Suicide Boys, Chapter 6
Kurt woke up early, same as he always did, the events of the night before still chasing slow circles in his head. Blaine had stayed over, was in fact still in Kurt’s bed. And he had most likely been awake when Kurt had called Puck.
It was dangerous ground and he knew that.
Chances were good that Blaine had overheard at least part of that conversation and even though it was nowhere near conclusive proof, Kurt knew that he’d still said enough to raise a few questions. The hooker comment can’t have helped, he thought. He just hoped Blaine hadn’t caught the worst of it, that taking the call to the bathroom had in fact put enough distance between them to give the conversation privacy. Otherwise he’d need to find some way to explain it if it ever came up, which was more fancy footwork than Kurt was prepared for at present.
But if Blaine had heard anything damning then he didn’t let on.
Saturday morning and it was as if nothing had happened. Maybe it hadn’t. Kurt wasn’t sure he wanted to stake anything on that kind of luck. As always, Kurt made his own luck.
He smiled at Blaine over breakfast, made the usual small talk about weekend plans and his scheduled shopping trip with Mercedes. Subjects and words carefully chosen to remind the other boy that he was normal. Nothing was out of the ordinary and the day could play on without paranoid interruption.
He flirted for good measure, played on the crush he knew the other boy had.
When he drove Blaine home he made sure there was never much of a silence in the car, and when he parked in front of Blaine’s house he made an aborted movement as if he were going in for a kiss but changed his mind at the last second. Puck wouldn’t like it, certainly wouldn’t like that Kurt wasn’t just giving the go-ahead to get Blaine out of the way, but just this once Puck didn’t need to hear about it.
Somehow he seemed to know anyway.
“He heard you. The phone call.” Puck accused that night, the both of them sitting in his truck outside the old abandoned drive-in, cups of steaming hot coffee in hand. “He did, right? I know you, so don’t try and lie to me about this.”
“I wasn’t going to,” Kurt replied, breathing in the steam from his low fat mocha.
“You were just going to forget to tell me. I’m not stupid,” Puck continued when Kurt didn’t say anything else. “I can see what’s going on here.”
“Oh?” Kurt arched an eyebrow. “And what is that?”
“You like him. Maybe not like attracted to him, but enough that you don’t want to have to kill him.”
Kurt felt his back stiffen, muscles tightening. If he held on to his coffee any tighter the Styrofoam cup would buckle. “You take that back,” he said, cold.
“What?” Puck asked, purposefully antagonising. “So it’s not the truth then?”
“You think that I’d rather put us both in danger than maybe let you kill him?” Kurt snapped, eyes narrowed in a glare that normally set people to cowering. Puck didn’t even blink. “You think,” Kurt continued, “I’d rather risk being exposed as a freak, as an accessory to murder?”
“Would you?” Puck demanded, turned around in his seat to face the other boy.
“You think I can’t keep secrets from him.”
“I think you like him too much to be objective.”
Frustrated, feeling put upon, Kurt gulped from his coffee to stall for a moment of time to think. The last few mouthfuls disappeared too quickly. He balanced the empty cup between his knees, looking at it rather than Puck. “Blaine isn’t a danger to anyone, and he’s not a bully.”
“And that matters?”
Kurt resisted glancing back at the other boy. He knew that if he did Puck’s face would give him his answer. The look in those deep brown eyes, the danger, the memory of hot naked skin and half-buried bodies. “No,” Kurt said finally. “No, I suppose it doesn’t.”
“Then I should kill him,” Puck said. His hand reached over, slid across Kurt’s knee and took the empty cup from between them. “Before he figures anything out. Before he gets to be real trouble.”
“...Maybe he won’t be.” That was probably wishful thinking.
Kurt slid sideways across the seat until he was pressed up against Puck’s side. “Until we know for certain that he actually knows anything, or that he would actually tell anyone, there’s no reason to act. Plan it,” he added, stroking his fingers up and down Puck’s denim-covered thigh, “think of how to do it without sparking any attention... But wait until I say so.”
-
Sometimes when a person’s perceptions change there’s a moment where they realise just how obvious things really were. Blaine was not at that moment. Blaine was still in the build-up, the times when the pieces of the puzzle still didn’t quite fit together into a whole. He had everything in circumstantial evidence, in hearsay and guesswork. None of it was solid.
Suspicions filled him, battling his natural attraction for a cool, confidant boy who had helped catapult him into popularity. Whenever Kurt smiled at him he got distracted, like suddenly it wouldn’t even matter if his suspicions were true. Kurt smiled and Blaine found himself coming up with justifications.
Maybe, he would say to himself, maybe Kurt didn’t know. Or, better, maybe he was wrong.
This strange suspicion that the killer wasn’t a perfect match for the police profile could just be paranoia. Post traumatic stress. Knowing that teenage boys were capable of violence didn’t mean that they were capable of murder.
Murder.
It was such a morbid, terrifying word. It had written itself on the inside of his eyelids like a memory tattoo, a constant reminder of all the bits and pieces that didn’t quite fit.
He knew he was being overly obsessive when he found himself walking towards the memorial during lunch on Monday, the gray skies and lightly spitting rain having chased everyone else inside.
Blaine stood there in front of the memorial outside the school, feeling strangely sombre.
Six names engraved onto a brass plaque at the base of a marble block.
“October, 2009,” Blaine read aloud, “While you may now be gone, you’ll live forever in our hearts.”
He stood there a little longer in silence, wondering about the six names and the boys they had belonged to. He thought about the rumours he’d heard, the statements Kurt had made about the boys having been bullies. The newspaper articles about their deaths weren’t a lot to go on. All of this information he had that he’d dug up in drips and drabs, in the end it amounted to pretty much nothing.
“Would you like to guess who they were before they died?”
Blaine jumped at the sound of another voice. He looked over his shoulder to see his mentor, arms crossed, looking at the memorial plaque in disdain. He wanted to ask what Kurt was doing out here, but he didn’t want to seem discourteous. After all, plenty of students must have passed by here since the last body had been discovered.
“Everyone likes to remake them as the poor, heroic victims,” Kurt continued when Blaine didn’t say anything. “The sports stars and the sons of respectable families. Nobody likes the idea that those poor dead boys were actually the least likeable, most viciously bigoted bullies in the school. That would be speaking ill of the dead.”
Blaine didn’t know what he could say to that. He stayed silent and watched Kurt walk up to the memorial, crouch down to run his fingertips over the writing engraved into the brass.
“These boys made my life a living hell,” Kurt mused, voice barely above a murmur. “They really don’t deserve to be remembered with fondness.”
“You suggested the memorial,” Blaine pointed out, wondering now if it hadn’t just been a ploy. A stroke of genius by an opportunist who had no reason to mourn. He watched Kurt’s lips tilt upwards into a thoughtful smile.
“It was a perfect move to make,” he admitted, and turned to look up at Blaine. Blue-grey eyes narrowed a little. “You don’t underestimate me. Do you think I’m callous?” Kurt asked as he stood again. “Cruel, to tell the truth about not being sad.”
“No,” Blaine answered, though deep down inside he couldn’t help but think that it didn’t seem natural. He couldn’t help comparing it to what he’d felt that summer, in the weeks after he’d been let out of hospital. Would he have been sad if his bullies had died? He wouldn’t have, he thought. “They bullied you,” he added. “You only saw their bad sides so it makes sense you wouldn’t mourn them.”
“Should I be glad they’re gone? Or is that going too far?”
Uneasy with the way the conversation was going, Blaine glanced away from the other boy and back at the plaque. “It’s logical,” he said, choosing the diplomatic answer, “given what they did.”
“Should I thank the man who killed them, Blaine?” Kurt asked lightly.
Blaine shook his head. “Nobody deserves to die,” he said quietly, but with the memory of his own bullies fresh in his mind he couldn’t find it in him to feel it.
“Nathan cornered me once. He was ready to beat me bloody in a dark, dank alleyway, ready to finally graduate to hate crime. But something in the shadows distracted him, and they say that night was the night he must have died. So should I thank the killer for saving me, or should I feel like it was my fault? Oh!” Kurt gasped dramatically, flinging his arms up and looking at the cloudy sky, “if only he had beaten me he may still be alive.”
The words hung heavy in the air. As heavy as Blaine’s silence. Kurt lowered his arms and smiled at him. Took a step forward and reached out to touch his chin. “It’s just a memorial, Blaine.”
“I didn’t know you were so morbid,” Blaine commented, skin tingling in a dangerous way where Kurt had touched him.
“Aren’t you?”
Kurt had a point and he knew it. Blaine shook his head. He turned his back on the memorial. “We should get some coffee,” he suggested. “My treat.”
Anything to change the subject. Anything to forget the chills threatening to creep up his spine when he thought about the dead boys.
At his old school Blaine hadn’t skipped a single class. A few times, when the bullying had been at its worst, he had simply refused to get out of bed and go to school but even that had made him feel awful enough that he may as well have been sick. This time around he wasn’t sure what to feel.
They took Kurt’s car because he was the one of them who actually had one, and a licence to go with it. A short time later the huge tank of a car was parked outside the Lima Bean cafe, a place Blaine had come to know as a social Mecca. Coffee appeared to be a staple of all social outings whether they ended good or bad. Today was no exception. No matter what happened he could always rely on the steadying warmth of a medium drip house blend to get him through.
“Was it bad?” Kurt asked him when they were seated, the two youngest people on a Monday afternoon.
“Was what bad?”
“What happened to you. I know,” Kurt continued, watching Blaine from across the table, “that people react differently to things. For example, the one time I ever saw Puck beaten up he was angry, but largely unaffected. Whereas if it had been me I’m positive I would have been a mess. So what was it for you?”
Blaine paused a moment, their earlier conversation still ringing through his mind. “It was bad for me,” he answered finally. “It was very bad.”
The two boys fell into a short silence. Kurt’s eyes dropped away from Blaine’s face. He picked up a napkin from the small stack on the table and started ripping it into perfect neat strips. By the time he spoke again the strips were already beginning to form a small pile on the table. “It was bad for me too.”
“It’s hard to imagine you ever being bullied,” Blaine said truthfully. “You’re so well adjusted I can hardly imagine you being anything else.”
The short, bitter laugh he got in response was a surprise. Kurt shook his head, a wry smile twisting his lips. “Everyone is a little messed up, Blaine. Even me, difficult as that is to imagine.”
“So what’s messed up about you?”
The second he asked it Blaine suddenly wanted to take it back. It felt like tempting fate, poking the sleeping lion. Deep down he knew he didn’t want to learn that Kurt wasn’t the perfect boy he imagined him to be. But it had been said and now there was no taking it back. Rather than try, Blaine kept his mouth shut and played with a sugar packet.
Kurt’s smile remained cool and humourless. “I’m thankful to the Lima Killer,” he reminded his friend. “I believe that would count as messed up, wouldn’t it?”
“Yeah... But,” Blaine offered Kurt’s own quote back at him, attempting once again to lighten the mood, “everyone is a little messed up.”
“Are you?” Kurt asked, eyebrows arched upwards, punctuating his sentence.
“You’ll find my picture alongside the dictionary definition,” Blaine joked.
He wasn’t sure if he meant it or not. The strange paranoid ideas that kept popping into his head implied that not everything was ok. The fact that he had a crush on a boy who already had a boyfriend (but may or may not like him back) was another bad sign. But on the other hand lay his popularity, his consistent good grades and all of the friends he’d made in McKinley’s glee club. It was an even match. Another trade off that reminded him of the kinds of things that happened in movies.
Blaine was ok, but for how long?
That very morbid thought snapped him back to reality just in time to catch Kurt’s reply.
“You’re not messed up. You’re the picture of mental health.”
Now it was Blaine’s turn to smile sarcastically. “I don’t know about that.”
“I don’t see why,” Kurt told him. His gaze roamed from the top of Blaine’s head down to the middle of his torso, the rest of him cut off from view by the edge of the table. “I’ve known you for a while now, Blaine Anderson, and so far you seem perfectly normal.”
Blaine accidentally tore the sugar packet in half. Tiny white sugar crystals spilled across the table. He looked over at Kurt and found himself speaking before he could think better of it. It was now or never, and he may or may not be about to risk his friendship. “Can I tell you something? Something really stupid and ridiculous that, if I tell you, you have to promise me will never turn into gossip.”
Kurt leaned forward a little. “Now that sounds too juicy to resist. Of course I’ll keep it secret.”
“I have this theory,” Blaine began, trying to organise his suspicions into one coherent idea to better explain it to Kurt, “and I know it’s a stupid theory, so bear with me. But I keep having this idea about the Lima Killer...”
“A theory?” Kurt prompted, leaning forward a little more.
“This is going to sound so silly.” Blaine gave a self-deprecating smile. “I keep thinking that the killer wasn’t just some random person with a thing for jocks. I actually think... I think that the killer was - is - a student.”
“A student,” Kurt repeated, voice neutral. “A student at McKinley?”
“Yes. It makes sense, it even fits with the profiling that was done on the killer.” Blaine hesitated, not sure how much he should say about what he thought. “I mean, it’s not without precedence. There have been high school shootings before, instances where a kid our age just loses it and goes to town on the people who made their life a hell. Under the right circumstances... it could be anybody, anybody who might’ve been bullied.”
He paused then, watching Kurt for any sort of reaction. The other boy just looked at him, his cool blue eyes not giving anything away. “It does make sense,” Kurt said slowly. “Do you have a theory about who it might have been?”
“...I do,” Blaine admitted reluctantly. “I don’t know if you’d want to hear it though.”
“I want to hear it,” Kurt assured him, a touch too quickly.
“I think... This is probably just me being crazy. I think it might be Puck.” Blaine stopped then, watching Kurt watching him, watching as his face closed off completely. “Just listen, it makes sense. Even you have to admit that Puck seems like he’s capable of a lot. If he were pushed too far -“
“If,” Kurt interrupted.
“I’m not saying he is,” Blaine amended, a flush of embarrassment starting to creep onto his face. “I’m just saying it’s possible. It’s a theory. I told you it was stupid.”
“It’s not stupid...”
“But?”
“But...” Kurt looked away a moment, then locked his gaze with Blaine’s. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to share this theory with anyone. If it’s not true then you’re playing with the sort of rumours that can ruin a person’s life, and if it is...”
A chill ran down Blaine’s spine. “You would know though,” he said to Kurt, suppressing the urge to shiver at the way the other boy looked at him from beneath long, dark eyelashes. “If it was true.”
“I would.”
The silence that descended on their table was so poignant that for a moment Blaine completely forgot they were even in a cafe. “Is it?” he asked.
Kurt looked down at the table. Blaine could actually feel his own heart beating as he waited for him to look up again. Eventually Kurt did, pinning Blaine to his chair with nothing more than a look. “Blaine,” he started softly, “I don’t know if you realise... I know exactly how you feel about me. But there are so many reasons I can’t break up with Noah to be with you.”
Blaine supposed that was enough of an answer. Suddenly he didn’t feel quite so paranoid anymore.