Blaine doesn't go to bed when he leaves the puppets and locks himself in his room. He's waited too long to take a shower. He can feel the bacteria crawling across his skin. He walks straight to his private bathroom, turns the shower to hot, and stands beneath the spray, not even flinching when the scorching water beats down on his skin. He wants to shut his mind off and put the day to rest. He hopes that the hot water, practically burning him, turning his skin red and splotchy where it touches, will give him something else to think about, but, as it turns out, it isn't enough to erase all of the unnerving weirdness he experienced.

When the day had started, Blaine was ready to go through the motions of filming another house for his brother, and being humiliated before a live Internet audience. He had put on his favorite music to get into the right mindset, and had chosen his clothes carefully, building up his armor from the inside out. He had looked forward to the end of it, when all he had to do was come home and work out the finer details.

That seemed like ages ago.

Now that that day was over and a new one beginning (he hates to admit it, but one look at the time on his phone before he stepped into the bathroom proves that it's true), he is stuck trying to resolve a multitude of feelings at war within him. In his living room are two puppets – one of which he is starting to have unorthodox feelings for, and another he believes wants to hurt him.

Blaine laughs out loud when that thought enters his head.

He can picture himself in a few years, bouncing from his brother's terrible renovation show to TLC's My Strange Addiction. His story can probably top that guy who admitted to having a sexual relationship with his car.

Blaine adjusts the water temperature to a less lethal level before third-degree burns can set in. He leans his forehead against the cool, damp tile, and closes his eyes, trying to imagine himself in a make-shift studio confessional, sitting on a red chintz sofa in front of a brown, sponge-painted wall, explaining how this demented relationship started – how he gave away his dreams of going to NYADA and becoming a performer on stage and screen because he fell in love with a puppet he found in the basement of a foreclosed house.

But the tail end of a dry laugh dies on his lips when he sees those eyes again – shimmering blue eyes that darken with desire as they gaze up at him through long, chestnut-colored lashes. Quivering pink lips whisper his name over and over like a chant. He can hear the voice in his head as clear as he can hear the shower water pattering against the tile.

Blaine…Blaine…

Blaine visualizes himself kissing those lips, claiming them for his own. They part for him, surrender to him. Beneath Blaine's fingertips, unbelievably soft skin trembles at his touch – impossibly smooth skin…almost like porcelain.

Blaine hears himself moan. He feels his cock twitch, and his eyes pop open. He looks down at himself, and freezes with revulsion.

It isn't the daydream that bothers him. It's feeling his hands creep down his chest, heading toward an uninvited erection, that makes Blaine begin to feel creepy and pathetic.

In a last minute attempt to rectify the situation, he switches over to his go-to masturbatory fantasy, starring Adam Levine wearing a whole lot of leather, but it doesn't work.

The battle lost, he turns off the hot water completely and lets the cold water take a turn at torturing him. He pounds the tile with his fist and grits his teeth, watching his boner die a painful, frigid death. When he has cooled off entirely, and those blue eyes no longer appear when he closes his eyes, he shuts off the shower and steps out of the tub.

His eyelids hang heavily over his bleary eyes, and he figures falling asleep will be simple at this point. He'll close his eyes, and his sleep-starved body will simply drag him under. He gets dressed in a heather grey t-shirt and plaid sleep pants, and climbs into bed. He pulls his comforter up around his shoulders, all the way to his neck, tucking himself in tight. He feels so warm and cozy. The next few hours of sleep promise to feel so damn good. But the moment his head touches his pillow, he catches an unexpected second wind…then a third…and a fourth.

Blaine stretches out on his stomach, his arms crossed beneath his pillow. He closes his eyes, but a second later, he opens them and flips on to his back, crossing his arms over his chest. His head sinks deep into his pillow, but not in the way that he wants. He flips over again, this time on to his side, his head resting on his hands, but that's no good either. He growls through clenched teeth, voicing his frustration to the darkness.

But there's no one to hear; no one to help.

His body is exhausted beyond compare but his mind is infuriatingly wide awake. If he can only find a comfortable spot, his brain might get the hint and switch off. He twists and turns, at one point switching ends entirely, laying with his head where his feet should be, which feels so unnatural it actually turns out to be a step backward. Regardless of what position he tries, one thing stays the same - he keeps his eyes glued to his locked bedroom door.

This is ridiculous, he berates himself. He tries to exhaust himself by focusing on inane things. His eyes sweep his room and the few things in it – an Ikea desk, with a lamp and his laptop on it; a three-drawer dresser with only the first two drawers filled; the door to his closet; the door to the bathroom; and the bunk bed he's sleeping in, with a full size mattress on the bottom, and a twin size bunk positioned perpendicularly above him. Blaine hasn't slept in this room in forever. The Gargoyles and Sonic the Hedgehog posters on the wall attest to how long it's been. But in the last few weeks that he's been here, it's begun to feel like home.

He likes the independence. He likes doing things for himself. He likes feeling competent.

But he doesn't like being alone.

He sweeps his eyes back around, stopping on the clock radio on his desk.

3:59 A.M.

Blaine rolls his eyes and groans when he sees the time. It can't possibly that early in the morning. He hasn't even closed his eyes yet! He flicks his gaze over to the clock again, just to be sure.

4:00 A.M.

“Ugh!”

Blaine thrashes out, pounding his fists on the mattress and kicking his legs until his blanket tumbles off on to the floor.

“Fuck!”

Blaine isn't normally a fan of cursing, but this particular bout of insomnia seems to warrant at least one four-letter obscenity. Today is going to be a big day, and he doesn't need to spend it stumbling around like a zombie.

He suddenly thinks about what happened in the basement – the arc of lightning, the visions, the disembodied voices in his head. He hears a noise he's certain came from the living room, and his eyelids fly open, no longer heavy.

Okay, maybe zombie isn't the best comparison he could have thought up.

Maybe he is being ridiculous about all this, but recognizing that isn't going to calm his mind enough to let him sleep. He stops fighting and lies awake, staring at his door, waiting for the dawn. While he does, Blaine lets his brain wander off on tangents of its own, touring the Victorian house in his mind. It astonishes him that he has so much of the layout memorized. Blaine thought for sure he'd end up have nightmares about that room in the basement, but his thoughts keep returning to the upstairs bedrooms.

He does his best to ignore the room with the broken picture frames and focuses on the other two rooms – rooms created for two completely different young men in a house that both celebrates and mourns childhood. Piles of toys and filth down below, memories crusted over by time, while upstairs, everything is immaculate - polished brass doorknobs, a Little League jersey mounted under glass, that exquisite suit hung up in the closet, the vintage sewing machine that probably works perfectly.

And that man with the sad eyes.

The same man who has already popped up in two unbidden fantasies.

A man who is unlike anyone Blaine has ever seen.

A man that Blaine needs to see again.

Blaine sighs. He's never going to get to sleep this way, so he might as well start the day. He climbs out of bed, grumbling under his breath as he scoots off the mattress and puts his feet on the floor. He picks his blanket up from where it landed at the foot of his bed, shoves his pillow underneath his arm, and trundles off to the living room. He reaches the bedroom door and stops, halted by the dark wood, which reminds him of the green-eyed puppet. His heart speeds up, his hand hovering over the doorknob, intrusive thoughts filling his head. He doesn't know what he'll find in the living room. What if something he brought back from the house has moved on its own? Specifically, what if the green-eyed puppet has moved off the loveseat? What if it's not in the living room?

What if it's found the knives in the kitchen?

“They're just ordinary puppets, Blaine,” he grumbles, knowing deep down inside that's a lie. He's not entirely ruling out the idea that he came in contact with some biological hallucinogenic inside that Victorian house, but those puppets are far from ordinary. He bites his tongue and unlocks the door, opening it and walking out into the living room in the same nonchalant way he would if he didn't have possibly supernatural puppets lying around. He tries not to pay too much attention to them. He can see from the corner of his eye that the puppet pieces are right where he left them, the green-eyed puppet on the loveseat and the blue-eyed puppet on the sofa, but with one tiny exception. He had gone off to bed with them facing each other, but now, the blue-eyed puppet's head seems to have turned away.

Blaine makes a point of not noting that detail. Maybe the two puppets weren't facing each other when he went to bed. Or maybe something completely plausible happened that could have caused the puppet's head to move. It could be a side effect of his walking heavily across the floor, or the porcelain head settling into the couch cushion, or a minor Southern California tremor that he didn't notice.

There. Three normal, reasonable, and in no way supernatural, possibilities.

Blaine lays out his blanket and pillow on the floor beside the sofa, ignoring the feeling of eyes on his person, knowing rationally that this is all part of some strange, acquired phobia left over from being trapped in that depressing house all day long.

He walks over to the dining room table and finds the photo album. He picks it up and turns back to his blanket, jumping when he catches the green eyes of the wooden puppet glowing eerily in the light streaming in from outside. He chuckles at getting spooked, putting a hand to his speeding heart, but then furrows his brow in confusion…and stops laughing. The puppet had been looking straight at the sofa a second before, but now its eyes are staring directly at him. They can't be following him, Blaine thinks logically, but the way they're painted, they seem to. It's the same phenomenon people experience with velvet paintings of Jesus…or Elvis.

Silly or not, he's never going to be comfortable in here with those eyes staring in his direction.

Blaine puts down the album and pulls off his t-shirt, laying it over the wooden puppet's head and tucking the fabric around it. He starts to feel physically lighter with the off-putting face and eyes covered. He makes his way back to the blanket, album in hand. He lies down on his stomach with his pillow shoved beneath his chest and the album flat in front of him. He flips open the cover and turns to the first page - a soft, black, rectangular sheet of aging paper that bends in the middle with the weight of the photograph on the other side. He turns it over and sees a single picture, beside which are the ghosts of spaces where others had been but had fallen out over time when the glue that held them to the pages disintegrated. This first photo is a black and white image of a beautiful young woman, smiling at the camera while holding a swaddled, sleeping newborn baby in her arms. The picture on the page opposite is of the same woman, sitting in a chair with an older baby on her lap. He turns the page again, and again, but the next two sets of pages are devoid of photographs. He flips ahead and finds a place in the album where some of the lost photos had been stuck into the spine.

He plucks the first photograph out and there he is – the young man with the blue eyes. He's younger in this picture than the man in the suit that Blaine saw, but there's no mistaking the curve of his mouth, the delicate slope of his nose, or his hair, styled high in the front, probably making him a whole three inches taller than his natural height. On a whim, Blaine flips the picture over. In the bottom right hand corner, written on the diagonal in fading pencil are the words: Kurt – age 14.

Blaine squints at the handwriting. It seems oddly familiar. It's sloppy and rough - all edges and few curves - like symbols more than actual letters.

“Kurt,” Blaine says aloud. He turns to the puppet lying on the couch. With his head settled in its current position, the puppet's one eye seems to look straight at Blaine. Blaine smiles up at him. “It's a pleasure to meet you, Kurt.”

Blaine replaces the photo and pulls out another one. It's 14-year-old Kurt again, standing beside an older gentleman. The older man has an arm draped across Kurt's shoulder. He's smiling at Kurt proudly while Kurt beams at the camera. Blaine turns the photo over, curious as to the identity of the older man, but all that's written there are the words Me and Kurt.

“Must be his dad,” Blaine mutters, putting this second photograph back beside the first and grabbing another.

There are two young men in this one. They look remarkably similar, but Blaine finds Kurt right away. This Kurt is slightly older, but still not the age of the Kurt he saw in the suit. Blaine's gaze shifts to the man standing beside him. His eyes go wide.

Could it be?

He holds the picture close to his nose, angling it toward the light to get a better look.

Oh my…

Blaine's eyes snap up for a second in the direction of the lump on the loveseat, covered by his grey t-shirt. Blaine flips the photo over. On this one also, at the bottom, are words scrawled in faded pencil.

Kurt – age 16

Sebastian – age 17

The green-eyed puppet finally has a name.

Sebastian.

Blaine peers at the picture, a swirl of jealousy pooling in his stomach at these two men standing side by side. Not that Blaine should feel jealous, he reminds himself. They were probably brothers. Blaine examines Sebastian closely, trying to pinpoint the familial resemblance.

Sebastian was handsome; Blaine will give him that. This photograph gives Blaine the impression that Sebastian was excessively proud. He's standing straight and tall in way that's looks like he's trying to prove he's taller than Kurt, which he was, but only by about an inch. A mischievous smirk pulls at his lips, almost as if he's mocking Blaine…or whoever was behind the camera's viewfinder. But Blaine has a suspicion that his demeanor might have been something of a front. He gets a sense from this photograph that underneath that cocky visage lies deep discontentment. It's visible in the rigid set of his shoulders, and his jaw clenched too tight. It's reflected in his eyes, where his smile doesn't quite reach, and the way he holds his hands balled into fists at his side.

Blaine looks over at the puppet's head covered by his shirt one more time.

“Sebastian.” He says the name out loud, letting it fill his mouth, feeling it roll off his tongue. “It's nice to meet you, too,” Blaine calls out, feeling immediately stupid for doing so.

Blaine flips through the remaining pages. There are a couple more pictures of the woman, this time with a child standing beside her instead of on her lap, but the other photos are mostly the same - Kurt and Sebastian photographed together at different ages, or the two young men photographed with the older man. In each of those photographs, Blaine can't help but notice how the older man always seemed to have his body turned towards Kurt, smiling at him as if he were the center of the universe, while Sebastian stood off to the side, somewhat out of the shot. Blaine takes his finger and gently traces a line between Sebastian and the older man. Yes, if Blaine takes a pair of scissors, he can cut Sebastian out of the photograph, and not a speck of him would remain.

Blaine doesn't want to sympathize with Sebastian, but he can't help it. His heart hurts for the young man.

Blaine yawns, covering his mouth with his hand and squeezing his eyes shut. He turns on his side to look up at the puppet Kurt.

“You two could have been friends,” Cooper's voice echoes in Blaine's head.

“We could have been friends,” Blaine repeats, staring at Kurt's face, yawning again. “That would have been nice.”

His mind walks through the bedroom that must have been Kurt's, with the sewing machine and the dress form, and those opera posters hanging on the walls. If Kurt were alive today, they could go to musicals together, watch old movies, or talk about fashion. Blaine has a lot of good friends back home in Ohio, but he's always felt like there was something missing, something that didn't mesh. Something about himself that he didn't quite have in common with everyone else, even if, in general, they liked the same things. He always thought that that one thing was the fact that he was the only out gay guy at school, but he's not convinced.

Maybe Kurt could have been that missing puzzle piece.

Blaine reaches out a finger and gently traces the line of Kurt's mouth. How close to the real Kurt's mouth is this one? he wonders. How close did the puppet master who made him get the blue of his eyes? Or the peach of his skin? Blaine gazes into Kurt's face, planning on letting this jumble of thoughts, daydreams, and questions carry him through the final hours until he has to leave in the morning.

***

Blaine watches Kurt's legs swing lightly against the square granite headstone he's perched on.

“Do you really think it could work out for them?” Kurt asks hopefully, his eyes turning back toward the screen. “Do you think they can fall in love and live happily ever after?”

“I don't see why not,” Blaine answers, tossing a piece of popcorn in his mouth. “Stranger things have happened.” Kurt turns to Blaine; Blaine gives him a wink, and a teasing smile.

Kurt looks at the bag of popcorn in Blaine's hand. He licks his lips with the memory of it, but he doesn't take a piece.

“Have you” - Kurt bites his lip as best he can, the move looking natural even though, for him, it's not - “have you ever been in love?”

Blaine stops chewing his popcorn and swallows hard.

“Once,” Blaine admits, looking down at his shoes in the grass, his cheeks coloring, though Kurt can't see the change in the dark.

“Ah,” Kurt says, nodding and turning away. “What happened? How did it end?”

Blaine chuckles a bit, his focus shifting from his shoes back up to the screen.

“It hasn't ended yet,” Blaine says, placing another piece of popcorn in his mouth and chewing thoughtfully. He watches the two lovers on the screen embrace, and then dares a glance in Kurt's direction.

Kurt is staring at him, his mouth dropped open, his eyes wide. Blaine laughs at the startled look on his face. Blaine places a kiss on his own index finger, then presses that finger to Kurt's lips. He curls his fingers beneath Kurt's chin and closes his mouth.

“You shouldn't sit with your mouth open like that,” Blaine says. “You'll catch flies.”

***

Blaine wakes up to the sun warming his cheek and a faraway buzzing, like the incessant drone of a gnat, niggling in his ears. He blinks his sluggish eyelids open and looks confusedly around, having forgotten for a second that he was lying on the floor in the living room and not in his bed. He sees the bright sunlight streaming in through the curtains. He sees the dining room table laden with tools. He sees the green-eyed puppet – Sebastian – staring at him.

Blaine's eyes pop open and he sits up straight.

Sebastian's painted green eyes are staring down at him, the grey shirt that had been covering his head pooled on the floor.

Blaine does his best to recall earlier when he had gotten spooked, and all of the reasons he thought up to explain away these puppets' odd “behaviors”.

“Southern California…earthquakes…tremors…nothing else going on at all,” Blaine mumbles, staring straight into the puppet's eyes as if challenging him to prove Blaine wrong.

Blaine stares at the Sebastian puppet for a solid, uncomfortable minute, but it doesn't move.

Still uneasy, Blaine stands and backs away towards his room, eager to turn off his obnoxious alarm and get a few more Zzzz's. He slams his hand down on the alarm button, then checks the time.

9:15 A.M.

He brings a hand up to his face and rubs his eyes with the heel of his hand.

“9:15…” he says out loud, wondering why that time in particular bothers him. He raises his arms over his head and stretches, hearing the vertebrae in his back crack one at a time. “9:15…” he says again, twisting back and forth. “9:15…” He stops stretching and smacks his forehead with his hand. “9:15!” he yells when he remembers. “I was supposed to meet Gary at the house at 9!”

Blaine shoves all thoughts of Sebastian's puppet head aside and tosses on the first outfit within reach – a pair of dark wash jeans, a red bowtie, and a slate blue button down shirt with teddy bear heads on it.

He didn't originally intend on wearing that shirt, but it seems appropriate.

He slips on his shoes and grabs his webcam, his Bluetooth, and his cell phone, a sinking feeling growing in his gut when he sees the message alert. Blaine decides to tear off the Band-Aid quickly and check them. There are already seven text messages from Gary and a missed call from Cooper (probably wondering when Blaine is going to get his ass rolling). There's no live feed planned for today. Blaine is just recording the general goings on, which gives him some freedom to work without playing to an audience.

It also means that he won't louse anything up too much if he's, oh, an hour late.

He slips his Bluetooth into his ear and dials Cooper back while he grabs his various keys.

“Blainers,” Cooper's voice greets him after half a ring.

That's not good.

“Hey, Coop,” Blaine says, fighting to get the words out around a yawn.

“Tsk, tsk, tsk,” Cooper scolds. “You sound exhausted. Long night tinkering with your puppets, Dr. Strangelove?”

“Not at all. I was busy working on the plans for your house,” Blaine lies.

“Right,” Cooper responds with a touch of skepticism. “Well, it's a good thing I trust you and your artistic vision.”

“Yeah, good thing,” Blaine says wryly. He makes his way back to the living room while he talks to his brother, but he's distracted by Kurt, by Sebastian, by beginning his day late, and he just wants to end this call as painlessly as possible. “Look, I'm heading out to the house now to meet Gary. I'll call you when I get there.”

“I'll be waiting,” Cooper says. There's a pause, a tense silence filling the space where Cooper would otherwise disconnect the call, like he wants to say something. Blaine is about to ask if there's anything else on his mind, but then the line goes dead.

Blaine shrugs it off. Cooper isn't shy about his feelings. If he has something to say, he'll say it eventually. Blaine heads to the front door, but he finds himself stalling - backtracking to his bedroom, to the bathroom, to the dining room table, double checking for things he knows he has. He shouldn't feel guilty, but he does - not because he thinks Cooper knows that he didn't do any of the things he was supposed to last night when he got back to the beach house.

He doesn't want to leave Kurt alone again.

Sebastian, too, he guesses. Blaine might have strange, irrational ideas about Sebastian not liking him, but he's broken, too. He was locked down in that basement room in the dark along with Kurt for all those years.

Nobody deserves that.

Blaine paces back and forth while he thinks, trying to find a solution so he feels comfortable leaving. He finally turns on the TV, switching the channel to AMC.

It's not the same as human company, but at least it won't be quiet.

He takes one last look at the puppets and walks out the door.

“I'll be back in a few hours,” he says as an afterthought, and then leaves, locking up the house and heading to his minivan.