Assault re-enactment therapy. Sometimes even rape re-enactment therapy.

Kurt won't do it for a lot of people. In fact, lately he turns pretty much everyone away who asks for it. But then again, Blaine isn't just anyone. He isn't just a client to Kurt, not anymore, even if that distinction remains private. Blaine is special, and his demons happen to be more pervasive than most. They don't only come after him when he's asleep or when he's alone. They're with him all the time. He sees them staring back at him in most every man he meets. It's part of the reason he's had trouble standing up for himself, even to supposed friends. It's why he's become a recluse.

It's why he needs Kurt's help.

They've spoken about it for weeks, during aftercare of Blaine's regular sessions. Kurt encouraged Blaine to seek out a therapist first, but Blaine flat-out refused. He said he had seen a therapist right after the assault happened, for close to a decade, actually. It hadn't helped. Blaine's therapist didn't talk to him about the attack, didn't work out ways for Blaine to manage his anxiety other than through medication, which wreaked havoc with his appetite and his sleep schedule, gave him unsetting hallucinations, and often times made his skin feel like it was crawling off his bones. The side effects didn't matter. The man was uncompromising in his approach to Blaine's care.

The fact that Blaine's therapist turned out to be a homophobe bent on referring Blaine to conversion therapy probably didn't help matters either.

Blaine had broached the idea of re-enactment therapy with a prior Dom, someone he felt fairly comfortable with. They had gone over the pros and cons, weighed the downfalls against the possibility for progress, but in the end the Dom couldn't go through with it. He never exactly gave Blaine a reason why, which caused Blaine to lose trust in him. Without trust, Blaine couldn't fully submit, and they eventually parted ways.

Kurt understands Blaine's reasons for cutting ties. A healthy Dom/sub dynamic requires trust, whether the sub is paying for a Dom's services or they're together in a committed relationship. Blaine's Dom should have had the courtesy to explain why he wouldn't do it, and if it was something personal, deal with the consequences. Kurt doesn't like to make work personal, but his decision to help Blaine might be classified as selfish. Kurt can't lose Blaine's trust.

He can't lose Blaine.

They've decided to exchange slaps for punches, and to abandon their usual system of safe words – green for go, yellow for proceed with caution, and red for full stop – for a single safe word.

E-flat.

In order for Kurt to know how to proceed, he needed Blaine to tell him everything. According to Blaine, it was the first he'd spoken about it in years. The way Blaine told it, he was jumped at a school dance – a Sadie Hawkins Dance. The first dance he had gone to after he came out, and he went with a guy, another gay male student who agreed to go with him as just a friend.

It actually started out as a pretty incredible night. Blaine and his date bought each other matching boutonnieres. They chipped in on a stretch limo with three other couples. They ate dinner at Bel Lago - a restaurant Blaine had gone to with his parents once freshman year and loved. A place he had tucked into his memory as somewhere to take a future date. When they arrived at their high school gym, it had been transformed into an undersea paradise with the aid of balloons, tinsel, and crepe paper. The lights were turned down low, some cover of Thank You for Loving Me was playing a little too loudly over the speakers, and Blaine danced his first ever slow dance with a boy.

If time had stopped at that moment, that dance would have ended pretty close to perfect.

But while Blaine and his date were trapped in their own bubble of happiness, some older jocks had seen them dancing and laughing and having fun, and decided that they weren't going to allow that kind of inappropriate display by a gay couple at their school. In a deposition taken after the dance, the ring leader, James Lipinski, told police that he wasn't going to have fags parading their depravity all over his school. He went home three days later with an order of six-hundred hours community service, with two hundred hours already served. His three other cohorts got away with only three-hundred hours a piece and the same credit for time served because they only cheered James on and stood guard. None of those boys threw any punches. Just James.

But none of the four of them had a scratch on them.

Blaine's date got away with a broken jaw. A single punch knocked him out cold. Besides, Blaine was the one who started all this according to James. Blaine was the one who thought it was right to flaunt his homosexuality by asking a guy to the dance. Blaine even asked his date out publicly – sang to the little twink in the quad and everything. Blaine was the one James was really after. Trying to start a chapter of PFLAG and shoving gay, gay, gay down everybody's throats. Blaine was the one who needed to be taught a lesson.

By the end of the night, Blaine had two broken ribs, a black eye, a sprained wrist, and his pants down around his ankles.

Blaine's parents pulled him out of public school and stuck him into private school immediately after that. Dalton Academy. Zero-tolerance bullying policy plus an excellent academic reputation. Blaine thrived there. He became Student Body President, captain of the show choir, fenced competitively, he even started a boxing club that invited special guest speakers to the school to teach its members practical self-defense. But he didn't date. He didn't go out at night alone. In crowds, he kept his head bowed with an eye peeking over his shoulder. If anyone touched him or brushed against him by accident, it triggered a massive panic attack. He dealt with it as best he could until he couldn't anymore, and Blaine traded in his dreams of performing on a Broadway stage to writing music and giving lessons out of his home.

Kurt's heart broke when he heard that story, the dominator inside him longing to track down James Lipinski and his pals in whatever trailer park or backwater town they ended up in after graduation and introduce them to the business end of his cattle prod. He actually started having dreams about it. He didn't tell Blaine that. Blaine trusted Kurt to help him through this, and that meant keeping his feelings in check. He trusted Kurt to take care of him.

Blaine's chance to confront those assholes has passed. He wants to learn to be numb to it now.

Kurt and Blaine have gone over the events of that evening so many times, Kurt feels like he was there, like he witnessed it. They made up a whole addendum to their original Dom/sub contract, with new hard and soft limits, boundary lines that Kurt can cross at his discretion, and some he cannot cross at all. Kurt knows everything that was said, everything that was done, has committed it all to memory. He's planned out this scene very carefully, trying to anticipate every possible outcome.

When he stands in front of Blaine to begin, his sub wearing jeans and a t-shirt (Blaine isn't quite ready to go a step further and dress in a three-piece suit the way he did those many years ago), Kurt knows that he can be the evil Blaine needs him to be – even if he'd rather tear his own hair out than do it.

But this isn't a hard limit for Kurt. If Kurt thought about that, he might hate himself for it.

“Are you ready?” Kurt asks, cool and calm, close to emotionless.

“Yes, Sir,” Blaine says with a shaky nod. “I am.”

“Okay.” Kurt says. Blaine breathes in and holds it. Kurt takes a moment to channel his own demons from the past, the faces and voices of jocks who made his life miserable in high school, who slammed him into lockers and threw him into dumpsters, and then gives Blaine a hard, resounding smack across the face.

“What did you think you were doing, faggot? Who gave you permission to parade your perversion around our school?”

Kurt slaps Blaine again, and Blaine takes it. This isn't about fighting back. It's about reliving – about facing the monster that's been plaguing him most of his adult life and not letting it own him.

“Do you think you have rights here?” Kurt leans in, yelling the words in Blaine's face – a face trying to stay stoic with his lower lip already trembling. “You think you have the right to do whatever you want?” Slap. “You don't even belong here!” Slap. “Nobody wants you here.” Slap. “You or your faggot boyfriend.” Slap, slap.

Blaine's right cheek is red, Kurt's hand a near-permanent imprint on Blaine's skin, and tears have started to leak from the corners of Blaine's eyes. With something cruel and painful twisting inside Kurt's stomach, he starts to laugh.

“What? Are you going to cry about it?” Slap. “Are you going to fucking cry?” Slap.

At this point in Blaine's memory, he was already on the ground, his wrist burning from being twisted behind his back. Kurt grabs Blaine's arm and spins him around, twisting his wrist up behind his back (though not as tightly as he had promised). Blaine hisses, but he doesn't struggle.

“Maybe I need to teach you a lesson, huh?” Kurt whispers, biting the shell of Blaine's ear. “You like being fucked by guys so much, maybe that's how you're going to learn.”

Blaine whimpers, but he doesn't fight, and Kurt shoves him down on the bed.

Blaine told Kurt that being beaten up wasn't what broke him. The broken ribs and the sprained wrist weren't what kept him locked up in his room at night, hiding under his blankets, unable to breathe. This was. The fear that this boy, bigger and physically stronger, a rage-filled bigot, was so dead set on putting Blaine in his place that he actually chose rape as a viable option. That admission hit Kurt hard.

He knew someone once who had a similar idea.

“You feel that?” Kurt asks, pulling Blaine's ass roughly against his crotch, digging his erection along the seam of Blaine's jeans. “Of course you do. And you want it, don't you?” Kurt laughs, smacking Blaine on the ass hard, which has Blaine biting back a yelp. Kurt reaches around Blaine's body and pops open the button fly to his jeans. “This is going to be easy. You fuckin' fags are always hot for a dick in your ass. You're probably all ready for me, aren't you?”

Kurt tugs down Blaine's jeans to his knees, then pushes his face down deeper into the mattress with a hand to the back of his skull. Kurt starts like he's opening his own jeans. He fumbles with his belt to make the buckle jingle. He pulls the belt out of the belt loops and tosses it to the floor in Blaine's view. He peeks at Blaine's face, sees the terror in his eyes, how his fear has nearly paralyzed him. They talked about this. They talked about what might happen when they got to this point, what Kurt had Blaine's permission to do. But in the end, it's up to Kurt, and Kurt doesn't want to go any farther. He makes a performance out of unzipping his jeans so Blaine can hear it, adds some muttering under his breath – fag, whore, slut – trying to get Blaine to react, to say his safeword.

E-flat.

Kurt sees it on Blaine's lips, but Blaine doesn't say it. Kurt's ready to call it himself, but he waits a little longer. He wants to give Blaine the chance to take control, one way or another. Kurt thinks he knows a way, something that will tip Blaine over the edge. The thing that convinced Blaine's parents to pull him out of school unequivocally.

“Blaine,” Kurt says, dropping his voice, giving it an edge he rarely uses, only around his slaves, and he doesn't keep those anymore, “I'm going to fuck the shit out of you. I'm going to fuck you till I tear you open, going to make you bleed. Then I'm going to tell everyone I know how fuckin' easy it is so they'll know they can hit this, too.”

In real life, two other couples from the dance had found them and broke things up before James could rape Blaine. But here, Blaine only has himself, and this is his moment, to find the strength to overcome it. To end it, and start moving on.

Or for Kurt to stop this, and maybe try again another time. A month from now, after Kurt fixes whatever damage this has done.

He hears Blaine cry – a horrible, terrified sob vibrating the mattress, and that's it. Kurt has to put an end to it.

“E…E-flat! E-flat! E-flat!”

It takes Kurt by surprise when he hears it, but that doesn't matter. He reacts to it instantaneously.

E-flat.

Full stop.

Kurt lets go. He moves away from Blaine on the bed. Blaine keeps crying, keeps muttering the safeword, trying to make the nightmare in his head match reality.

“Blaine,” Kurt says in a voice both soft and stern. “Blaine, it's me. Kurt.” Kurt finds Blaine's focal point – a stuffed lion he's kept since his childhood – and puts it in Blaine's view. He walks calmly around the room, switching on lights, turning on jazz music from an iPod dock on the dresser, the way they had discussed. “I'm the only person here in the room with you. Answer me if you understand.” Blaine doesn't answer. He doesn't say anything, but his whimpering stops, and his sobs begin to die down. Kurt turns on the television and puts on Blaine's Gilmore Girls DVD, also something they discussed, so that the sound of voices and a sense of normalcy fills the air. “Blaine.” Kurt walks slowly back to the bed and crouches down to get into Blaine's line of sight. “Blaine. Do you know who I am?” Blaine's eyes drift from the stuffed lion to Kurt's face and he focuses. Then he nods. “Good,” Kurt says. “Do you still feel safe with me here, or do you want me to get someone else?”

Blaine only has one friend locally, which is kind of gut-wrenching for such a sweet guy like Blaine. His friend's name is Drew, and he happens to be an ex from a short-lived relationship, which Kurt doesn't exactly like, but he's not going to object. Kurt has talked to Drew a handful of times. He seems like a decent guy.

And, as Kurt has to keep reminding himself, this is about Blaine's comfort, not about Kurt.

“N-no,” Blaine says, his voice inching back. It sounds young, and it sounds scared. “No, Sir. I…I don't need anybody else.”

“Okay,” Kurt says, relaxing now that Blaine can talk again. “Do you want me to touch you?”

Blaine nods before he speaks.

“Yes, please, Sir.”

Kurt stays in Blaine's view, letting his sub see what he's doing. Kurt carefully puts a hand to Blaine's back and runs it down his spine. He feels Blaine shake, but Blaine doesn't flinch at Kurt's touch, and the more Kurt touches him, the more Blaine starts to calm down.

“Would you like me to hold you, Blaine?” Kurt asks.

Another nod, and the hint of a sad smile.

“Yes, please, Sir.”

Kurt wraps his arms around Blaine's body and helps him to his feet. He pulls Blaine's jeans back up and re-does the buttons to his fly. They climb on the bed together, but Kurt leads the way. Blaine drops down next to Kurt and Kurt pulls him close. Kurt has held his fair share of subs in his life, and his fair share of lovers. He doesn't hold Blaine the same way as either. He holds Blaine like he's precious. Blaine's trembling body settles into Kurt's in a way that doesn't feel anything other than right. It tells Kurt that he shouldn't be doing this, that he should be putting more distance between himself and Blaine.

“H-how did I do, Sir?” Blaine asks in a strained voice – a voice tired of being held back, one that longs to speak out, the way he used to.

“You did wonderful, baby boy,” Kurt answers, pulling the edge of Blaine's blanket – his favorite red flannel blanket - to wrap him in. “How do you feel?”

“I'm…I'm not happy, Sir,” Blaine admits. “I'm sorry, Sir. We talked about it. You warned me, and I…”

“Shhh,” Kurt says with a knot in his throat. “I know, baby. I know. But we'll fix it. We'll figure out a way.”

Blaine sobs against Kurt's shoulder, and Kurt lets him cry. And when Blaine stops crying, Kurt will go to the kitchen and get him some ice-cream. He'll massage Blaine's back and shoulders while he eats. Kurt will put him in a bath, get him ready for bed, then lie beside him till he falls asleep.

And Kurt will stay the night, in case Blaine needs him.

Kurt can say it's all about Blaine, and that makes it seem okay. He can say that Blaine's a paycheck – a big paycheck – but that's never been the case.

Rory Gilmore makes a pithy comment and Blaine tries to laugh, but he starts to cry harder. Kurt hugs him, but behind Blaine's back, Kurt curls his hands into fists, daydreaming about who he has to find and kill to make this right again. Because the only other thing he can think of will put an end to his professional relationship with Blaine way too quickly.

And a personal relationship with Blaine is out of the question.

Isn't it?