Tears stream hot and unchecked down Blaine's cheeks by the time he reaches the beach house, but for the life of him, he can't remember when he started crying. He doesn't think he was crying when he left Kurt's room - no, memorial - with the suit clutched to his chest. He might have gotten misty-eyed when he closed the door and walked numbly down the hallway. A tear could have welled up and broken free as he hurried down the stairs. But between crossing the living room, locking up the house, and walking to his van, everything else he did is a blur.

He drove on autopilot all the way to the coast, the majority of his thoughts focused on the new reality he had been saddled with.

Before it registers, he pulls into his driveway and parks. He kills the engine and crosses his arms over the steering wheel. He looks at the reflection of his face in the rear view mirror - cheeks splotchy, eyes rimmed red, curls on his head pulling free of the gel he uses to keep them out of his face from the many times he ran his hand through his hair. He's alive. He looks like complete and utter hell, but he's here – eighteen-years-old, working hard, with his entire future ahead of him.

Then he thinks of Kurt.

Beautiful, talented Kurt.

Kurt, who Blaine could see himself falling for.

Kurt, who didn't get to have a future.

Blaine drops his head into his arms and bawls. The suit he brought home for Kurt sits beside him in the passenger seat. Blaine reaches a hand over and grabs the cuff of the sleeve, holding it like he would Kurt's hand if Kurt were there to comfort him.

Kurt has become so real to Blaine in the past couple of days that Blaine feels like he is there, holding Blaine's hand, whispering that everything will be okay, singing sweetly in that magical voice of his.

Blaine is trapped by the enigma of which is more devastating – the fact that Andrew lost his wife and both of his young sons, or that Kurt and Sebastian didn't get the chance to live a full life. They died so young and had so much potential. The mournful look on Catherine's face was evidence to Blaine of just how much potential Kurt had.

Blaine needs to know more of this story, and he has six boxes full of books that can potentially tell him, but he doesn't have the time to look through them all.

He wants answers now.

He needs answers before he loses his heart completely to a man he never knew.

Horrifically enough, that includes knowing how Kurt died.

The cause of Kurt's death wasn't an essential nugget of information before – not when Blaine had assumed that Kurt grew to be an old man and died peacefully in his sleep. But now, knowing that wasn't the case, Blaine needs the truth.

But he can't face the puppets yet – not in the state he's in.

Blaine stays in the van until the air around him grows uncomfortably cold and there isn't a tear left in his body. Then he climbs out of his vehicle, sluggish and depressed, ready for another day to be over.

Again, he considers calling Cooper, longing for a familiar voice to talk to even if that voice will be doing little more than making fun of him.

If Blaine has to be honest with himself, he really wants to talk to his mom.

Blaine leaves the boxes in the van but takes the suit with him when he goes inside the beach house.

From down the walkway, he can hear the television still going from when he left this morning. He catches a few lines of dialogue from the movie Some Like It Hot before it goes to commercial.

He opens the door and curses.

It's nearly pitch black inside the living room, even with the light from outside streaming through the curtains.

Blaine swore before he left that he wouldn't leave Kurt in the dark again.

“I am so sorry, guys,” he says as he walks into the house, the suit draped over the crook of his arm. He locks the door behind him and immediately switches on a light. “I didn't think I was going to be out this late, but …”

He bites his tongue. He doesn't want to mention selling the toys in case that might be offensive somehow.

Blaine lays the suit down on a chair by the dining room table, trying to think of a more pleasant direction to steer the conversation, when his foot hits something hard, sending it sliding a few inches across the floor. Blaine looks down and gasps, stumbling back a step.

Sebastian's wooden torso is sprawled out on the floor, looking suspiciously like he was trying to crawl across the room to reach the sofa where Blaine left Kurt.

Blaine looks over at the sofa and finds Kurt lying in the exact position Blaine put him, but over by Blaine's blanket, stopped by the photo album, lays Sebastian's wooden head.

Whether his green eyes are aimed at Kurt or at the photo album (open to a page with a single picture of Andrew sitting with Kurt and Sebastian), Blaine can't tell.

Blaine looks at the puppets, at the loose puppet head, at the picture in the album. He thinks about the journals in his van and his conversation with Catherine. There is something going on here that goes deeper than a house full of toys and two broken puppets, and Blaine feels strongly that if he puts these puppets back together, he might find out what it is.

It's an absurd and inane notion, but it's all he has.

Blaine doesn't want to stall any longer. He wants to put Kurt and Sebastian back together, and now seems as good a time as any.

Blaine picks up Sebastian's torso and repositions it on the loveseat. Halfway through the task, his stomach growls.

“Crap,” Blaine mutters. He forgot to pick something up on the way home, but he doesn't want to stop now to cook something. He looks around at the puppets and the tools and everything waiting for him to get started, but if he doesn't eat, he's not going to last too long.

He hurries reluctantly to the kitchen to make a sandwich with the puppets on the forefront of his mind. He pulls out a hunk of roast beef and a jar of mayonnaise from the refrigerator, and grabs a loaf of rye bread off the counter. His mind wanders while he constructs his sandwich. He accidentally forgets the mayo the first time around and has to take the sandwich apart to layer some on, but he does remember to pour himself a glass of Coke. He'll need the caffeine if he's not going to get any sleep.

A loud clatter from the living room makes Blaine's head snap up. He grabs his finished sandwich and his glass of cola and rushes into the room. There Sebastian is, lying on the floor again, and Blaine rolls his eyes.

“I know, I know,” Blaine says. “I'm getting to it.”

He takes three more steps into the room and hears a blood curdling growl.

“RrrrrrrrrrrrRRRRRRAAAAWWWWRRRRLLLLL!”

Blaine stares in horror at the torso lying on the floor, his heart slamming to an agonizing stop in his chest. Blaine swallows hard, the sound of his blood pounding in his head blocking out everything else. Any minute now, the headless torso will rise up off the floor and attack him; Blaine knows it. The puppet jiggles, struggling to pull itself up even though it has no arms or legs. Blaine's knees go weak and his mouth goes dry.

“Seb … Sebastian?” Blaine calls out to the possessed piece of wood dancing disjointedly on the floor. “Sebastian, is that you?”

Blaine dares a step forward, holding his drink so tight in his hand that the ice cubes knock against the side of the glass.

“Sebastian, I …”

“RrrrrrrrrrrrRRRRRRAAAAWWWWRRRRLLLLL!”

The wood torso lurches up and Blaine stumbles backward, spilling cola down the front of his shirt, the ice cold liquid soaking through to his skin.

“Fuck!” he yells, his mind preparing – with growing trepidation - to confront the headless puppet.

The torso falls back on the floor with a loud CRACK and Blaine screams, but a flash of orange and the sound of footsteps pattering across the floor cut Blaine's scream short.

A cat. An orange tabby cat with a purple collar crawls out from beneath Sebastian's torso and turns on Blaine. Freed from beneath its wooden prison, the cat meows quietly. It sits in front of the door and meows again, looking from Blaine, to the door, and then back at Blaine.

Blaine stares at the creature with wide, incredulous eyes.

“What the …?”

The cat meows again, looking towards the door, and then back at Blaine.

Blaine considers the cat's wordless request while trying to figure out how the hell the animal got into the house in the first place. They never had a pet at the beach house, so it has no pet doors or anything of the like, and Blaine hadn't left any of the windows open that he knew of. It probably waltzed on in while Blaine was unloading the puppets and the tools from the van, and had been locked up in the house all day.

Blaine steps over Sebastian's torso, puts his dinner on the dining room table - glass half-empty from when the soda spilled down his shirt – and opens the door. The cat gives Blaine a last, confused look, and trots primly out the door. Blaine watches it disappear down the walk and into the night.

“A cat,” Blaine says, closing the door. A cat would explain Sebastian's torso lying on the floor. It's an easier, more reasonable explanation than what Blaine had started to believe – that the puppets are haunted.

Blaine always tries to keep his mind open to the possibility that things happen in this world that there are no explanations for, but he's also his father's son, and George Anderson is a man for whom logic and reason outshine everything else. Often times, Blaine's father's voice is the voice of rationale in Blaine's head, and it wars with the other, less acceptable ideas that Blaine sometimes believes.

This is definitely one of those times.

So, as Blaine drops into his bedroom for a change of clothes, it's George Anderson's voice he hears lecturing him to grow up and be reasonable. Blaine changes into his pajamas from earlier that morning, laying out his wet shirt on his bed and pre-treating the soda stain. Before he heads back to the dining room, he grabs his laptop. He might as well do some research while he works. Besides trying to find information on Kurt and Sebastian, he's going to need a reference for the finer points of repairing porcelain, which is something he hasn't really had to do. The puppets they worked on in arts and crafts class were made of felt and foam. The only time Blaine has ever tried to repair something made of porcelain was when he was in the third grade and he dropped his mother's coffee mug. He tried and tried, but he couldn't get the handle to stay on. The first time his mother tried to use it, the mug detached from the handle, spilling hot coffee in her lap.

Taking that into consideration, Blaine decides to start by repairing the Sebastian puppet. In his heart, he really wants to get the Kurt puppet put together, but he doesn't want to screw him up. Blaine feels guilty that he is, in essence, using Sebastian as a guinea pig. Sebastian doesn't appear to be as well constructed as Kurt. The finish on his face is spotty. The wiring holes aren't as smooth as they could be, and some of them don't line up too well. The Sebastian puppet looks like a prototype, something the original artist (who Blaine is certain had to be Andrew Smythe) was practicing on with the same intentions as Blaine. If Andrew thought so little of his son (as Blaine suspects from that entry in the journal), this seems likely.

So as guilty as it makes Blaine feel, starting with Sebastian seems like a good place to start.

Blaine sits Sebastian's torso upright, leaning his back against the loveseat to keep him straight. He picks up Sebastian's head and fits it to the neck joint, balancing it until it sits steady. He takes a length of wire he salvaged from the basement workshop off the table and works it through the holes where they meet up, using a pointed file to widen the holes that don't quite match. After a great deal of fine tuning, he manages to fix Sebastian's head to his body, and secure it so it won't come off.

Blaine stands and bends backward at the waist, his back muscles aching from lifting boxes all day, and then from being stooped over this puppet. He looks at his handiwork sitting on the loveseat in front of him.

A wooden Sebastian Smythe with his head attached.

Yup. He looks even more disturbing than he did before.

But now Blaine feels confident he can fix Kurt's neck.

Blaine grabs the wire and the file, and walks over to the sofa where Kurt's body is laid out.

Blaine readjusts Kurt's head, supporting his neck in a way that feels intimate. He runs his fingers over Kurt's neck, images of kissing soft, unblemished skin filling his mind, along with a sweet, lavender smell that's conspicuously new.

Blaine clears his throat as a way to erase the image from his head. He looks at the gap in Kurt's neck where his head separates from his body. He sees where the original wire has loosened from the holes. If this injury had happened recently, it would have been just a matter of tightening the wires and winding them together. But time and moisture have rusted the wires through, leaving stains on the porcelain. The stains, in Blaine's opinion, are almost as sacrilege as the damaged wires.

“I'll get rid of those,” Blaine promises, returning to the dining room table. He finds a tub labeled ‘Porcelain Paste' - a cleaning product he's heard of before - and a chamois. He grabs them off the table and returns to Kurt. He carefully removes the rusted wires from the holes in Kurt's neck. Then, dabbing gently at the goopy pink paste, he rubs the polish into the porcelain, removing the rust stains.

“There,” he says when the stains have been completely buffed away. “All gone. Now we can rethread some new wire in these holes, and your head should fit on your neck good as new.”

Blaine puts down the polish and picks up the wire, threading the holes in pairs, connecting the joint to itself, and then to the head, making sure that at the end of each juncture the head has a full range of motion while seated on the body.

When he's done, Blaine smiles wide, moving Kurt's head around on his neck.

“And that's your gorgeous head back on your neck, Kurt. Does that feel better?”

Blaine hears a soft tinkle, like a wind chime ringing only in his head – a sound that could be mistaken for laughter if there was anyone else around him that could laugh.

Blaine looks down the length of Kurt's body, at the shattered pieces and broken fragments. No amount of experimenting on Sebastian's wooden body is going to help Blaine fix these splintered porcelain parts.

“One minute,” he says, raising a single finger in front of Kurt's solitary eye. He retreats to the dining room table in search of glue or cement, or maybe a magic wand since it's going to take as much miracle as skill to get these pieces back together. He's overwhelmed by the amount of tubes on the table, all claiming to do different things for different materials. Blaine's going to have to decide what he wants to tackle first before he chooses what adhesive to use.

Blaine returns to the sofa. He looks at Kurt's legs and arms, then up at his one eye.

Thoughts of repairing Sebastian forgotten for now, Blaine decides on the part of Kurt he's going to attempt to repair first.

His eye.

He wants to look into Kurt's two beautiful blue-glass eyes.

Blaine looks through the pieces on the sofa. He knows he saw it – the eye socket with the glass eye still inside. Blaine felt it was such a good omen when he stumbled across it. Gluing the eye socket back in he might be able to do. Remake an eye socket out of scratch – not so much.

Blaine finds the piece and sets it aside, going back to the table for more supplies. He rummages through the various tubes and tubs of glues and pastes until he finds a combination that he thinks might do the trick. He grabs a piece of super fine grit sandpaper and returns to Kurt.

“I'm going to be very careful,” Blaine says, his heart pounding as he considers what he's about to do. Repairing Kurt was the reason why he started this whole endeavor, why he gave up his commission and his salary in the first place. But now that the time has come, he feels like there's more than just a broken puppet on the line.

He feels like if he doesn't do this right, something important will be lost.

Blaine picks up the eye socket and examines the splintered edges. He roughs them up a touch with the sandpaper, then moves to Kurt's head and does the same to the edges of the hole there. This way, after applying the glue, the edges will adhere better. Blaine fits the socket to the hole to ensure that the piece will fit, and then he starts gluing.

With a tube of pottery glue, he outlines both sets of edges – on the shattered piece, and then around the hole. The room around him has become so quiet, it's fraying Blaine's nerves. Even the waves outside seem to have stopped crashing against the shore while Blaine works.

He wants to talk to Kurt. He wants to tell him that he found out about Kurt's dad, and about the terrible tragedy of his death. He wants to tell Kurt that's he sorry, how his heart broke for Kurt when he heard. But those things happened in the past. They have nothing to do with this future. Blaine decides it's an unnecessarily painful thing to drum up.

Blaine sets the eye socket into Kurt's head. He picks up his chamois, and with a clean corner of the fabric, he wipes away the left over glue. When the surrounding porcelain is clean, he puts the chamois down and stares at both blue eyes at once.

“You know, I keep wondering what life would have been like if we knew each other,” Blaine begins, feeling this is a better path for conversation than dredging up a depressing past. “If we had gone to school together, if we had been friends. I think I would have liked you right away. I can just feel it …” Blaine rolls his eyes. “Wow. That sounded less corny in my head.”

That tinkling laugh returns, and Blaine holds his breath.

A wind chime, he convinces himself, from one of the other houses along the beach. That's all it is. Just a wind chime. Not a laugh.

“I keep having dreams about you,” Blaine divulges, dropping his voice to a whisper, “about you and me … uh …” Blaine sits back a bit, careful not to dislodge the glued piece pressed beneath his fingertips. “Well, about you and me. You know, it's stupid and preposterous and doesn't make any sense whatsoever, Kurt, but even though I never knew you, I miss you.”

Blaine sighs, pulling his fingers away from the eye socket to check how it sits.

He has to look twice to believe what he's seeing.

There are no cracks around the eye socket. The shattered star-pattern break is gone. The nicks knocked out of the porcelain that Blaine hadn't even had the chance to touch-up are filled in and whole. Using barely two tablespoons of glue, the eye socket looks as good as new.

“What the …?”

Blaine blinks his eyes and looks closer. He lifts a finger and traces the eye socket all around. He can't feel the break. It simply isn't there anymore.

“Oh my God.” He picks up the tube of glue and reads the ingredients. “This stuff is amazing. Where the hell do you buy this stuff?” He considers Googling it, seeing if they still make it and how much it would cost to order it by the case.

Encouraged, Blaine decides right then to fix the rest of Kurt's puppet. It will most likely take him through till the morning, but he doesn't care. The first person scheduled at the house isn't showing up till noon, and now that he's started Kurt's repairs, he can't think of a good reason to stop.

He moves down Kurt's body to his arm – the one that is shattered in less pieces than its mate. He starts with the larger chunks, treating them the same way as the eye socket. He roughs up the edges around the piece, roughs up the edges around the hole, and then applies glue to both pieces. On this shattered limb, it's a daunting task, as eventually a broken piece will need to connect to another broken piece, and Blaine isn't sure that he has enough of this mystical glue to make all those fragmented pieces stick.

“I heard you're a singer,” Blaine continues, treading cautiously into what he knows is sensitive territory. “I'm a singer, too.”

Blaine doesn't want to brag, even if it is to himself, so he moves along.

“I have so many questions,” he says, not even considering whether or not that's an admission he should have kept to himself, because it naturally leads into questions about what, exactly? Which will reveal the things that Blaine knows about Kurt's past.

George Anderson's voice returns to tutt disapprovingly in Blaine's head as he moves on to repair the second arm.

“What are you doing, Blaine Devon Anderson!?” it scolds. “Take a look at yourself. Look at your life now! Look at how you're acting! You're not a child anymore!”

Blaine swallows hard, finishing up the arm and starting with the legs.

No, Blaine consoles himself. He's right, not his father. He feels it way down to the marrow in his bones. He's right about this. He knows it. Blaine sifts through the broken pieces, sanding and gluing, fitting the puzzle of Kurt back together a piece at a time. He knows he's rushing through the repair, but he needs to finish.

He needs to show his father that he's right.

But Blaine starts to panic. Doubt causes him to panic, and panic causes Blaine's fingers to tremble as he fits the final pieces into Kurt's leg and glues them together.

His whole body trembling, Blaine sits back on his heels and waits. He believed so hard that putting Kurt back together would do something, start something, make something happen, but as he waits in the low light for Kurt to miraculously come to life, he knows it did nothing.

Blaine looks at Kurt's unmoving face, his unbreathing puppet body.

His father's voice is right. This is crazy. He's talking to himself. No one else. Just him.

He has to face the facts. Maybe there is an outrageous mystery in that Victorian house, waiting for someone to solve it, but that's all.

It's the bitter end of a long day, and Blaine is talking to himself, to inanimate puppets, not Kurt and Sebastian.

Sebastian's puppet was pushed off the loveseat by a cat. He didn't move himself.

Kurt and Sebastian are dead – dead and buried - and have been for a long time.

Compulsion or not, Blaine is sympathetic to that house, to the things he's seen, to the memories of heartache and despair. That's all this is. His mind and heart are open conduits, always have been, searching out everyone else's pain and taking it upon himself.

The story of Kurt, Sebastian, and their parents is a horrible, awful one, but Blaine can't let it take over his life.

Blaine stands up and steps away, finding it hard to breathe.

NYADA. He put his future at NYADA in jeopardy for this. He still owes the school thousands of dollars before the start of the fall semester, and he gave that away for puppets! It was so spur of the moment when he did it; it had happened so fast. What was he thinking? Where else did he think he was going to get the money?

Blaine sits at the dining room table and hunches over. He rests his elbows on his knees and buries his face in his cupped hands, breathing in deep to stop hyperventilating.

Maybe what he did is fixable. Maybe if he humiliates himself beyond belief on air, Cooper will give him his commission back, and his salary. Even if Cooper only gives him half, it might be enough with the savings he has to get him to NYADA.

Blaine hears a whimper. It has to be his own voice, Blaine thinks. He's on the verge of tears as it is. But what if it's possibly …?

He raises his eyes and looks at the mostly completed Kurt puppet. He slides off the chair onto the floor and crawls over to the couch, his eyes locked on to the puppet's vacant stare.

“Kurt,” Blaine says, staring deep into the puppet's eyes, “if you're in there, if you're really here and you can hear me, please say something.”

Blaine pleads to Kurt with watery, hazel eyes as Kurt's eyes stare silently and blankly back.

“Blink your eyes,” Blaine begs. “Do something. Show me I'm not crazy. Please? Tell me I didn't do all of this for nothing. Tell me I didn't screw up again.”

Kurt lays still and silent. He's just a puppet. Nothing special. Nothing more.

A sob lodges in Blaine's throat.

Blaine's parents are right. He is a screw up. He looks around himself at the living room and the dining room, at everything he threw his future away for.

Blaine has to put a stop to this – a full stop right now. The story of Kurt, Sebastian, and Andrew is a story – a sad story, but only a story - and Blaine is letting it affect him too much. Kurt is dead, long dead, and nothing Blaine can do will change that. Not putting together these puppets. Not throwing away his future. Blaine is a real live human being who's lonely and sad because his parents, who he'd been close to all of his life, have completely rejected him, and he's trying to find something to hold on to. He's never had a real boyfriend and Kurt sounded like such a perfect fit. The two of them together could have been …

Ugh! He needs to stop torturing himself! He has to give this up. He is going to climb under his blanket, go to sleep, and when he wakes up in the morning, it's going to be a brand new day for Blaine Anderson.

No more ghost stories.

No more puppets.

He ignores the mess around him. He closes up the photo album, shoving the loose pictures back inside, and dumps it on the dining room table. Too tired to remake his bed, he decides to pass out on the living room floor since his comforter and pillow are already there.

He doesn't say a word to Kurt or Sebastian this time as he gets ready to go to sleep.

Blaine wraps himself tight in his blanket and puts his head down on the pillow. He sighs into the silence that surrounds him.

Silence.

Not serene, not peaceful, but dead silence.

So silent that a nearby clinking sound should catch Blaine's attention, but it doesn't. He won't let it. No more banal noises attracting his notice as if they are of the utmost importance.

No. The world around him is full of people and animals and ordinary things that make noise, things that have nothing to do with ghosts or spirits. Very natural, normal things. A cat outside. The house settling. The waves rushing in and out, beating upon the shore. These are things that Blaine would like to return to.

Blaine empties his mind, preparing to focus on the future from here on out. Maybe he'll hit the beach tomorrow. He can have dinner at that café he saw on the show Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives. It might be a little pricey, but he deserves a treat. Who knows? Maybe he might meet someone to share an appetizer with.

Blaine sighs wistfully at the idea of a summer romance.

“Goodnight, Blaine.”

“Goodnight,” Blaine replies. Blaine breathes in deep. It takes Blaine a moment. He breathes in again … and then stops.

Blaine's eyes pop back open, his lips quivering as they try to form words while he turns his head around.

The only word he can think of to say, unfortunately, turns out to be the hardest one to get out.

“K-K-K-Kurt?”

The blue eyes that Blaine has gotten so used to looking into are open wide, but they don't seem vacant like they did before. The pale pink lips, usually frozen in one expression, split into a warm smile.

Porcelain edges click lightly as the puppet blinks his eyes.

“Hello, Blaine.”