Kurt was inconsolable when they returned home. Blaine carried him into the house and straight to bed, cradling him as he cried. They stayed like that for a long time--just pressed close, and Blaine tried to comfort Kurt and at the same time fight the relief he felt.

Selfish. Some things never change.

They made love again-- Blaine covered Kurt with his body, shielding him, and watched his face as he pushed inside him over and over. Kurt's eyes stayed half-open, searching Blaine's as he wrapped his thin legs around him and surrendered. Their lips met in the middle, over and over, just like they had done-- Met somewhere between life and death, crossed lines that were never meant to be crossed.

Afterward Blaine lay on his back, holding Kurt against his chest. Blaine's fingertips dragged against the boy's smooth skin, trying to soothe him even though he knew he couldn't. What could he say to yet another soul trapped on Earth forever? He never had any words for the ones before--and now here was one he loved, and he was still completely useless.

It was quiet for a long time but for the distant echo of passing cars, and the light pattering of rain on the window. When Kurt finally spoke, his voice wove effortlessly through the silence.

"I thought I'd see them again," he whispered. "My mom and dad. I thought I'd be with them right now."

"I know, baby," Blaine murmured, his heart aching. "I know. Shh."

"What am I going to do?" Kurt continued as if he hadn't heard anything at all. "You'll grow old, Blaine. You'll move on. You'll forget me--"

"No," said Blaine more forcefully, and turned Kurt's head to look at him. "Look at me. I will never forget you. Do you realize what you've done for me? What meeting you has done to my life?"

Kurt shook his head, his eyes wide, and Blaine held him closer, stroking his hair.

"There aren't any words, Kurt," he whispered. "None. You--" His fingers clenched in Kurt's hair as his heart constricted painfully. "Just you. Nothing else, Kurt. You're more alive than I've ever been. And you brought me to life."

Blaine looked away from Kurt, and pressed the boy against his heart. He felt tears on his skin.

"I'm going to find a way to save you," he continued in a low voice. "I will. I won't let you be trapped here, Kurt. I--"

His eyes went wide as he was struck with a sudden realization. He felt as if a drop of cold water had slipped into his blood, sliding to the very tips of his fingers.

"Prewitt," he said softly.

"What?" he heard Kurt say. Heart beating wildly, he sat bolt upright and took Kurt by the shoulders.

"St. Teresa's," he explained, his eyes awake and alive. "The Ecstasy Club. It all makes sense now, Kurt-- They created you, Lisbeth said. She called you an avenging angel. When they killed you-- It was a ritual, to make something."

"Okay..." Kurt's eyes were searching, confused.

"An avenger," Blaine pressed on, his thumbs pressing into Kurt's shoulders. "That's what you are. You weren't made to hunt down and kill them, Kurt. You were made to kill a specific person."

"Who, though?" Kurt asked, and he looked frightened.

"I think I have an idea," said Blaine, slipping out of bed. He started rustling around for his clothes, his heart beating a mile a minute. "It's just going to be you and me, though. Get dressed, okay? We're going to St. Teresa's."

--

"Mike? How's the Blake case going?"

"Cold. Officer Hudson told me the guy was a pederast, though, so I'm not exactly disappointed."

Blaine pulled on his coat as he headed out the door, Kurt close by his side. It was raining softly, and the night was crawling in. He was quiet on the phone for a moment as he buckled in, eyes fixed on the water streaming down the windshield.

"Blaine? You okay?"

"Yeah," he replied. "When we see each other next, I wanna have a talk with you."

"You're not in love with me, are you?"

Blaine laughed. "You wish. Nah, it's just-- I have to tell you something. You'll wait up for me, right? You've always waited up for me."

"You're kind of freaking me out," said Mike, his voice uneasy.

"Don't worry about it," Blaine replied. "I'll see you around, okay? Give the girls kisses for me."

He hung up. Kurt was beside him in the car, looking concerned. Blaine reached out to trail his knuckles over the boy's smooth cheek, let his fingers slide down his neck. Beautiful, he thought. I've never seen anything more beautiful, not ever.

"Let's go," he said with a soft smile, and started up the car.

--

St. Teresa's wasn't nearly as charming and picturesque in the rain. Instead it looked like something from a children's author who wrote scary stories, all dark and desaturated yet somehow eerily whimsical at the same time. Blaine pulled up a far distance away walked up the slope in the rain, confident that Kurt would follow him.

He could feel Kurt's unease, and he reached out to grasp the boy's hand tightly until they made it to the building. Then he shoved his hands into his pockets and walked purposefully inside.

It was dark and strangely empty. What time was it, anyway? Blaine didn't bother checking; he kept on walking until he reached Prewitt's office, and found that the door was open just a fraction. Slowly and cautiously he pushed it the rest of the way and stepped inside. It was empty.

There was no sound but for the thrumming of the rain on the windows and the click of Blaine's footsteps. He felt Kurt squeeze his hand.

"He's not here," the boy said softly, and Blaine said nothing, just walked forward to the desk and began to search through it. It contained mostly textbooks and religious literature, but Blaine unearthed a small leather-bound journal from underneath a large King James Bible that looked old and well-used. He cracked it open and flipped through a few pages, fascinated--but then he heard a shriek, and stuffed the book into his pocket as he straightened up immediately.

"Kurt--?"

"I'd stay out of this," came a familiar voice behind him. Blaine barely had time to turn his head before he felt a cold, strong hand grasp his forearm and wrench it behind his back. He tried to throw out his other arm to hit the man behind him--but then it occurred to him...

"Daniel?" he said in a tiny voice. The ghost behind him gripped him tighter, then reached around to grasp his chin and forcibly direct his face upward.

"I got you, baby," Daniel whispered. "Look."

Kurt was being restrained by Dave Karofsky and Timothy Blake. Kurt was crying out and struggling while Karofsky nuzzled his neck and hair, and Blake licked his lips as he looked over Kurt's body. Lisbeth Frankel stood by and watched, a cold look on her face, while Robert and Ellen Callahan cowered in a corner.

"So what do you think, Lissy?" said Blake, circling Kurt and Karofsky. "Should Dave and I take turns, or should we just skewer him on both ends? I'll take his mouth."

"Leave him alone!" Blaine screamed, but he was ignored.

"Don't involve me in your depravity," Lisbeth replied, disgusted. "Get your retribution quickly, if you don't mind. I'd rather not witness this."

"No," said Blake, closing in on Kurt and seizing him by the jaw. "We're gonna drag this out. You thought it was bad the first time, Kurtie? Well it's gonna be much worse now that you can't die. We got all eternity to play with you..."

He glanced over his shoulder at Blaine. "And you, buddy, that bullet fucking hurt. You're gonna watch." Blake moved to unfasten his pants. "Hold him down, Davey."

"No!" Blaine screamed. He struggled hard against Daniel's hold, fighting with all his might--until suddenly, Daniel wasn't there anymore. None of them were there anymore.

They'd disappeared.

Kurt fell immediately to his knees, and Blaine rushed toward him. He put an arm around Kurt protectively as Headmaster Prewitt came into view, dressed sharply as usual, a rather nonchalant expression on his deeply lined face. He moved to his desk and placed upon it the candle he'd been holding, which he'd undoubtedly used to summon the ghosts.

Blaine helped Kurt to his feet then moved in front of him, walking slowly toward Prewitt.

"You called them here," he said in a low voice, deeply shaken. "You have the Gift too."

"In a manner of speaking," Prewitt replied. He snuffed out the candle then moved to light the lamp near the window, casting the room in amber light. It was deceptively warm, and cast shadows that stretched up the walls of the ceiling like misshapen trees.

"I get it now," Blaine continued, speaking carefully. "Most of it, anyway. The Ecstasy Club wasn't a student-formed worship group. You organized it. You took these troubled kids and manipulated them into becoming your own personal cult."

"You make it sound so diabolical," said Prewitt, chuckling as he mindlessly organized his office. Blaine stood his ground.

"You hurt them." Blaine stepped closer. "You made them hate themselves so much that they had no one else to turn to. You became their only salvation, didn't you? And just in case any of them got any ideas, you silenced them so they'd die if they told anyone what you were doing. They had to obey you, or they'd never be free. And some of them were so brainwashed they killed people-- And killing Kurt Hummel, doing terrible things to him-- They wanted to be free from you that badly. And Jeffrey Pine--"

"Jeffrey Pine was a lost soul," said Prewitt softly as he straightened out a stack of paper. "Instead of offering up his own suffering, he chose to offer up another's. Unfortunate. Only few are strong enough to find true enlightenment. Miss Frankel came close, but..."

"Look, I get it," said Blaine, moving even closer. Kurt stood close by, utterly silent, and his eyes flickered downward as Blaine's hand moved slowly toward the pistol at his hip. "Being Gifted is more like being cursed. That's what this is about, isn't it? Seeing the dead every day... It can eat away at you, at your soul. I understand. It makes you hate the world."

Kurt's eyes fixed on Blaine, his lips parting. The other man's face looked suddenly so much older, and his beautiful eyes looked haunted. He could see something at war there--and he realized with a jolt that Blaine had never met anyone else who could see ghosts before now.

If Prewitt was at all troubled by what Blaine was saying, he didn't show it. "I'm afraid I don't understand what you're getting at," he said softly. He'd opened the top drawer of his desk, and his hand lingered inside it, slipping underneath a false bottom.

"If you're claiming that I have some sort of sixth sense, I'm afraid you're mistaken. God merely shows me the truth of the world. I doubt it's anything like what you experience, young man. The dead only come to me when I ask for them. Like my former students-- They're here because I asked them to come. Because I knew you'd come here tonight. To arrest me, perhaps? Or maybe you're simply desperate to find someone like you, who knows your pain."

"And you're all about pain, aren't you?" Blaine scoffed. His fingers curled around his gun. For all his ambivalence turned dislike for the man before, he now felt nothing but unadulterated hatred. He'd never hated another human being so much in his life.

"To suffer is to be closer to God," Prewitt continued. "I have been enlightened, dear boy. What you call the Gift is truly a blessing from God. I have completed my mission, and now I'm ready to meet Him."

He smiled at Blaine, and it was horrible to behold. "Just as St. Teresa claimed," he murmured. "Take your pain, my son. Face it. Stop running from it. Then take that pistol of yours and put it in your mouth. Only then will you know God."

Blaine's eyes went cold. All the anger and pain he'd felt from the first time he met that little girl with the braids--all the confusion and sorrow, all of the guilt, all of the unfinished business--seemed to rush up from within and consume him. For a moment, he was the least alive person in the room.

He said, "There is no God."

The trigger was pulled.

--

It happened in a fraction of a second. Blaine whipped out his pistol, and Kurt's hands flew to cover his ears as the resounding gunshot split the air around them. What followed was screaming, glaring silence, and Kurt finally lowered his hands to look at the scene before him.

Prewitt was still standing, perfectly unharmed, slowly lowering a handgun. Blaine had gone horribly stiff beside him--and Kurt nearly couldn't bear to face what he knew was reality, blunt and inescapable before him. The moment lingered, a still frame, frozen in place. Then Blaine fell to his knees.

"No--" Kurt choked out the word in the pleading voice of a frightened child, and he reached out to catch Blaine as his body crumpled to the floor. The weight of it dragged him down too, and he knelt on the ground with Blaine in his arms, cradling him.

"No, no, no..." He pressed his hand against the blood blossoming over Blaine's shirt, but his hands couldn't stop it. They weren't alive anymore.

He ought to have contemplated vanishing then, only to reappear before Prewitt and rip the man's eyes from his sockets. But all thoughts of revenge seemed to bleed out with Blaine on the floor. He had no desire to kill anymore. He had no lingering spirit of vengeance. All he had was the man he loved slowly inching toward death in his arms, and he would bring back to life every person he'd ever slaughtered in the name of retribution if he could stop it.

A second gunshot rattled the air, and another body fell to the ground. Kurt didn't have to look over at the desk to know that Prewitt had turned the handgun on himself.

"Blaine," Kurt whispered, stroking his lover's hair. Bloody tears streaked down his cheeks. "Blaine... Can you hear me?"

"Prewitt," Blaine croaked. The inside of his lips was red with blood, and Kurt stifled a sob. "Kurt-- Kill him..."

"He's dead," Kurt whispered. "But it's okay. You did your best, you're okay... Shh, please don't try to talk. I'm gonna try to heal you, okay? Just like I did with Tina--"

"No," said Blaine, and he struggled to get each word out. His face was rapidly losing color. "Y-you've done enough. And I-- I think this is it, Kurt. I can be with you. I want--"

"No you don't!" said Kurt shrilly, gripping him tighter. "You--everyone--you think death is some kind of big escape, like it'll make everything better, but it doesn't, Blaine-- You're not ready. I wasn't ready. And I won't let you be trapped like I am, Blaine, I won't."

Everything was sinking in. Prewitt was dead, but Kurt hadn't been the one to kill him. Kurt's spirit was still lingering, and even though his killers were all dead, he felt no peace. All he had were tethers, chains holding him down that would continue to do so until the end of time.

"Revenge didn't free me," he continued in a low whisper, stroking Blaine's hair as the other man lay heavy in his arms, eyes closed, weakly sucking in breath. "Nothing will free me. But that's okay. Because that's not why I'm here. I'm not an avenging angel." He leaned down and kissed Blaine's forehead. "I'm your angel."

He kept stroking Blaine's sweaty hair--then softly, sweetly, he began to hum. Through the creeping numbness and the taste of death in his throat, Blaine felt the warm things close around him again, just like he had on the night he'd first met Daniel's ghost. Wings, folding around him. Protecting him.

"Kurt," he rasped. "What're you...doing..."

Kurt said nothing in reply, just cradling Blaine close as he hummed something sweet and timeless and achingly sad. Somehow, the numbness seemed to be lifting, and Blaine's vision cleared. The taste of death rolled back down his throat. His heart quickened and he began to panic.

"Kurt--" He didn't know how it was happening, but he had to stop it. Somehow. "Kurt, stop-- Please!"

The warmth around Blaine seemed to fade, and so did Kurt. Like water slipping from his hands, the boy seemed to trickle away from him, and he reached out-- He had to get him back. Kurt couldn't go away; he needed Kurt. The world seemed to suddenly exist without him, though, and Blaine couldn't remember when he'd ended up on the floor, curled up on his side, utterly alone. It was like Kurt's entire existence had been erased.

Blaine lay there for a long while, in shock, surrounded by the scent of his own blood. He pressed his hand against his chest, feeling for a bullet hole--but there was only flesh, warm and alive.

No, he thought. No no no... It repeated over and over in his head like a frantic prayer, until he realized he was saying it out loud between choked sobs-- "No. Kurt-- No... No, it should have been me... It would have been me, goddamnit--"

It was as if something was attempting to wrench his heart out of his chest, but found his ribcage blocking it--and instead of letting go, it just pulled and pulled and pulled until Blaine thought he would scream from the pain. He curled his arms around himself and wept like a child, so overcome with grief that he didn't sense the presence of a ghost materializing beside him.

"Are you done?" came the dry sound of Daniel's voice. Blaine's sobbing had dissolved into quiet whimpering, and he stared blankly ahead, refusing to look up at the ghost of his ex-fiance.

"What do you want, Daniel," he said in a flat, broken voice that did not sound like his own.

Daniel crossed his arms over his chest. "I want you to get up," he said simply. "It stopped raining."

That made Blaine look up at last. Daniel was standing above him, along with Lisbeth's younger sister and Susan Langdon. Blaine pushed himself off the floor and stared, confused. "Why are you all here?" he asked, his voice tense.

"Kurt went away to save you," said Lisbeth's sister in her raspy, too-low voice. "He went away forever, probably..."

"I know," said Blaine hollowly. "He shouldn't have."

"But he did," said Susan. "You get a second chance. None of us got that, Detective... Even though you tried your hardest. And we're grateful."

Daniel rolled his eyes. "Basically, we think you should get off your ass and appreciate the fact that you get to live another day. You should be grateful, too."

"But it was all for nothing," Blaine croaked staring down at his hands. "I wanted to save Kurt so he could go on, so he could be with his family again...and now he's... Where is he?"

"I guess you have to keep living and find out," said Daniel.

In his pocket, Blaine felt his phone vibrate. There were flashes of blue and red outside the window-- Mike, he thought suddenly, and his hand darted down to the inside of his coat to pull out the journal he'd taken from Prewitt's desk. A quick flip-through was enough to prove that there was enough evidence within to prove the headmaster's guilt--and he had an entire school of kids who could now testify against him.

He wasn't done yet.

Slowly, inch by inch, he pushed himself to his feet. The ghosts around him were already starting to fade. Soon the only one that was left was Lisbeth's little sister. Blaine had seen Daniel go and, strangely, didn't feel a twinge of guilt or regret. Lisbeth's sister seemed to sense this, and she reached out to touch Blaine's hand.

"Thank you," she said softly. "I'm gonna go There now. If I see Kurt, I'll tell him that you decided to keep living."

Blaine squeezed her hand in thanks, and then she was gone.

The sirens got closer, and Blaine heard the doors of the school slam open. The footsteps of students and teachers who had awakened filled the hallways, as well as the sound of Mike's voice, calling his name.

Blaine slipped the journal back inside his coat and grabbed his gun off the floor. He turned and went for the door, ready to fix this, ready to end it.

He wasn't done yet.