Blaine lifts his gaze and peers down the cluttered hallway, swallowing his growing unease. As much as his brother's voice becomes a canker when Blaine listens to it for too long, the idea of calling him back crosses his mind. Blaine knows he would be setting himself up for endless ribbing, but right now he needs something familiar to keep him company.

Blaine has been left alone in project houses before, but they were nothing like this one. Blaine is a sympathetic person, totally without meaning to be. It took him a long time to build up a thick skin to guard against the kind of grief and despair that comes with confronting a hoard in a foreclosed house, but a speck of that grief always seems to attach itself to him. The painful memories, the unfulfilled hopes, the broken dreams – they speak to him on a personal level. They are powerful, almost tangible entities, with minds of their own. He sloughs them off as best he can, he trains himself to be detached, but something inevitably clings to him, walking away with him, nagging at him all the way home.

He usually eradicates those demon emotions through rom-com marathons and buckets of popcorn mixed with peanut M&Ms, but he doesn't see that working this time.

This house is unique.

Its long-forgotten treasures have found a way underneath his skin. He feels them accumulate with every breath in that he takes. The spirits of this house have wrapped their fingers around his heart and taken hold. If he doesn't leave now, he's afraid he's not going to. He'll simply sink into the swamp of its despair and become one with the piles of unopened toys and unfinished puppets.

Blaine isn't convinced that there are enough sappy Kate Hudson and Meg Ryan movies in existence to set him free if that happens.

Blaine pushes himself off the table. He pockets his webcam and Bluetooth, and starts down the staircase that leads to the basement. He expects it to look like any other basement now that the lights are on, now that he's walked through it and become familiar with everything inside, but an abrupt pang hits him in the chest when he sees the workshop again, especially when he eyes the open door to the room with the shattered puppets on the floor. He tries not to think too hard about it as he gets to work. He clears his mind of the smashed picture frames from upstairs and the demolished photographs they once held. He shoves away any thoughts of a possible connection between the atrocity in that bedroom and the abused puppets in the basement.

He tries, but he doesn't necessarily succeed.

Blaine finds two worn cardboard boxes in the workshop that only have a handful of things in them. He moves those to another fuller box and carries the empty boxes into the room. He decides to pack the puppets separately, putting the pieces for the blue-eyed puppet in one box, and the pieces for the green-eyed puppet in the other.

Blaine is eager to move the blue-eyed puppet first, but its head and body are made entirely of porcelain. They're brittle and cracked. He's afraid that the contents shifting around in the box while he drives might cause further damage. In the basement, he sees nothing to wrap the pieces with. There are bolts of fabric in the workshop, but with their age and the moisture all around, he's not sure that they aren't molded through and won't disintegrate the second he unrolls them, releasing mold and filth and general grossness into the air. He has some towels and blankets in the van, but he doesn't want to waste time doubling back up the stairs empty handed. So he begrudgingly starts with the green-eyed puppet, whose parts are made of wood, and less likely to break.

He decides to stack the puppet limbs first, then torso, and finally the head, to minimize any potential scratches. He bends down to retrieve the first piece – an arm. His fingers barely touch it when an arc of blue electricity shoots out from the limb like a great tentacle, spiraling around his fingertips. Blaine jerks back, catching himself before his foot comes down hard on one of the porcelain limbs. Blaine's heart pounds against his ribcage, but he's startled more than hurt. He rubs his hand to diffuse the burning tingle in his skin. He stares at the wooden limb, waiting for it to move or for another arc of electricity to dart out and grab his ankle this time, or his leg. His body shakes with anticipation, but the limb remains dormant. Blaine looks at his fingertips, certain that he'll see scorch marks left behind, but his skin looks unharmed. Blaine moves his hand back and forth in front of his face, wiggling his fingers and flexing his joints.

There are no marks on his skin, but there's a definite aftertaste in his mouth. It's an unusual mixture of anger, bitterness, and a sense of resentment so strong, it refuses to go away. He runs his tongue along the roof of his mouth and swallows over and over, but the flavor hangs on tight.

“What the hell was that?” Blaine asks out loud, subconsciously expecting Cooper to interject a snarky remark, but his question gets answered only by silence. The shaking in Blaine's muscles dies down to a subtle tremble as the adrenaline level in his body drops. “O-kay…” He approaches the limb again like he's addressing a frightened dog. “I'm going to pick you up now. I'm not going to hurt you. I'm going to take you home with me and fix you up. You'd like that, wouldn't you?”

Blaine brushes the limb with his fingertips, then snatches them back, bracing for the stinging fork of electricity.

But nothing happens.

He touches the limb once more, then tentatively wraps his fingers around it, picks it up, and puts it in the box. He does the same with the next limb, testing it out with a graze of his fingertips before grabbing it and placing it beside its mate. He packs the remaining body parts this way, glad that Cooper and his audience can't see this ritual. His mind reels, trying to come up with a logical explanation. He assumes that the friction of his shoes on the carpet, coupled with the dust on his clothes, must have caused the shock.

He'll overlook the fact that the stream of electricity wrapped itself around his fingers like a lasso.

He picks up the puppet's torso, bending it at the waist to fit it into the box. Finally, he picks up the head, holding it with both hands. His eyes unintentionally meet the green-eyed stare of the puppet. Blaine hears an ominous crackling in his ears, and he freezes. The electricity isn't there, but the anger is, the bitterness, and the resentment. It pulses through his body like a ripple and carries with it a phantom voice that is less of a physical sound than a feeling.

You were a mistake! A horrible mistake! You did this! Everything…it's all your fault!

Blaine drops the head in the box. He doesn't mean to, but it flies from his grasp as if it was batted out of his hands. It lands face down on the torso of the puppet with a loud clunk. He would have rather not dropped it, but he's glad he doesn't have those eyes staring up at him.

If he had to personify this puppet in the same absurd way he's done to everything else, he'd say it doesn't seem to like him.

Blaine folds the flaps of the box loosely shut over the top and picks it up in his arms. It's lighter than he predicted, but a hell of a lot clumsier. He woefully misjudged the structural integrity of the box. The bottom is not completely secure. It bows outward, and the flimsy cardboard feels like it's falling apart in his hands.

“Please don't break, please don't break, please don't break, please don't break,” Blaine chants as he rushes out of the room, through the workshop, and up the stairs. He keeps on chanting as he picks the fastest route through the living room and out the front door.

The sunlight burns his eyes, forcing them shut. He turns his head into a shadow created by the box in his arms, and blinks a few times to get his eyes to readjust to the outdoors. They water like crazy, dusty tears stinging and streaming down his cheeks, but he doesn't let that stop him. He gets to his van and slides the box onto the roof, sighing with relief that it didn't dissolve along the way. He reaches into his pocket and grabs his keys to unlock the passenger side door. Ignoring the puppet for a second, he dives into the glove box and rummages through it for a tissue to wipe his face. He gently dabs the inside corners of his eyes, then swipes his forehead, his cheeks, and his chin.

“Ugh,” he groans when he pulls it away from his skin and sees a brown film staining the white tissue. He grabs another tissue and wipes down his ears and his neck, feeling more normal now that his skin isn't itchy from the gunk on it. He's still going to have to do some serious deep cleaning of his pores when he gets home, but in the meantime, this is a relief.

He blinks a couple times more until his eyes feel less gritty and he can keep them open for longer than half a second. Then he opens the door to the back seat. He decides to put the puppets in the seats and the tools in the trunk; the puppets have a better chance of staying safe without the threat of heavy tools crashing into them during an unforeseen brake check. He slides the decaying cardboard box off the roof and into the seat on the passenger side, reserving the seat behind the driver for the blue-eyed puppet.

Yeah, he might be taking this to a weird place.

Blaine sets the box in the center of the seat and gives it a shake to make sure it won't slip off. As an extra measure, he pushes the front passenger seat back as far as he can to wedge the box in. He stands back and takes a look. Thank God the rental car place ran out of sedans and upgraded him to a minivan. Blaine resisted the idea that he was driving a mom vehicle for as long as he could, but now he can't help but be glad that he has all this extra room. It would stink to have to make more than one trip from this house to the beach house and back.

Confident that he's done everything he can to keep the wooden puppet safe, he closes the doors, leaving them unlocked since he doesn't want to fumble for his keys when he returns with the more fragile porcelain puppet. Besides, he hasn't seen a soul around all day. He doubts that anyone is skulking about, scoping out his van. And really, in a neighborhood of half-a-million dollar homes, who's going to steal a damaged cardboard box filled with broken puppet pieces?

He rounds to the rear and opens the hatch, searching for anything he can find that might help him protect the porcelain puppet. He finds the blanket and towels that he keeps on hand for impromptu trips to the beach, gathers them up in his arms, and heads back into the house, his footsteps slower and his breathing easier since he's had a rejuvenating moment of fresh air and Southern California sunshine. It inspires him to leave the front door of the house open to get air flowing through the rooms.

A silly notion occurs to him as he heads through the living room, swiftly dodging hazards and circumventing obstacles, his feet having already memorized the way. With the door left open and the light streaming in through the windows, the house seems to breathe.

He climbs down the staircase for the third time that day. It's becoming old hat, but in the back of his mind he knows that the sun will set in a few short hours, and he's not foolhardy enough to be anywhere near this house after dark, lights on or no.

He passes through the workbenches and into the back room where the porcelain puppet waits to join its friend.

His.

His friend.

Blaine can't refer to this puppet as it any longer.

It doesn't feel right.

Blaine clears a spot for himself on the carpet and kneels down, disheartened by the sound of crunching beneath his knees. He wipes his sweaty hands on his jeans, examining the piece in front of him. It's an arm, its surface marred by hairline cracks running every which way, emanating from an impact to the forearm and webbing out in multiple directions. It's a painful-looking break, but regardless, the beauty of this one piece cannot be denied. Whoever fired this puppet paid a tremendous amount of attention to getting the tint of the matte glaze just right. There are subtle variations in the pigmentation so that the skin tone isn't one solid color. Aside from that, finer details have been added – strokes of chestnut-colored paint that give the appearance of hair, a sprinkling of freckles, even a slash of silvery-white that looks like it was meant to be a scar.

All that time, all that work - ruined.

Blaine smiles.

Not anymore, he thinks. Not when he can fix this.

He reaches for the arm, but pauses with his fingers hovering an inch or so away. He marvels at the contrast between his own tan hand and the glaze on the puppet that resembles soft, human skin, wondering if this puppet might shock him, too. Even though he has no evidence to the contrary, he doesn't believe this puppet will hurt him.

He doesn't believe this puppet wants to hurt him.

Blaine lowers his fingertips to the porcelain arm. He runs them delicately up the forearm, stopping at the huge break.

“Don't worry,” Blaine whispers. “I'm going to fix that. I promise.”

The task of moving this puppet's body is more time consuming and exasperating than the last. Every piece he picks up splinters into smaller pieces, and Blaine becomes terrified that if he keeps this up he won't have anything but powder left. Blaine moves the arm at a mind-numbingly slow pace, centimeter by excruciating centimeter, until he gets it into position. He wraps it in a towel and puts it in the box, followed by a leg, then the other leg. But the next arm he touches nearly crumbles to dust. He picks up as many of the large chunks and fragments as he can, hoping that he can find a resin that will sufficiently fill in the holes. He doesn't think he can replicate the intricate hand-painting, but he's going to try. The torso is tricky to manage with the head still attached. The neck joint rattles, and when Blaine picks up the puppet's body, cradling it in his arms like a wounded child, the head lolls to one side, then rolls to face away. Blaine sees a gap separating the head from the neck, which widens when he lifts the puppet higher.

“Nononononono,” he mumbles anxiously, laying the puppet back down.

He knows he can't lift the puppet onto the blanket, so he decides to slide him on. He lays the blanket out on the carpet as close to the puppet as he can, inching the fabric underneath the body as much as he dares. He stops when the body is half on, half off the blanket.

Blaine blushes when he sees the exquisite puppet lying on his blanket like a lover waiting for him. The body may be broken, and one eye missing, but he's still an outstandingly handsome young man.

Blaine cups his hands beneath the lower part of the torso (under the puppet's ass, technically) and slides him further on. He knows Cooper thinks he's crazy for trading his salary to rescue this broken puppet, but what his brother doesn't understand is that Blaine and this puppet have something in common - Blaine is broken, too. He's about as incomplete as they come. No matter what he does, no matter how hard he works, there's something missing. He feels it. He's sure people can see it when they look at him.

His parents definitely do.

Missing a few parts here and there isn't the worst thing that can happen to someone.

Being forgotten, disappearing entirely, that's the worst thing.

Blaine slips a hand beneath the puppet's shoulder and another behind his head, lifting him ever so gently and relocating him the final distance.

“Just a few more inches,” Blaine says in a soothing voice, “and we'll wrap you up and put you in the box.” Blaine gazes at the puppet's face, into his single good eye. He smiles wider as he lays the puppet on the blanket, but his hand beneath the puppet's head starts to feel warm. It begins at a spot in the center of Blaine's palm and radiates like a single ray of golden sunshine. It's liquid heat, pouring into his veins, shooting out to his fingers, filling his body up like a cup of cocoa on a cold winter's day.

His eyes are open, his mind awake, but the haze returns. It obscures his vision in a veil of white mist. It drifts in front of his eyes. He can only peek through in random spots where it thins, revealing shimmering images that disappear like the dreams you hold on to in those seconds right before you wake.

“Can you feel that?” Blaine hears his own voice whispering inside his head.

“I do,” another voice replies. It's high and lilting, pure as silk and singing in his ears.

“What does it feel like?” 

“It feels like…like summer all over my body…”

Blaine laughs, pressing his lips to cool skin. “And what else?”

A giggle answers him in that same musical voice. “It feels like…”

The voice gasps, and Blaine feels his body tighten.

“It feels like you,” the voice whimpers breathlessly. “Everything is you…all around me…it's you…”

Blaine closes his eyes as the world collapses in on him. Behind his eyelids he can see another set of eyes gazing back at him – perfect blue eyes, patient blue eyes, loving blue eyes that shift to grey and glimmer like rare jewels. Quivering pink lips smile at him, part, and then whisper a single, blissfully choked-off word.

“Blaine…”

Blaine's eyelids snap open. He's staring into the puppet's eye, forehead pressed against the one spot of flawless ceramic on his face - at the juncture between his eyebrows. Blaine's breathing comes in heavy pants, his face burning hot, his stomach muscles clenching.

“Jesus…Christ,” he mutters. “What…the hell's…wrong…with me?” Blaine eases the puppet the rest of the way onto the blanket, then wraps him up and lifts him into the box, closing the flaps on top. “Hallucinogenic mold spores,” Blaine babbles, “in the water on the walls…absorbs into the skin…hear about it all the time…” He rambles his way up the stairs and into the dining room, down the hallway, and out the front door. “I'm going to bed the second I get home. There's no way I got enough sleep. No more late night movie marathons for me.”

This cardboard box is sturdy, and he feels a peculiar comfort in holding it against his chest. He opens the door behind the driver's seat and sets the box down, contemplating buckling it in for extra protection. He doesn't want it to slide around while he drives, but he's afraid the seatbelt will tighten and crush the box with the puppet inside.

He can't decide, too befuddle to think straight about anything because Blaine can still feel it – someone else's voice in his head, someone else's body pressed against his, someone else's skin beneath his lips, and those eyes…

Blaine wants to look into those eyes and lose himself for as long as possible.

He closes the door without making a decision, figuring the puppet is safe for now while he gets the rest of the supplies he needs. Since he doesn't assume he'll need any of the big table saws and such, he hopes only one more trip will do it. The sky has gone from bright to golden as the sun starts to sink towards the horizon.

He wants to be on the road soon.

Back into the house and down the steps to the basement he goes. He clears out one more box and collects the tools quickly. He also grabs paintbrushes, tubes of glue, pots of resins and waxes, bottles of lacquers and shellacs, and different varieties of paints. If he has the tools the original puppet maker used, maybe he can come close to copying the artist's technique.

This box, by far, is the heaviest of the three, and Blaine struggles under its weight. He's not about to complain, seeing as he managed to fit everything in it, but climbing up the stairs becomes a complicated waltz of leaning against the wall, stepping up, shifting his weight, turning sideways toward the opposite wall, and stepping up again. He grunts with each step, and twice he almost leans backward too far, but when he reaches the top, he crows with triumph.

“You see that?” he says out loud to himself, balancing the box on his upper thigh so he can shake out his numb hands one at a time. “All in one trip…”

Blaine shuffles across the greasy linoleum, skidding forward on a spot that's slick with a dollop of prehistoric lard, and collides with the dining room table. He doesn't see the table tip, turn ninety degrees, and then slam back on its legs, blocking the entrance to the hallway, but he hears the shower of newspapers fall to the floor, followed by a dull thunk.

Blaine takes a blind step forward and runs into the table. It cuts him off at the waist and knocks the air out of him.

Blaine groans.

“Great. That's just…great.” He sets the heavy box on the table and grabs the lip of the wood, pulling the table away. He sees the newspapers scattered in the entryway, and on top of them, a photo album - overturned and open, pages down, with several loose photos peeking out from underneath the cover.

He might have ignored it, picked up his box and stepped over the album on his way out to the van, but a face peering up at him stops everything.

It stops the breeze in the house blowing.

It stops the world turning.

It nearly stops his heart.

Blaine bends over the album, looking at the face with light greyish skin and darker grey eyes smiling up at him. But Blaine knows those drab hues hide skin of creamy alabaster, and eyes of cornflower blue. Blaine reaches down and slides the photo out from between the pages.

The man in the photo looks exactly like the man Blaine saw wearing the suit.

Those eyes, those lips – they were waiting for Blaine behind his eyelids.

But he also looks like Blaine's beautiful, broken puppet.

“Who were you?” Blaine whispers, tracing the man's eyes, his brows, the slope of his nose, his perfect mouth. “And what are you doing here?”

Blaine gazes at the photograph, looking his fill till he has every line of the man's smiling face memorized. He slips the photograph back into the book, then makes a split-second decision to take the album with him. He had told Cooper he would take everything he needed to fix the puppets. His blue-eyed puppet was built to look like this man; he can feel it. Therefore, he needs the photos to repair him.

Shadows grow long in the hallway as the sun sets further, and as far as Blaine is concerned, that's his cue to leave. He sticks the rest of the photos between the pages and closes the album, shoving it into the box. He picks up the cardboard box, now with the photo album inside, and beats a hasty retreat.

He steps through the front door, stopping momentarily to lock it.

“Okay,” he says, continuing to walk and talk to himself like he's still doing the walkthrough with Cooper, “I'll take all this home and then…”

Blaine is a foot away from the van when he notices something out of place. The box in the passenger seat, the one containing the parts of the wooden puppet, has tipped over to the left. It's stuck in the aisle between the seats, leaning against the box on the other side.

“How in the hell…”

Blaine walks up to the window to get a better look. He has no idea how it could have happened, but it doesn't look like anything has fallen out. He just considers himself lucky that whatever did this didn't knock over the other box instead. He sandwiches the box of tools between his body and the side of the van, and pulls the door handle.

It's locked.

“Huh…”

Blaine walks the box to the back of the car. He opens the hatch, sets the box down, then closes the hatch again. He walks around to the passenger door on the street side and pulls at the handle.

It's locked, too.

He goes back around and tries all of the doors again.

With the exception of the hatch, every single one of them is locked.

Blaine doesn't want to try and explain this one. He just wants to go home.

He fishes out his keys, unlocks the driver's side door, and climbs into the front seat. He climbs over to the second row of seats and fixes the box, repositioning it the way he had it so that it doesn't slide again.

He gives it a shake, trying to figure out how it might have moved, but wedged behind the front passenger seat, it doesn't budge an inch.

“I just…I just need to get out of here,” Blaine admits to himself. “I can't…ugh…”

Blaine goes back to the driver's seat and buckles in. He takes a look around – at the street, at the other houses, at the marbled azure-and-champagne gold sky above, at the collection of cars parked by the curb that weren't there before, their owners tucked somewhere inside their houses, yet to make an appearance.

He doesn't look back at the house when he drives away, letting its maniacal, mismatched paint job fade to black as he turns the corner and heads for the Interstate.

***

It's late when Blaine pulls into the driveway of the beach house. The indigo sky has ultimately consumed the last rays of summer evening sun, and a long line of arc sodium lights casts an unattractive orange glow on the concrete sidewalk. Blaine hears the ocean waves crashing onto the sand from where he sits in the van with the windows wide open. He had to open them ten minutes in to the trip to flood the van with cold air when his eyelids sagged and his head nodded. He cheated at dinner, stopping by an In ‘n Out drive thru for a burger and a milkshake, which he ate on the road despite his own personal beliefs regarding eating while driving.

His muscles ache and his brain screams with exhaustion, but there's no way he's going to sleep anytime soon.

Still gathering his strength to move those boxes one more time, he pulls his cell phone out of the center console and starts composing a text. At the rate he's going, Blaine will never get to the dozens of calls he was supposed to make this evening, but he can at least schedule one thing.

Blaine sends a text to his brother's connection in the collectibles business, Gary Shepton. Blaine had never heard of the man before he arrived in San Diego, but from what he could grasp during conversations with appraisers he worked with at the other houses, Gary is apparently the guy to call in Southern California for anything toy related. Buying, selling, and refurbishing toys is not just a job to Gary; it's a passion. One that he takes very seriously. Gary was heartbroken when the Happy Meal toys in the last house turned out to be junk. Blaine is pretty sure Gary will have kittens when he sees all those toys mint in their boxes, stacked ceiling high. He shoots off the message and gets an immediate response. It's so quick that Blaine wonders if Cooper didn't already clue Gary in, and he's been waiting by his phone the whole day for Blaine to contact him.

Either way, Gary will be at the project house at nine in the morning, hell or high water.

It takes Blaine nearly an hour to unload the van. He chooses the dining room table as his base of operations, and uses the loveseat and the sofa in the recessed living room as a staging area to organize the puppet pieces. He unloads the puppets first since he would feel guilty about leaving them in the van while he unloads the box of supplies. He starts with the box containing the blue-eyed puppet, then the green-eyed one, and finally the tools. He lays out a cloth on the dining room table to protect the wood from the tools as he lays them out. A lot of them he recognizes, but some of them he has no idea what they would be for. Most of those unexplained ones appear to be homemade. Whoever made the puppets also made the tools they needed to put them together.

Conceivably, he could stop there, but he doesn't, taking the time to organize each puppet and lay it out in order so that by the time he's done, he has a visual of how everything will fit together in the end.

The green-eyed puppet gets the loveseat, while the blue-eyed puppet gets the couch.

It's two in the morning before Blaine locks the door to the house and declares himself done. He looks at everything he has spread out between the dining room table and the living room sofa – the puppet pieces, the various tools, the army of bottles, jars, and tubs, and wonders what he has gotten himself into. Why did he want to do this again? Is it worth throwing away his commission on this project, especially when he has more pressing matters to deal with? Blaine looks at the face of the blue-eyed puppet and sighs.

He doesn't have any words to explain it, but yes. The answer is yes. It is worth it.

Now if he could only figure out why.

He's exhausted and elated and confused and eager, but his urgency to get the puppets started seems to have lessened now that he has them home and safe. He decides to retire to his bedroom, but when he reaches the door, he notices specks of dust on his clothes. He remembers the dank basement, the motes floating through the air, the possibility of black mold hiding in wait for him, clinging to his outfit all day long. He turns right around and heads back through the living room to the mud room on the opposite side of the house. He undresses, peeling off layer after layer of spore infested clothing, and stuffs them straight into the laundry machine. He measures out a capful of detergent and pours it in, then pours in another capful for good measure, setting the whole thing on heavy duty deep clean. He pads back across the living room, naked except for his boxer briefs. Halfway across the room, he gets that feeling again – the one that sets every hair on end.

The distinct, very real feeling that someone is watching him.

He looks straight towards the windows with their translucent curtains drawn. Even though they let in a great deal of the outdoor light, they do an excellent job of obscuring the view from outside.

He turns and takes a peek at the puppet heads lying beside their disassembled bodies on the sofa and loveseat. They're just as he left them except…the green eyes of the wooden puppet seem to have shifted.

Are they looking directly at him?

Blaine stares, leaning forward, almost challenging the eyes to do something, and then shakes his head. They probably settled in that position, because there is no way that those eyes are following him.

Blaine heads back to his room, and with one wary eye staring out into the living room, he closes and locks his door.