Blaine's seven years old and lonely and afraid. His parents are yelling downstairs, loud, loud, loud, and it feels bad in his ears. His fingers ache from pressing against his eardrums, his eardrums ache from the pressure, the bruise on his arm throbs.

Blaine is a little dark boy in a big dark house, and his little dark closet is the safest place to be. At the very back of his closet is a little dark passage. It's colder than his room had been, darker than his room had been, but he has a sweater and a flashlight, and things are quieter in the passage. Leaving the closet door closed behind him, he crawls inside. He can stand without crouching, though his curls brush the top. His footsteps are quiet on the splintered wood, someone's painted things on the walls, things in scrawled handwriting that Blaine can't read, pictures that he doesn't particularly want to look at.

At the end of the dark little tunnel is a dark little room, a shabby little room, a cold, uncared-for, uninviting little room. The wallpaper peels, grey with mold over its faded pattern of pastel roses. The carpet presses down under Blaine's steps, leaving behind dark, damp footprints. A mirror hangs on one wall, green dotting and warped unto fun-house curves, its gilt frame rusted black. In a corner is a tiny chair, white paint chipped, and on that chair sits a little pale porcelain doll. Its eyes are cast down, its frame hunched, thin-wristed, swinging bare feet. It is clothed in a coat and pants disproportionately small in a way that doll clothes often are. They must've been nice looking once, and now they are faded and too-small.

Blaine crosses over to it, ignoring the feeling of a hand gripping his shoulder hard enough to shift the skin over the bone. There is something about this doll that pulls him to it, the way a swipe of air by a candle swept the flame towards the rush. Blaine kneels by the chair to look in the doll's face. The grip releases his shoulder, and the doll's face pulls up, as if to look at him. Blaine has never seen eyes more beautiful. They are blue edged, spiked with green and grey. The green and grey seems to fade after a few seconds, and they are startlingly blue, a color almost painful to look at.

"Hello," Blaine whispers.

The doll blinks back.
The next day, Blaine wakes up, blankets pulled over his head, skin clammy. His heart pounds fast for a few seconds until he realizes the house is safely quiet around him. Kicking his way free, he gets out of bed and slips on his warmest pair of socks, grabbing the flashlight tucked under his pillow. He slings his shortest, lightest blanket around his shoulder to make a sort of cape, holding the two corners together with a rubber band to be sure it stayed on.

His closet is dark and close and the door shuts behind him.The passage is still there.And still the doll waits at the end, a doll with the most entrancing blue eyes Blaine has ever seen.
Every day from then on, Blaine sneaks through the passage to the little dark room. Most would think it strange that he would want to spend time there. It's damp and cold and shabby, and he always feels fingers on his arm or a brush against his back or thighs.

But the doll looks at him as if it is human. He can tell anything to it, and when they play Blaine feels the strange space between his ribs ease for once. The doll doesn't talk much, but when he does his voice is soft and high and sweet, if a little roughened from disuse. He always thinks of the perfect thing to say in a story, and he likes birds. Blaine finds a big book about them on his parents' shelf downstairs, and brings it to the doll to look at every day. He offers to leave it, or his blanket (because the room is very cold), or new clothes or some food from the kitchen, but the doll says he can't. He says that would be Bad, and he's trying harder to not be Bad. That makes sense to Blaine. His mom yells a lot when he's Bad and won't talk to him at all.

Once, he did take a piece of bread with peanut butter when Blaine asked if he wanted it. That day he had said he didn't know Blaine. He'd looked at Blaine warily from the corners of his greenish eyes and told Blaine to call him Winter. He had called the Man bad words, but Blaine heard his dad say them all the time, so it didn't bother him much. After he'd eaten the bread, he'd told Blaine he'd better run before the Man saw him.

 "I hear his footsteps on the stairs," Winter had said. Blaine had wrapped his blanket closer around him and scurried back into the tunnel, though he hadn't heard the footsteps at all.

Blaine's ten, and they make fun of people who play with dolls. He's good at keeping secrets, though they sit heavy in his stomach. He doesn't tell.The doll's eyes are blue as the sky when Blaine sees it, the pure sky at the very center or the world, unfiltered by clouds or screens or tinted car windows. It is only a little shorter than he is, and its touch feels less like glass and more like skin, though cold porcelain skin. The doll doesn't talk any more (maybe that was something Blaine made up, that's what little kids do, right?), but sometimes its eyes look as though it could. Sometimes its eyes meet his, wide and pleading, as if begging, please hear. Please don't go. So Blaine doesn't. He tells everything to the doll, everything he needs to say, so that his head never feels so full of secrets and words that it will explode.

Blaine's eleven and he still goes to see the doll every day he can. He should feel kind of pathetic but he doesn't, not at all. He can't feel pathetic, because when he sees the doll, slumped in a corner, seem to straighten as he approaches, he feels the spaces in his chest swell for a moment before smoothing over, filling like a glass under a faucet. Sometimes the doll had said his name was Winter, or Burn, but Blaine sometimes wonders if he'd made that up. Like he'd made up the feeling of hands on him, or the footsteps on the stairs (there were no stairs there was no way out but the passage was there?).

Blaine's fourteen and he's had his cast off for exactly six hours. His leg hurts and his wrist hurts and his ribs hurt and his heart hurts. He's cold and he can't get warm, even with two hoodies on and fleece-lined sweatpants. The house is quiet around him but he still feels uneasy, too open and too many angles he can't see. His closet is small and has walls pressing in on him from every side, and there's not enough light to make his head pound and his eyelids pulse painful. At the back of his closet is the little dark tunnel, and even in the closet he has an itch under his skin, get out get out go go go run run run-Stop. Stop. Please. Blaine pleads with the drumbeats in his mind. Even under his eyelids, he sees the white shape of the doll.

He'd seen that shape lying on the concrete, arms covering his skull, his skull fragile as porcelain. He hasn't seen the doll since the afternoon before that night, not even as he slept, cold in a hospital bed. Eyes burning, he inches through the little dark tunnel.

At the other side of the little dark tunnel is a little pale boy.

Not so little, Blaine realizes as he swivels to look at Blaine.His eyes are the doll's eyes. The boy cowers under Blaine's shadow, dusty and grey in the dim light of the little shabby room. Scrambling to his hands and knees, he presses his forehead to the floor."Um-" Blaine stutters, confused. "It's fine-you don't. Uh. Please get up." 

The boy sits back on his heels, movements robotic. The glimpse Blaine gets of his eyes is a blue-green-grey lightning bolt. They're begging, let me speak and hear me speak. Let me tell and don't tell. "It's okay, we should-you should-you can-talk. Yeah." Blaine's tripping over his words, trying to talk soft and low so as not to frighten him.The boy casts his eyes down, jaw clenched, the muscles of his back tight, straining, as if to fly-or brace himself for a fall or the cut of a whip.

"May I touch you?" The boy says, his voice husky from disuse but high and soft.

"Of-of course. You don't need to ask-" Blaine begins, but then the boy is crawling towards him, still on his hands and knee, slow and cautious, and extends one delicate hand to lay it on Blaine's foot (his wristbone stands out sharp, purple veins stretched over the knobs of bone, skeleton-thin). His wrist is encircled with scars in the shape of stars, and his fingerprints on his other hand, lying palm-up on the floor, look slightly crooked, not lining up with the flesh of his fingertips as they should. Blaine holds his breath, unsure of what to do. His heart squeezes if being held in a hand, and he feels a familiar brush across the back of his thighs.

The boy whispers softly from the floor, "No..."

"What's your name?" Blaine whispers back. "Mine's Blaine." A sudden urgency grips him, but the boy doesn't answer him.

"The footsteps. Run."

And Blaine, stupid and cowardly as he is, runs. He always runs.

He runs back to his room, and he can't breath, and his head pounds, but he welcomes the pain against the feeling of numbing cold in his hands and feet, extending to his joints and creeping up towards his chest. 
The next morning, which dawns grey and even colder than last night had been, Blaine clambers through the little dark passage, and in that little room is the tall pale boy.

He isn't sitting in the corner. He doesn't cower. He stands in the middle of the room with a body at his feet. As his gaze flicks up to meet Blaine's, blue and green and grey and shining cutting and sharp through the darkness of the room and the damp haze of mold and screams, he's still breathing hard. A little smirk twists a corner of his mouth, before it drops back into the slack, pained look Blaine remembered from yesterday.

Blaine's fourteen and foolish, but for once he's not afraid. "He's dead," the boy says. "We're Kurt."

 "Have you always been?" Blaine says.

Kurt shrugs. "We're a lot of things."

"Are you sure he's dead?"

"We've been waiting to do that for a while."

"So you are?"

"What?"

"Sure?"

"Very." 

Blaine watches as Kurt drags the body to the corner and chains it to the little white chair, which sits there, paint more flaked and gouged than ever.

"It's dead, you know. That won't make a difference."

"Of course it's dead. We just told you so. But perhaps he can still feel it." Kurt picks up the end of the chain and whips it directly at the body's face, a bloody unrecognizable mass already.

 "How'd you do it?"

"Well, honestly, we've you to thank," Kurt says, and casts his gaze towards a red-stained knife in the corner. Blaine remembers the black enamel handle sticking out of his mother's butcher block in the big kitchen with the high counters.

 "So what do you do now?" Blaine says.

"You ask a lot of questions," Kurt says.

Blaine shrugs.

"I'm going to make sure he hurts. And then I'm going to eat."

"I have some food. Do you want to come with me and eat it?"

"Sure," Kurt says. He swings the chain a couple more times."What're you going to do after?"

"Oh, I don't know. See what it's like down the stairs. Finish revenge."

"There are no stairs."

"There are," Kurt says. "I know it. Anyways, we'd better go eat. I've got a lot of revenge to finish."

"How much?"

"Years worth."

"When did I give you the knife?"

Kurt furrows his brow. For once he doesn't have an answer. Finally, he shrugs and says, "Can we eat soon?"

"Sure. Anytime you want to."

Kurt's eyes flick shut, as if he was sleeping on his feet. 

"Kurt. Kurt?" Blaine says, wanting to reach out and touch his arm, make sure he's still there, but afraid that if he does Kurt will run. Already, the muscles of his back are tensing, his grip on the chain turning white-knuckled. His eyes snap open.

"Winter. Not Kurt," he says, and deals the body on last blow. "We're hungry. Do you have any food?"

"Yes," Blaine says. 

"Let's go," Winter says. His eyes are green and sharp as the edge of leaf and they dart from side to side, his shoulders curl in where Kurt's were squared, and his hands are quicker, almost spiderlike the way the bony fingers jab and retreat. He slides into the little dark passage easily.

"What about the stairs?" Blaine says. "You wanted to see what was down them."

"No stairs. Stairs aren't safe. Let's eat." 

They crawl through the little dark passage and tumble out into Blaine big dark room. Kurt-Winter's-clothes are rags, and before they go downstairs Blaine lends him a hoodie and a pair of sweatpants (he won't change in front of Blaine, Blaine wouldn't look anyways. He goes in the closet and shuts the door and Blaine's worried for one second that he would disappear, but he emerges with the clothes hanging from his hips and shoulders, arms wrapped around his ribcage).They twist Blaine's doorknob and emerge, blinking the lights of the long tall hallway, down the winding shadowy stairs to the kitchen.

Winter washes the knife, scours it with steel wool, dips it in the bleach, and scours it again before sliding it back in the butcher block. Its black enamel handle looks exactly the same as the others, and Blaine realizes that it won't be long before he won't be able to remember which one it had been, that he'll soon use it as nonchalantly as any of the others.

Water still running, Winter leans against the counter, and his eyelids flutter down.

"Are you-"

"Fine," Winter says, but now his eyes are wider, the blue-green-grey that Kurt's had been.

"Kurt?"

"Yes?" He says absently. "What was down the stairs?""Um, we didn't go down the stairs."

Kurt presses his lips together, and Blaine feels as if someone is pricking his chest with the tip of a knife, because he doesn't want all the handles to look the same, sticking out from the wood of the butchers block. His fists itch to hit and hurt and he understand why Kurt wanted the man to feel pain, because he can think of quite a few people he wants to break right now. "We can go up them," Blaine says. "Can't we?"

Kurt's eyes are cast down on his hands, gripping white-knuckled to the edge of the high marble counter. "We can," he says slowly. Blaine feels like he could touch the blue flame of the gas stove and not feel pain. The knife makes a sound like skin over silk as he slides it from the wood. "Give me one. One for each." Kurt says. Sliding another knife free, he says, "This is one for Lima. William's mother. Who stood by and told him that what he did wasn't wrong." Taking another, he says, "This is for Bystander. Who just didn't care. This is for The-Way-Things-Are, who said that I would have to take it because there was no other choice." He considers the three knives laid out in front of him. "And one more. Just in case."

Blaine sees the silver glints of the blade dance in Kurt's eyes.

"What about you?" Kurt says.

"I don't know."

Kurt looks him in the eye, and Blaine's touched that blue flame. "You know."

There are two knives left in the butcher block. Blaine takes them both. They wrap the blades in rags and place them in the bottom of Blaine's empty bookbag, cover them up with sandwiches and cheap paperbacks. The glass panels on the tall heavy front door reflect glowing points of light on the walls.

The outside looks like a blur of green and grey.

They leave the tall heavy front door swinging open behind them.

"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; 

I lift my lids and all is born again. 

(I think I made you up inside my head.) 

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,

 And arbitrary blackness gallops in: 

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead."