Concerning the UFO Sighting Near Lima, Ohio (Glee, PG-13, Kurt, gen)
Title: Concerning the UFO Sighting Near Lima, Ohio
Warnings: Kidnapping and impersonation, implied dubcon/noncon, and generalised S3 issues up to and including 3x14.
Rating: PG-13 for content.
Word Count: 2414
Summary: Aliens made Kurt do it. They have, in fact, been making him do it for a while.
Notes: Title from the Sufjan Stevens song, Concerning the UFO Sighting Near Highland, Illinois. Many, many thanks to ileliberte and airgeer for their help and beta reading. Please heed the warnings; this story started as lighthearted crack, but it took a lengthy detour along the way.
Night times were the worst. The alien thing would lie on his bed eerily still as if in death until it sensed someone approaching, when it would begin to toss and turn in a mockery of dreaming. Kurt did not want to watch, but he had long since accepted that there was nothing else to do here on the space ship, and by now it had become an inescapable compulsion to observe the disaster this doppelganger was making of his life.
He had been driving home from spending time with Blaine when it happened. Kurt had on his Bluetooth headset, and maybe his attention had wandered, because he had not seen any of it coming, there had been no warning. Suddenly there had been a bright light on the road and then Kurt was looking at his body as if from above. His first reaction had been to wonder if that was all there was to death, but there was no other car and he could see his Navigator travelling smoothly down the road, fading into the evening, whole and undented. It would be some time - lengthy explorations of winding corridors made out of strange materials; plain meals with an ever-present whiff of sea weed; and above all, Earth outside his window, green and blue and far below, and a room full of displays inexplicably tuned to his life - before he accepted that it had been something else altogether.
So many times in the next few months Kurt had wondered if this would've happened if he'd stuck around for one more kiss goodbye, or one less, even. What if he'd driven down that particular stretch of road two minutes later, what if he'd taken a different route home? Maybe the aliens would've found someone else? There had been stretches when he blamed his father and his intransigent adherence to Kurt's curfew. It had been the night New York approved its marriage equality bill, and they had spent it glued to Blaine's laptop and their phones, searching for TV streams to watch the state senate proceedings and then the reactions pouring in from all around. They had held hands, hugged, surged together and apart in their frenzied joy at this new victory, and when Kurt had left he had been sure nothing would wipe the grin off his face for the rest of the summer. Now all that remained of those moments was the alien thing, going through the motions of Kurt's life day by day and doing an increasingly worse job of it - and nobody seemed to notice.
At first the thing had excelled at mimicking Kurt's habits, adhering even to Kurt's careful moisturizing routine. It was horrifying, the way the thing could mirror him so well and slip into his life without anyone noticing. The horror spiked whenever Blaine was nearby, when they touched and whispered and held hands (they hadn't been kissing much lately); Kurt didn't even know if the thing was contagious, if it had any sort of ambition, any kind of plan or goal. All he knew was the bright light, and that there was something down on Earth - was it made of clockwork? Was it a living thing? Was it an alien stuffed into a mockery of his skin? - pretending to be him.
Then he had an even more horrifying thought, that he may not be the only person in this situation. The space ship was mostly empty. There was the unkempt old man who roamed the corridors singing snatches of 50's rock songs, wholly adamant that he was, or had once been, Elvis; he had the looks for it but whenever Kurt thought about it in more detail, the panic and fear became too overwhelming and he had to stop. Beyond that there was only the occasional glimpse of green tentacles slithering around a distant corner, and that was so infrequent that the first few times Kurt had convinced himself he was simply having flashbacks to one of Finn's awful movies, until one day he slipped on a trail of slime. But Kurt had no means of knowing how many other ships there were, high above in orbit over Earth, how many other people were simple spectators to their own lives.
Thinking about that was terrifying too, so Kurt watched instead. Sometimes he did it solely in the hopes that there would be a clue somewhere that would lead to his return, just like he sometimes scoured every corner of the ship, but nothing ever turned up.
Amongst his anger and his tears he gave everyone the benefit of the doubt for not realising something was amiss at first. Yes, he probably would've come up with the same student president campaign posters, and he would have loitered underneath Ms. Pillbury's office window to hear the casting deliberations too. But the days grew short and the number of mistakes the thing made kept on mounting. He had been on the ship long enough that horror was no longer the sole emotion on his mind, and Kurt was finding himself extremely frustrated that neither his friends, his boyfriend nor even his family had taken him aside to discuss his sudden change in behaviour, his new leaning towards martyrdom. After Sebastian's stint with the slushie he had watched in muted horror as the thing held Santana back. That was the biggest thing so far, the one that had made him turn the room where slept and ate the strange green-grey mush completely upside down in hopes of finding any sort of sign that it had housed someone before him who was now gone, confirmation that this would eventually end. It had followed so many other incremental slip-ups: the student council campaign, the NYADA application... Kurt watched these things accumulate, observed his interactions with others, and could not help but wonder if that was really how his friends saw him, so sanctimonious and uptight. He wondered if that was who he actually was - he didn't want to believe so.
Sometimes Kurt wondered if the thing knew what it was, if it was aware of being just a thing and of having stolen his life. Maybe it'd been dropped into Kurt's Navigator that night with only bare guidelines, or maybe it had all of Kurt's life somehow downloaded into whatever passed for a brain. He wondered if it made decisions on its own or if every single moment was beamed down from some command center somewhere, perhaps even on the ship. Once or twice he even considered whether he would have made the same choices in the circumstances he watched unfold. At night he wondered if its body felt like his body, if when Blaine trailed his hands and lips over the thing's skin, it came alive like Kurt had done, back in the summer, like it sometimes still did when he tried to summon the ghost of touch to forget about it all. But all that wondering led nowhere good, and so once again Kurt would find himself back in the room with all the displays, watching his life happen without him, and trying not to think.
The night West Side Story opened had been the only one he'd cried himself to sleep.
He made a point of not knowing how often it happened, after that. Whenever Blaine and the thing were alone in an empty house Kurt would stalk the corridors of the space ship instead, searching for either (maybe) Elvis or his mysterious slimey captors in pursuit of answers of some sort. But both of them were elusive and more often than not, when defeated and without a way home, he returned to the viewing room he'd be greeted by scenes of such heart-breaking domesticity that he would have to turn away sharply and start his search again. He would try to distract himself by thinking of the fashions he had seen go by from afar, composing outfits and assessing the purchases the thing made as it bungled its way through the year's trends - there were a few pieces that Kurt earmarked for an eventual resale.
In some ways the two weeks Blaine spent convalescing and absent from school were easiest to bear, because at least he was apart from the thing for a few hours every day. Yet they were so deeply intertwined into each other's lives that not even Blaine's injury could really keep them apart. Kurt couldn't help the swell of emotion whenever the thing found another Valentine's Day card tucked into its locker (it had never been Kurt's), nor could he help but think with momentary fondness of the silly extremes Blaine had gone to, disguising his handwriting in every single valentine. All of those little details served only to remind him of where he was, however, of the months and months since he'd had a conversation with anyone or felt the warmth of someone else's skin against his, even in something as chaste as a hug from his dad. If he had thought last year's Valentine's day was bad, the lead up to this one was so much worse. At least last time he had been there to experience things as they happened.
It was the twin needs to make sure Blaine was alright and to have a piece of this night for himself that made him keep watching, perversely, as the thing took off to its secret rendezvous on Valentine's day itself. The gorilla was too tall and too broad to be Blaine, he immediately realised, and grew stiff and frightened in his viewing room. The vestiges of last year's terror had mostly gone, yet in the second after the mask came off they rushed back to Kurt -- although seemingly not to the thing. Making sense of that moment was hard, afterwards. As he tried to not watch Blaine, healthy and hale, dance with the thing he could not help but appreciate its kindness and gentle words with Karofsky because he knew, over and over again, how it felt to be so alone. But he was not certain he could have done the same, had it been really him down there on Earth.
He had barely heeded Karofsky that night in Scandals, registering his presence and little else as the thing talked with him, but from what Kurt recalled he had sounded, if not happy, then at least serene. Which was why the unanswered calls lighting up his phone did not trouble him too much over the following days, until rumours started flying viciously through all of McKinley High and in a special assembly Principal Figgins confirmed what the entire student body had already heard. There were no details in the short speech, but Kurt ran out of the viewing room and threw up in the corridor, meandering the empty corridors in shocked horror until his breathing slowed and his heart calmed.
His vomit had been cleaned when he returned, and there was a trail of drying slime leading in the opposite direction he had come from. He followed it, heart beat spiking again at the possibility of finally confronting one of his captors, but it came to an abrupt end midway down the corridor, as if one of the smooth panels were actually an unmarked door. When he pounded on the walls nothing shifted or gave way, nothing changed at all.
In the wake of Karofsky's suicide attempt, being alone suddenly became harder than it had been ever before. Kurt repeatedly sought Elvis' company but he was poor comfort at best, humming snatches of old classics with eyes so unfocused that Kurt was certain his presence was not actually registering, that the poor man had been wrecked by his isolation long ago. Down on Earth the thing seemed to be struggling to make sense of things as well. The first night Kurt had watched as it sat up against his headboard the whole night instead of faking sleep, and in between practice for Regionals and conversations with the God Squad it would often just gaze at walls until someone interacted with it. It almost seemed to Kurt that it was suddenly too preoccupied with something to consistently maintain the charade of Kurt's life, and he found himself hoping that this somehow meant his ordeal was nearly at an end.
However, nothing changed. When the thing visited Karofsky in his hospital room and cried, Kurt recalled his own dark days and how they had felt, the complete lack of faith in the possibility of his own happiness; it was not very hard to imagine Karofsky's recent despair. His sympathy and understanding were both genuine and freely given, even from afar, but seeing the thing and Karofsky interact once again Kurt was unsure he could have provided the comfort Karofsky craved, or the help he so clearly needed, had the task fallen to him. He knew with unfaltering certainty that there were too many things standing between them for them to ever evenly meet, to be even half of what Karofsky wanted them to be.
Instead, watching them together he could not help but wonder what would happen to the thing, were he to die. Would it carry on unperturbed and take over his life completely, or would it collapse, suddenly limp, its inner workings exposed? And what if the thing somehow died, would Kurt remain alive? He was not sure how long he would survive up here before the solitude drove him insane. Seeing his life unfold without him became more difficult by the day, as the tangible reality of it became more distant and details faded from his mind no matter how hard he tried to cling to them. But he had no means by which to even write things down, no distractions at all. There was nothing to do on the space ship other than sleep and eat and watch.
Somewhere in its bowels the elusive creatures that had brought him here lurked, but the corridors were seamless and never led anywhere new, not even when, at the height of his desperation, he would rage at corners he was sure he had seen them disappear into before. It was completely unclear to him whether he was here to learn something, or simply as some strange beings' play thing. There had been no clues, no indications, no signs, just a bright light and then a cold white room.
He hoped this would be over soon.
-
Should you need additional closure you may also choose your own epilogue!
Door #1 (additional warnings apply: Vore.)
Door #2
Door #3
Warnings: Kidnapping and impersonation, implied dubcon/noncon, and generalised S3 issues up to and including 3x14.
Rating: PG-13 for content.
Word Count: 2414
Summary: Aliens made Kurt do it. They have, in fact, been making him do it for a while.
Notes: Title from the Sufjan Stevens song, Concerning the UFO Sighting Near Highland, Illinois. Many, many thanks to ileliberte and airgeer for their help and beta reading. Please heed the warnings; this story started as lighthearted crack, but it took a lengthy detour along the way.
Night times were the worst. The alien thing would lie on his bed eerily still as if in death until it sensed someone approaching, when it would begin to toss and turn in a mockery of dreaming. Kurt did not want to watch, but he had long since accepted that there was nothing else to do here on the space ship, and by now it had become an inescapable compulsion to observe the disaster this doppelganger was making of his life.
He had been driving home from spending time with Blaine when it happened. Kurt had on his Bluetooth headset, and maybe his attention had wandered, because he had not seen any of it coming, there had been no warning. Suddenly there had been a bright light on the road and then Kurt was looking at his body as if from above. His first reaction had been to wonder if that was all there was to death, but there was no other car and he could see his Navigator travelling smoothly down the road, fading into the evening, whole and undented. It would be some time - lengthy explorations of winding corridors made out of strange materials; plain meals with an ever-present whiff of sea weed; and above all, Earth outside his window, green and blue and far below, and a room full of displays inexplicably tuned to his life - before he accepted that it had been something else altogether.
So many times in the next few months Kurt had wondered if this would've happened if he'd stuck around for one more kiss goodbye, or one less, even. What if he'd driven down that particular stretch of road two minutes later, what if he'd taken a different route home? Maybe the aliens would've found someone else? There had been stretches when he blamed his father and his intransigent adherence to Kurt's curfew. It had been the night New York approved its marriage equality bill, and they had spent it glued to Blaine's laptop and their phones, searching for TV streams to watch the state senate proceedings and then the reactions pouring in from all around. They had held hands, hugged, surged together and apart in their frenzied joy at this new victory, and when Kurt had left he had been sure nothing would wipe the grin off his face for the rest of the summer. Now all that remained of those moments was the alien thing, going through the motions of Kurt's life day by day and doing an increasingly worse job of it - and nobody seemed to notice.
At first the thing had excelled at mimicking Kurt's habits, adhering even to Kurt's careful moisturizing routine. It was horrifying, the way the thing could mirror him so well and slip into his life without anyone noticing. The horror spiked whenever Blaine was nearby, when they touched and whispered and held hands (they hadn't been kissing much lately); Kurt didn't even know if the thing was contagious, if it had any sort of ambition, any kind of plan or goal. All he knew was the bright light, and that there was something down on Earth - was it made of clockwork? Was it a living thing? Was it an alien stuffed into a mockery of his skin? - pretending to be him.
Then he had an even more horrifying thought, that he may not be the only person in this situation. The space ship was mostly empty. There was the unkempt old man who roamed the corridors singing snatches of 50's rock songs, wholly adamant that he was, or had once been, Elvis; he had the looks for it but whenever Kurt thought about it in more detail, the panic and fear became too overwhelming and he had to stop. Beyond that there was only the occasional glimpse of green tentacles slithering around a distant corner, and that was so infrequent that the first few times Kurt had convinced himself he was simply having flashbacks to one of Finn's awful movies, until one day he slipped on a trail of slime. But Kurt had no means of knowing how many other ships there were, high above in orbit over Earth, how many other people were simple spectators to their own lives.
Thinking about that was terrifying too, so Kurt watched instead. Sometimes he did it solely in the hopes that there would be a clue somewhere that would lead to his return, just like he sometimes scoured every corner of the ship, but nothing ever turned up.
Amongst his anger and his tears he gave everyone the benefit of the doubt for not realising something was amiss at first. Yes, he probably would've come up with the same student president campaign posters, and he would have loitered underneath Ms. Pillbury's office window to hear the casting deliberations too. But the days grew short and the number of mistakes the thing made kept on mounting. He had been on the ship long enough that horror was no longer the sole emotion on his mind, and Kurt was finding himself extremely frustrated that neither his friends, his boyfriend nor even his family had taken him aside to discuss his sudden change in behaviour, his new leaning towards martyrdom. After Sebastian's stint with the slushie he had watched in muted horror as the thing held Santana back. That was the biggest thing so far, the one that had made him turn the room where slept and ate the strange green-grey mush completely upside down in hopes of finding any sort of sign that it had housed someone before him who was now gone, confirmation that this would eventually end. It had followed so many other incremental slip-ups: the student council campaign, the NYADA application... Kurt watched these things accumulate, observed his interactions with others, and could not help but wonder if that was really how his friends saw him, so sanctimonious and uptight. He wondered if that was who he actually was - he didn't want to believe so.
Sometimes Kurt wondered if the thing knew what it was, if it was aware of being just a thing and of having stolen his life. Maybe it'd been dropped into Kurt's Navigator that night with only bare guidelines, or maybe it had all of Kurt's life somehow downloaded into whatever passed for a brain. He wondered if it made decisions on its own or if every single moment was beamed down from some command center somewhere, perhaps even on the ship. Once or twice he even considered whether he would have made the same choices in the circumstances he watched unfold. At night he wondered if its body felt like his body, if when Blaine trailed his hands and lips over the thing's skin, it came alive like Kurt had done, back in the summer, like it sometimes still did when he tried to summon the ghost of touch to forget about it all. But all that wondering led nowhere good, and so once again Kurt would find himself back in the room with all the displays, watching his life happen without him, and trying not to think.
The night West Side Story opened had been the only one he'd cried himself to sleep.
He made a point of not knowing how often it happened, after that. Whenever Blaine and the thing were alone in an empty house Kurt would stalk the corridors of the space ship instead, searching for either (maybe) Elvis or his mysterious slimey captors in pursuit of answers of some sort. But both of them were elusive and more often than not, when defeated and without a way home, he returned to the viewing room he'd be greeted by scenes of such heart-breaking domesticity that he would have to turn away sharply and start his search again. He would try to distract himself by thinking of the fashions he had seen go by from afar, composing outfits and assessing the purchases the thing made as it bungled its way through the year's trends - there were a few pieces that Kurt earmarked for an eventual resale.
In some ways the two weeks Blaine spent convalescing and absent from school were easiest to bear, because at least he was apart from the thing for a few hours every day. Yet they were so deeply intertwined into each other's lives that not even Blaine's injury could really keep them apart. Kurt couldn't help the swell of emotion whenever the thing found another Valentine's Day card tucked into its locker (it had never been Kurt's), nor could he help but think with momentary fondness of the silly extremes Blaine had gone to, disguising his handwriting in every single valentine. All of those little details served only to remind him of where he was, however, of the months and months since he'd had a conversation with anyone or felt the warmth of someone else's skin against his, even in something as chaste as a hug from his dad. If he had thought last year's Valentine's day was bad, the lead up to this one was so much worse. At least last time he had been there to experience things as they happened.
It was the twin needs to make sure Blaine was alright and to have a piece of this night for himself that made him keep watching, perversely, as the thing took off to its secret rendezvous on Valentine's day itself. The gorilla was too tall and too broad to be Blaine, he immediately realised, and grew stiff and frightened in his viewing room. The vestiges of last year's terror had mostly gone, yet in the second after the mask came off they rushed back to Kurt -- although seemingly not to the thing. Making sense of that moment was hard, afterwards. As he tried to not watch Blaine, healthy and hale, dance with the thing he could not help but appreciate its kindness and gentle words with Karofsky because he knew, over and over again, how it felt to be so alone. But he was not certain he could have done the same, had it been really him down there on Earth.
He had barely heeded Karofsky that night in Scandals, registering his presence and little else as the thing talked with him, but from what Kurt recalled he had sounded, if not happy, then at least serene. Which was why the unanswered calls lighting up his phone did not trouble him too much over the following days, until rumours started flying viciously through all of McKinley High and in a special assembly Principal Figgins confirmed what the entire student body had already heard. There were no details in the short speech, but Kurt ran out of the viewing room and threw up in the corridor, meandering the empty corridors in shocked horror until his breathing slowed and his heart calmed.
His vomit had been cleaned when he returned, and there was a trail of drying slime leading in the opposite direction he had come from. He followed it, heart beat spiking again at the possibility of finally confronting one of his captors, but it came to an abrupt end midway down the corridor, as if one of the smooth panels were actually an unmarked door. When he pounded on the walls nothing shifted or gave way, nothing changed at all.
In the wake of Karofsky's suicide attempt, being alone suddenly became harder than it had been ever before. Kurt repeatedly sought Elvis' company but he was poor comfort at best, humming snatches of old classics with eyes so unfocused that Kurt was certain his presence was not actually registering, that the poor man had been wrecked by his isolation long ago. Down on Earth the thing seemed to be struggling to make sense of things as well. The first night Kurt had watched as it sat up against his headboard the whole night instead of faking sleep, and in between practice for Regionals and conversations with the God Squad it would often just gaze at walls until someone interacted with it. It almost seemed to Kurt that it was suddenly too preoccupied with something to consistently maintain the charade of Kurt's life, and he found himself hoping that this somehow meant his ordeal was nearly at an end.
However, nothing changed. When the thing visited Karofsky in his hospital room and cried, Kurt recalled his own dark days and how they had felt, the complete lack of faith in the possibility of his own happiness; it was not very hard to imagine Karofsky's recent despair. His sympathy and understanding were both genuine and freely given, even from afar, but seeing the thing and Karofsky interact once again Kurt was unsure he could have provided the comfort Karofsky craved, or the help he so clearly needed, had the task fallen to him. He knew with unfaltering certainty that there were too many things standing between them for them to ever evenly meet, to be even half of what Karofsky wanted them to be.
Instead, watching them together he could not help but wonder what would happen to the thing, were he to die. Would it carry on unperturbed and take over his life completely, or would it collapse, suddenly limp, its inner workings exposed? And what if the thing somehow died, would Kurt remain alive? He was not sure how long he would survive up here before the solitude drove him insane. Seeing his life unfold without him became more difficult by the day, as the tangible reality of it became more distant and details faded from his mind no matter how hard he tried to cling to them. But he had no means by which to even write things down, no distractions at all. There was nothing to do on the space ship other than sleep and eat and watch.
Somewhere in its bowels the elusive creatures that had brought him here lurked, but the corridors were seamless and never led anywhere new, not even when, at the height of his desperation, he would rage at corners he was sure he had seen them disappear into before. It was completely unclear to him whether he was here to learn something, or simply as some strange beings' play thing. There had been no clues, no indications, no signs, just a bright light and then a cold white room.
He hoped this would be over soon.
-
Should you need additional closure you may also choose your own epilogue!
Door #1 (additional warnings apply: Vore.)
Door #2
Door #3