Blaine looks up at the full moon looming overhead and sighs, doom flooding his body with that single glance. He feels it burning inside his brain; itching underneath his skin; wedging between his heartbeats, adding a skip to their usual rhythm. It’s almost time…and this time, Kurt is going to see. The one thing that Blaine had tried so hard to keep from him, Kurt was going to bear witness to first-hand – the change. White fur, sharp teeth, yellow eyes, and all. Blaine’s transformation from human…to beast.

They’ve been traveling for over an hour. They had to drive outside the city limits, to a rural area of the county covered mostly in dense, undeveloped forest. They parked beside a shadowy covert in a vacant, dirt, parking lot, and started walking the rest of the way. The trail through the woods that leads to Blaine’s secret spot becomes treacherous. No defined path marks the way, but Blaine has been to this exact place hundreds of times.

More times than he would like to remember.

This isn’t what he wanted – to be cursed in this way, to have his life put on hold every full moon so he can suffer this torment. As long as he can recall, this has been the routine for him – brought here first by his father, then by his brother, neither of them wolves, but knowledgeable of them. But for the last few years, he’s gone it alone. He felt so isolated before he met Kurt. Even though he had friends at school, he kept a wall between himself and them. They weren’t really what Blaine would consider good friends anyway. They flocked to him because of his status – captain of the Warblers, leader of the Fight Club, president of The Debate Team. But Kurt was different. He didn’t need to be won over. The friendship that Kurt gave him so readily, and the love that came with it, are the things Blaine has wanted more than anything, and now, he’s putting them in jeopardy.

But he loves Kurt too much to say no to him. He just prays this doesn’t turn out to be the end for them.

If Kurt abandons him tonight over this, Blaine will have nothing left.

He’ll truly be cursed.

“Are you sure you want to see this?” Blaine asks, nervously toying with his bowtie.

“Absolutely,” Kurt assures him, stopping walking to help. He pulls off the tie, folds it carefully and sticks it into his pocket. “This is a part of who you are, and I want to see it. Besides” – Kurt starts on the buttons to Blaine’s shirt, biting his lower lip – “I think it’s kind of hot.”

“Hot?” Blaine says, confused, as if the thought that him being a werewolf might turn Kurt on had never occurred to him. “Alright.”

Kurt undoes the last button, and Blaine slips his shirt off. The smile that had started on Kurt’s face, coupled with a hot flush on his cheeks at watching his sexy boyfriend undress, halts momentarily when he sees the sad look in Blaine’s eyes.

“Is there something wrong?” Kurt asks, taking the shirt and folding it over his arm.

“This isn’t going to be like Twilight, Kurt,” Blaine says, starting on his pants. “This is reality. My reality. And I don’t want it to change anything between us.”

“Blaine…” Kurt grabs hold of Blaine’s shoulders and turns him to catch his eyes – eyes that shift from human to canine as the moonlight hits them. “Look at me.” Blaine stops fussing with his pants and stands up straight, looking in Kurt’s eyes at his request. “I promise, nothing that happens tonight is going to change the way I feel about you. I love you. I always will. And I’ll be here for you, no matter what.”

Blaine nods, a touch disbelieving, but he can’t debate. He’s run out of time. “Alright,” he says, taking a step away when he feels the moon reach its peak, its white light filling him from head to toe. “Just, please…keep that in mindahhhh!”

The convulsion is sudden. It hits Blaine like a battering ram to the back and arches his spine. His mouth opens, wider and wider until it becomes a grotesque, gaping maw, locked around a silent scream, his throat tensing, trying to force out the sound. Kurt gasps at the sound of bones breaking, reforming, limbs stretching, then retracting, the subtle outline of muscles tearing beneath Blaine’s skin, reattaching, bulging with an inhuman strength.

“Blaine!” Kurt cries, arms awkwardly outstretched, caught between wanting to hold him, comfort him…and wanting to run for the sake of his own protection. Maybe he didn’t think this through as thoroughly as he should have. Didn’t it say in The Prisoner of Azkaban that a werewolf would kill his best friend if he crossed his path? He and Blaine are a little more than best friends, but at any rate, did Kurt want to take that chance?

Kurt doesn’t want to die, but tied with that, he doesn’t want Blaine to kill him. He doesn’t want the boy that he loves to have to live with the heart-wrenching guilt of having savagely murdered someone he loves.

Blaine thrashes, a clawed hand swiping Kurt’s way, inches from his face. Kurt stumbles backward, his foot hitting a gnarled tree root, sending him sprawling to the ground. As he tries to wrench his foot free from a second, interlocking root, he sees Blaine in silhouette against the moon, crying out, pleading over and over, “Oh God! Oh God!” How can he withstand this? Kurt wonders as he reaches down and yanks the brittle root from the ground. How can he go through this agony month after month? It must be unbearable! Poor Blaine! Poor, poor Blaine!

Kurt hurries to his feet, determined to stick it out - stay with Blaine till the end, if that’s what it takes. Kurt can’t leave him now. Not after he’s seen the way Blaine suffers. A screeching wail splits the night, a final throe, and then…poof. Nothing. Blaine’s gone. The night goes quiet, the air still as the stale breath of death.

Kurt blinks. He looks around, but Blaine has utterly disappeared, leaving behind him his pants and boxer briefs, which are, surprisingly, whole and untouched, when Kurt thought they would have been ripped to shreds. He wonders if that agonizing transformation snapped Blaine out of existence. Blaine had said once that it seems to get worse every time. It looked to Kurt as if Blaine was being torn apart, joints severing, limbs curling in on themselves.

Kurt feels numb. In a moment, he’ll have to resolve the fact that his boyfriend is gone, dissolved by the metamorphosis he should have never endured, but there’s something else pressing in on Kurt. He’s alone…in the forest…off the beaten path. He doesn’t know north from south. Left, right, forward, behind – it all looks the same.

He’ll never find his way out.

He feels a chill swoop down his spine. He hears a rustling of leaves, or of cloth; a crackling twig; a muffled, high-pitched bark. He freezes. Something leaps onto his foot out of the dark and Kurt cries out “Blaine!” futilely, since he knows Blaine won’t answer.

“Rrrrruff!”

Kurt hears a yip. He feels a slight weight on the toe of his boot, hears a scrape-scrape-scraping sound, and follows it down.

There, perched on its hind legs and bracing on the toe of his Doc Marten, is a tiny, white, puffy dog-looking creature, with yellow eyes, and sharp, pearly-white fangs.

It’s panting, almost gleefully.

And it’s cute as sin.

Kurt’s mouth twists.

“Blaine?” he asks. “Is that you? You’re…alive?”

The ball of fluff yips, and jumps happily, zipping in a circle a few times in search of its tail before gazing adoringly back up at Kurt. Kurt is extremely relieved that his boyfriend hasn’t evaporated into nothingness, and yet, after that terrifying display, he feels somewhat…cheated.

“That’s…that’s it?” Kurt asks, vaguely disappointed. “That’s your werewolf form?”

Blaine tilts his head, yellow eyes turning golden in the moonlight, an oddly questioning expression on his furry face, like he’s asking Kurt what he thinks.

“You’re…you’re a Pomeranian,” Kurt says.

Blaine yips a confirmation.

Kurt’s eyebrow kinks. “I think I own beauty blenders bigger than you.”

Blaine plops down on his haunches in the leaf litter and whines.

“Oh, no,” Kurt coos, crouching to pet his boyfriend. “I’m sorry, Blaine. I didn’t mean to…”

A piercing howl rings out nearby, and both Kurt and Blaine pop their heads up in search of it. It had never dawned on Kurt that there would be more werewolves about, but logically, if Blaine is a werewolf, there must be others.

Bigger ones.

More dangerous than the white tuft of fuzz at his feet.

Unless horror movies had it wrong, and werewolves are really just pocket pets in disguise.

The trees in front of them shake, branches crunching, foliage parting. The howling grows louder, closer. A few narrow trunks fell in the wake of three tremendous wolves stepping out from the thick of it, grey fur glistening under the moonlight, a match to their razor sharp fangs. Kurt lurches upright and steps back, with Blaine at his ankles, walking steadily away. Kurt tries to look as non-threatening as possible, hands coming up in a sign of surrender. The three animals gnash their teeth and shake their muzzles, saliva flying from their mouths, eyes pinned on Kurt and his furry companion.

The smallest of the three stands about Kurt’s height at the shoulder, and the next one appears nearly twice that size.

Nope. Not small. That’s just Blaine.

“Oh…my…God…” Kurt mutters in a shaky voice, his body cold, his heart paralyzed with fear.

Blaine, seeing his frightened boyfriend tremble above him, snarls in defiance, shooting off in the direction of the encroaching danger, bearing his teeth, growling like a demonic Furby on acid.

“No!” Kurt screams. “Stop! Blaine! They’ll kill you!”

But the deed is done. In a split second, Blaine takes position dead-center between Kurt and the wolves, fearlessly confronting the beasts, white fur bristling, sticking out all over. It would be positively adorable if not for the image filling Kurt’s brain of one of those snarling monsters gobbling Blaine up whole like a fluffy Mentos.

Kurt turns his head, but he can’t completely look away. As morbid as it seems, he can’t stop watching. He has to know what’s going to happen to Blaine. In the end, if Kurt manages to escape the inevitable massacre, Blaine’s parents will deserve to know what happened to their son.

That he died in defense of Kurt’s life.

Blaine yips louder, growls harder, and from his slanted view, Kurt can see Blaine trying his hardest to give those three wolves hell.

The animals stop. Their eyes open wide, mouths of sharp teeth curling up into what looks like a comical grin.

Can wolves laugh? Kurt suspects he’s about to find out.

Before Kurt’s eyes, the three wolves grovel, bowing their heads and falling to the ground, humongous paws covering their muzzles as they whimper in apology. Blaine leaps between them, snipping at their ears, and the large animals actually quiver in fear. Blaine assesses them, their cowering states, and when he’s pleased by their submission, he leaves them where they are, thrusts his black jelly bean nose in the air, and jogs triumphantly over to Kurt.

“Wow,” Kurt says in awe, looking down at teeny werewolf Blaine, yipping up at him proudly. Kurt bends over and offers out his cupped hands, which Blaine hops into.

“That’s my brave, bushy boyfriend,” Kurt says, cuddling Blaine close to his cheek. Kurt smiles when Blaine nuzzles back, accompanied by tiny licks and nibbles. “The fiercest puffball of them all!”

Kurt glances over at the humbled wolves, lying obediently still, then buries his nose into Blaine’s soft fur.

“Who’s a ferocious beastie?” Kurt says. “You are! You are! Yes, you are…”