Chapter Text
The nightmares started his second week in preschool, when a boy shoved him down on the playground just because Kurt was smaller and because he could. It was always of somebody holding him down and hurting him badly. Some of the ways he didn't even understand. Mommy and Daddy kissed a lot and it made them happy, so why was it so scary when he had the nightmares about being kissed in that same way?
The nightmares continued even when he was too old to climb into Mommy and Daddy's bed. They got scarier. His other bad dreams got less scary when he knew, even in his dream mind, that there weren't really ghosts and that bears didn't get into people's houses. But now he knew that when he dreamt of somebody pulling his clothing off and touching him in those places, it was scary because only bad people would try to touch him there and if they did, he should yell and run to get a teacher or somebody like a teacher.
Even after his mom died, after the nightmares about her death started to end, these dreams continued. When he reached puberty, the nightmares got worse and sometimes they even seemed to come at him during the day.
He was thrown down onto a luxurious bed in a room that was all gilt and delicately-painted walls and his clothing was torn from him. His captor held his wrists over his head with one hand, slapping him with the other, while a voice choked with rage and tears and lust rasped "Stop looking at me with those god-damned whore's eyes! Those sea change eyes, damn them and you to hell!" The physical pain of the brutal penetration was more endurable than his terror at knowing he was this man's prisoner. Fortunately that happened at the end of a Cheerios practice so nobody noticed his panting and sweating.
These daymares, as he called them, became more vivid and in them, he had stronger memories than he did during the nightmares. In the one after he threw the solo for Defying Gravity, he knew that one of the things he wanted to live for as he clawed vainly at the hands that were choking him and tried to kick against the heavy body almost crushing him against the wall was that he'd gotten his first concert solo as a violinist at the age of 17. In the one in the hospital where he was holding his unconscious father's hand, he knew that he was in Antioch in the Crusades and the still-unseen man who was threatening to gouge out his eyes, "those sea change eyes" was the Crusader who had just killed his father when they took the city. Rather than endure the lust of his father's killer, he had used the last of his strength to seize the dagger enough to direct it into his throat.
It wasn't until the time when David Karofsky stole his first kiss that in the next nightmare, he saw his attacker's face. He told himself that it was only normal that in a nightmare about having to flee his home hidden in a cart filled with fodder for the animals pastured outside the city that the menaces to his life and his virtue had come from somebody with Karofsky's face.
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Most of the time, Dave Karofsky was in control of himself and of the situation he was in. That was why he slushied the losers, to make sure that the situation was under his control. The problem was when the sight of Kurt Hummel made him feel that control start to snap. He didn't just want to shove him down in the playground or smash the ball as hard as he could at him during dodgeball or push Hummel's face down into his lunch and claim that he had stumbled. He felt it like a compulsion. He wasn't sure what would happen if he didn't do those things, but he never tried not to.
But then between freshman and sophomore year, something happened. That something was Hummel changing from looking like a little kid to looking like something very, very fuckable. Except the problem was that Dave Karofsky was straight. He didn't want to fuck boys or men, not even if they sounded like girls and had the perfect skin that girls are supposed to have or those eyes, those sea change eyes.
Then he realized, bit by bit, that those exhilarating, frustrating, intense dreams he had of hunting and sometimes capturing and using, sometimes failing to capture but always killing or causing the death of some alluring human prey had one thing in common. That whether his target's skin was the color of cream or sand or sable or caramel, whether the hair was long or short, gold or brown or red or black, whether the body was male or female, it was those eyes that were always the same. Those eyes that he had seen widen in fear or narrow in contempt so often, those eyes that changed color like the sea, those eyes that belonged to one Kurt Hummel.
With that piece of knowledge, he carefully wrote down each dream or daydream and the details that he "remembered" in each of them. Sometimes in those instances he even knew exact years, other times, all he got was a sense of a decade or even vaguer senses still. Sometimes he knew an exact location, sometimes perhaps a country or a region. But the combination of places and times was enough for him to check on the web or even in books. In those visions, even for times and places he had never heard of, he had gotten far too many details right. The uniform of German soldiers stationed in Prague around 1850, exactly what the view out to the sea looked like from a field outside ancient Troy, the details of the Panin palace in turn of the century Moscow, popular songs of the 1940s, where a priest's hole was located in Mains Hall in Wolverhampton in England, no way could he ever have known that in any normal kind of way.
And, well, it was a lot easier to believe that the way he felt about Hummel was some kind of fate rather than something that just happened to him. Because he was a normal straight guy who was meant to be at the top of the pecking order. Maybe his homework suffered while he was spending all of his time looking those things up as well as thinking about Hummel, but it was worth it to know.
Because that way he knew what to do next. It was fucking fate that he was going to have Hummel, he was going to satisfy himself with the little fairy's body and this time, he wasn't going to let him get away, either by running or dying on him. Okay, he was going to have to do something about that ridiculous prep boy who first thinks that he can counsel Dave and then thinks that he can actually shove him and now thinks that Hummel's his. Oh, he'd do something about the way that the twerp couldn't keep his hands off what doesn't belong to him, but that was really just an annoyance. Hell, sometimes he even remembered killing a certain little irritation.
This time, he knew what he'd never known before. He knew the past and he knew some of the mistakes that he'd made. He could avoid making those again. This time, Kurt Hummel would belong to him and he would have no escape.
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The problem with Brittany wasn't that she was dumb, intermittently dumb and wise, or even insane. She was very bright and very sane; the problem was that she was carrying on conversations with people in the visible world simultaneously with conversations in the invisible world. So when she said that she sometimes forgot her middle name, she was saying that to reassure a little girl in medieval Pisa whose middle name was actually eighteen names. Some of it was was her own fault; she should have named her visible world cat after a Lord Tubbington in the invisible world.
She couldn't see, however, the long, bloodied chain woven of fear and hate and rage and desire without love that tied Karofsky and Kurt until one of them saw it himself. But when she saw it, she also saw the threads of gold and purple and azure that linked Kurt and Blaine in a bond of love. Sometimes they were siblings, sometimes lovers, sometimes friends. But each time, the dark chain crashed through those bonds. While it never break them, each time it destroyed either Kurt or Blaine. Love can make the spirit invincible but is no shield against death, what the bloodied chain brought each time.
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Karofsky told himself that he had shuddered with excitement and lust and that there was no dread when he next saw Kurt. He swiftly followed him out of the school, planning to do nothing more than watch. Instead, Kurt seemed to sense his presence and turned to confront him again. "Why are you following me?"
"Nobody told me that I can't leave the school the same time as you, Fancy."
Kurt gave an exasperated little huff. "You followed me around all day. Why?"
"Seems like you must have been watching me if you think so." He told himself that soon enough, he'd be able to do as he pleased with Hummel. After a few centuries of waiting, he chuckled to himself, he could hang on for a while longer. But instead, Hummel took a step forward. "What, you want to kiss me again?"
"You kissed me. By force. And then you pretend that you're not gay yourself. Well, get over it! I'm a boy. You want to kiss me, that means that you want to kiss boys."
"Not always boys," Karofsky breathed, coming closer despite his better judgment. "You. And not just kiss. Why won't you just accept that you belong to me? That hair, that soft skin, those sea change eyes..."
"What did you just say?"
"Those pretty eyes." He watched as Kurt's hand flew to his face and his eyes widened in horror, just as they had before. Time to switch to one of the alternative plans. He held his hands up in a gesture of "no threat meant," right out of prep boy's playbook. "Okay, okay, I know what I said. And you know what it means." Kurt was shaking his head in attempted denial but Karofsky knew he was listening. "So look, maybe now is when we can break the pattern." He reached out a hand to Kurt's cheek but deliberately didn't try to come close enough to touch it. "It sounds crazy, maybe it is crazy, but Fate means us to be together. I just keep screwing it up." He furrowed his forehead. "Do you know how weird it feels to be apologizing for about twenty past lives?" A shrug. "Anyway, this time, I've learned enough to be ready for it. I'd be good to you, babe, I'd take care of you. Sure, I'm scared, I'll admit that, but you can help me, what about it?"
Hummel was falling for it and actually smiled sadly at him. "Dave, believe me, I really am sorry that I've got to say no because I don't want to hurt you. But it's Blaine I love."
Dave forced himself not to go right to the plan of hitting the fairy on the head and dragging him off somewhere. It wasn't time yet, no matter how much he wanted to. "What if he's the obstacle this time and you and I are the couple?"
Kurt shook his head again. "Not happening. But maybe this is what was supposed to happen, that we make peace this time."
Karofsky make himself smile ruefully. "Maybe that's it." He rubbed the back of his neck. "I cannot tell you how weird this conversation feels."
"Same here. Goodnight." Karofsky watched Kurt head off. Well, it wasn't going to be that easy, but he didn't really think it would be.