastian’s feelings for him, whatever they are. He can use this; even though the lies are hard to tell, and they feel like they’re taking a piece of his soul with them every time they fall from his lips, he has to. It could save Kurt. Pretending he wants Sebastian back couldsave him.

Because that’s what this is. It wasn’t Kurt—it was Blaine the whole time.

“I could have anyone run the harem,” Sebastian says quietly, lifting his hand and running his thumb over Blaine’s lips. “There are professionals for that. You thought I kept you for that? You—you are mine. You will always be mine. And I think it’s time to remind you.”

He wraps his other arm around Blaine’s back, the braided leather of the whip tickling against his ass and legs as it drapes from Sebastian’s hand. Blaine leans in, his right hand landing on the desk for what he hopes Sebastian sees as support.

He crawls his fingers across the wood, seeking.

“The trash behind me is going back to the harem,” Sebastian says, his breath hot against Blaine’s face. “He’ll be locked in his room until he heals, and then we’ll find a buyer for him so that you aren’t…tempted again. In the meantime, you will stay in my rooms, and we’ll spend as long as we have to in there making sure you understand again. You belong to me, and you will never love another.” His voice wavers for a moment, and he tugs at Blaine’s lower lip with his thumb, surprisingly tender as he studies the damage he did with his teeth. “Mine.”

Blaine fingers brush metal, but he can’t get close enough, not without risking detection. He leans in and kisses Sebastian hard, spinning himself back against the desk, the wood digging into the flesh of his thighs.

“Fuck me,” he begs quietly. “Here, now, please. Show me.”

It works, and Sebastian grabs his thighs and lifts him onto the desk, spreading him open and shoving his tongue into Blaine’s mouth. Blaine sucks on it, arching his back and placing his hands behind himself, leaning back. Sebastian follows slowly, nails dragging up, leaving stinging lines of red up his ribs before he grabs Blaine’s jaw, forcing his head back and deepening their kiss hard enough to hurt.

Blaine’s hand closes around the metal. He pulls back, tightening his thighs around Sebastian’s hips and holding him close.

“Yours,” he whispers, and Sebastian almost smiles at him just as Blaine swings.

The heavy hole-punch clips Sebastian’s head just above his ear, sending him stumbling back. He curses, looking up quickly.

“You—”

Blaine hops down and swings again, this time catching Sebastian right across the base of his skull. He drops heavily, and Blaine swings again, just in case, the metal singing when it collides with bone, this time laying open a gash that immediately trickles blood down through Sebastian’s hair. He drops the hole punch, grateful for the heavy quality of it, and runs over to Kurt.

“Kurt, can you move?” he asks, cupping Kurt’s face. “How hurt are you?”

He shifts over, panicking quite a bit over the past twenty minutes, and looks over Kurt’s back, his fingers working clumsily at the strong tape that holds his ankles and wrists together. He finally finds a tab and pulls, unwinding the tape as quickly as he can as he takes in the hard ridges crossing Kurt’s back.

“Oh, Kurt,” he breathes, catching Kurt when he slumps over, finally freed. He’s breathing unsteadily, but he’s breathing, and his eyelashes flutter against his cheeks.

“Blaine?” he asks, his voice faintly slurred. Blaine cups his cheeks and kisses him very gently.

“I’m here, it’s okay,” Blaine whispers, struggling against the prickle of tears in his eyes. He wants so much to break down and cry and hold Kurt close right now, but he can’t yet—their plans, their escape, it all has to happen now. “We’re leaving, Kurt, it’s time to go. Can you stand?”

Kurt breathes for a moment before he nods, clutching at Blaine’s arms and straining to stand upright. He achieves it unsteadily, leaning heavily, but he’s up, and Blaine walks him to the chair, sitting him on the edge.

“I need you to hold on for just a minute, okay?” Blaine says softly, as though speaking to a child. “Can you do that for me?”

Kurt nods again, his fingers moving to grasp the edge of the chair, holding himself up. Blaine hovers for a moment, making sure he’s steady, before he rushes across the room, looking for the thumb drive that Sebastian threw. He finds it near a bookcase, still intact despite the impact against the wall. He rushes to the computer, plugging it in and checking it.

It has several videos on it, but nothing of the evidence against Sebastian. And when he looks through the computer, the files are missing.

“Damnit,” he curses, looking around. It’s too much to ask for the drive to be in the computer, and it isn’t, nor is it in any of the open drawers. But Sebastian wouldn’t just throw all that away—there were important documents, and he’d keep it all somewhere.

Blaine tugs at the two bottom drawers on the desk. They are locked, and a quick check of Sebastian reveals no key. He’s not prepared to break in like he wanted to be when they decided to leave—he has a little knife in his room that he could have used to help pick the lock with a paper clip. The only sharp object in the room is a letter opener, but it’s too big to fit in the tiny lock.

So he improvises. The letter opener is an ornate, pretentious thing, styled to look like a jewelled dagger. It’s thick and heavy, the edge sharp. He tests the tip—it’s strong, but it almost cuts his finger. He takes it by the handle and, as quickly as he can, jimmies it into the negligible gap between the edge of the drawer and the desk itself.

It’s not easy going. The opener still bends, but he manages to jam it in quite a bit before the pull of the lock stops it. It’s not perfect—there’s only a little gap—but Blaine thinks he’s strong enough to make it enough. The opener isn’t strong enough to pry open the drawer—but there might be something that is.

He grabs the hole punch—it’s heavy, but the handle of it is a relatively thin edge. It almost fits behind the push of his arms, but it’s only when he stands and stomps on it that it wedges in completely. After that, it’s a matter of sweating and straining through tugging on the bottom edge until the wood starts to give. The entire time, Kurt’s breathing, loud but increasingly steady, is what gives Blaine the motivation to continue, even when it seems too hard. He finds himself working along with its rhythm, and soon enough—even though it feels like too long entirely—the drawer gives, the wood next to the lock splintering enough that Blaine can pull out the punch and use it as a bludgeon to remove the rest.

The drawer contains some of what Blaine is looking for. A thumb drive, which, upon inspection, contains the files they’d gathered as well as other backup files from the computer that Blaine hadn’t been able to access. Beside that, over some file folders with hard copies of sales reports that Blaine leaves, there is a handgun—small, black, and powerful-looking, a full mag already loaded up. Blaine checks the safety and tucks it in his waistband, unsure of what else to do with it and hoping that he can figure it out based on his woeful education of watching television and movies and the minimum research he thought he could get away with on his own laptop.

All he needs now is a car key, and there’s only one other locked drawer in the desk. He checks on Kurt, kissing him and whispering to him encouragingly before he turns and breaks through the bottom of the drawer he just broke into, reaching in and searching through the keys until he finds what he’s looking for—an old key, with a thick plastic head and jagged metal teeth instead of the sleek, straight lines of the newer electronic keys. It has no remote with it to open the locks or start the vehicle, and it’s just what Blaine needs.

“Can you bear to wear a shirt?” Blaine asks. “It’ll be a little tight on you, but it shouldn’t hurt too much.”

Kurt looks unsure.

“I might,” he says truthfully, “but we’d have to go back to the harem, I don’t know—”

“I wasn’t planning on going back to the harem,” Blaine says. “I was just going to steal Sebastian’s clothes and leave him here.”

Kurt looks around for a moment. His mouth twists, and he considers for a moment before he sighs.

“I think it would look suspicious if we were leaving with me in baggy jeans and a too-tight shirt,” Kurt says reasonably, and Blaine has to admire the level head he’s keeping—he is close to an all-out panic attack himself. “I think we should return to the harem, act casual, and then we can head out like we planned. Even if it takes a little extra time.”

Blaine kisses Kurt and smiles at him.

“I’d be a wreck without you,” he says. “Let me tie him up and then we can go.”

He grabs a roll of tape from the desk and binds Sebastian’s wrists and ankles tightly, not caring a whit if he cuts off all circulation. Maybe if Sebastian loses his fingers and toes, it’ll be some kind of retribution for the wrongs he’s done. One for the traumatized boys just barely out of childhood, one for the people whose families they’ll never see again, one for the lovers torn apart by jealousy, one for the injuries to innocent people, and on and on and on. Every vein that stops coursing blood, every artery that crushes down, can pay for the lashes on Kurt’s back and for every kiss he ever stole from Blaine’s lips, pretending it was some sick approximation of love.

Finally, he tapes Sebastian’s mouth, winding it around his head several times to make sure he can’t rub it off when—if—he wakes. He decides to keep the tape as well, just in case, leaving the roll over his wrist.

“Okay,” he says. “Come on, we’re going.”

“Wait,” Kurt says. “Can we—should we send everything to my dad? Just in case?”

Blaine nods in agreement.

“Yeah, just one sec.”

He loads the thumb drive and attaches everything to an email to Burt’s address. With a quick message to expect them soon, Blaine pulls the drive and pockets it, turning back to Kurt.

He locks the office behind them and helps Kurt limp out and through the house, and it says something for Sebastian’s household when nobody gives a clearly injured Kurt a second glance—not the two guards stationed by the front hall, not the three house slaves they pass on their way to the harem. Blaine feels like he’s floating in a dream, like it’s not really happening, and he clings to that, hoping it’ll get him far enough away before he inevitably cracks under the stress. He’s close now—his breathing is coming shorter, and his heart is hammering far too hard for what physical strain he’s under. It’s going to crash eventually, but he needs to get them out before it happens.

Kurt, on the other hand, bears up like a living embodiment of Atlas, wincing and gasping but otherwise trudging on, not a single complaint to be heard. Blaine loves him desperately in that moment.

“What happened?”

Nick stands in the common room, his eyes wide. He rushes forward, but Blaine pauses and holds up a hand to stall him.

“Just let us go into Kurt’s room,” Blaine says. And then he takes a risk and decides to trust him—he’s not sure he can handle Kurt and packing and getting out all at once, and Nick has always been his friend. “Come in with us and I’ll explain.”

When he has Kurt sitting on the bed, he immediately starts pulling out clothes, a few shirts and pants and some underwear and socks, and he selects an easy pair of ankle boots and brings it all out, setting it on the bed. He very carefully pulls Kurt’s briefs down, damp with sweat. He pulls out the wipes from his bedside table and gingerly cleans everything he can, grimacing at every one of Kurt’s hisses of pain as he works and talks.

“Kurt and I are leaving,” he explains without ceremony. “Sebastian wasn’t jealous of him, he was jealous of me, and he whipped Kurt this morning. He had me come in and he was going to make me watch like he did with Jeremiah, and then he was going to lock me in his room and teach me a lesson just like he did last time. And I won’t lay back and let him fuck me into submission while he hurts someone I love.”

“That’s what he did? Last time?” Nick asks, looking ill.

“Yes,” Blaine says. “And he was going to do it again. Kurt and I were planning to leave anyway, but things have moved up a little.”

“Where’s Sebastian right now?” Nick asks.

“He’s bleeding on the floor of his office,” Blaine says, his voice cracking as saying the words brings the reality of it front and center. He takes a deep breath and pushes through. Sebastian doesn’t deserve his guilt, and somehow, all the pain that Sebastian ever caused Blaine wells up like blood from the wound on Sebastian’s head, and Blaine feels it draining from him. “He’s tied up. But who knows when Trent will need to go in there to get some papers, so he could be found anytime. We have to go.”

Nick just nods.

“I’ll go grab some stuff from your room,” he says, and bolts out.

Blaine dresses Kurt, putting the loosest, softest shirt he could find on him. He tugs on new briefs, tight jeans, light socks, and the ankle boots, and brushes his hair with his fingers to make him look at least halfway presentable.

“Does it—look tragic?” Kurt asks, his breath stuttering as the shirt shifts against his back.

“You shouldn’t look this good, actually,” Blaine says, brushing his lips against Kurt’s forehead. “Are you ready to go?”

“I’m ready.”

Nick comes back just then, a small duffle bag in his hands that used to hold Blaine’s boxing gear. Now, when he lays it on the bed, Blaine sees some of his own clothes in it. Nick throws in Kurt’s things and zips it up.

“Need any help?”

“I think we got it,” Blaine says, throwing the strap of the bag over his free shoulder as Kurt takes his place against the other.

Nick smiles at him sadly, and it’s then that Blaine realizes how selfish he’s been. Nick and Jeff are in love, too, and they could’ve escaped as well.

“Nick, I’m sorry—” he begins, but Nick just shakes his head.

“No, you gotta do what you gotta do,” he says simply. “If Jeff and I could’ve escaped, we’d have found a way by now.”

“Come with us,” Kurt pipes up. “Get Jeff and just come with us, we’ll—”

“We can’t,” Nick interrupts. “You guys going—you can probably slip out without too much notice, but all four of us? That’s too suspicious. We’ll get caught. Better some of us get out than none of us at all.”

He smiles again.

“Jeff and I were purchases, remember?” he says. “We can always try to get our freedom someday. We’re not farm slaves—we have identities, we have different rights. We’ll figure it out, we’ll find each other.”

“It’ll happen soon,” Kurt assures. “We have evidence that can shut Sebastian down, maybe they’ll let you go.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Nick replies doubtfully. “But you guys should go. Don’t wanna wait too long. I’ll go distract the guards—you guys wait here till we go by and then get out, okay?”

Blaine nods. Nick nods back and slips out. Moments later, there’s yelling, and the sound of pounding feet. Nick peeks in and waves them out.

Blaine pauses for only a moment. There’s nothing else he feels like he can say. This is it.

He walks Kurt out of the harem, down the hall, and out into the garden.