Sweat dripped from Blaine's forehead and down his back as his sneakers hit the pavement of the McKinley track. The freezing air burned his lungs but he was glad that Coach Sylvester insisted on keeping the track and field cleared of snow (she'd said it was to build up the Cheerios' endurance by having them practice in all weather, but Blaine was pretty sure she just got some sort of sadistic kick out of giving kids hypothermia).

As for why Blaine was exercising in the winter chill in nothing but shorts and a tank top, he wasn't entirely sure. It did feel good, though, to be putting so much energy into something that was fairly mindless. He let the music from his iPod fill his ears and clog his neural pathways, timed his breathing to the beat of his shoes, and just ran.

Finally, as his twelfth lap came to a close, he slowed to a walk, his calves burning and his breath fogging in front of his nose. He pulled out his earbuds and glanced up at the darkening grey clouds covering the sky. It would probably snow later. Out of breath, he went and collected his red hoodie from where he'd tossed it over the fence and shrugged it over his exposed shoulders. The running had kept him warm up until then, but it was below freezing and he could already feel his body temperature dropping. He headed towards the locker room, where a shower and a drink of water (he'd left the bottle inside so it wouldn't freeze) was waiting for him, but stopped when he spotted a hunched figure sitting atop the bleachers. He hesitated before climbing up the rows of benches.

"What are you doing out here?" he asked when Finn looked up.

Finn shrugged. "Clearing my head, I guess." His hands were shoved deep into the pockets of his puffy vest and his legs were pulled in conserve heat. "How far did you run?"

"Three miles."

"Nice."

Blaine paused, then sank onto the bench just below Finn. "Have you heard anything from the hospital?"

Finn shook his head. "It's only been a couple of days, though," he said. There was a certain tightness to his voice that Blaine couldn't quite place.

"Finn, I'm really sorry I've been such an ass about all this," Blaine said. "I reacted in all the wrong ways and I'm pretty sure that just made everything worse."

Finn propped his legs up on Blaine's bench. "It's not really your fault," he assured Blaine. "The first time I found out, I couldn't look Kurt in the eye for, like, a month. I don't think there's any right way to react to it."

Blaine shivered as a light breeze rippled over the bleachers. "What happened?" he asked. "After Karofsky kissed him, I mean."

Finn shifted uncomfortably where he sat. "Look, man, I really can't talk about this stuff with you, okay? Not without Kurt here. I already made that mistake once."

Blaine nodded with a swallow. "Okay. Sorry."

"For what it's worth, though?" Finn continued, making Blaine look up. "I know you just want to help out, and personally I'd rather that you could. But with Kurt in the headspace he's in now it's just not a good idea."

Another nod. "I understand."

"I'm just trying to look out for him."

"I get it."

Finn rubbed his hands together, blowing into his fists in an attempt to warm them up. "Are you going back to Dalton?" he asked after a long, strained silence.

Blaine blinked in surprise. "I… wasn't planning on it. Why?"

Finn studied the clouds overhead. "I just figured with Kurt gone there's nothing else keeping you here."

In all honesty, the idea of going back to his old school hadn't even occurred to Blaine. "I don't know…" he said slowly. After all, there were really only three and a half months until school was finished, so there wouldn't be much point to a transfer now. "Maybe in the fall."

Finn fell quiet again, and Blaine's teeth began to chatter. The wind was beginning to pick up and the clouds were quickly growing darker.

"Looks like a blizzard," Finn observed, watching the sky like he was worried it would come crashing down.

"We should probably go."

Neither of them moved for a long time. When Finn finally spoke again, Blaine's skin was covered in goosebumps and his legs were blotchy from being exposed to the cold.

"Tell you what," Finn said. "Once all this stuff with Kurt starts to calm down, I'll talk to him and see if you can go visit him in the hospital."

Blaine pressed his lips together for a moment. "Are you sure he'd be okay with that?"

"No." Finn shrugged. "Won't know 'til you ask, though, right?"

"Fair enough, I guess," Blaine acquiesced. "Thanks."

Finn nodded then stood up, keeping his shoulders hunched and his hands in his pockets as the wind tugged at his coat. "Come on. We should go home before it really starts to snow."

A full-blown blizzard was howling outside as the hands of the clock on the wall of Blaine's bedroom spun around and passed midnight. The windows rattled and the house creaked loudly, making the darkness in his room seem all the more pressing. The power had gone out an hour ago and Blaine's laptop was running solely on battery, its screen the only light illuminating the room. Blaine was sitting up in his bed with his back propped against the headboard and his computer on his lap, forsaking sleep and slowly working his way through his video library.

Why he insisted on torturing himself by watching old Warbler performances with Kurt, he'd never know.

Clicking on what was probably the twentieth or so recording, he watched himself onscreen, standing in the middle of the Warblers with his arm around Jeff, performing the opening lines of Ya Got Trouble in a joking imitation of Harold Hill.

"Friend, either you're closing your eyes to a situation you do not wish to acknowledge, or you are not aware of the caliber of disaster…"

Ignoring his own singing, Blaine searched the rest of the Warblers and found Kurt, who was standing with his back to the camera and sandwiched between David and Thad. For the first two minutes of the song, there was nothing out of place and Kurt joined in at all the right cues.

"Ohh, we've got trouble! Right here in River City!"

Then, Blaine's heart lurched as he noticed a shift in Kurt's posture. It was subtle, only alarming if the person looking at it had an inkling as to why Kurt's shoulders had suddenly slumped forward. It became more obvious as he stopped dancing and singing, instead backing away from the circle of Warblers surrounding Blaine. Neither Thad nor David noticed.

"Oh-ho, we've got trouble! We're in terrible, terrible trouble!"

Blaine was so engrossed in watching Kurt's movements that he didn't notice Trent also leave the circle until he appeared just beside Kurt, wrapping his hand around Kurt's upper arm. Trent said something quietly to Kurt that Blaine couldn't make out, glancing at Blaine's onscreen self before tugging gently on Kurt's arm and leading him out of sight of the camera.

Blaine stared at his computer in confusion as the crescendo of the song came to a close and the video ended. How the hell hadTrent known? Trent was a nice guy, sure, but he and Kurt hadn't been that close. Had they?

God, he'd been so ignorant.

Blaine supposed it wasn't really any wonder Kurt had dumped him.

The door to his bedroom creaked open, and Blaine quickly shut his laptop as his mother leaned in. "You're still up," she said.

"Uh, yeah." He shrugged as the windows rattled against the blizzard outside. "Storm's keeping me up, I guess."

"What were you looking at?"

"N-nothing," Blaine stammered, chewing on the inside of his cheek.

His mother crossed her arms, and she was probably giving him a look but it was too dark to tell for sure. "Honey, I could hear the music. Was it old rehearsal videos?"

"Yeah." Well, that was true. She didn't need to know that he hadn't been watching the actual performance.

His mother's slippers shuffled against the floor as she came over and sat on the edge of his bed. "Blaine, what's going on?" she asked. "Please just tell me. I know you're worried about Dad being pulled into it, but he'd never do anything so drastic as kick you out. He loves you just as much as I do."

Blaine swallowed, knowing exactly what she was referring to. He'd told her first that he was gay in the eighth grade and he'd been so petrified that his father would kick him to the curb that Mr. Anderson hadn't found out until four months later. His father had been anything but supportive of the "choice," as he put it, but fortunately he hadn't been repulsed enough to make Blaine leave.

"I know he won't kick me out," Blaine said softly. "But he always manages to make me feel like crap anyways. Cooper does too, but at least if some stranger calls me a fag I know Cooper has my back. You know how many times that's happened and Dad hasn't said a thing?"

"Blaine," she replied, half gentle and half stern. "I'm pretty sure that this has got nothing to do with… that. You've only been acting like this for the past couple of months." She reached over and squeezed his knee as the wind outside whistled against the walls of the house. "What's going on, Bumble?"

Blaine was silent, his fingers curled tightly around the edge of his laptop as the house creaked and groaned. He shivered even though it wasn't cold in the room.

His mother only sat quietly, waiting for him to speak. And he wanted to. He did. But years of adapting to his family's warped system of "be honest and you'll feel better for about five minutes until it comes back to bite you in the ass" had trained his brain to instinctively shut off the communication between his brain stem and his tongue, and he couldn't open his mouth.

His dad wouldn't yell at him or punish him or throw him to the curb over this – Blaine knew that – but there were always other ways of making him feel even worse about the situation. His father's usual chosen method of undermining (whether that choice was intentional or not) was stating blatant but casual remarks played down with such an insignificant tone so no one heard them but Blaine. His mother he knew was endorsing this system entirely unintentionally just out of sheer unawareness, and Blaine wished that she would see she was just as much at fault for constantly changing her mind about the things she promised. As for Cooper, as strained as their relationship was, Blaine had no doubt that his brother was always on his side. Cooper was just too wrapped up in his own head to be able to help most of the time, but that was a trait that he and Blaine shared more than anything else, so Blaine couldn't exactly hate him for it.

"Blaine," said his mother. "You need to tell me what's going on. I'm not asking."

Swallowing, he tried to convince himself that the walls of his bedroom were strong enough to withstand the storm raging outside.

"Kurt's sick," he whispered. "He's sick, and I didn't do anything about it."

"Oh, sweetheart," she sighed, reaching over and wrapping one of his hands in hers. "I'm really sorry. But it's not your fault."

"No, I know it's not, but I didn't… I reacted badly and I wasn't…" Blaine trailed off, shaking his head and staring at the snow-plastered window. The house groaned around them like it was trying to keep its foundation in the ground. "It doesn't matter," Blaine said. "He doesn't want to see me again."

His mother paused for several seconds as the windows shook in their frames. "Honey, if Kurt's dying then you should probably go see him anyway."

Blaine blinked. "He's not dying."

"Oh. Sorry, I thought— What's wrong with him then?"

Blaine raked his fingers through his curls, his heartbeat skipping slightly. "He, uh… He's got m-multiple personalities," he mumbled, avoiding his mother's eyes.

She stared at him for a few seconds as if she wasn't sure whether he was serious. "Multiple personalities?" she echoed. "How… How does that work?"

"I'm not really sure. It's – It's really confusing." Blaine sniffed, tugging at his curls again. "Kurt's just one of them. A few of the others don't really like me."

"Oh my God," she breathed. "Is he okay, though?"

Blaine's breath hitched in his chest as he shook his head. "No."

"I think maybe it would be a good idea for you to stay away from him for awhile."

Blaine's head snapped up. "What?"

"Honey, this sounds dangerous. Mental illness isn't something to take lightly. I don't want you getting hurt."

"Just a second ago you told me to go see him anyway," Blaine said flatly, feeling his teeth clench. He should have listened to his instincts and kept his mouth shut.

"I thought you meant cancer or something like that!" his mother insisted. "Bumble, if there's a possibility that Kurt could physically hurt you, then I don't want you near him. There's no way to predict that kind of thing."

Blaine fingers curled tightly in his lap, and the house let out another loud and long groan as it strained in the blizzard. "This isexactly why I didn't want to talk about this, Mom," Blaine spat, his throat constricted.

"Bumble, be reasonable. You're eighteen years old. You're too young to be trying to handle this kind of—"

There was suddenly an earsplitting crack-BOOM-snap-crash and the ceiling of Blaine's room was ripped open, the wind howling as it rushed into the room and whipped at their skin and clothes. Massive branches crashed against the floor less than a foot from Blaine's bed, twigs snapping and scattering away. Pieces of ice and snow bit into Blaine's cheeks as his mother yelped and grabbed his arm, yanking him out of bed. Shielding their eyes from the snow and screaming wind, they blindly staggered past the tangle of tree branches to the door. They had to break a few icy branches before they could open the door and fall into the hallway, Blaine yanking the door shut behind them.

"Are you okay?" his mother asked.

He nodded, out of breath as the door rattled and the wind pushed through the crack at the bottom. His teeth were chattering, snow still stuck to his hair.

"What's going on?" Blaine's father demanded, appearing from the door to the master bedroom. "What happened?"

"The tree outside fell onto the house," his mother said shakily. "Crashed through the roof."

His father let out a gruff noise of annoyance, barely audible over the whistling wind inside of Blaine's room. "Damn it, we're going to have to get that fixed," he said before turning to Blaine. "You're okay?"

"Yeah."

"Good. You can sleep in Cooper's room for now. See you in the morning." He turned around and went back to the master bedroom without another word.

Blaine's mother sighed, brushing the snow out of Blaine's hair. "Just try to get some sleep, okay?" she said. "We'll talk more tomorrow."

Blaine swallowed, already dreading it. He bid her a good night and went down the hall to his brother's room.