Cooper's frantic screaming in Blaine's ear scares the dickens out of him more than anything else. Cooper has a surprisingly shrill voice for a grown man. It falls somewhere between the sharp cry of a toddler who has skinned his knee and the wail of a damsel from a black-and-white monster movie. Blaine scrabbles to grab the Bluetooth, yanking the device out of his ear in an attempt to salvage what little hearing he has left.

Yes, the head lying on the floor, staring blankly up at him with one pale blue eye might look like a real human head, but Blaine knows right away that it isn't from the way the light reflects off of its surface, and from the missing eye socket, the area surrounding it shattered in an unnatural star pattern. No, the head isn't human. It's porcelain - bisque masterfully tinted to look like human skin. It absorbs the ambient light around it and glows with an ethereal quality, giving off a halo of pinkish-white.

Blaine waits for the ringing in his ears to die down before he puts the Bluetooth back in his ear, catching Cooper mid-ramble.

“…and did you see, I mean, oh my God! That's…just…creepy as hell!” Cooper's excitement when he makes that statement startles Blaine. It shouldn't, seeing as Cooper has crossed the line into the macabre more than once on this walkthrough alone, not to mention other times in other houses when Cooper had said that he hoped Blaine would uncover something gruesome beneath the piles of trash, like mummified cats or cockroach swarms.

As a joke, Cooper had emphasized. But still…

Luckily, Blaine had yet to stumble on either one of those.

Would Cooper honestly have been thrilled if Blaine had found an actual dead human body? Sometimes Blaine wonders exactly how far Cooper is willing to go for the sake of ratings.

At this precarious moment, Blaine feels it's safer not to ask.

Blaine raises the webcam up along the shaft of light and sees scattered remains, each appearing remarkably human at first blush, but upon closer inspection, just as manufactured as the first.

“Let's see more of the room, Blaine,” Cooper commands. “Get it all. Pan around.”

Blaine feels around the walls inside the doorway, trying to find a light switch, but there doesn't seem to be one. He opens the door behind him wider to let more light from the workshop fill the room. With more than a single shaft of light to work with, he can see from wall to wall of this small room with ease. There are more body parts on the floor, including a second human-sized head, this one with piercing green eyes instead of blue. Blaine takes a step through the door, focusing his webcam on the pieces individually, and notices that all of these parts are exclusively life-size. The body parts are jointed, meticulously painted, made to look real and human, but they're puppets – life-size puppets.

Human-looking puppets.

Blaine steps carefully over the broken limbs and shattered bits of porcelain to give Cooper and his viewers the full effect of this bizarre spectacle. Then he peels his eyes away from the floor to scan the rest of the space. On opposite sides of the room, there are beds, no more than army-issue metal cots by the looks of them, one on each end, pushed up against the wall.

Blaine approaches the bed to the left. It's made up to be slept in, covered in stiff white sheets and a thin, olive-colored wool blanket, with a pillow at the head. Blaine glances over to the matching bed across the way and sees that it, too, is made. On both beds, the covers are thrown back and the mattress indented, indicating that they must have been slept in at one point.

Blaine turns back to the bed he's standing beside, keeping the webcam trained on it as he examines the damp, grey stone wall. He sees marks cut diagonally into the stone, filled with shimmery pink porcelain dust.

Marks that look suspiciously like fingernail scratches.

Blaine's entire body fills with a sudden chill. It starts where his hair stands on end and washes down to his feet. He swallows hard when it begins to fill his throat, knotting into a hard lump, choking him.

This room isn't a closet or an extension of the workshop.

This is a cell.

Blaine doesn't want to be an alarmist. He usually saves the drama for Cooper, and if it hadn't been for the genuine note of nervousness in Cooper's voice when he warned Blaine about the room not showing up on the blueprints, Blaine might consider this all an elaborate set-up. It wouldn't be beyond Cooper's scope to contrive some kind of haunted house inspired mayhem to freak Blaine out on-air, but Cooper Anderson isn't that good an actor.

Blaine considers the bigger picture.

If this was a cell, who was kept in here with these puppet parts scattered all over the floor and why? Was this some kind of weird sweatshop, with the original owner of the house keeping a couple of poor slaves locked down here to create puppets in order to feed his demented doll fetish?

Besides the beds and the broken puppets, there's not all that much to look at in this room, and Blaine can't help but feel sorry for whoever might have been locked in here. Of course, he could be jumping to conclusions, letting the ghastly atmosphere of this house get on his nerves. Whoever owned this house was obviously a toy fanatic, who happened to have a healthy (for lack of a better term) puppet obsession. From the look of the workshop – the order, the organization, the wealth of materials, the half-finished projects – this space is the heart of the house. The owner most likely spent the majority of their time here. Maybe this room was a bedroom built to be as close to the workshop as possible. If the bedrooms upstairs look anything like the living room, the hallway, and the dining room, maybe this was the only place available to sleep.

Blaine sure hopes that's the case.

He pans the camera one last time so that Cooper can get the footage he needs, but without realizing it, his eyes keep returning to the puppet head on the floor – the one with the sorrowful blue eyes. He shifts his gaze over to the green-eyed puppet, but he doesn't stare at it as long as he stares at the first. There's something in those eyes, which change subtly from blue to grey in the artificial light, that haunts him, and he can't shake the feeling, even though reason and logic argue to the contrary, that this beautifully morose puppet is begging for his help.

Cooper's voice pops back through the Bluetooth. “It's like…night of the living dead…creepy…creepy ass dolls…”

Blaine rolls his eyes at his brother's unoriginality.

My brother, the actor, ladies and gentlemen.

Of course, Cooper was always better at reciting other people's lines, not so much with the coming up of his own.

“Well, let's get out of the Valley of the Dolls and head upstairs to the bedrooms. What do you say, Blainey-wainey?”

Blaine nods, even though Cooper can't see him. But Blaine is convinced that the puppet did; that the blue-eyed puppet with the glass eyes is watching Blaine pick his way through the debris to get to the door.

The puppet is watching him leave…and Blaine can't do it.

He doesn't understand why, but he can't leave it. He can't condemn it to a sentence of loneliness in the dark, or to the trash heap when the cleaning crew comes to the house tomorrow.

“Come on, little bro. This is giving me the super heebie-jeebies!”

“I want them, Coop,” Blaine says without really thinking about the consequences, but it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter that tons of Internet viewers heard him. It doesn't matter that Cooper will use this to his advantage. Blaine has a pressing need to rescue this puppet from this horrible house, and not abandon it the way it had been before.

“What?” Cooper asks, the delight in his voice evident.

“You heard me, Cooper,” Blaine says. “I want these puppets.”

“Turn the webcam around so we can see you,” Cooper sings. Blaine drops on to the bed - the springs creaking with his added weight.

Here we go.

Blaine turns the webcam on himself and adopts his most frustrated, put-off face, complete with pouty mouth.

This is another part of the game. If he plays it Cooper's way, he gets what he wants, and Blaine wants those puppets.

“But, Blaine,” Cooper says in a condescending voice, “these disturbing puppet-things could be worth a lot of money, like the ones upstairs. We can fix them up and voila!”

“I don't think they are,” Blaine negotiates, hoping that instead of doing something to make Blaine look like an ass that maybe, for once, Cooper will simply listen to reason. “I think these puppets were made more recently than those other puppets. And look here…” Blaine gets up off the bed and walks over to the green-eyed puppet, focusing the webcam on its smug face. “Look at the varnish work on this puppet head. It's mismatched. I'm not sure that can be fixed. No collector in their right mind would buy it. There doesn't look like there are enough salvageable pieces in here to make one complete puppet, not to mention two. So, my taking these off your hands won't eat into your profits at all.”

He turns the webcam back on his face and waits for Cooper's response.

A long silence meets his well thought-out argument, then the recorded sound of crickets chirping, and Blaine sighs.

He knows it didn't fly.

“What do you want, Coop?” Blaine asks, running a hand through his sweaty curls.

“You know what I want, Blaine,” Cooper replies, and Blaine sighs again. “You know how this works. Make me a deal.”

This is part of a newer segment in Cooper's show called Blaine Makes a Deal. In his mind, Blaine can see the graphic that Cooper already has cued up flashing across his face on Cooper's screen.

Cooper devised this new form of torture a few weeks ago when Blaine had asked to buy a vintage upright piano from one of the other San Diego project houses. Blaine comes up with a compelling argument for what he wants. Cooper retaliates with a reason for why he needs to sell said item (to recoup costs because they are way over budget, because it's worth more to the renovation than to Blaine, because Cooper is considering keeping it for himself, yadda-yadda-yadda). After some bickering and banter back and forth, Blaine gets his keepsake, but in return Blaine does something for Cooper – something embarrassing.

In the case of the piano, Blaine had to complete the rest of the renovation for the house wearing a chicken costume, which sucked because San Diego had been experiencing an unseasonal heat wave his first week there. But the torment was fortunately short lived and now Blaine has a piano.

After that episode, Cooper begged Blaine to find something in the next house that he wanted. Anything. It didn't matter if he really wanted it or not. Apparently viewer response to the segment was so overwhelming that Cooper was desperate to repeat that accidental success.

At the next house, Blaine obliged, asking for a Wedgewood Jasperware music box. He had spotted it amidst a mass of cheesy faux Hummel statuettes and broken Happy Meal toys.

The music box, with its delicate pink coloring and the stark white figure of a woman carved on the lid, reminded him of his mother. She had collected music boxes as a young girl, but between going away to college, changing states, and then getting married, they had all been lost or broken.

Blaine thought that he could give this one to her if she ever spoke to him again.

He paid for it by having to dress as Shirley Temple, complete with a rainbow swirl-lollipop prop, red patent leather Mary Janes, and a curly blonde wig.

“Fine, Cooper,” Blaine says, “but here's the deal - I want all of the pieces in this room, and anything I think I might need to repair them.”

“That's a hefty haul,” Cooper says. “I'm not sure I can come up with a costume ridiculous enough to cover all that…unless you're willing to do the rest of the remodel in only a diaper…”

“Nope,” Blaine says, “I have something better. Something you'd be stupid to refuse.”

“Oooo,” Cooper coos. “Better than my little brother running around in a diaper with a pacifier in his mouth?”

Blaine pauses and makes a face. “Oh my God, Cooper.” Blaine pulls back, shaking his head. “What the hell is wrong with you!?”

Cooper clears his throat. “You…uh…you said you had something better…”

Blaine keeps an eyebrow raised in disbelief as he continues.

“In return, I…” Blaine's eyes drift back to the puppet's face, which he thinks, insanely enough, has started to look hopeful. Can that really be it, or is something in the air he's breathing getting to him? “I'll give you my salary from the renovation, plus my commission.”

Another silence.

“Wh-what?” Cooper sounds stunned, and this time he isn't joking.

“That's right,” Blaine says, feeling the tables turn in his favor. “Everything that I was set to make on this renovation.”

Blaine can hear Cooper breathe but nothing else – no clicking of the computer keys, no scribbling notes, no recorded sound effects.

Cooper is rarely ever speechless, and Blaine wishes he could be there in L.A. with him to see the look on his brother's face.

Blaine realizes that what he's doing is ludicrous. There is no way these broken puppets are worth what his brother is paying him. And what about NYADA? Why is he willing to put his future in jeopardy for this? Blaine can't answer that. If he were to voice all of that out loud, he might actually see how asinine his decision is.

But where intelligent arguments in every form should prevail, they are snuffed out by the feeling that this is what's right.

“Blaine,” Cooper says, sounding more like his older brother than the conceited actor Blaine is used to dealing with, “I can't…”

“Cooper,” Blaine interrupts, worried that Cooper is about to mature without warning and put a kibosh on the whole deal, “I want them. This is important to me.”

Cooper sighs. It's heavy and unamused, but Cooper recovers quickly the way he usually does, and the mega ego he's so famous for returns.

“Well, congratulations, Blaine!” Cooper says in his best game show announcer voice, which sounds a tad forced. “You have just bought yourself a bunch of broken doll parts and a stigma that will follow you around for the rest of your life!”

“Thank you, Coop.” Blaine flips the webcam back around. “As always, you are far too generous.”

“You're welcome. Now that that's settled, would you mind doing your benevolent brother one teensy little favor?”

“Name it,” Blaine says, too overjoyed to be worried about what Cooper might have in mind.

“Can you get the fuckity-fuck-fuck out of that basement?”

Blaine laughs. It ricochets off the walls with a hollow echo. “Sure.”

Blaine is relieved that Cooper agreed to let him have the puppet pieces. Though what would Cooper have actually been able to do to stop him, with him in Los Angeles and Blaine in San Diego? He might drive down, but knowing Cooper that was highly unlikely. Now that the puppets are his, Blaine feels reluctant to leave them. He wants to take them back to the beach house and work on them right away, but he still has the rest of this house to deal with.

He hopes there's nothing upstairs that wants him to take it home. He doesn't have much more to bargain with, and Cooper isn't going to let him get away with not being embarrassed twice.

The next time, Blaine will be wearing a diaper.

Blaine doesn't feel quite as guilty when he leaves the basement room this time, looking over his shoulder once to lock eyes with the blue-eyed puppet, silently reassuring it that he'll be back.

It's much easier to negotiate the house now that the electricity is switched on. Bulbs have sprung on everywhere, and whatever specters had been hiding in the shadows are banished by the light. Blaine comes out of the basement staircase and through the door to the dining room. He peeks down the hallway into the living room and sees the menacing shapes and silhouettes for what they are – toys and puppets and stuffed animals and junk.

With the flip of one switch, Blaine has brought the house to life and exorcised the demons.

“Okay,” he says, an added spring in his step as he heads to the upper level of the house, “I am going up the staircase. I believe you said the bedrooms are up here?” Blaine slips back into TV personality mode, more comfortable with his surroundings since he can see where he's going.

“That would be correct,” Cooper answers. “There should be three bedrooms, a bathroom, and a door that leads to the attic.”

“I take it I'm going to the attic?”

“Exactly.”

There's a distracted catch to Cooper's voice. It's not as teasing as before. Blaine tries to imagine what might be bothering him. This remodel is going to be Blaine's last house for a while, and on top of that, it's their most ambitious project house to date. If Blaine can help Cooper pull this off, it puts Cooper in line to make a worthwhile profit for his investment.

Blaine sees how that might be daunting, but his brother doesn't buckle easily under pressure. It seems kind of odd for him to mellow out now.

Blaine reaches the top of the staircase and comes face-to-face with atrocious avocado-green carpet on the floor and faded pale-gold paint on the walls, but Cooper doesn't rise to the challenge, and for the first time ever, Blaine fills in with the crude humor.

“My God, Coop. It looks like they hired the last guy who decorated your condo to do the upper level here,” Blaine jokes. “What was his name?”

“Hey, no hatin' on Carlos,” Cooper says. “It was either let him decorate my condo or marry his sister.”

“Coop, Coop, Coop,” Blaine scolds with a tsk, “you need to learn when to keep it in your pants.” Blaine makes his way to the last door at the end of the hall – the door he assumes will lead to the attic. In a house this old, maybe there are possums nesting up there…or bats. That would bring the old Cooper back.

Blaine stops short. This house is seriously messing with his mind. What the hell is he thinking? He's not going to contract rabies to cheer his brother up!

The attic turns out to be uneventful. It's a smaller space than it appears from the outside. The door opens to a staircase that leads up to a tiny room, perfectly square, with neatly stacked boxes and a few older furnishings in storage. Cooper mentions nothing about selling them, nor does he do any Internet searches, which is a good thing. Blaine plans to bring this place back to its original splendor, and as many of the furnishings unique to the house that he can use, the better.

“Did you want me to check out these boxes, Coop?” Blaine asks, hanging around on the top stair and glancing them over, trying to find any writing that might indicate what's inside. He sees some indecipherable scrawling (symbols, or maybe shorthand), but nothing he can decipher.

“Nah,” Cooper says. “This looks a little too normal for my taste. Let's get to the bedrooms.”

“Still hoping for some mummified cats?” Blaine asks, bounding down the stairs.

“Aren't I always?”

Blaine leaves the attic staircase and walks out into the hallway. He stops in front of the first door. He reaches for the doorknob, letting his fingers linger on the polished brass.

It winks up at him, gleaming, out of place in this house where every surface is covered in a thick layer of grunge.

“Are you getting any ideas for how we're going to remake this disaster?” Cooper asks. “Or are you going to hire a decorator so you can have more quality time to spend with your creepy puppets?”

“I would like to bring it back to its original design scheme,” Blaine explains, brushing off Cooper's creepy puppet comment. “I figure that I'll do some research, Google pictures of the house in its heyday, maybe hit up the historical society for advice. We have to clear out all the stuff first. That's going to be the bulk of the work, but I won't know for sure how labor intensive that's going to be until I get a look at these bedrooms.”

“And why's that, Blainers?” Cooper asks with a yawn. This instructive chitchat, necessary if the show has a prayer of being taken seriously, bores the hell out of Cooper, and he has no qualms about showing it.

“Because it's my experience, Coop, that the majority of the mess in a hoarder's house can usually be found in the bed…rooms…”

Blaine turns the knob and pushes the door open, shoving it harder than he needs to, expecting to encounter a large mound of stuff blocking the entrance. The door flies open and Blaine falls forward, fumbling the webcam one-handed, but catching it before it hits the ground.

“Blaine?” Cooper calls through the earpiece. “Are you alright, squirt?”

“Yeah,” Blaine answers, righting the webcam so Cooper can see. “I kind of expected that door to be harder to open, but…”

His sentence cuts off again as he surveys the room.

“It's…clean…” Cooper says, watching the view from Blaine's webcam, staring at a room that has been surprisingly well kept.

Though preserved seems like a more accurate term.

The room is decorated simply by modern standards, but it was probably considered stylish in its time. The bed in the far corner consists of a full-size mattress in a mahogany frame, a matching dresser and wardrobe standing against the wall by its side. Above the dresser hang pennants representing baseball teams in the American League – the Chicago White Sox, the Detroit Tigers, and the New York Giants. Alongside those pennants hangs a framed jersey that Blaine doesn't recognize. It's a cream-colored baseball jersey that, miraculously, doesn't appear to have faded with age. Maroon pinstripes run vertically from shoulder to hem, the name Smythe sewn across the back.

The jersey doesn't look like a professional jersey.

It looks like it was made for a child.

Above the pennants sits a baseball bat sealed in a wood-and-glass shadowbox.

“Look up there, Blaine,” Cooper says with a touch of awe. “Is that a genuine…”

“Louisville Slugger? It looks like it.” The bat is mounted high above Blaine's head, too high for him to see it closely. He doesn't want to step on any of the furniture, so he raises the webcam over his head for Cooper to get a better look.

Cooper gasps.

“It's signed, Blainey! That might be Mel Ott's signature.”

“That would make sense,” Blaine says. “He played for the New York Giants, and there's a New York Giants pennant on the wall.”

Blaine hears Cooper typing on his computer again. “Let's move along to the next room, Blaine. We may have struck out in here, but I bet the real catastrophe is next door.”

Struck out, Blaine thinks. A baseball pun. Sigh…

Blaine takes one final sweep of the bedroom with his webcam before he heads for the next room. Blaine sees another polished doorknob, and that confuses him. With all the clutter downstairs making it difficult to walk around, who would bother to come up here to clean the doorknobs? Or to keep that one room spotless?

Blaine doesn't push as hard on this door when he opens it, and it, too, swings in effortlessly.

This bedroom is as clean as the one before. It has a similar mahogany bed, along with a matching dresser and wardrobe, but with a few additional touches. There's a wicker dress form in the corner of the room, and a cherry wood sewing table next to it, an antique Singer sewing machine set into the top. There is no sports memorabilia on these walls. The walls in this room are covered in posters, framed like the ones downstairs, but the glass on these is spotless.

Blaine goes down the line of posters, reading off the names.

“Porgy and Bess…Arabella…The Eternal Road…these are old operas from the thirties,” Blaine remarks. He walks to the dresser, where a leather box covered in deep purple velvet sits. Using only his fingertips on the metal latch, he opens the lid and aims the webcam inside.

“So, a sewing box, a sewing machine, a mannequin…thingie, theater posters…are we thinking a son and a daughter?”

“That's a sexist assumption.” Blaine turns away from the dresser and walks toward the wardrobe, to root through the clothes and see if his brother might be right.

“True, but think about context, Blainey,” Cooper points out. “This stuff is from the thirties. If there was ever a time to be sexist…”

“You make a valid point,” Blaine interrupts, pulling a suit from the closet and carrying it to the bed to lay it out, “but I believe this room might have belonged to a boy.”

“A boy into sewing and musical theater.” Cooper chuckles. “You two could have been friends.”

“Yeah,” Blaine agrees, running his hand lightly over the expertly tailored suit – a suit that looks as if it has never been worn. “Maybe we could have.”

Blaine takes a moment longer gazing at it – the fine details, the even stitches, the amazing craftsmanship. This is a garment that was lovingly made, and has definitely withstood the test of time. It's a shame it didn't get any use.

“Okay,” Cooper says, clapping his hands hard, the sharp noise making Blaine wince, “you know what that means. The mess that we're searching for is behind lucky door number three.”

Blaine grimaces. That's Cooper for you. Always hoping for those mummified cats.

Blaine backs away from the bed, filming the handsome suit laying on it. A haze passes in front of his vision, and he suddenly sees an image of a young man standing before him – a man about his age - wearing that suit.

A man with fair skin, as fine as porcelain, and eyes bluer than the ocean - eyes holding such a depth of sadness that Blaine feels his heart stutter in his chest.

“Blaine?” Cooper's voice cuts through, clearing the image from Blaine's head like blowing away a wisp of smoke. “What's wrong there, little bro?”

“Wh-what do you mean?” Blaine asks, turning his head left and right, trying to find the heartbroken man in the suit. The suit is there on the bed, but the man is nowhere to be seen.

Why did he look so familiar?

“I mean, you made a sound like someone punched you in the gut. Are you okay? Did you run into something off camera? Because we talked about that…”

Cooper requires that all accidents be filmed - not for insurance purposes, but because it's funny.

“N-no,” Blaine stammers, doing a full 360 to get one last look around. “No, I think I've been here a little too long, that's all.”

“Well, we only have a few more rooms to go, and then you can go home and do the rest of the menial work. I'm not paying you for nothing, you know.”

Blaine scoffs. “In this case, you're not paying me at all.”

“Exactly,” Cooper says, and Blaine can hear his brother's irritating grin. “So get your tuchus moving.”

Blaine approaches the last bedroom, sure that Cooper is right. He'll turn the knob, open the door, and something horrible will fall on him.

He doesn't even want to consider what that horrible thing is likely to be.

Blaine wraps his fingers around the doorknob. This one's polished too, but he's concentrating so hard on formulating evasive maneuvers that he doesn't notice. He turns the knob and pushes the door in, letting go so it can swing freely the rest of the way while he takes a huge step back.

But no avalanche follows him out into the hallway.

Blaine steps through the door to another pristine room. It, too, has a mahogany bed with matching dresser and wardrobe.

“Three children?” Cooper asks, but Blaine is already shaking his head.

“No,” Blaine replies, walking toward the dresser and a pile of overturned picture frames, shards of glass crunching underfoot. Blaine cautiously picks up one metal frame between his thumb and index finger. “Parent.” Blaine turns the frame over. The damage is extensive, so much so that the broken glass has torn straight through the photograph underneath.

All Blaine can tell is that the picture is black and white, and there are three people in it, but he can't see their faces.

“Definitely a parent,” he repeats.

He turns over the frames, each one decimated, the glass smashed, the photographs desecrated beyond recognition. The trail of broken frames leads Blaine to a dark spot in the carpet, and a spattering of thicker, amber-colored glass pieces. Blaine crouches low to get a better look at it. The liquid has soaked through the carpet, all the way to the padding underneath.

No one even tried to clean it up.

A foot or so away from the stain, Blaine finds the neck of a liquor bottle.

“It seems like someone went on a bit of bender and did some damage,” Coopers says.

Blaine stands, his eyes fixed on the picture frames, the bottle neck, and all that glass. It reminds him of the scene in the basement room – the body parts, the fragments of porcelain everywhere, and the blue-eyed puppet staring up at him with longing.

Like the man in the suit.

Could this have happened the same night those puppets were destroyed?

Blaine walks away slowly, but he can't stop staring at the glass, because the reality of it is all so horrible. These photographs, violated so senselessly, are horrible. The violence of this damage is horrible. This wasn't an accident. Someone didn't trip and fall into the dresser and knock these over. They were demolished out of anger.

“All of these bedrooms are…”

“Immaculate,” Blaine finishes.

“Yeah,” Cooper agrees with a disappointed sigh. “That bites. I was really hoping for a pizza box landslide at the very least.”

Blaine sucks in a shuddering breath as he sweeps the camera around, taking one last panoramic shot. He thinks about what it would take to push someone to do this. How much would a child have to disappoint their parents to make them want to obliterate the memory of their face?

Would going to the wrong college be enough?

“Let's finish up downstairs so we can get you out of there,” Cooper suggests, mirroring Blaine's thoughts from the past few hours.

Blaine backs out of the room, leaving the gut-wrenching scene behind him, and unlike the other two rooms, he shuts the door.

Blaine wants this to be over. He's had enough.

He bypasses the upstairs bathroom, with surprisingly no complaints from Cooper, and hurries down the stairs to the dining room. He walks swiftly down the hallway and across the living room. He ignores the piles of toys and debris, not even thinking to put the mask back on his face as he breathes the foul air. He reaches the far end of the house – a section he overlooked earlier since he was so focused on not dying. This part of the house includes the kitchen, the downstairs bathroom, and a guest/servant bedroom, but all three rooms are nothing but floor to ceiling toys without an inch of space to spare.

“Well, I think that's it for your house,” Blaine says, his heart racing at the thought of gathering up his puppets and heading out of there as soon as possible. “Was there anything else you wanted to see?”

Cooper seems to wait a breath on purpose before he answers.

“You seem kind of anxious, Blaine. Do you have a hot date or something?”

“Nope.” Blaine starts taking obligatory background shots of the rooms on the lower level, working his way to the dining room. “Just eager to get started on your remodel. I have a lot of phone calls to make, emails to send out, plans to sketch…you know the drill.”

“Yeah, but you've never been so Johnny-on-the-Spot before. I would have stopped paying you sooner if I knew that was the way to get you to bust your ass.”

“Don't flatter yourself, big brother.” Blaine stops at the dining room table, leaning his hip against it. “I want to hit the beach. Go work on my tan.”

“Well, you do that, Blainey-boy. Just make sure you're back there bright and early in the morning.”

“Will, do, Coop.”

“And all of you out there in computer-landia, be sure to tune in…”

Blaine turns off the webcam. He disconnects the call in the middle of Cooper's PSA, and pulls the Bluetooth out of his ear. With his index finger, he massages his sore ear canal, glad to be rid of the stupid thing. Blaine breathes in deep and exhales long, trying to will his aching muscles to relax.

When Blaine started helping Cooper film these walkthroughs, he was amazed at how exhausting wandering through a house could be. Add to that the anxiety of not knowing what God-awful thing you might find, along with constantly trying to be entertaining and informative, and sometimes Blaine thinks that Cooper isn't paying him nearly enough.

Most of the time, when Blaine does a walkthrough of a project house, someone accompanies him – a relative of the past homeowner, a member of the fire department, one of Cooper's contractors, the realtor – even if that person doesn't show themselves on camera. This time around, Cooper didn't want to consult the fire department just in case they declared the house unsafe (the bastard), none of the contractors were available, there were no relatives to consult, and the realtor outright refused to come.

Blaine goes over the schedule for the rest of his day in his head. He still has so much work to do here. He has to move the puppets and some of the tools out to his minivan. He has about a dozen or more phone calls he has to make. He has to write up an itinerary and throw together some preliminary sketches.

Blaine can feel the aftermath of this walkthrough start to weigh heavily on his shoulders. So many of the houses he's visited previously have had their fair share of ghosts, but this house seems to have them in spades. He shakes his head to clear his mind, letting the silence surrounding him bleed into his brain, and comes to an unnerving realization.

Without his brother's voice in his ear, Blaine is completely and utterly alone.