AtOG fic: The Other Ghost

[rainjoyswriting]

The Other Ghost, an All the Other Ghosts fic, because last year reminded me how much I really miss writing superheroes you guys ^^;

Disclaimer: Apparently you can tell that I'm Old because I still write disclaimers? I don't own the characters, nor claim to.

Rating: I'm going with R, just for some very difficult subject matter.

Warnings and spoilers: Spoilers for both AtOG and Grey, naturally. AtOG has always come with a whole bunch of warnings you should definitely know about, here quite a lot of discussion of past sexual assault and general trauma, and this one also comes with a referenced character death, which I know sometimes people just do not want to read about, so if you *need* to know who it is before you'll even contemplate looking at this thing, spoiler here on that.

Summary:
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do --
determined to save
the only life that you could save.
- Mary Oliver


Note: In terms of timeline, this fic takes place in the 'dark' five years of Grey, post-superhero-outing, pre-Julio, which I always suspected were the true goldmine years for writing superhero fic in (a whole team of supers to play with!!). I don't think I even attempted to reply to comments on the last thing I posted - my health is just, it is bad you guys, I'm making more realistic rules for myself about how I live now (Niitza I have owed you an email for like an actual year I am terrible, I'm sorry ;___; ). But I am really grateful when people take time out of their day to let me know they liked a thing I made, I really appreciate that, thank you <3 I'm just protecting what little arm I have to get to tap away at things like this when I can . . . I hope you and your loved ones have been safe and well, please continue being gentle with yourselves, the echoes of these times are going to live in our bones for a long while yet. Btw if you're an academic philosopher you may need to hold a genuine position on the existence of possible worlds to make hypothetical statements have truth content? Don't even ask me the shit I do in my day job, I feel very lucky to get to do it . . .








He's more than a block away before he feels safe enough to stop running, to skid to a halt at the edge of the building's roof turning to face the way he came, invisible but arms already in a defensive posture, breath running hot, strung-wire tense for pursuers. But unless they're as invisible as him, there are none. Just the New York night and the Ghost, alone.

The aloneness is only the second-eeriest part, and that in itself makes the back of his neck prickle.

The Ghost turns and looks across the city, heart still beating hard in his throat from the run, and he wets his lips but it's just New York. It looks the same, that ordered, chaotic grid of glass and stone and concrete, it sounds the same, engines and car horns and sirens so far below, it even smells the same and the sight of it fractures with tears, for one second, before he lifts his eyes skywards to that same night sky dulled amber like it sits above a permanent fire, and blinks to regain control over himself. Then, hands flexing in their fists, he fades himself back into view.

"Artie what the hell did you make," he whispers, looking across the city that is not his city, confused to the point of fear.

Here is what the Ghost knows, which feels like nothing like enough right now, it feels like a night sky black with ignorance with only a couple of frail winking lights in it and neither of them the pole star. This is what he knows: He was sitting in the training room in the base with Quinn after a workout, chatting about kickboxing - Blaine's taken it up to diversify a bit, Kurt has always preferred more elegant martial arts, leaning more towards precision and grace rather than focused brutality; Quinn has studied it some, and had a dangerous little light in her eye over the focused brutality that was unnerving Kurt when Sam appeared like lightning, the wind from his run stuttering the Ghost's hood and Quinn's hair, Sam yelping that it wasn't him okay he didn't push the button it wasn't him but -

By the time Santana and Puck arrived also swearing that it wasn't them okay they had half the story and the Ghost was still swaying somewhere between dull black fury and shock like he might faint, leaning into the fury to keep to his feet.

By the time they got to Artie's lab, the Ghost felt like a disembodied head, he couldn't feel anything of his body, as Artie was talking far too fast and high and Brittany was the only quiet one, standing guiltily beside the hulking machine, scuffing the ground a little with one sneaker. "I only wanted to see what it did," she mumbled, and the Ghost looked at that big shiny red button she'd pushed and thought that if you don't want a button to get pushed around this team, you do not make it big and shiny and red, Artie, the hell.

It's a time machine, Artie said. It's still experimental, he wasn't even sending objects anywhere with it yet, even after that he might move on to mice but -

But Phalanx had been standing curiously in front of it, and Brittany had said, "What does this do?" simultaneous to pushing the button, and the whole room lit up, and then . . .

The Ghost sits heavily on the edge of the building, shuddering his breathing slower, slower, staring out across his-city-not-his-city, before his eyes trail down and he lifts the edge of his pale cloak, and looks at the bullet holes peppering its lower left corner.

The fury just . . . he didn't have the strength for it, it went out like a candle flame without air, he stared at where Blaine wasn't and pressed with his thumb the base of his third finger through the glove, where the ring pressed smooth as the moon into his skin. He could see through the edges of his own hood, dumb shock turning him translucent, and he said, whispered into that lab full of panicking superheroes and no Phalanx, "Bring him back."

Nothing, nothing in their lives is ever so simple as that. Santana swooped Brittany away somewhere before the Ghost's temper could pick up again, Artie ordered everyone away from the machine so he could work out where he even had sent Phalanx. Sam tried, ineffectually, to comfort the Ghost, his patting hand flapping right through his shoulder. And Artie said, eventually, that he couldn't bring him back, didn't even know what he'd done, where Phalanx had been sent, but, but but but, he could zap the Ghost exactly the same way and give him something to bring the both of them back with, just give him a moment -

The 'moment' took eleven hours. The Ghost paced the base numb, visible now and then, tangible now and then, eyes wide and blank and seeing nothing, through walls and up and down corridors, heart running like a nightmare metronome in his chest because Artie didn't even know if the damn machine worked and if it didn't send Phalanx anywhere, if all it did was vaporise him, the Ghost was volunteering - demanding - to get vaporised right after him, and he knew exactly what he was doing, he knew exactly what he was doing, if there was one chance out of a thousand to save Blaine's life then he always knew what he was doing. And Artie called him back to the lab with the three cuffs he'd made, each one winking with a red LED, one for him to wear, one to get on Phalanx and then activate to bring them both back. And why he'd wasted the time to make three of them (the Ghost was a bit hysterical by then, if it counts as hysteria when it's damn well proportionate to what's actually happening) was because, he said, "I've seen this movie before, okay, if you only take two then one of them is definitely getting broken and then there'll be some heart-rending decision you've got to make while devastating string music plays in the background, just take the three of them, okay?"

By then it was pushing eleven o' clock, and under the humming strip lights of Artie's lab the Ghost stared down the muzzle of the machine Artie made and said, just quietly, "If this thing turns out to have vaporised both of us then you bet I am coming back here to haunt your asses."

Artie's grin was fixed and nothing to do with humour, as he pushed the button. And the world flashed white, and - nothing changed, he was still standing on the same floor, nothing even moved but he was looking now at some wrecked laboratory space, just trashed with tables tipped over (not Artie's desks, set to raise or lower as he needed, just fixed workstations) and debris everywhere and two agents clearly standing guard in the doorway turned and swore and were already holding guns, one of them yelping, "- is that him?" and the other one choking, "Another one -?"

The Ghost had even started to form the question when the first bullets rattled through the wall and his cloak and he snapped intangible (Why were they shooting at him?) and ran at them to take their guns out first, because 'another one' meant Phalanx had already been here.

But more agents were running down the corridors outside as he shoved one guy down by the back of his neck to whack his head off the doorframe and brace himself to kick the other under the chin, and there was no time to ask questions, just chaos, he slipped invisible half-into the wall and held quiet, watched, waited, wanting to know . . .

A half dozen agents all freaking out, talking into their phones, picking up the two already down to take them to the medical bay, talking in low panic about a 'super invasion' and the 'fucking Ghost?' and debating whether it was his costume (Honestly, does he update it that often? All he's done in the past few months is play with the placement of the seams) and warning everyone else in the base about a super who can turn invisible and maybe teleport, not yet taken down, everything had to shut down -

One of them with a noticeable black eye checked the time on his phone and swore, said, "My chopper's leaving in five so I can give a statement at the tank, is that still going if he's creeping around here?" and another said, "Run for it. We'll flush him out."

Good luck, assholes, the Ghost thought, following the man with the black eye down the old known routes to the hangar. If Phalanx has been through here and that guy's got a black eye and is about to give a statement, the Ghost definitely wants to hear it . . .

His powers make some things so easy, he does see why people feared him going to the dark side for a long time, before the Ghost got outed as only Kurt after all and after taking one collective look at him, people seemed to give up on the idea of him as any sort of malevolent force. But it was simple to walk invisible onto the copter behind that agent, easy to settle down in an unoccupied corner and listen to them talking excitedly about the super in the complex and what was being done to locate him (clearly not enough, the Ghost thought, unhooking the water canister from his belt to take a sip) and what a super might find in there if they snuck around -

Am I in the future? he thought, listening to their paranoid, jarred conversation about all these supers 'invading', if 'they' were finally coming for 'us'. Does it all go bad again, worse than the registration days, worse than when I only had the NYPD shooting at me as well as the criminals, is the government on our case again? What happens?

What have they done to Phalanx?

"They'll be interrogating him, they'll get it out of him. No more teleporting where he is, right?"

They laughed and the Ghosts' fists creaked his gloves, closing so tight. Over the noise of the whirling blades overhead they didn't hear a thing.

The journey took a length of time that he is very familiar with. He knew the building they were landing on, he knew the city they were landing in, watched through one of the copter's small thick windows as New York climbed closer and settled all around them like the sea. They were on the roof of the SIU HQ, Finn's workplace, and the Ghost hopped invisible through the side of the copter and looked around uneasy, wrapping his arms around himself, feeling for the first time in his life like his own city was no home territory to him. It felt alien, weirdly threatening. He knows every inch of his city, every one of its seams and stitches, but this -

He didn't know this.

He followed Black Eye into the building, to the elevator, watched him hit a button for the basement level and then stood behind the shoulders of the agents in there, listening to them talk ("He threw things as well, like these - hard projectiles, don't even know what -") until he realised - quite suddenly -

He could see the misty shape of his own body, and his heart stopped.

No more teleporting where he is, right?

It took a fraction of a second to try to will his body invisible again and realise it didn't work, and he knew what that meant, knew it from the inside of his spine. And one of those agents, eyes uninterested on the dull mirror of the elevator's closed doors, suddenly focused on his grey form appearing just behind his own back, and the man's face went as pale as the Ghost's cloak.

While he still had enough of his powers to do it he grabbed through the edge of the elevator and bowled himself upwards, climbing blind in the dark between floors, up and up until his powers felt solid enough in their intangibility for him to spill out into a corridor, breathless and invisible and heart panicking like a trashcan bouncing down a hill, shit. Shit, shit.

He was only a couple of floors up from their destination when he had to bail. But something down there numbs supers' powers, and that means - that's where they're keeping Blaine, and without his powers Kurt can't get there, and -

Some sort of alarm started blaring, and the Ghost knew it was for him, and his heart nearly failed in his chest at the thought: He can't rescue Blaine from anything if they catch him too, and something, something, someone, makes him no ghost at all if he gets any closer.

He knows who's down there. He knows who hates supers enough to work with an organisation that treats them like this. And he knew then that he needed a plan or neither he nor Blaine are ever getting home again.

He squeezed a hand at his heart, a half-second's unsaid vow for a husband somewhere below him he was coming back for, and as a door burst open further down the corridor and three running agents came through, one panting, "Schuester, Schuester is coming up, right - ?"

He ran for the stairs, for the roof, for escape, for the chance for both of them to escape . . .

The Ghost stares over the city (not his city) and runs thumb and finger over the bullet holes in his cloak, and swallows. He doesn't know when he is. If this is the future - like hell he is letting this future happen -

But if this is the future, why don't they know Phalanx? He frowns at that, letting his cloak fall from his hands, trying to think. Black Eye was describing Phalanx's powers like he didn't know them, and all of them seemed to think that both Phalanx and the Ghost - and they weren't certain it was even him - teleported themselves into the base as if that was a power of theirs too. And if the government has turned on supers and is taking them down again, the Ghost and Phalanx must be top of their list, they must have already clashed over this, they know their names and where they live and their families, they know their powers, for god's sake every child in every major city in the world knows both of their faces, they have their action figures. How could they be so clueless about Phalanx appearing in their midst? How could they be so uncertain about the Ghost?

It doesn't feel right, not just because he doesn't want it to, it just doesn't feel right. The country came too far with supers' rights to backslide this much in such a short time period - he got a look at their phones, they're not crazily advanced here, they looked just like . . . they looked contemporary, just like his phone does. And William Schuester's still alive, putting some boundary on how far ahead they could be. So how many years could it take for people to forget Phalanx, be uncertain about the Ghost, for anti-super forces to take over their own base and not know what they look like?

None of this makes sense and none of it even matters because what he needs to work out is how to get Blaine back, alone, from a secure building full of hostile agents, with no powers. And he has to do it fast, he has to do it fast, because if Schuester is still interested in fucking around with other supers' powers, if his bitterness and jealousy still have him running experiments on what their bodies can do - it drags a little shuddered moan out of him, his shoulders hunch until they hurt, if he's got Blaine -

A voice says from some distance over his shoulder, "Do you mind - just moving back from the edge, please, and then maybe we could talk?"

He's up, whirling, body already flowed to defence but as his cloak swings around -

- the other cloak blooms darkly back, as the other figure shifts his own stance in response, and they stand there mirror images of each other, dark cloak and light poised for defence, and the very last of the blood drains from the Ghost's face as he stares himself in the eye.

*

He was still groggy with the sedative when they interrogated him, in a little dingy room with an obvious one-way mirror on the wall, but Blaine doesn't think that's why he found the interrogation as confusing as he did. Now they've given up on his mulish silence and stuck him in a cell (bed pallet fixed to the wall, metal shapes of sink and toilet fixed to the other wall, close enough to - well, from the bed Kurt could lean and touch them) the urge to sleep is heavy on him, he could sink under the dark again in a second. But he sits upright, rather than lying down, leaden arms bearing his weight on the thin mattress. He's trying to think.

Forget all the panic and stress and confusion. What does he know?

Artie said he was trying to make a time machine, and as Phalanx was peering at it, Cheer Girl - okay, Cheer Girl touched something she pretty much definitely shouldn't have, take that one for granted. There was a flash of weird light, and then the lab was . . . different. And some guy in a lab coat Phalanx had never seen before in his life, who wasn't there a second ago when all of the now-vanished superheroes were, screamed at him.

And then there was just - bedlam, for a while, Phalanx holding his hands up and trying to ask questions and be polite while very confused by all the screaming until a bunch of agents poured through the door and started shooting at him so then it was shields time and then there was lots of yelling and then - then things just deteriorated, Phalanx felt how very unsafe this situation was and made the possibly erroneous decision to get out of it. That meant he had to fight through all the agents blocking the doorway. Too much chaos and gunshots and things breaking, just too much happening, more agents appearing and screaming at him - they didn't seem to know his name, they just kept calling him 'the super', like what he is is all he is - and the fight trashed its way through the base almost to the exit when a burst of pepper spray threw him off and made him choke, and something hit him bruising-hard in the side but when his hand grabbed for it, it wasn't a bullet. It was a . . .

Syringe, Blaine thinks, rubbing with the heel of his hand the space between his eyebrows, head still dull with the contents of that syringe. Tranquiliser. He was out for a while after that.

He woke up here, in this cell, or one identical to it. Once he was awake, sitting up groggily, confused and not liking the situation one bit, someone checked through a grille on the door and then he was hauled out, down a corridor of blank cell doorways, up through the building to that interrogation room. He didn't look at the mirror on the wall beside him, folded his arms in his seat and determined to be civil but not exactly helpful, if they didn't intend to help him. Because the thing was -

For every one of their questions, he had twenty more . . .

They didn't know his name - and it's been years now, everyone knows Phalanx, especially these guys. They did ask if the name 'Blaine Anderson' meant anything to him, and kept asking him over and over if he had a twin, if he was a clone, it got weird. Blaine isn't good at being rude but hr channelled his inner aggravated Kurt and kept his arms folded and asked if he was under arrest, if he was getting a lawyer, and they didn't answer so neither did he.

Eventually one of the two agents looked the other in the eye, then took a piece of paper from their file and slid it across the table to Blaine - and he was Blaine, they'd taken his costume, he was dressed in these baggy dull grey sweats he's still wearing without his mask - and he looked down at the photographs, the mug shots, and felt his heart go still.

He breathes slowly on the bed, and wants very much to lie down and sleep but he has to work this out first because he has to, as soon as possible, get back to Kurt, and that is not happening if he doesn't work out where the hell he even is, because Artie said a time machine but - those pictures - were him, yes, a younger him, a kid he looked in those photos, big scared eyes for the camera, but Blaine had never seen the pictures before in his life. He didn't remember them being taken, he's never even been arrested, he's never had a mug shot taken. Himself from some years ago stared frightened at him now through the paper and Blaine stared back at a face that looks like his but he knows that he's never worn it.

Where is - who is - this other him? When he asked questions they didn't answer, Blaine understood how the interview was working, they were interrogating him, it wasn't mutual. And they might be able to violate his right to a lawyer but they can't do anything about his right to plead the fifth so he just closed his mouth and stared at that photograph of some scared kid wearing his face, guessing his age, maybe - it's clear that the kid in the photo hasn't slept, his hair's a mess, he's got more of a scuff in need of shaving than Blaine has right now, which all weirdly made him look younger, not older. Blaine would guess he's in his early twenties in that photo, though he could pass for eighteen. He knows he wasn't arrested at that age, he was just finding Kurt at that age, just taking ownership of his own powers, just becoming a superhero; Phalanx was just being born.

He rubs his eyes and a soft noise, almost a moan, just sort of happens, he's too tired to make it not. If he went back in time, that explains why they don't know Phalanx's costume on sight, but it doesn't explain how those photographs got taken without him knowing it. Because this organisation - hell, they were in their base; if this is the same organisation that works with them now, if Blaine's gone back to the bad old days when supers were considered a threat - that still doesn't explain how they have Blaine's photograph, how they know his name. If they knew him then how did he manage to keep his identity secret with the Ghost for so long, before Psyche was forced to pull their identities from their heads? None of this makes sense. Unless . . .

He rubs his face, trying to force himself awake.

Unless it wasn't a time machine. Unless Blaine hasn't got zapped back in time but sideways in reality. He doesn't remember that photograph being taken because it didn't happen to him. This is a world where supers are still considered a threat, enough for them to be held without charge, without access to a lawyer, in a specially-designed prison where their powers don't work, and Blaine knows that because he tried to make them work in that interrogation room but he couldn't. He tries again now, though his powers always feel a drain when he's tired, and shocks himself with the flurry of green shields that pepper the air in front of him and wink out again immediately.

- if his powers work -

It takes a good few minutes' trying because he wants to get back to Kurt he wants to get back to Kurt but after throwing all the strength he's got at that door through his shields, he's made only the smallest dents and it's clear that it's been built too strong, he can't break it. Once he gives up and sits back on the bed, shaky breaths heaving in him, he can hear - some angry, muffled voices, complaining, surprising him; he rocks himself up to his feet, shuffles to the door, presses his cheek to the closed grille to listen. Other cells, he thinks, dopey with exhaustion. There must be other cells along here and I've woken everyone up trying to hammer my way out.

"Sorry?" he calls, vague and groggy, but he doesn't know if they can really make that out, he can't hear any words amidst the mumbling anger out there. He staggers back, sits on the bed, tries to think, tries to think, his powers are working again, is it something to do with the tranquilliser wearing off? It really doesn't feel like it's wearing off, it feels, it feels, he yawns until he hurts his jaw, it really doesn't feel . . .

He can't go to sleep. He has to get back to Kurt.

The thin mattress is like an anchor, and he hasn't got the strength to haul himself up again.

*

Even through the shock, even through the sudden awful understanding of what's happening, the very first thing that matters, that jars immediate to the forefront of all other thought, is the simple matter of how very sensitive to fear Kurt Hummel has always been. Now, looking into the eyes of the other Ghost, he immediately relaxes his stance and raises his hands, weaponless, empty palms fully visible, making himself appear safe. It's not just that he needs that other him to not immediately vanish on him. It's that seeing someone else so afraid, so afraid of him clutches him in the throat, and he needs to make it stop right now.

The other Ghost doesn't relax his hands or his stance at all, and the Ghost knows that the only reason he's not rigid is because rigid muscles can't fight. His gaze flickers quick as a blink over the Ghost, and he says, his voice a little low and rasped, "If you're a shapeshifter then you are - well, a little out, I mean -"

"I'm not a shapeshifter, please, I'm - sorry, I know this is -"

"Fighting crime in white, I mean you'd spend half your life getting the blood out of it -"

"- I - know, I - do, sometimes, um," he wets his lips, feels so thrown. The other Ghost still hasn't relaxed, is still ready not only to kick his ass if the Ghost moves close enough for it but is visibly alert for the surrounding rooftop, for anything that might spring at him, everything about his stance and his face, it's not only so weird seeing himself from the outside like this - without the filter of a mirror's backflip he looks so subtly wrong to Kurt in a way he knows deep down is right - it's, it's, oh god, his own body remembers that stance, that expression of distrusting the entire world, he knows, he knows -

He knows what it feels like to face the entire world knowing that he has to watch his own back or die, knowing that there is no-one looking out for him, knowing that there is no shield, not for him, not ever. And it makes him nauseous how his own muscles want to tense in sympathy, returning to that ancient loneliness core-deep and brittle as a sheet of glass, the memory of what he was, once, before he had Phalanx. His heart crunches inside him, he shocks himself when the tears sting, when he has to clamp them down with an in-gasped breath, he doesn't even know if he's crying from the memory of living it or facing this man who lives it still.

And who glares at him only more suspicious as the Ghost's grief becomes obvious, as he stands there breath shuddering and holding his hands up in surrender, saying, "It's still grey, that never changed, it's just - it got lighter. And I know it's a dumb colour for crimefighting but I - I mean, we know how much a symbol like that cloak can matter and - and I think I probably deal with a lot less blood than you do, now. I have someone to - to help me with that." He is really struggling not to cry, it's been a day and facing this, himself, exactly who he could have been, he's never prepared himself for - who prepares themself for this? "If I, if I say the name 'Phalanx' . . . that doesn't mean anything . . . anything at all to you, does it . . . ?"

The other Ghost glares back, guarded, a permanent fraction of a second away from invisibility, from fleeing; the Ghost knows he'd be intangible already if he tried to touch him. He says, "Should it?"

The Ghost closes his eyes and just feels sick. "I'm going to lower my hands to cover my mouth," he says, and does, slowly, so he can close his eyes and suck a breath in through his gloves, wary of tipping himself into panic he's feeling so much, too much right now, and there's no Phalanx here to sing to him and make him feel safe. "Okay," he rasps, lifting his head, looking at the other him still standing there only, he knows because he knows himself, because he needs enough answers to know how much danger he's in right now. "I'm you," he says. "From another world. I have a friend who is a genius and also an idiot who made what he thought was a time machine and there were some - incidents, and I ended up here, except I don't know where here is, I am very lost right now because this looks like my city and it is not. It is not. Because it's yours, clearly."

The other him says nothing, but the Ghost senses his possessive satisfaction over that confirmation, he knows he wouldn't like someone else wearing his face turning up in his New York and claiming it for himself. "I know you don't trust me or believe me," he says. "I wouldn't, if I were . . ." He bites those words down; he would be suspicious enough if someone turned up wearing his face and said they were him, but what he almost said was that if he were still this version of him - the pre-Phalanx him - he would be so, so much worse, and he doubts that's going to help the other him trust or like him more. He shrugs. "It's crazy," he says. "I get that this is crazy. But 'crazy' is kind of just, a Thursday to us, so - will you hear me out? Please?"

The other him says nothing and doesn't move. He's wondering if I'm keeping him still for a reason, the Ghost thinks. He's wondering if there are snipers locking on to him, if something's approaching his back. He says, "How would you feel safer about us having this conversation?"

That throws the other him, his eyebrows fold under the mask. It takes the Ghost a moment to understand why, when the other Ghost says, "What would you give up to make me feel safe?"

Anathema, of course, to make himself feel more vulnerable than the permanent vulnerability he must always feel, not only all of Kurt's own exhaustive terror but here he lives in a world that purposefully eats its supers alive. "I'm going to sit down," he says. "Okay? You can - prowl, if you want, you can be invisible if you want, but please, please just listen to me for a moment because I - need your help. I need your help. I can't do this on my own, I don't understand this world and I have to rescue someone and I need your help. And I know you help people, and I know you find helping me hard because - because I'm you and I've always stunk at helping myself too, so maybe - maybe this is a chance for both of us to try something new. Please. Um." He swallows, and sits cross-legged on the rooftop, carefully tucking his ankles to himself, looking up at - himself, glaring warily back.

"You have three minutes and then I'm going," the other Ghost says, and the Ghost can see on his face that he already wants to go and is staying out of suspicion - better that he at least knows where this doppelganger is - and that twisting barbed fish-hook Kurt purposefully set in his guts, because he might have a difficult relationship with caring for himself but he has never, since the day he first put that cloak on, denied anyone who asked him for help.

"Okay," the Ghost says, and takes a breath; only now he's sitting does he feel how light-headed he is, bubbles are popping inside his brain, he can't think straight. "I think I'm from a world next door to yours, and I'm here by accident because I followed - someone." He's going to have to work up to that if this man is going to believe him on it. He wets his lips. "I need to rescue him, I think he's in danger, he's - he's a super too, and there's a building - they're holding him -"

"I know the building," the other him says coolly, and the Ghost blinks up at him, desperate for some true knowledge of what the hell he's facing here. "I don't go there."

". . . your powers stop working there."

The other him just looks at him, neither confirming nor denying, but he knows himself. Curiosity would have sent him into a building that shady helicopters kept landing on the roof of, and finding that his powers cease working in that building, terror would have sent him flying out of it again never to return. He has a sudden startlingly clear memory of the first time he met iBorg, flying into New York on Hallowe'en night and the Ghost still new to Phalanx and even the idea of interacting in a trusting way with other supers responded like a stray cat someone just tried to pick up; getting this man to trust him enough to help him is not going to take five minutes, he thinks with a sick dropping in his stomach, because he doesn't know how long Phalanx has.

"I have to get him out and get him home," he says. "I need to know everything I can about that building, because I have to go back in for him."

The other Ghost looks at him evenly, then paces the edge of the rooftop a little, making himself a harder target, and facing himself so paranoid and brittle Kurt just feels so sad. "Do you even have my powers?" the other Ghost says, and it takes the Ghost a moment; if the other him thinks that he's a shapeshifter still . . .

He lifts a hand, lets it fade half out of sight, waggles his fingers a little. He says, "If you want to throw something through my head -"

The shuriken buzzes as it passes through. The hood fills and flutters, and the Ghost blinks, hears the thrown slip of metal skip and skitter across the rooftop behind him, and says tartly, "There was a much more polite way of doing that, you know."

"You offered," the other Ghost says, looking no less troubled. "How do I know you're me?"

He gestures down at the overknee boots he switched to a year ago and is still entirely in love with; since he got outed and no longer has to care if people can see a fashion designer's tinkering with his costume whenever he feels like it, he switches things up whenever he damn well pleases. Being stuck in one outfit for years on end did not agree with him. "Look at these. Look at them. They have you all over them." The other Ghost doesn't unpick his stance at all, but allows with a twitch of one eyebrow and one shoulder, Fine, yes, they do. "I look just like you and I have your powers, look, I have your voice, you can stop doing the dropping it thing around me, let's be honest it never fooled anyone anyway -"

"Maybe the reason you don't get helped," the other Ghost says, eyes narrowing the way an irritated cat's tail flicks, "is that this is how you ask for it."

"- I'm you," the Ghost says, throat hurting. "So I know the reason that we don't get helped is that we don't ask for it. Look, I am not going to use your name on an open rooftop on this world, but I know - everything, I mean, everything that's the same between our worlds, I know all of it. I know - if you're wearing that cloak, if any version of me is wearing that cloak, I know - I know -" There is no escaping this and his own voice comes lower with the sheer weight of the decade of pain still hanging from this truth, less raw than it once was but a fact of his life that he manages like a medical condition, day to day tending it as its complicated symptoms require. He says, looking into his eyes and very quietly and it hurts, "I know what Karofsky did to you, because he did it to me too."

This is what he knows about himself, even before the other him goes stark white in the face, even his lips paling faint, his eyes fixed on his in blank unmoving incomprehending panic: If he didn't meet Blaine then he never would have told another soul what David did in high school, what it did to him, what it meant to him, he would never even have said his name out loud, he wouldn't have heard his name since high school and he had no preparation, no idea what it would do to him if he did. He holds his hands up desperately, says, "Please don't run, please don't vanish, please just - I know, the way that no-one else ever could I know, I'm here, please, you're safe now, you are so much safer than you realise now, you-"

"Shut up." the other Ghost whispers, white in the face and - moving, not exactly shaking, not exactly trying to move, just little flexing shifting twitches to all his muscles like he can't keep himself still, like there are ants swarming his nerves. "You don't know - if you can just sit there and say it then you don't know anything -"

"I thought I was so grotesque and broken and poisonous and damaged that it was a relief that I was going to die alone." the Ghost says, and his throat shivers a little but only because of how true it all is, how true it all once was and yet for this him is still true every day of his life. "I thought I was unfixable, I was toxic waste, I thought I was - just, a broken thing -"

The other Ghost folds his arms around himself, walking up and down now, shoulders bristling under the cloak. "Shut up. Shut up."

"I was terrified of - my own body and every other man on the planet and -"

"Shut up or I swear to god it's worse than a shuriken this time -"

"That haunting will do nothing to me that I haven't felt before. Look at me, will you just - I'm you, I get it because I'm you, it happened to me too. Look at me - I know, I know exactly how much it hurt you and I know you do not need fixing because you are not broken, you are hurt and that is different. Please - please, every night you help people, you're not different to them, you aren't a lost cause, you aren't not worth saving, every single person you help deserves to feel safe because people deserve to feel safe and that means so do you -"

"Will you just stop - psychoanalysing me for a second so I can - Jesus." He's still twitchily pacing the rooftop, rubbing his arms under the cloak, eyes tracking the roof underfoot just looking lost. His breath shudders out of him and the Ghost swallows in sympathy pain, in his own pain, he's still learning how to live with himself, how difficult he can find that sometimes. He watches him walk, the other him, the jagged-anxious path he's taking, the decision forming horrible behind his eyes. Then the other him looks across at him again, and he swallows with such difficulty it's visible even behind the cloak, and he says, low, "I'm not like the people I save. Tell me why."

Nausea like exhaustion falls down over him, oh these old paths, he hasn't walked them like this in years. He puts his hands over his eyes, hunching himself in smaller, it hurts in such complicated ways at his diaphragm dragging these words out of himself, a fish hook in his guts left so long underwater it dredges up foetid rotting weed. "Because you tell yourself that what they're going through is real, so real and horrible they have to be saved from it, and what we went through wasn't anything, just dumb high school stuff, it doesn't matter, it was nothing and we're just weak. But you know deep down why you tell yourself that." He presses the heels of his hands into his eyes, he is an adult, he is here to rescue Phalanx, and still, still, it hurts so much. "You know what it would cost you to admit the truth."

Silence, for a long time, and the Ghost can't rush the other him now, he needs the time just to get his own breath even again. So it's the other him who eventually says, voice raw and shakier now, "How can you just sit there and say this like - how can you - how is it the same if -"

He understands the question that he can't form, lowers his hands and lifts his head to look up at him again feeling frailer, realer, somehow. He thinks about it. He suggests, "'How can I talk about it like it's past tense when you're not ready for that yet'?"

The other Ghost shrugs, tight and angry. The Ghost sighs, doesn't even mean to, it comes out as sheer exhaustion.

"This is the part where - where we really diverged, not just the worlds we live on, um." With his thumb he presses, through the glove, the base of his third finger, the most solid thing he's ever felt. He licks his lips. "I think on your world the man I came here to rescue - Phalanx - I think he never found you, maybe because of all this anti-super stuff going on, maybe - I don't know. But on my world, a few years back, another super - he asked me to help him train to do what I do. What we do." He looks into the eyes of the other him suspicious now not with not believing him but with wariness of how much pain he knows he's holding, and how much more he can dredge up. "And - don't ask me why I agreed because even at the time I thought I'd lost my mind, I was just - not coping well and he was - kind, he thought about me in a way I just - hadn't even noticed that no-one else, even I hadn't, no-one had, not since I was a kid. And, um, we - we got close, and, um." He wets his lips again, gives up, pulls the left glove off and holds up his hand so the ring gleams pale in the night. "We've been married for two years." (Two years six months and eight days, his mind supplies in a murmur, that pleasing little tally that he silently in his satisfaction keeps.) "He's the reason I changed my cloak and - and I can talk about things I couldn't, I really couldn't before. I didn't know that someone could be so - patient with me. That anyone would ever actually care enough to really want me to feel safe, he acted like I mattered so what I've been through matters, he, um, I'm - I'm sorry." He tugs the glove back on, feeling small, he's never felt embarrassed of that ring before. "I feel kind of like an asshole sitting in front of you - I know I wouldn't have believed this if I hadn't met him. It could never have been anyone else, I could never trust anyone else like that, I know - I know I would still have been alone if I hadn't met him, if I'd even still been alive, and I - I don't know what it feels like for you, to have to - know that."

He can imagine. He can imagine how alone, how brittle and frightened and barbed with self-loathing he was before Blaine and then the possibility being waved under his nose of his being happy, better than happy, daily and unthinkingly content with himself, with someone who loves him - loves him! - settled, in love, married, these are insane words for the other him to connect with himself. It's not just the gnawing jealousy of being alone on a scale that feels galactic and looking in through the lit window at Kurt, who has things he simply never thought of in relation to himself they were so far beyond a possibility for him. It's - there are other, knottedly complex ways that this must . . . he knows himself, the himself he was before Blaine. He knows as good as fact that if he hadn't met Blaine then he would never have met anyone else; he knows as good as certainty that the man opposite him grew up afraid and ashamed of his sexuality but thought that he would get a boyfriend one day and then it would be beautiful and all the shame would be gone -

- and then high school, because he no longer wants to blame David after all the two of them have been through, high school stole from him the ability to feel anything towards sex but terror and revulsion. The other him has never even kissed someone and wanted to do it. The idea of casually climbing into bed beside a husband - Kurt knows this man can't even imagine, couldn't conceive of the times that he and Blaine decide well they'd better have sex now because their lives are crazy and they don't know where the hell they'll find the time or energy in the next week's schedule to do it and when did they last do it, should they start marking this on the calendar Blaine we are not marking this on the calendar -

Looking at himself he feels the sheer scale of the distance he's travelled, to be so casual and easy with his own naked body and that of the man he loves, when it really wasn't that long ago that men's bodies were just weapons and he couldn't conceive of anything they could want him for that wasn't violence. All his scars, how ugly he felt, how vulnerable he felt, like his whole body was a wound flinching from any touch and all the world made out like if you're not having regular great sex then you're a failure, like there isn't any option to opt out, like he needed even more shame on top of all the fear he was already trying to just manage . . .

He looks himself in the eye and it twists in him, his want to help him; he says low and true, the pained want to help him surprising him in piercing, twisting, barbed-wire ways, "You have to find him. The him on this world. And I need you to help me get my him back, please, I love him - more than anything, more than - I can't go back without him. I won't. I won't. So I'm dying in the attempt or I'm bringing him back but please, I need your help."

The other him looks at him, low and raw, as if finally the Ghost has touched something in him truly vulnerable, more even than the memory of David Karofsky. He breathes, slowly. And he says very quietly, "No. You don't know what it feels like."

He swallows, that complicated mixture of guilt and need and pain, and his voice gutters with how hard this is to get out. "I know - that you know - that I couldn't be with anyone for anything less than - than exactly how much he does mean to me. So will you please help me get him back, please, I can't - let anything happen to him, he's - he's -"

It is really very, very difficult not to cry in this moment. And the other him looks at him with his face twisting in such a helpless way, and he rubs his eyes, says roughly, "Now I'm the asshole. Don't . . . I'm not even jealous because it just doesn't make any sense to me. It just . . . no." He shrugs. "Just no. I would not pick up some other super to help do this, all it does is create another person who knows and who could get me killed as if the entire fucking government and most of the country isn't conspiring to get me killed already. I wouldn't put anyone else through what I'm putting myself through. And I wouldn't just trust some guy, I wouldn't -"

The Ghost says, to the rooftop, the feeling of it grinding in his guts, "I fell in love. You could too, for him."

The other Ghost snorts.

The Ghost swallows, and lifts his head again, looking up at him. "If I go in there not knowing what the hell I'm doing then I won't be able to save him and I'll only get myself killed too. And I will do that, for him, I - of course I will. But if you helped -"

"I am not going in there."

"It doesn't have to be that, just -"

The other him illuminates his cell, clips it away in his belt again. He says, "I have an appointment I'm already way too late for."

It clicks, the sudden realisation; it's Friday night. "Mr Conti," the Ghost says, and his mouth twitches, too sad for a smile. "I'm glad you have him. He'll be wondering where the two of us are right now too, on my world."

The other him has a more alert look in his eye, some surprise, that the Ghost knows Mr Conti too, that they have this, as well as everything else. He looks across the skyline for a moment, thinking, then takes a long breath through his nose and sighs. "Come on," he says. "I'm not doing this without coffee, I know that for damn sure."

He's already striding for the edge of the roof, and the Ghost pushes himself up on an arm, startled. "You - ?"

"Coffee first." the other Ghost says determinedly, and flutters out of sight.

The Ghost takes a breath, and understands, and for a second the despair rises like agony - every moment Phalanx is out of his sight he could be in the hands of Schuester and the Ghost remembers what it feels like to be in the hands of Schuester and he's scared - but he has to let it go, has to let his own body fade, to run after the near-silence of the other him, following the route he knows, sliding down the sides of buildings with semi-tangible hands, kicking off and catching the fire escape next door, heading for Mr Conti's coffee shop. The other him can't trust him enough to put his neck on the line for him after a few minutes' talk, he needs more than this, it's not even believing him so much as just digesting it all. He would have had less of a shock to the system if the Ghost had appeared in his universe still as alone as he is, it would have made more sense to him. The Ghost confident, healing, married -

His throat hurts, but he needs this man, needs his help, he can't do this alone because if he fucks it up it's Blaine's life. So he follows the other him, invisible in the dark, for a cup of coffee and one more chance to convince him to save his husband with him, to face the thing he cannot have for no reward but their happiness . . .

*

Invisible with his arms around his knees on Mr Conti's kitchen roof he waits through the murmur of the other Ghost talking to Sal in the doorway, the pause, the wait for the surprise second coffee. He can't stop himself remembering Mr Conti, his Mr Conti, the first time he asked for two, with for the first time a boy sitting up here beside him; and the candle, and the rosebud in a vase . . .

When the doorway closes, cutting dead the line of golden light on the alley floor, the other him walks over and leans up, holding two cups, and yawns without a hand free to hide his mouth, "Here . . ."

The Ghost fades into view, lets his legs loose, leans down to take both cups. The other him hauls himself up beside him, hands through the brick, and sits - further from him than Phalanx does. Which - it's just a thing he notices, as he passes the other Ghost his cup back; everything right now is reminding him of his lack of Phalanx.

(Where do they have you what are they doing to you are you awake trapped scared are they hurting you Blaine -)

He breathes in coffee like incense before prayer, and closes his eyes to drink. He thinks of swans, the visible serenity, the legs paddling manic below the surface.

"So," the other him says, awkward now they're just sitting with coffee, like these more normal interactions are more difficult than facing off against a potential threat on a rooftop. They are, the Ghost knows, to him.

The Ghost swallows his coffee, and flicks open the compartment in his belt to get his cell out. As soon as it lights, there he is; as soon as Thanksgiving was done Phalanx set his lock screen to the goofy selfie he took of them last year, mushed cheek-to-cheek, Santa hat and reindeer antlers, the Ghost's nose wrinkled under the mask to laugh, Phalanx beaming. He holds it out to the other him who looks at him as if checking - checking what? If it's a trap, that he does mean for him to take it? The smallest human interaction seems to pain him like they all come with thorns attached. Finally he takes the cell and looks down at the photograph, silent until the screen darkens again, face unreadable. Then he hands it back.

The Ghost tucks the cell away and the other Ghost drinks some more coffee, nods slowly. "Okay. 'Phalanx'. You designed that."

The costume. Of course he can tell. "I left off the pteryges. They just seemed sort of -"

"Whippy and distracting."

"Mm."

"What does he do?"

"He makes shields. Translucent green hexagons. They're surprisingly versatile."

"Just shields?"

"Just shields." The Ghost suspects sheer adorableness might be a secondary superpower of Phalanx's but assumes that's obvious to the eye. "I thought . . . when he first turned up, he was - I was still in the dark cloak, and he seemed . . . everything I wasn't. Like the heroes in comic books. Brave and good and - and -"

"Not me."

"Not dark. Not - complicated. But he is, in his own way. We've had our friction. I'm not easy, me and all my baggage, and he's got his own past, he - needs this. The hero thing, it means something to him that . . . we all have our own reasons. But I wanted him to look classically heroic."

"I wouldn't." the other Ghost says, quite simply, not aggressively or scornfully, just stating a fact. He shrugs. "Take on some other super, let them into my life, I wouldn't. I just wouldn't."

"Well . . . on my world I wasn't worried about the government kidnapping me, the worst I had to worry about was the NYPD shooting me which, okay, I did sometimes worry about." He folds both hands around his coffee for the warmth, glad of the cloak, missing the close warm body he'd usually have half the cloak tucked around like a wing right now. "But . . . look, I've had years to think about this, I don't really know why I - why I tried to trust him. I have my theories."

The other him stretches his legs long, then lets them dangle over the edge of the roof again. He says over the steam of his coffee, "Elucidate."

He needs him to understand exactly what Phalanx means to him or he might never see Phalanx again. He takes a breath, lets it slowly loose. He says, "Okay."

He's never really said any of this to anyone, not even Blaine, really, though he suspects it to be true. "He came looking for me. He'd seen the Ghost on the internet so he moved to New York to meet me so he could train to be a superhero too. And the first time I met him he got between me and Puckzilla when he came back for me and got, just, clobbered by Puck's tail, so rather than leaving him to get arrested I snuck him off to a doctor." He's not using Mike's name, but he suspects the other him knows it, if he's still alive after this long. "And I could have said no. There were a thousand points along the way where I could have, more than once I did, I eventually caved when he - literally he bumped into me in the street and spilled my coffee. No masks, just us. And he knew me. And it was - my literal worst fear and once the shock had worn off a bit because I thought I was having a stroke for a while - it just -" He rubs his tired eyes, it's already late, near morning, and he's exhausted. "I just never believed in fate until then. Before or since. That just felt like, yes, of course, in my life? Of course I trip over the super-groupie who knows my face without the mask because he obsesses about me on the internet, of course I do."

"What I would do," the other him says, slowly, "is haunt him and vanish."

"In the middle of the street, in the middle of the day? I couldn't do a damn thing. I got coffee with him."

The other him gives him a sharp glance, and the Ghost shrugs. "My brain had switched clean off, I thought I was going to pass out. Once I started - being able to respond to the situation, I told him no, again, and he . . . he didn't push, that's the thing. He offered me - he gave me all the ammunition, all the information I needed on him and all his contact details, and he left. And I could have . . . he wouldn't really have been able to find me again, he wouldn't have tried to, if I'd left it at that. But . . . I mean, this is the thing, right," turning his body a little more towards the other him because this is the part he suddenly would like some confirmation from himself on, "he knew. He knew. Every other guy - they can't hurt us, not really, can they, because we're us, but because of the secret we could never use that and that's why they were dangerous. They could hurt us not because we can't defend ourselves but because we couldn't let them know that we could. But he already knew. I could haunt him whenever I liked, there was no secret to blow. And it was - I mean, it was weirdly liberating, to - to just not have to be afraid, not like that, I mean I was afraid of a thousand other things but what was different was that . . . that he was the only guy in all the world I could fight back against if I had to. It was the first time it felt - like an even footing. Like I wasn't just . . . like I wasn't in a position where if, if he tried to hurt me, I literally didn't know what to do. I knew exactly what to do, and I could. And that made him . . . having him that close made him safer than anyone. Does that make sense? Does this sound crazy to you?"

"I mean, yes," the other him says. "Yes, it sounds crazy. But . . ."

He watches the other him gaze across at nothing in the night, and knows what he's thinking about; the man he could haunt whenever he needed to, the man he wasn't helpless against, the man he could take a risk with because to Kurt any intimacy was a risk, before Blaine. He's spent a long time trying to work out his own tangled psychology in relation to men, and himself. He wants to be well, to have a healthy relationship with himself, partly so he can have a healthy relationship with Blaine but partly just because he genuinely wants to be okay. You have to reach a point where you decide that you want to manage the parts of your own suffering that you can, because god knows the world will give you enough suffering you can't manage. He wants to be happy, now.

It was Blaine who said, a couple of years back , that he wanted to start seeing a therapist. "Just, now and then," he said, those earnest eyes of his, watching Kurt across their living room sofa. "We deal with some pretty intense stuff on a night. I want to be able to deal with it - properly. Healthily. Is 'healthily' a word?"

The secret was blown by then, of course, and Kurt understood looking at Blaine trying so hard to keep the conversation light that this was an offer, as well as a statement; the secret was out and the old excuse he always had that he could never tell anyone anything because of what it might lead them to discover, that was done. For years Kurt had managed his own ghosts through ignoring them, submitting to their bleak narrative of what he could be, fixatedly piling more and more dirt on their graves, anything but dealing with them. It had simply never occurred to him that he could learn some way to live with them, and here Blaine was offering it to him. It's not just high school, the symptoms he has that he does now recognise are PTSD, years as it took him to acknowledge that. They do see a lot of stuff on a night, he dreams about it sometimes, he doesn't want to take these things out on Blaine or on anyone else, including himself. So now he sees a therapist once a month to check in. Most of the painful part of it seems to be done, the things he had to talk through at first; now it's the day-to-day, managing his triggers, understanding his frustrations. He's less afraid than he used to be. Looking at this man now, he is so much less afraid than he used to be, and he had no idea how far he'd travelled until he looked himself in the eye.

"It's not just him," he says, and the other Ghost looks at him again, quiet and patient but not entirely trusting, just willing to listen. "On our world - I mean, there's anti-super feeling out there, there are bigots wherever you go, but the government isn't on our tails, we work with them, in our own way. If you ever meet an Agent Sue Sylvester, by the way, she is entirely on her own side and in a way that makes her weirdly very trustworthy, you always know precisely where you stand with that woman." He takes a sip of coffee and his warmed breath now sighs out white. "But - due to a complicated set of events, and if you ever meet someone called Sebastian Smythe he is a - a snake-weasel, he takes on other supers' powers, do not trust him, he's in a max security prison for supers on my world now with William Schuester, he makes supers' powers just stop working, I think your world's Schuester is in that building, we'll need to deal with him."

"'We'," the other him says pointedly, and the Ghost rolls his eyes.

"Schuester - I can't tell you he's a good person. But I think he could be, I think he's worth trying for. Anyway, complex set of events, we got outed about three years ago." He looks at the other him, shrugs. "The whole world knows. The worst thing. The worst thing. And the thing is . . . it was kind of the best thing that ever happened to me, after Phalanx. I'm not constantly trying to make sure that the Ghost is nothing like me and I'm nothing like the Ghost, I don't have to make me, the me without a mask, so helpless anymore. I never have to let anything horrible happen to me to keep the secret safe. I can haunt anyone now, and it just -" He waves a hand. "The weight it lifted, god. So, yes, I can talk about these things now, because I'm not living inside them so much anymore, I'm free. It's not - it did give me other problems. Now I'm always the Ghost, mask or not, so I have to be always the Ghost. It's a lot of - pressure."

His therapist asked him that once; Do you feel a lot of pressure to appear a certain way to other people? and Kurt looked at her flatly, measuredly, because even without the mask he'd know that that was true, the Ghost was merely the frosting on that cake.

"But no-one tries to kill you?" the other Ghost says, and the Ghost smiles helplessly at his incredulity, he can imagine how crazy this sounds, because the reason being outed was always his worst nightmare was his dad's life in the balance, and that's what he's really being asked.

"They still do that, but not in a way we can't manage. My family's protected, which is the main thing. But the Ghost is - people use him, he's a symbol, he means different things to different people and - I do have to deal with a lot of that in a way I could really do without." He rubs his face with a gloved palm. "Idiots get it into their heads how tough they'd look if they could bring down the Ghost of New York and it drives me fricking crazy."

The last one was some MMA fighter who really wanted the honour of defeating the Ghost. Kurt had refused to even acknowledge his demand for a fight - it was such dumb toxic masculinity bullshit, he complained to Blaine who was the one who'd been sent the tweet, he has serious crap to deal with in his work, he doesn't exist to boost other men's egos, that guy can get his head out of his ass and take up knitting if he wants a challenge - so the guy took some poor man in a Spider-Man costume on Time Square hostage in broad daylight and yelled for the Ghost to come fight him. And because he felt awful for the poor guy just trying to make a buck off tourists and because he was pissed, he did; walked across Time Square in full costume in broad daylight past the police lines and the whole thing was filmed from about two hundred different angles, all eight seconds of it. It was important that he didn't use his powers, and that he made it humiliatingly brief. It was important that no-one else got it into their heads to hurt someone else for a chance to fight the Ghost, that they didn't even want to; knowing that the Ghost is Kurt Hummel, and Kurt knows exactly what the rest of the world sees when they look at him and isn't ashamed of that in the slightest, knowing that if they fight the Ghost and lose they lose to Kurt too, that is important to him. Too many kids care about the Ghost for Kurt to let some douchebag with a tender ego take him down. He never asked to be the mountain that other people want to conquer but as long as kids are looking on hugging their Ghost dolls and needing to know that there will always be a hero, he isn't going down. And the queer kids who feel at the mercy of their bullies, seeing someone like Kurt take on his own?

Do you feel a lot of pressure to appear a certain way to other people?

Hah.

He looks at the other him, who looks back looking confused, mostly. And the Ghost feels like a blade in one of the chambers of his heart his fear for Phalanx - with every beat, it bleeds - and doesn't know if they're there yet, if he trusts him enough to help, doesn't really know much about this other him at all. "How are you surviving?" he says. "If I hadn't had Phalanx I'd have been dead about twenty times over in the last few years. How are you still alive?"

The other him is silent for a while, then says, "You mentioned Puckzilla earlier as if you'd fought him more than once."

"- he didn't come back for you?"

The other him shrugs. "Supers disappear. Any super the police put their hands on, I never see them again and I never see a word about them in the news. So I hardly ever see supers, and never more than once. And you know what it's like. Bullets and knives, I'm a ghost. I could always screw up and get killed but so far I've coped. Occasionally it's a bit close but never the way it is for the people I'm trying to help." He picks at his coffee cup, breath falling out slow and pale. "I used to try to get any supers I came across away from the cops, but I can't save everyone. Especially when they won't stop trying to kill me, when someone cannot get their head out of their own ass in that way my options are kind of limited. So the impression I get is that you deal with more supers than I do, and with our powers it's really only the supers who stand a good chance of killing us."

The Ghost thinks with some despair of his biannual infuriating run-ins with the Pink Dagger who they just can't keep in a goddamn jail and who just keeps coming this close to taking him out, and then thinks of the people who can make him disappear having Phalanx too, and feels sick. "Okay," he says, and swallows. "Yes. Whenever I've come close it's been supers, every time." The Pink Dagger, David Karofsky, the Honey Badger, Sebastian - more than he can think of in this moment. Supers really are the only ones with a reasonable shot of taking down someone who chooses when they want to be solid enough to be hurt. "But you're on your own, still. I don't . . . it takes some grit to keep going, every night, alone."

"I don't think about it like that. It's just what I do."

He does understand that. Whenever he did allow himself to peer into the precipice he balanced on the edge of when he was alone, he looked away again very quickly. Sometimes it's just better not to think. Easier, anyway.

"Show me again," the other him says, putting his coffee cup down and holding a hand out, and the Ghost blinks at him before he understands and reaches for his cell again, unlocking it this time, opening the photos. Call him paranoid, there have been too many leakings of celebrity nudes for him to ever allow a photograph especially on his work cell that he doesn't mind anyone seeing.

Most of them are just Phalanx, which the other him scrolls through with his thumb and a frown, puzzled and almost angry with it, staring at the man the Ghost is married to. "I know, right," the Ghost says, and finishes his own rapidly-cooling coffee, putting the cup aside.

"And he likes - us."

He was going to say 'you' before the sheer depth of the rudeness of it occurred to him, the Ghost knows. "Mm. He really, really does. I really want you to find your world's version of him. It's not just that he - you have no idea how you're going to love him, it's not just that. He needs you too. You'll make him happy. I make him happy."

The other Ghost still looks profoundly sceptical of this, handing his phone back. The Ghost takes it and glances at his husband's handsome face as if it's new again, the wonder of Blaine wanting him of all people. "I know," he says, putting the cell away. "I get it. I spent weeks thinking he was just delusional and he'd get over it, then months thinking he didn't really want me, he wanted the Ghost, and unfortunately I come attached. But he loves me. No-one knows me like he does, no-one ever can, it's not just that he's the only person I talk to about a lot of things, he's there out with me every night, we deal with it all together, we know when we need each other because we're both there together in it. He knows me and he loves me. He thinks I'm beautiful."

It's an embarrassing word to say, never something he does say and something he didn't realise he'd feel so uncomfortable stating, though the other him looks at him - confused, wary still. "It must have been a shock," he says. "To him. It being - the Ghost being - just us."

He presses the ring into the base of his finger. "You know, to him, 'just us' is enough."

There's silence for a moment, as the other Ghost glares across the alleyway trying to make this make sense in his head, and the Ghost doesn't know how to help him in it. He looks up at the bruise-coloured sky. It's midwinter so it won't be light for a good while, but that doesn't mean the morning isn't close and every second (his heart beats, bleeds) fear for Blaine makes him more and more nauseous. He takes a long breath, says, "A couple of weeks back we got into a fight with some idiot with a freeze ray, and just as an FYI if you haven't been in this situation yet, do not ghost through a block of solid ice, you literally might as well jump in the Hudson on January first, I was just - done."

Breath punched from the lungs through sheer cold, limbs numb with shock, the shiver setting in so deep his bones rattled; the memory's embarrassment factor still has it seared in deep. "Phalanx was trying to fend him off with his shields and I was shaking so badly I could hardly take a step without my ankle going over which is really embarrassing when you're wearing a superhero costume, so I fumbled out a shuriken - I could hardly grip the damn thing - and just hail-Mary -" He flails a helpless hand in the gesture again - "yeeted it and - ten million to one chance, billion to one chance, the best I thought I'd do is distract him with it but it went into the barrel of the gun. Just popped in there like it was magnetised to it. And when he fired the gun blew up, and I'm standing there shaking like an idiot and I look around at Phalanx and -"

He puts a hand over his eyes, the smile wobbles with the clench of fear for him now, as he sees the exact expression shining on Phalanx's face like Christmas morning -

"He was looking at me like I just put the stars in the sky. And - nothing I say, nothing I ever, ever say will convince him that that was a fluke. Nothing. Because he thinks I'm that good. But here's the thing -" His throat hardens, this hurts like he's been kicked in the gullet, "yesterday morning I was browsing through Serious Eats in bed and I asked him what he thought about waffle iron churros for breakfast and he gave me this - this really serious, intense look he has sometimes and he said -" He remembers the exact intonation, the perfect formation of every syllable of his voice wrung with its meaning - "'I don't want you to think I only married you for your cooking but I am literally the happiest man on Earth right now' and I just -"

The way he looked at him, the way he meant it, that their most ordinary moments sparkle like Christmas baubles unwrapped from their tissue paper, and he doesn't know where Blaine really is or what they're doing to him and if he's okay -

"We're enough for him. Even without the mask we'd be enough for him. And the weirdest thing is," he says, looking down at the empty cup beside him, and his voice comes rough now, this admission hurts in a very complicated way, "the best thing he ever gave me is that -" He wets his lips. "Once upon a time I thought I literally couldn't live without him. Once I met him, once we were together, I just thought, I can never, never go back to not having him, I would literally rather die. For a long time I thought that." Sometimes he wonders if that time he lost control of his powers, what it really was was that; his subconscious giving him a way out of ever having to face a day without Blaine. "But - we're older, now, and healthier, stronger, we're . . . the - hardest, best gift he ever gave me is that I probably could live without him now. If he left me, or - died, or anything that could happen to us, I mean I would grieve until it felt like death but I really think one day I would just pick myself up and keep going. I might even have it in me to trust someone else, to be with someone else, eventually. And I don't want to and I - really, really hope I never have to." His throat is agony, it feels like it's going to split. "But I think I could, and he gave me that. He made me feel like I'm worth the way he loves me, and that's better than just . . . that's freedom. More than just need. Feeling like my feelings matter. I love him and I choose him and he chooses me. That's the biggest thing. Not being helpless anymore, not being . . ."

"You want to walk into a building where you're not a ghost even if they kill you to get him back."

"Yes. Because I choose to." The Ghost looks across at the other him, shrugs helplessly. "I don't want to live without him, and I don't want him to die, he doesn't deserve it, he's wonderful. Anyway, rescuing people is my job, and I owe him plenty of rescues by now." He picks up and picks at the coffee cup again, he's unpeeling part of the cardboard, bit by bit. "He got me back from Schuester once. Now it's my turn."

"And you want me to go with you."

The Ghost tips his head, thinking. "He came here looking for me," he says, and swallows. "God. Maybe that's where they took the other him, your him, if they found him. He came here for you and they took him." His forehead creases, he feels a gnawing of unease. "What do they do to supers in there? Could they still have him, the him from your world?"

"I have no idea." The other him looks across the rooftops opposite, arms wrapped around himself under the cloak, against the cold or just against the excess of reality he's dealing with tonight; Kurt knows that feeling smaller sometimes makes him feel safer. "If they . . . I know they have holding cells for supers in a couple of police departments. Maybe they - transfer them there, to that building where their powers don't even work, to keep them long term? God. God, and you want to walk in there -"

"Not necessarily walk. We're superheroes, we have options if we want a grand entrance."

"This isn't funny."

"Anti-super psychopaths are holding my husband hostage in an alternate reality, I'm not exactly laughing here."

"This isn't the alternate reality," the other him mutters into his knees. "You're the alternate reality. You are very, very alternate."

The Ghost swallows and it hurts so much. "I have to get him back."

"They'll kill all of us. All of us. That doesn't help anyone."

"Don't you even want to know what's in that building, in your city?"

"Look," the other him says, and the anger is low in his voice, "don't act like I'm being - like I chose to let those bastards do whatever they want, because you aren't from this world and you really don't get it. What I want it to help people and to be able to text my dad every morning so he knows I'm still alive. And what you're asking me to do right now is risk this being the last night that I ever get to do either of those things, and just - what do you think they do to us, they hate us, they can't stand the thought of anyone having power that they don't and they would - they would -"

The word that blooms quiet and dark in the back of the Ghost's mind in that moment, touching something low and hissed in his spine, is 'genocide'. It's a huge word, and an awful one, and to suddenly connect it with himself - but he's felt it before, of course. It's not just the powers. He's gay in a way there's no point trying to hide; he's felt more than once in his life the sheer dumb weight of some people's desire for his obliteration from the planet, him and everyone like him, the desire not just to do violence towards him but to erase him. Some people think that they get to decide that other people should be invisible, less than ghosts. Yes. He knows what some people would do, to make themselves feel safe at the expense of supers' lives. What he says, voice choking on it, is, "They're doing it to my husband."

The other Ghost puts his hands over his eyes, muscles tight in his balled sit, and Kurt feels how he hates himself in that moment because when Blaine came to rescue him from Schuester he brought an entire team of supers to help and all Kurt has been able to manage, between two worlds, is himself.

*

The Ghost doesn't know what time it is, knows that even in the long nights of winter the dawn will come soon, knows that both he and the other Ghost must have been awake for a good twenty hours at this point, knows that he feels too light in the head, deranged with fear and exhaustion, he is far from his best when for Blaine now he needs to be better than his best. He knows more than anything that he doesn't have Blaine back safe in his sight again, and his throat is beginning to harden on the knowledge that the only way to get him back, to try to at the very least, is to do it himself, alone, without powers, without much hope. He's aware of the dissonance of it: He knows he can't do it alone, but he's still going to, and Blaine would yell him right out for it and be right to do it but he's still doing it, and his dad's voice would break but he would tell him not to, the pointlessness of it, and he's still doing it, and he is either going to die in the attempt or they'll bring him down and do whatever they're doing to Blaine to him too and there will never be rescue for either of them, and, still, he's doing it.

He didn't sign up for this. He's been a superhero and a living human being for too long to not know that you don't get to choose what life has signed you up for.

Because the other him can't, he knows it now, the weight of the despair of his knowledge of himself. Over the hours of pleading the closest the other him has got to going in that building is their cautious eyeing of it from another rooftop, invisible, listening to each other's breath before the other Ghost says, "No." and the Ghost follows his footsteps to some distance again, safe buildings between them and that awful place that sucks the powers from them, where the other him fades back into view, gloved hands over his eyes, head down in the dark hood.

"No. No. No." He shakes his head. "Just think about it, be rational. We won't have powers and they will have guns. We'll be killed or worse than killed. If he loves you like you say he does, he doesn't want that for you, the best thing you can do is go home to your dad -"

"Don't." It comes out thick and hard, his voice hurts, but the other him knows the low blow it is to bring his dad into this decision.

"Every night we come this close to - just, destroying him, every night, and you know damn well we don't have a right to die, we owe him that. You can't - no. Just no. If you're me then you know that - he was too good to be true, we don't get that -"

"Fuck you," Kurt spits, and then is surprised at himself, and the other Ghost lifts his head and looks pale with surprise back at him, but still the Ghost's shoulders bristle. "Fuck that," he corrects himself to, with some reluctance. "We're not doomed to be unhappy and alone, we get a choice, and I choose him over - over anything. Everything. I'm going in there. You can - go home. Look, just - go home." He rubs his own hot, exhausted eyes through the mask, and he doesn't blame him, he knows he's the one being a fool here. "I'll do it alone. I can't . . . I can't ask you to do it. But you can't tell me not to either."

The other him stands almost quivering, fists clenching in their gloves, says like it's hard, "I'm not - you know it's - it's not just dying, there's worse than dying -"

"I know," he says, because good god he knows it, his life is an exercise in the learning of it.

"Every night I risk the dying, I never know if it'll be cops or criminals or the government or if I rescue some anti-super bigot who attempts a 'citizen's arrest', that's happened, I never know who's going to kill me and I can't - going in that building, that building, it's not just death, you understand that they won't just kill you -"

"I know, but it doesn't have to - it doesn't have to go like that, no-one has to die."

"You don't have any powers in there! They have guns and you're just some guy in a cloak!"

His breath comes in, cold before the dawn through his nose, and he says, low, "We are not 'just' anything. Not with everything we've survived. We know more than death, we've both come through that, we know it can be come through."

"Oh come through what," the other him snorts. "That was nothing. That was just high school, that was nothing."

He knows that bitterness, that toxic contempt for his own pain, and he has to briefly clench his teeth, close his eyes against it. He says, through his uneven breath, "It wasn't just high school. We survived college, that - guy - we survived, and it wasn't nothing."

"What guy?"

The Ghost looks at the other Ghost, who looks back warily, waiting for some prompt of how to respond, because he doesn't know what he's responding to. What strikes the Ghost with dis-ease is that the other him doesn't seem to be fishing, the way he had earlier in the night, for proof of what the Ghost knows. He seems genuinely uncertain, and Kurt . . .

For a moment, his mouth shapes silence. Then he manages to breathe out, "That guy, in college. You know . . ." He looks into his eyes and feels dumbstruck, because he knows that he doesn't know. "I went out with him for drinks the night Dad found out," he says, can't believe he's saying this, he feels like he's having an out of body experience. "I got too drunk and he walked me home and," and, and, and, he casts for words, he feels unmoored. "And he got on top of me on my bed, and. And. Rachel maced him. And. I need to sit down."

He does, for the second time that night, just sits on a rooftop and finds that his hands are shaking, looks at them stupid and silent and can't believe how quickly the tears come, in this mask they never do the way they do to Kurt. He clasps his hands together, tries to fight the shake, doesn't understand -

Does understand -

It never happened to him. The other him. Whatever was different, that didn't happen to him. And it's forcing Kurt now to face the story he's always told about what happened to himself, the story behind the story, the story he didn't even know he was telling: That what happened in college confirmed what happened in high school. That it put a nail in it, put ink over the pencil, that it retroactively made both incidents inevitable. That Kurt just is the kind of person that happens to, that somehow there is a cause and effect that involves him causing that effect. And he would have sworn, five minutes ago, that he was so far healed beyond thinking like that, he talked the talk about perpetrators carrying a hundred percent of the blame for their actions with the confidence of a convert and in his secret heart he didn't even realise that he didn't believe it, not for himself. Because all these years, all these fucking years, that story made the story of high school make sense, and now, facing himself carrying a different story, it doesn't anymore.

Because it never happened to him, the other Ghost. High school did, but college didn't. And here's the fucking kicker, it made no difference to him at all. High school hurt the other Ghost just as much, it traumatised him just as much, he's still wearing that near-black cloak. High school was enough. All these years, the stories he's been telling himself, high school was enough, it was too much just as it was, he didn't need the confirmation, he didn't - he doesn't even know what he's thinking, high with exhaustion and terror and too much of everything -

The other him says, blankly, "It happened again," like he doesn't understand.

And he doesn't, Kurt thinks. "No," he says. "Not again. It's never again, every time - that - every time is unique in its awfulness, believe me." He stares at the rooftop and doesn't see anything of it. "No." he says, more quietly. "Not 'again'. High school was personal. I was just a body to that other guy, he didn't know me, it wasn't - it wasn't the same. But in my head - I don't know how I've been thinking about it." His stomach clenches, rebels. "I thought it was inevitable." he says, and it comes out too strangled, the words burn his throat. "Because I'm me. But it turns out - it wasn't. Me. Because it didn't happen to you."

The other him stands there, silent in his dark cloak, then says, "I blew a guy off, the night Dad found out. I couldn't face it, I knew I'd never be normal, go out on dates like a normal person. I went out instead, as the Ghost. Came home to a pissed off text and never saw that guy again."

"Funny," Kurt mumbles, without a grain of humour in it. "You did what Dad thought was the dangerous thing and you were safer than I was, being normal, doing what he wanted."

There's silence between them then as Kurt, the Ghost, really tries to summon his reserves of sense, really tries to drag himself together, find some strength, he knows he needs it, to stand up and walk into that building and try to get Blaine back whatever happens next. He feels - it's like snowfall, like an immediate twelve feet of it just dumped on his head and everything is white and distant and muffled and cold. He feels so very, very alone and silent in his own mind.

He thinks, At least if I don't survive the night I don't have to go talk about this with my damn therapist.

"Alright," the other him says, and when the Ghost manages to blink, to look stupidly up at him, feeling wan and weak and too unsteady in any limb to do anything at all - the other him is tugging his gloves comfortable down his wrists, flicking his hood to its best position. "Fuck it. Let's do this, if we're doing it."

The Ghost says, "What?"

"Let's go get your husband back, hell this guy better be worth it, I can't - believe - I can't believe I'm doing this. I cannot believe I am - let's go, pick yourself up, do not give me time to change my mind."

"What - what -" He scrabbles to pick himself up, staring at himself. "You're serious?"

The other him shrugs, and looks helpless, and looks, finally, like when their eyes meet, like there's compassion there, not just confusion. "I thought - I hardly even survived high school, and I thought that meant I could never . . . anything. You know. Ever." He shrugs his tensed shoulders. "And you - you got through high school and then that happened and then you still - you still fell in love and went with it and - and he's got to be worth it, hasn't he? Because -" He huffs his breath out, looks embarrassed almost to anger with sheer bafflement, and waves a hand at the Ghost in his paler cloak. "Because let's face it, you are about ten thousand times more together than I am and you - I didn't know. That you went through that. I'm sorry," it's said uneasily, and he almost, the Ghost understands the gesture, reaches for his hand. "I'm sorry you had to go through that. But if he was still worth you risking - everything for - then he's worth it. So fine, to hell with it, let's go get him. But I really don't know how." His jaw flexes, and his eyes on the Ghost's are honestly, openly frightened. "No powers, and we don't even know what we're facing in there."

He stares at him, and his breath isn't even. He stares at him, and feels the little point of light in his chest, like the only star in the sky, and recognises the feeling with some surprise as hope. "You'll help me," he says, hardly understanding it.

"I don't know how is the problem."

The Ghost swallows, and jerks his own gloves down, brushes his hair back underneath the hood and resettles the cloak around his throat. "It'll be okay," he says. "Because, I don't know about you, but even without my powers?" He tosses the hood back a little, finally beginning to grin. "I'm kind of a badass."

The other him watches his eye, wary but steady, before the corner of his mouth deepens a small, dangerous smile. "Hm," he says, and folds his arms, looks across the rooftops in the direction of that building that emits fear like a stain on the sky. "Now that you mention it, I'm kind of a badass too."

*

The lights are bright and there's all sorts of chaotic noise and Blaine jerks awake with a snort, muscles like lumps of lead on a hard thin mattress. He tries to push himself up on a wrist that slides out under his weight and whacks his chin off something (solid cardboard by the feel of it) that is masquerading as a pillow and blinks in a startled, stupefied way, head full of cotton wool, like he's woken not hungover but still drunk.

He's in a windowless, overlit cell, and he remembers everything.

He drags himself to sit on the mattress and blinks quite a few times, trying to get his vision to be something other than an unpleasant buzz of too much light, but that might just be the overhead bulb; and then the confused clanging outside has come to his own door, which is banged on hard three times before it laboriously unlocks and opens, and an agent says brusquely, "Up and out, canteen."

Canteen? He has no idea what time it is, but does feel hungry in a strange, empty rather than actually eager-for-food way. He gets a little unsteadily to his feet, he's in some uncomfortable cloth slippers, and walks out of the cell into the cell-lined corridor, where a straggling line of people in the same sloppy uniform as his are gathering, flanked by agents - obviously armed - and all looking various shades of sleepy, sullen and scared. And right in front of him in the line -

"Noah?" he says, confused.

Noah Puckerman makes an angry jerking motion with his head but doesn't look back at him. "Only my mom calls me 'Noah', half pint."

. . . huh. Eeriness has taken every hair on the back of his neck. Surreptitiously Blaine tries to summon a shield underneath the hand at his side; nothing. Which means . . . he scans further up the corridor, sensing from how no-one else is looking over their shoulders that that sort of movement is a bad idea, and spots near the front the familiar thin face looking over the queue of nervy prisoners, because Blaine knows that that's what they are. William Schuester is in the building. So is Noah Puckerman. Who else . . . ?

Once all the cells are emptied they're marched out of the corridor, down a wider one, into an open canteen - it feels enormous overhead after the tight, crowded space of the cells, but it can't be bigger than a high school gym. There are long tables and benches screwed into the floor, and a hatch at the end the line works its way towards. Blaine follows Puck in picking up a compartmentalised plastic tray, and spins it uneasily in his hands, very aware of the shields he can't summon right now. He says, "Hey, Puck?"

Puck seems a bit more relaxed now they're out of that tight corridor. Blaine's always had a good eye for picking up unwritten rules and chameleoning his way inside them, to fit in, to not stand out; the prisoners are nervy in the corridor outside their cells, more relaxed in this canteen, and so are the agents, who have fallen back to flank the walls, watching the prisoners eat. Talk is rising, there's no milling around - everyone stands and sits with whoever was beside them when they were put into the line - but there's a bit more ease in the air, even if not actual ease, so talk is possible here, especially under cover of everyone else talking and eating.

Puck says, "What, Anderson?"

"You know my name," Blaine says, feeling his own lack of ease at that, because he has a very good idea of what it means. Puck looks over his shoulder at him in a derisive way and then stops, and frowns.

"What happened to your face, you get a guard pissed?"

"Oh -" His fingers are at the scar on his top lip before he thinks, and then drop away again. "No. Uh. Long story. In this context a very, very long story." They had a photograph of his face, younger, frightened, no scar, so they must have him somewhere, his age by now but - frightened, and with no scar. "I - this is going to sound kind of crazy but I'm not from your planet? I'm pretty certain I'm from an alternate dimension. I'm a literally different Blaine Anderson to the one you know."

"Right," Puck says, not sounding especially interested. "You get concussed when you get that scar?"

Blaine finds himself at the front of the line and mimics Puck, holding the tray out, looking at the apple and cup of juice put into two compartments of the tray and the beige slop put into another. "What is this?"

"Breakfast, princess."

Probably oatmeal? Blaine thinks, brows low, then looks up and smiles at the canteen staff. "Thank you."

He follows Puck to the nearest half-empty table, Puck saying, "So on this alternate world are you tall-errrr . . ."

His voice tails to nothing, he almost stops walking - Blaine stumbles a little at his back - because there up ahead already sitting at the table they're heading towards is an eerily familiar head of dark curls in desperate need of a cut, looking up from his own tray where he's listlessly picking at oatmeal with a spoon, finding a smile for Puck and then seeing -

Blaine watches his own face fall open with wordless confusion, and nudges Puck to hurry to sit, flumps quickly on the bench beside him, leans across the table and says to his own look of earnest wide-eyed incomprehension on another face, "I'm from an alternate dimension."

"Oh. Cool," the other him says, and immediately understands and accepts it. Blaine would too, in his circumstances, it would make more sense than any other possible explanation, and while Kurt might think alternate dimensions absurd, Blaine doesn't. Kurt's DVD shelves are full of prestige drama, Blaine's are stacked with sci fi.

But Blaine is thinking fast right now and he knows all the mines hidden just underground to be threaded between. He looks up, straight at William Schuester standing there against the back wall with the other agents, and says, "Is everyone here a super?"

"Yup," Puck says, looking at him, the other him, him again. "Seriously, alternate dimension? You're not just fucking with me and you've got a twin."

"I got accidentally blasted here by a guy who thought he'd built a time machine," Blaine says. "Look, I - need to know some things fast because I need to know what to not give away to these guys, you -" He looks at himself, his own confused, brightening eyes - the other him looks thin and tired but perking up somehow, looking back at Blaine, like this is the most exciting thing that's happened in weeks. Probably it is, Blaine has no idea how long he's been in this place. "You've never met the Ghost of New York, right?"

Puck snorts and shoves his own tray away like Blaine just ruined his appetite, and the other Blaine's eyes gleam. "No, but I - uh. I did come here for him, originally. Just, you know, things interrupted my grand heroic plans." The self-deprecation twitches his smile, but his eyes remain earnest. "But he's amazing. He's like Robin Hood, they just can't catch him."

"Robin Hood," Blaine murmurs, and it jumps in his heart, the sad joy of it, Kurt would get such a kick out of that. He already knows that the most important thing in the world is that Kurt doesn't try to find some way to follow Blaine, to rescue him, because these people getting hold of Blaine is bad enough but this world's Blaine Anderson has no secret to blow, there is no Phalanx to be unmasked and he doesn't know who the Ghost is to blab on him too. But if these people get hold of Blaine's world's Ghost, that is going to make an avalanche of trouble for this world's Kurt Hummel . . .

"Okay," Blaine says, trying to think, trying to think, he really wishes Kurt were here, he's the one who's good with plans. "Here's - where we're at, um. On my world supers aren't locked up in weird creepy ways by shadowy government agencies, we work with them, to some extent, making the world a better place. So, on my world, you're a superhero called Phalanx, and you're - Puck, uh, you mostly just go by 'Puck' but officially it's Puckzilla."

"Why change what ain't broke," Puck says, beginning to eat his apple, leaned back with one arm folded across his chest, watching Blaine stare at himself like it's primetime TV.

"And a friend of mine who works for one of those government agencies tried to build a time machine but he's accidentally knocked me into your world and I need to get back, I mean, I need to get back, my - it is very important that I get back. But it looks like . . . this is a difficult situation to get out of."

Puck says, "Yeah, Sherlock Holmes, I didn't pick being stuck in here from out of a brochure."

The other him is brushing his hair back as if self-conscious of it; Blaine hasn't seen a mirror in a while but imagines that he looks a little more groomed than most of the people in here, who could do with a haircut, facial and about thirty hours' safe sleep by the looks of it. "Our powers don't work in here," the other him says. "We don't know why. We thought it might be something they're putting in the food but even if you don't eat it -"

"It's him," Blaine murmurs, lowering his head, hissing, "Don't look. That tall skinny guard in the middle -"

Puck, ignoring his instructions entirely and openly staring across the room, says, "Schuester?"

"Don't. Look." Blaine says through his teeth. "Yes, Schuester. He's on my world too, he's a super, but his only power is to stop other supers' powers working. He's in a high security prison on my world, keeping other supers' powers muted and serving out his own sentence."

"Wow," the other him says softly, and looks fleetingly over his shoulder at Schuester. There are other supers at their table listening, a clone of Blaine suddenly appearing is more entertainment than they must usually get at breakfast and a couple of them glance back at Schuester too, but there's a listlessness to all of them. Even if the food isn't drugged to keep their powers down, Blaine is wondering if some other form of medication is circulating in here, or if it's just long-ingrained fear and hopelessness. The other him says, "What do you think would happen if you put your world's Schuester in a room with ours?"

"That - oh, wow, I don't know." For a bright moment it pleases Blaine to try to work out what Schuester's powers would do to himself, but then he shakes himself out of it, priorities. "They can't work out what my deal is because I look like you and presumably have your fingerprints and DNA and anything else they want to check. So I don't know . . . what they're going to do about that. They'll probably be interrogating me again, I need to know what to definitely not tell them."

The other him has been increasingly fidgety during this conversation, and finally blurts out like he can't contain it anymore, "Have you met the Ghost of New York?"

. . . because of course he does, because of course wouldn't Blaine . . .

"Uh, I, yes, try to control yourself, but -" He looks down at his hand, and he stops. He stares at his hand for a long silent second, and then he swallows, and takes a long breath, and he contains himself, because.

They've taken his wedding ring, and his own naked hand is a horror to him in that moment.

He contains the urge to swear, to freak out, to attempt to flip the table and stride at an agent and demand - he doesn't do any of it. It's just a ring, he tells his own clenched teeth. It's just a ring, it's more important to get back to the man who put it on you, it's more important -

Bastards, his clenched teeth scream through his jaw, to take his ring.

Puck says, "You got some imaginary clue from your alternate dimension written there?" and Blaine snaps out of staring at the back of his hand, looks up at them again feeling more drawn, feeling his heart pumping in his ears.

"Don't freak out and don't say anything loud," he says through his teeth, as quiet as he can under the noise of all the other supers in the room. "But yes, I know the Ghost of New York, when I came here I found him and we started working together and -" The other him is staring at him, like his brain has switched off. "- and two years back we got married." Two years, six months and eight - it must be a new day; nine days. It's not long enough, not to have Kurt. "We're, we're a team. In every possible way. And I'm - scared that he'll try to come find me and I need to get out of here, these people can't get him."

"No," the other him says, it gulps out of him like a reflex, and he jerks as if he startles himself. "No, no, they can't. He has to stay out there. It's - it's so important that he stays free, doing what he has to, it's symbolic -"

"It's his fault I'm in here," Puck mutters, flicking his spoon away by the handle.

"You robbed a bank." the other Blaine snaps back at him. "Someone has to prove that supers aren't just supervillains and you were not the one doing that in that scenario. I'm a - hero? On your world? 'Phalanx'?"

He nods, but his attention is on Schuester, and thinking about Puck. "Were you born a super?" he says, looking across at Puck. "No-one - gave you the powers?"

"They only started a couple of years ago," Puck says. shrugging. "I turn into a huge dinosaur, it's really cool, better than a bunch of dumb shields."

"I guess that makes sense," Blaine murmurs, thinking about it; Schuester always said he had the most luck drawing powers out of supers they were dormant in, not putting powers into people who had none. Puckzilla he must have accelerated, on their world, not created. He thinks, in an odd way, that his world's Puck is going to feel really good to find that out, so he really would like to get back there to tell him it.

"Why?" Puck says. "You saying your powers are a science experiment gone wrong?"

"No, I . . . on my world, that guy, Schuester, he, uh, experimented on you, made the powers come out a lot sooner. And on this world he's holding you here, he really is not good for you, huh," he trails away from the thought looking at the other him, who is staring back at Blaine.

He came here looking for the Ghost; he was taken by these guys, never even found him; how long has he . . . ?

The other him says, low and almost breaking on an emotion Blaine couldn't name, "You married him?"

Blaine unthinkingly looks at his naked third finger again, and his gaze flinches from it. "Um. Yes. He . . . I wanted to in a matter of weeks, I held off asking for a couple of years, you know, gave him an opportunity to see how great I am too." The grin fades, he doesn’t feel any humour in this situation. "He's the most amazing person I've ever met," he says, very seriously to his own bewildered eyes. "And I have to get back to him. I have to. He is so much better than anything you can imagine he is because he's just so - different from all of that, so him and I can't just desert him like this -"

"No," the other him murmurs, and looks really impossibly young and lost. "No, it's - important, we should get you back to him -"

He came here looking for the Ghost and got taken by these guys instead, when Blaine came looking for the Ghost . . . he says, quietly and dreading the answer, "How long have you been here?"

"Oh, there's the girl here, her powers are that she always knows exactly when and where she is, isn't that cool? She always knows her latitude and longitude and the time and date to the millisecond, I think that's a really cool power! And obviously her powers click back on every night so she -"

"When Schuester's asleep, or distant," Blaine murmurs, because that makes sense to him now.

"- she can keep us updated, so I've been here, uh, nearly five years, now, um." His face has taken on a hollow quality, an emptiness to how he stares at Blaine, and then he puts a smile on again, says, "That sounds like a long time when I say it out loud."

Five years. Five years.

Five years, Jesus, that cell, every day of his life, five years, while Blaine has been - studying and meeting Kurt and training and becoming a superhero and advancing as a superhero and learning and fighting and working with Mike and - and marrying Kurt, every night by his side, every single day a bed with him in it, to have none of it, none of it, five years -

Five years, but - he says, baffled, "What did they charge you with?"

Puck snorts, says without looking away from Schuester, "This guy does not get it."

The other him gives a pained smile, says, "We don't get charged, we don't get trials. I've never seen a lawyer. We just get put here." Then his eye falls from him, skittish, and he looks across the table, murmurs, "I can't believe you met him. I can't believe you married him."

He doesn't say it like he really doesn't believe it, like he thinks he's lying. Just that compared to his life, Blaine's must sound like a dream, like the fantasy Cooper still sometimes complains it is, that Blaine has got everything he wanted, everything he ever wanted, like his life was designed as a cradle to catch him. And Blaine has always felt gratitude for what he has, he's lived too close to losing it all too often to not feel that, but seeing this - seeing this that could so easily have been his life instead -

Seeing this that could yet be the rest of his life, if he doesn't find a way out of it . . .

"That guy's the reason we're all stuck here?" Puck says, hands gone into fists on the table's edge, eyes black on William Schuester. "He's a super too an' he keeps us all caged in here like animals?"

"Okay, we need a plan, our only advantage right now is that he doesn't know that we know, so stop staring at him," Blaine says. "I don't even know how long I've been here, what time is it?"

"They move meals around," the other him says, stirring at his oatmeal with his spoon and warily watching Puck, who's still glaring across the room at Schuester like he can kill him through sheer hatred. "Marcie - the girl who knows the time? She thinks it happens anywhere between six and eight AM, but it's not always the same time. Sometimes our powers come back on when they put us back in our cells."

"Because Schuester's too far away. They must move meals for his schedule, they need him here if you're not locked in."

"We didn't know that, it never made sense. But he's always here, now you mention it, always, for all meals and exercise. The other guards come and go like they get time off but never him."

"Okay, so we need a plan."

Puck growls, "I plan on smashing his head into the wall."

"Puck," Blaine says, in a warning voice. "Maybe we can all get out. If we can get the word passed quietly - really quietly -"

"Jailbreak," the other him breathes, and Blaine gets the impression that it's not even the thought of freedom that animates it, it's the romance of the concept. It feels - weird, painful, looking at his face. There's an element of fear in his eyes even when his primary attention is on something that excites or interests him, like a dog who fully expects to be beaten and just doesn't know when it's going to come. Five years, Blaine thinks. No trial, no charge, no lawyer, no rights. And fuck, where would all these supers even go, in a world this hostile to them? How is he going to get them out of here? He has to get out, and selfishly he does know that a full jailbreak is the best cover for his own escape he could get, but it's more than that, he knows what the right thing to do is. But how the hell is he supposed to save all these people?

Because this 'Marcie' they talk about - why is she here? Her power is nothing that someone's phone wouldn't do for them. Blaine gets why Puck and even he would be held by a paranoid, bigoted government, but someone who knows the time - she's harmless, her powers are harmless. They're not holding her because they honestly think she's any danger to anyone. They're holding her because she's a super, and that's the only reason they need, the only reason they need to hold any of them. It's not what their powers are, it's just their powers. It's not even really the powers, it's their difference.

The nasty knot of helplessness he's beginning to feel in his stomach, that age-old shame of his impotence in the face of greater brutality, he knows to name it now, he knows not to feed it, not to lash out to avoid it. He remembers failing to protect a friend and he remembers how that helplessness drove him to want the mask, to want to help, and now he knows that his duty is to get back to Kurt - to his Kurt who needs him, and to protect the Kurt on this world who does not need someone who knows his name in the hands of these people, because Blaine doesn't know what they might sink to to get it out of him and doesn't honestly know what he could withstand to keep it safe - but he looks at this room full of supers, heads low over their food, talking unhappily together, looks at his own strained, fear-thinned face, five years in this place -

He feels exhausted still with the aftereffects of that drug, feels small, and powerless. How is he supposed to save all of these people, god, how is he supposed to save himself?

*

Just before six in the morning they slip in through the roof, because they already know their powers work higher up in the building, and they sink through the ceilings and walls invisible, the dark and light cloaks. The time is far from ideal and both of them could use eight hours' sleep at the very least but the Ghost can't risk Phalanx in this place a minute longer than he has to and the other Ghost insists that he cannot be given a moment to actually think and change his mind in, so in the predawn dark of New York in winter, they pass through ceiling tiles into an open office, its lights off, and pick their way between the desks and computers.

The Ghost sees the other him pause, looking around the dim space, and then pick up a pen drive from a desk and slip it into his utility belt. He needs to know what the fuck is going on in this evil building even more than the Ghost himself does, of course. The Ghost's plan is to get Phalanx and go; the other Ghost has to wage a war that they're both praying will last for longer than just one night.

Into a corridor, low emergency lighting, following each others' soft footsteps; passing hooded heads through closed doors to look into offices, finding the stairs, making their way down. Empty office buildings are creepy, the Ghost thinks, the lifelessness of places that only make sense as containers of life. More offices, more offices. "Like a police station," the other him murmurs, soft as autumn leaves at his back, and the Ghost gives a small affirmative hum. They've both crept through enough police stations while invisible to know that drill.

Down through the building, still invisible, their powers still working. Offices, offices . . . some sort of storage room. There's a hatch at a desk and shelving behind it, like lost property but really enormous, and the Ghost has a bad feeling, ghosts through the desk and its protective screen, turns to the first shelves, the dusty sticker marking the letter A -

In one wire tray there are two bulky paper bags labelled Anderson, Blaine, but with different dates and numbers written underneath them. The one marked with yesterday's date is much bulkier than the other, and he knows why, knows the exact weight of Phalanx's armour as he tips it onto the desk. He only allows himself the briefest of pangs, the agony of seeing his empty armour, before he begins hurriedly working through the belt; Phalanx's cell he pockets, as the other him whispers in the dark, "What are you doing?"

"Taking anything that might lead back to you. We need to wipe this armour down, I don't know if I might have touched it without gloves on."

"Why would you -"

"I'm out," he says. "No secret identity to blow, we're not fussy about that anymore. Do you have -"

The armour has already picked itself up in invisible hands and he can see the bustling of the other Ghost, who doesn't trust someone as careless as him to do it, scrubbing it inside and out with an antibacterial wipe, making an aggravated sighing sound about it. The Ghost sighs back, and then sees - the little plastic baggie, the - the -

He doesn't even open the bag. He just ghosts his fingers through it, and picks up the plain gold wedding band in there, and stares at it on his own invisible palm.

Alright, assholes, he thinks, slipping the ring invisible into his belt. Now it's personal.

They work quickly, near silently, the Ghost taking anything he thinks might lead back to himself, the other Ghost scrubbing any possible fingerprints from any surface that would hold them. Then they re-bag the armour and put it back, and the Ghost can taste fear in the back of his throat like ozone, and ignores it as best he can. Did they make him undress? Did they strip him? He is going to - really, he is not going to be his gentlest self over this, he really is not . . .

The first signs of life come on the lower levels, it's after six now and there are lights on against the dark morning outside, they see their first agents walking through a corridor, talking about baseball. A touch of invisible hand to invisible wrist, and they follow them but bypass them at the elevator, they don't want to be in an enclosed space when they know what's going to happen next.

"I really hope you're as good as you think you are," the other him says, quietly, as they walk down another rubber-floored staircase, and the Ghost can see the beginning of the outline of his own arm.

"I really hope you are too," he murmurs back. "Shall we try this floor?"

"Anywhere's as good as anywhere else for a last stand," the other Ghost mutters, his cloak like dark smoke beginning to show as the Ghost passes through the doors like they're thick liquid, feeling his intangibility fade, and walks out into a brightly lit reception space, a desk and TV screens showing security camera footage, a man not watching the screens but talking to another agent leaning against the desk, both of them looking up startled then dumb then horrified as a pale and dark ghost - Ghost - walk towards them through the lobby -

The agent standing fumbles for his gun and the Ghost catches his arm and smacks his elbow into the side of his jaw before that can become a serious problem, hears the almighty whack of the other Ghost slamming the guy at the desk's head into his own desk but not before the alarm has been pushed, a high blaring electronic noise, shit but there was no way they could do this invisible after all -

They catch each other's eyes, fully visible now, the Ghost knows he couldn't ghost if he tried, and they roll their eyes at the tedium, and slide back-to-back as running feet approach the two sets of doors they're facing.

And then there's chaos. The Ghost's heart is a quick hot thrill of a thing, he knows the danger of this, the instant death of a half-second's fuck up, and he knows as well that he never designed his own costume for this, he would never have put a super with different powers into a full cloak and hood, the point was always to be intangible and invisible as required and now that option is removed, he has to be better than he thinks he is. The cloak to be grabbed, the hood cutting off peripheral vision, he has to fight harder and better and smarter than every single person he's facing combined. And, back to back with himself, he does what he has to do.

He only gets glimpses of the other Ghost, agents are arriving in a stuttered stream, shouting and panicked, drawing guns and tasers that have to be dealt with - the mercy is that in a relatively small space, none of them have yet dared try to shoot through the mess of fighting bodies. But the other Ghost -

He's never had a shield at his back, never trusted his own survival to anyone's hands but his own. He fights beautifully, the Ghost thinks; he fights brutally. He doesn't hold a thing back, not a hairline fracture of hesitation in him when he puts his full force into someone else's skull, he's fighting for his dad's life, knowing what his dad's life would be if he went and got himself killed, and it shows. The Ghost himself - he's tired, stressed, wound-up, jarred everywhichway by the last twenty hours but all that matters to him, all that matters, is that he's got Blaine's wedding ring in a compartment of his belt and he is putting it back on his finger for him. He twists an agent's arm so he shrieks as he turns right around, his back to the Ghost, and he can kick with his heel their wrist so their taser spins from their hand and away across the room, then flow that movement into spinning them both around and flipping the agent over his back, casting an unbraced, disorientated body full-weight into the midriff of the next one running at him, her taser accidentally hitting him instead.

There's no room, more people running in, someone on the floor is screaming, "Send Schuester! Send Schuester!" and a walkie-talkie crackles, "Inmates in the canteen, can't despatch Schuester, what is happening?" and they could never keep back-to-back, not in this melee, there are too many damned agents and no Phalanx to shield his back, one runs at him with spit flecking the corners of his mouth and wild eyes, fear or sheer hatred he doesn't know but all he can do is elbow him in the throat -

An elbow snatches around his neck from behind and the instinct is to ghost, which - doesn't happen, he grabs the wrist at his cloaked neck in panic and feels a hard blunt cold object dug into his lower back, and a voice he knows says behind his ear, "Two of you is better than Christmas, Casper."

He has a fraction of a second to think, Sebastian.

Of course Sebastian, on this world, chose his side.

Of course Sebastian is happy to see more than one Ghost, he gets to kill him and keep him to use, too.

Of course, with my luck, I meet Sebastian with no powers and a gun between us.

Blaine -

He has a fraction of a second, then Sebastian fires.

*

"I'm gonna kill him," Puck says, eyes still on Schuester, knuckles like pure bone they're so tight on the table.

Panic stabs him clean through as Blaine grabs his arm, hisses, "Puck-"

"Think about it," Puck growls, glaring hellfire through William Schuester's head. "I kill him, we all get our powers back, boom goes this place. That crazy Latina'll blow the roof off and the rest of us -"

He just has the time to file away that that probably means Santana is here, but mostly what Blaine has is fear. "Puck we need a plan, you can't just -"

Puck stands up, the only standing prisoner in the room, and all the agents look at him, Blaine's hand falling from his arm, the last thing he needs is attention. Then an alarm goes off.

At first the sheer volume of noise obliterates any chance to think, but then Blaine feels more confused panic - all they have to do is stand up unexpectedly and alarms go off? They don't even have any powers with Schuester here! - and then - the agents at the walls are talking as quietly to each other as they can over the blaring of that alarm, the inmates are groaning, some getting out of their seats and laying on their stomachs on the floor, hands over their heads. And Puck is still glaring at Schuester.

"What does this mean?" he shouts to the other him, over the noise.

The other him shrugs. "Usually it's a drill? You have to lie down on the floor."

But the agents around the walls of the room are panicking more, some are running out, and he hears one word that one of them yells to another as he leaves, through all the noise Blaine hears a word he is trained towards even over the blaring of a siren slamming his eardrums in a high, continuous assault, a word that since he was a teenager has meant excitement, joy, safety, heroism, pure love -

"-Ghost -!" that agent is yelling at his companion, and Blaine is on his feet like a dog whose master has called.

Kurt came for him. Of course Kurt came for him, as immediately obvious a fact as light and dark, something that was always going to happen, inevitable as dawn. But William Schuester is here and Kurt has no powers -

Puck has climbed over the bench, is striding over the bodies of confused supers lying on the floor, some lifting their heads, and in the corner of the room - oh shit there's Santana, sitting beside Brittany, both of them long hair loose, Brittany screwing her eyes up against the blaring of the alarm, Santana picking up her tray and rhythmically bang-bang-banging it off the table. Two other women at her table start doing the same and that's distracting the agents, as the noisy protest picks up and progresses through the room. But Puck is still very noticeably striding at Schuester who takes a step back, and another agent takes a protective step forward, as he approaches.

Blaine scrambles over the bench, hurries to follow him. Another super climbs on top of a table and starts singing, loudly, over the alarm; it sounds like the Internationale, this is just surreal as that agent drawing his gun steps forward to confront Puck before he can reach Schuester but it's like a wire in the room has snapped, like the supers know something is up, this isn't a normal alarm, and the super at the table immediately next to him lunges from her seat and tackles that agent to the floor before they reach Puck. No-one else is fast enough; Blaine is almost at Puck's shoulder as Puck punches Schuester full-on in the face.

Schuester's head bounces back off the wall and he folds down like laundry. Puck swings a leg back to kick and Blaine throws some shields up between them before he can kill him, yells, "Puck-!"

"Oh," the other him says, at Blaine's side and sounding startled, delighted. "Our powers!"

"Oh yeah," Puck says, and - his shoulders are broadening, his grey prison clothes stretching, the fabric snapping across his scaling skin, he's telescoping upwards, a long tail is telescoping out downwards, his fingers are lengthening into claws, "our powers."

Blaine slams a quick-thrown shield into the hands of an agent who's drawn a gun but before he can fence them all off behind a wall of shields - the safest place for them with Schuester down and the supers they've held for years finally fully-powered and actually dangerous for the first time - Santana has stood up, her hands full of glowing marbles, and Blaine knows what happens next, can only throw some protective shields up between the supers and the wall as the explosion strikes.

*

The agent in front of the Ghost jerks inwards, clasps her stomach, looks stunned, and the Ghost feels the echo of the way bullets buzz as they pass through a ghosting body. And he knows, immediately, and there is no time, grabbing Sebastian's wrist before the surprise can set in and swinging him to meet his own free hand, haunting him and feeling no regret, using the momentum of his falling body to toss his limp weight into another agent and knock them both flying.

"Powers!" he yells at the other him, who is immediately invisible, and the agent fighting him just flat-out screams a second before something he doesn't see hits him in the face. The Ghost - has a fraction of a second's hesitation in him for that agent lowering herself to the ground, hands at her stomach where the blood is staining her shirt but there's nothing he can do, and what matters more -

He's invisible, intangible, because he needs to be alive to find Blaine. Something invisible catches his arm before it finds his hand, the other Ghost, who says, "Basement, I just checked the security cameras, there's a -"

The building rocks with the boom, the floors for one moment like panna cotta, the walls not reliably vertical. Invisible hands grab at each other, the alarm makes a dying noise as the lights go, before some back-up generator shudders it all back to life again, aftershocks like ripples through everything that should be solid. The Ghost felt it through his feet, says wryly, "That way?"

"After you, it's your husband," the other Ghost says, and they keep hold of each other's hands to drop invisible through the floor, ignoring the agents fumbling, trying to pick themselves up all around them, panicked and screaming and yelling into their dust-covered phones.

Through the ceiling and two more agents are running through another corridor, away from the dust pouring out of the open double-doors behind them. Something - like some sixth sense, some more-than-knowing, is alert as a gundog in the Ghost's stomach. He drops his invisibility, runs for those doors, sees the open space of the canteen and its side spilt into rubble, the ceiling come down and a crack of dull sky showing above, all that dangerous debris held in the safe net of green shields so it doesn't crush the room full of people below, and his heart -

He sees the fighting at the sides of the room, some of the obvious prisoners in baggy grey forcibly pinning down agents, getting their guns off them, some others are using super-strength to wrench up screwed-in tables and benches and move to barricade the door the Ghosts just ran in through, but most of the movement in the room is towards that open patch of sky just showing the dirty stain of dawn above them. People in grey are clambering up the spilling rubble, helping each other out, Puckzilla is there hoisting supers up to reach for street level, and standing behind the thick of it - the Ghost doesn't even need to choose between them, he knows as if by the feel of his aura extending twelve feet away from him, doesn't even look at the almost-almost-identical man beside him but sees Blaine glance aside from the shields he's holding the ceiling up with at the last moment and then the Ghost's arms are around him and Blaine's arms clamp tight back and for one moment, Blaine's face buried in his cloak at his throat, nothing else matters.

Blaine says, muffled, "Hey, could you - get that for me? The ceiling?"

"Oh," says Blaine's voice from another body behind the Ghost's back, "yeah, of course."

And Blaine can drop his attention from the ceiling (there's a crumbling thump from overhead as the rubble falls from one shelf of shields onto another), run his hands down the Ghost's back and say, eyes on his holding so deep that way they do, "Hey, you."

The Ghost says because he feels like he's going to cry, "I left you alone for five minutes."

"Yeah, I, seem to be in the middle of an insurrection here," Blaine says, hand falling down to take the Ghost's, and he looks down at William Schuester laying crumpled on the floor beside them. "The others'll probably be back soon with reinforcements, we need - I don't know what to do with him."

The Ghost looks down at him and it isn't even really a decision, it's just the only thing to do; as long as William Schuester is alive on this world then no other super on this world is safe, and he's aware of the other Ghost who ran in beside him now somewhere at his back, and all those obvious supers climbing their way to freedom, and what he could have done to Blaine, and what he might have done to the other Blaine - he's too dangerous, he can hurt too many people. He knows he doesn't have the time to think through all the consequences but those consequences are for later, for now, the moment he wakes up, they're all doomed. So he crouches down and puts the spare wrist cuff Artie gave him on Schuester's wrist, snaps it closed so the lights on it come alive, and hits the button. The lights glow brighter, the cuff itself seems to become light so bright he can barely look at it, then Schuester himself does, then - he's gone.

The Ghost stands up. The other Ghost says at his back, "Okay, I can't do that."

Blaine looks back at him and starts, visibly, and the Ghost knows it's the dark cloak, knows Blaine is probably having the exact same revelation the Ghost himself did on seeing him dressed like that. "Come on," he says, taking Blaine's hand, "we need to go."

The other Ghost - is looking at the other Blaine, uneasy, horribly open in the face, horribly frightened, as the other Blaine stares back blankly, stunned, and the Ghost - he almost steps forward, almost says something; but the other Ghost snaps his head up, grabs the other Blaine's wrist, meets the Ghost's eye and says, "Rendezvous. Stay with me, take a breath," to the other Blaine, and they're gone, invisible, probably straight down.

Alone with his husband in a room full of yelling, fleeing supers, the doors barricaded behind them, someone is loudly singing revolutionary songs and Blaine holds his hand with his eyes aimed upwards, using shields as slides to send rubble skimming to the emptying parts of the room. "Rendezvous?" he says.

They hadn't had much time or information for much of a plan, except for the water tower they would meet at if they both had, and were able, to flee. "I'm turning us invisible," the Ghost says, holding his hand. "We can stay long enough for the others to get out but then we need to go."

"You know -" They're already invisible, letting the chaos run past them, holding hands and holding that ceiling to let the others escape. Blaine struggles in silence for a moment, then says, "Probably some of the people we're letting out now are dangerous. I mean, not all of them, hardly any of them probably, but if they've been locked in here getting more and more pissed for years -"

"However dangerous they might be," the Ghost says, with his free hand popping a compartment on his belt, "I don't think an underground Gitmo for supers in New York is the way to deal with them. Nor anyone."

There's thumping at the barricaded doors behind them, agents trying to get in. The Ghost finds Blaine's invisible left hand and slips a ring over his finger, settling it comfortable to the base; Blaine squeezes his hand tight with gratitude. "Are we intangible?"

He feels so much better for getting that ring back on Blaine, and doing it invisible, just them, it feels like a very private moment. He squeezes his hand back. "We are now. Last few to go. It's nice that Puck's helping."

"Santana blew open the ceiling."

"It seemed like one of her explode-first, think-next decisions."

". . . did you send Schuester to our world, is that what that wrist-thing was?"

"Let's - talk about that later." The Ghost's invisible cloak picks up and flutters as agents finally burst through the doors, and their hail of bullets hit not the last supers climbing out but the wall of serene green shields blocking them around the doorway. "Ghost straight down?" he suggests, voice raised over all that goddamn shooting.

"One second for Puck to get himself out . . . yeah. Ceiling's gonna come down in a hurry."

"So profoundly not our problem," the Ghost says, and holds his husband's hand, and lets them fall as if through water into the safety of the dark.

*

They'd arrived at the rooftop water tower, still holding hands, Blaine relieved to be out in the cold dawn air even in the thin clothes of that underground prison, to see the other them standing beside it, the other Ghost arms folded beneath the dark cloak, back crisply straight, the other Blaine squinting across the rooftops with his eyes shielded by a hand and mouth open like he couldn't believe the width of the world he was in. The dawn was beginning to glow with a light somewhere between orange and pink but already fading, already becoming just another grey city sky. The other Ghost had looked across at them with a swing of that dark hood, that skittish, dangerous gaze Blaine remembers from the first times he met Kurt back when everything was dangerous to Kurt, and the other Ghost looked at the Ghost, looked at Blaine, looked back at the Ghost with too much there behind his eyes. Then he drew himself up, quietly gave an address, and unfolded his arms to take the other Blaine's arm - he looked at the other Ghost mildly, dreamily, as if only semi-present - and they vanished.

So did they, and invisible, they followed the other Ghost home.

It's not the apartment Kurt used to share with Rachel, nor the rather larger one he now shares with Blaine, but a cramped little studio that Kurt's designer's eye has done the best he can with, Ikea hacks and clever storage to make what is basically a glorified closet into a reasonably pleasant space to live. But it smells like the places Kurt lives, like his colognes and his hair products and the scented candles he likes, like the foods he cooks the most, like him, as the other Ghost closes the blinds and puts on a lamp and then stands there, just stands there, for a long time, doing nothing. Blaine looks to Kurt for guidance but Kurt is still, patient, eyes soft on the other him, who finally lets his breath out slowly through his nose, and closes his eyes like he's scared, and lifts a hand, and lowers his hood.

The other Blaine is still just looking at things, like the world is all new to him. There are probably colours in this room, Blaine thinks, that he literally hasn't seen in years. And - and then there's the Ghost, both of them, Kurt now letting his pale hood down and sinking his shoulders and just looking exhausted, looking across at Blaine and lifting a gloved hand, running a thumb across the shadows he must have under his eyes. "What did they do to you," he whispers, and Blaine finds a smile for him, a very weary and aching one, he feels the last day and night all the way through his bones.

"It wasn't too bad, they really didn't hurt me, we can talk about it later. Are you okay, are -"

He looks at the other Ghost, looks at the other him. The other Ghost puts a knuckle to his forehead, between his squeezed-closed eyes, like he's having a migraine, then rasps, "I'll make some coffee. I need to call in sick at work and - and work out what to - I'll make some coffee."

Blaine has to step aside to let him walk to the kitchen corner, where he pushes a wheeled kitchen cart to the wall, onions in its bottom shelf and a coffee machine on its top which he unwinds the plug from for the socket. "Someone talk. Please just say something, I don't think I have one living brain cell left that can cope with this right now."

Kurt gives his back a small tight smile, then looks across at the other Blaine, says in his soft voice, "Hi."

". . . hi," the other Blaine says, and just looks lost. It's Kurt who looks concerned, touches the other Blaine's shoulder and murmurs, "Sit down," leading him to the small sofa - Blaine looks around and finds an old desk chair repurposed for the kitchen's small folding table and sits there. Behind the open slats of an artfully-arranged bookcase set up to divide the room is Kurt's neatly-made bed, the other Kurt's neatly-made bed, and Blaine looks at how the other Kurt has his back to it, measuring coffee with unsteady hands and his head down, and he knows - that dark cloak, and all those years ago, who Kurt was when Blaine met him, who this Kurt is now -

Oh, fuck, what have they done?

It's not like they had a generous set of options, and Blaine doesn't remember either of them forcing the other Ghost to decide on the spot to bring the other Blaine home with him; he suspects that Kurt has told the other Ghost what he needed to know about Blaine to make him decide that on his own. But now he's done it there's the whole issue of what being in a room with a man with a bed means to Kurt at his most fearful, and Blaine doesn't know . . . but he looks at the other him, he looks younger than he does but they're the same age, it's exhaustion, the thinness of his face, it makes his eyes look dark and huge. And he doesn't have that scar, Blaine hadn't realised how that aged him. He looks like a frightened kid, sitting beside Kurt on that little sofa, Kurt looking troubled at him. Two hours ago he was asleep in the cell he probably thought he'd die in. What have they done . . . ?

Kurt looks across at Blaine, Blaine is aware of how much healthier and sturdier he looks than that other him, and then back to the other, and Kurt murmurs, "You've been in that place as long as you've been in New York."

Kurt's always been good at putting puzzle pieces together. The other Blaine looks up at him, he still looks dazed, he's looking at the Ghost. Kurt seems to realise it and unpeels his own mask, tucking it into his belt, rubbing a little excess glue from one cheek. "That's a long time," Kurt says quietly. "I can't . . . that's a really long time."

The other Blaine shuffles his slippered feet on the rug a little, and says to them, ". . . yeah, I guess it . . . is."

"I don't know what happens now." The other Ghost is leaning his hip back into the counter, arms folded, watching them from beside the steaming coffee machine. "I didn't - I have never done this before."

"Okay," Kurt says, gently, and then to the shell-shocked other Blaine, "Blaine, this is Kurt, he is the Ghost, you will get used to that. Kurt - me - this is Blaine. You're just going to have to trust each other, because this world is eating its supers alive and - and you need each other, frankly."

"I'm . . . a fugitive, right?" the other Blaine says, and looks at Blaine as if for confirmation of this. "If I leave this apartment -"

"Yes, that's - just keep on reminding me how permanent this is." the other Kurt says spikily, rubbing his face with a gloved hand before he pulls the gloves off and snaps them folded, tucking them into his belt. "I didn't know what else to do, they will - they would kill them rather than let them go free, and I can't rescue everyone but -"

"You can rescue each other," Blaine murmurs, looking at the other him look at the other Kurt. "Hey," he says, touching the other him's knee to get his attention. "Do your family even know what happened to you? Does Cooper know?"

Pain knots in the other Blaine's eyes. "I don't know," he says, voice kept mostly steady. "I really don't. I haven't spoken to or heard from any of them since I got taken."

The other Kurt gives a sudden start as if he's remembered something, grabs the remote and puts the TV on. It comes on on a news channel, cell phone camera footage of - of the street outside the building they just aided in blowing a hole in, in the eerie predawn dark, supers in baggy grey clothes, one girl saying frantic to the person holding the phone, "They had me for two years, I don't even know why, I need to call my mom, I need to -"

The other Kurt turns the TV off again, that hollow look in his eyes Kurt gets when he really just can't handle his own emotions right now so he's decided not to feel them at all. "Yes, we have done something very, very permanent," he says. "And no, you can't leave this apartment, not if they're going to arrest you again." He closes his eyes, then opens them and takes some mugs down from a shelf, says, "You I know how you take your coffee, you two?"

"Let me," Kurt murmurs, pressing the other Blaine's shoulder for a moment as he stands up, squeezing into the kitchen beside his double. Blaine's just spotted a print of the New York skyline on the wall that Kurt owns too, which has thrown him, familiar object in such an unfamiliar place. "Go sit down, you look exhausted."

"I know you are but what am I," the other Kurt snarks in an angry sing-song, and looks at the sofa where the other Blaine is, and folds his arms and doesn't sit down, very suddenly, he looks like he wants to cry. And Blaine -

It's instinct, it's Kurt, he touches his hand with the automatic desire to comfort and the other Ghost startles like he's been electrocuted and Blaine snatches his hand back. The other Kurt stares at him and then says, "- bathroom." and slams one of the only two doors the apartment has on them all.

Over the coffee machine Kurt closes his eyes for one second, Blaine watches him take a long breath, and then he opens his eyes and takes a cup of coffee to the other Blaine. "Here," he says, and smiles, and the other Blaine looks up at him like an angel is handing him a cup of coffee, which, for Blaine at least, is kind of what is happening.

"Thank you," the other Blaine whispers, and looks again at the bathroom door, and takes the cup.

"Please be patient with him," Kurt says very low, his own eyes uneasy on that bathroom door. "You understand this is - a lot for him." The other Blaine looks at Kurt, gazes with open adoration, Blaine doesn't know if jealousy would be the appropriate response, he just understands how the guy feels, rescued from Hell itself by the Ghost. "No-one knows, no-one, no-one, and he brought you here and - please be patient with him. And please don't get any idiotic 'heroic' ideas into your head about walking out of here to make him more comfortable because if you get taken by those people again then he will never forgive himself. You're just - you're in this together now, and you need to work out how to make that work."

That hadn't occurred to Blaine and should have immediately, and he's so achingly grateful, in that moment, for Kurt knowing him so well. Disorientated as he is, it probably would make sense to Blaine in this situation to do the 'right thing' and put the Ghost first, and get himself killed or recaptured, and it would be dumbest idea in the world. But if the Ghost tells him not to then he won't; it's going to be some time before this Blaine is confident in himself to do much more than follow his orders. It was for Blaine too, when he first put the costume on, he thinks of them as his training-wheels days, thank god Kurt remembers them too . . .

Kurt passes Blaine a cup of coffee, and as if he can't hold it off any longer he holds his face and kisses his forehead once he takes it, and strokes his hair back, and says again, despairingly, "I left you alone for five minutes." His breath shivers. "When we get home I'm making you that moussaka you like."

Blaine murmurs, "Oh cool, the one with the mint and feta?" and Kurt gives a slow, happy, grinding sort of sigh into his forehead. Then he gets his own cup, looks at that empty seat beside the other Blaine and instead, unceremoniously, sits in Blaine's lap; it's the only other option, beside the bed. Blaine just hooks an easy arm around his waist and takes a long drink of coffee and sighs, exhausted, relieved, what a day.

He says, "We have a way of getting back too, right, you didn't use it up on Schuester?"

"Oh I am not staying here one minute longer than I have to, no offence," to the other Blaine, who waves a oh don't worry about it hand. "We just need to - to drink this and go."

The other Blaine still hasn't drunk from his cup, though he's holding it under his nose, inhaling the scent. "I think this is going to physically hurt my taste buds," he says, then takes a little sip, licks his lips, looks thoughtful, then the smile spreads over his face. "Wow."

"He reacts like that to coffee even when you don't lock him up for five years," Blaine says, looking fondly up at Kurt, and Kurt elbows him in the arm.

The bathroom door clicks, and the other Ghost emerges - Kurt, now, entirely, mask removed, though he's still wearing the cloak. "Sorry," he says, mask in one hand, eyes touching the other Blaine, then Kurt. He clears his throat. "It's been - a bit of a night. I . . . you know what you said earlier tonight, about having to be the Ghost?" the two Kurts watch each other's eyes, Blaine is fascinated, subtly different shades of green in the blue where the light falls from another angle. "Well I've never - I've never had to be the Ghost, because no-one ever . . . the Ghost was the Ghost. I've never had to . . . you know?"

Kurt nods, mouth twisting wry. "Drink your coffee," he says. "We need to share everything we might need to know before we go."

The other Kurt comes more alert at that, businesslike, as if this is much preferable to facing the real fallout of the choices he's made tonight. He nods, takes his cup, hesitates only marginally before sitting primly beside the other Blaine, who hunches slightly to make room for him.

"I sent Schuester to our world," Kurt says. "That building is the headquarters of the NY unit that deals with super incidents on our world, and William Schuster should be in a high security prison in another state, so they will take him safely into custody when he just, like, appears there. It just seemed safest. Artie can always send him back, and at least he's no danger to you in another dimension. Plus it might do him some good to speak to our world's Schuester. I don't think they're going to let him out of prison in a hurry but he's a lot closer to reformed now."

"He almost killed you," Blaine gets out through his teeth, because they have very different attitudes towards William Schuester.

"He actually killed a whole bunch of people, Blaine," Kurt says, and takes a sip of coffee. "I don't know, it turns out to be - educational, talking to yourself." With a small, ironic smile for the other Kurt. "When he seems safe enough we can send him back. I hate to say it but he's useful to have in a jail if you have actually dangerous supers in it. The other thing - he wasn't the only agent who's a super in that building." He looks at Blaine. "Sebastian was there."

"- what, where -"

"Bastard shot me in the back," Kurt mutters, then sniffs like it's nothing. "Sebastian Smythe, did you get a look at the tall, skinny, kind of ferrety guy who shot me?"

"I was kind of occupied," the other Kurt says, but he seems a lot more - not exactly relaxed, just not actively upset right now, at the presence of three other men in his space. Kurt needs to be engaged with something, Blaine knows, and he's very good at putting what he doesn't want to attend to aside when he doesn't have the time for it right now.

"He'll be on Facebook," Blaine says. "Or Instagram, do you have a laptop?"

The other Kurt slides a MacBook from a shelf underneath the tiny desk beside the sofa where his sewing machine sits, and flips it open. "What are his powers?"

"He takes on other supers' powers, I'm guessing they don't know he's a super." Kurt watches the other him type his password, then takes the laptop as it's handed across and passes it to Blaine, who is in charge of everything to do with the internet. "He really wants our powers and will do literally anything to get them. Don't trust him, trust him much less than Schuester, Schuester will be open in his hatred, Sebastian will lie about anything and everything, just - never trust him."

"Really," Blaine says, because trusting Sebastian is still a painful subject for him, "don't." He turns the laptop screen to the others, on a 'I'm casual on the deck of this yacht because I'm the kind of person yachts are nothing special for' photograph of Sebastian he's got in his Instagram. "Memorise the face and never believe a single word it utters. He shot you?"

"I ghosted," Kurt says dismissively.

"What else?" the other Kurt says, and the other Blaine is just watching them, the superheroes talking about their important superhero things, taking tiny, careful sips of coffee and gazing all but open-mouthed at the three of them. "I don't suppose there's anything you need to know from us to keep your world more safe."

"I think we've had a really good illustration of how safe our world is," Blaine admits. "I mean, it's not perfect but - this has been kind of humbling. Seeing how hard it is here, for supers."

Kurt rubs his shoulder, and looks sad. "What about Agent Sylvester?"

Blaine looks at him, not really knowing what he means by it, he's always been a bit afraid of Agent Sylvester even if Kurt will stand up to her like he's the only immoveable object her unstoppable force can hit. "What about her?"

"What if they - if they found her, I think she could help."

"Why would she help?"

"Because she might think it's in her interest to, that's the literal only reason she does anything," Kurt says, then to the other Kurt, "Agent Sue Sylvester, she will not be on Facebook, I wouldn't even bother. You can trust her to follow her own agenda and make everyone else dance to it. If you can show her that her agenda should include making the world safer for you and other supers, she will move mountains, you have no idea. But I have no idea how you'd find her."

"It's a start. Thanks." The other Kurt has put his cup aside and has his arms folded, and he isn't looking at the other Blaine, Blaine has noticed how little the other Kurt has liked to meet his eye, or his own. And Blaine knows, and it hurts to know it, he knows how traumatised this other version of himself is, his life basically cut off when he got taken and he's had nothing but fear and loneliness since then, but this other Kurt - Blaine knows the kind of things the Ghost deals with every night, and to deal with them alone, and to deal with them - in that cloak. He knows what the dark cloak means. He'll never forget Kurt telling him, the first time, how helpless he once was, and how much, how much it hurt him.

If there's been, for this Kurt, no Blaine, then there's been no Phalanx. And if there's been no Phalanx then there's been nobody. Other men are just potential sources of violence and for all his loneliness and longing, Kurt has been alone. And he's scared to look at him, the other Blaine, because - because Kurt must have told him that he loves this man enough to marry him and there in the chaos of the jailbreak, getting the other Blaine out of there, making him safe, then it felt natural to the other Ghost to just take his hand. But now he's in his own apartment and all the rest of reality has to be dealt with, with everything that means. And Blaine looks at this quiet, wan version of himself and is nervous, it feels like he doesn't want to leave this Kurt alone with him. On one level it's absurd - he's him, so Blaine knows he's never going to hurt Kurt. But on the other hand, he's not him, is he? He doesn't know how this guy is going to act. He's been locked up for five years, suddenly he's dumped into the arms of the superhero he's always idolised, Blaine didn't always know to - he didn't know what Kurt's boundaries, drawn not in sand but reinforced concrete, meant to Kurt -

As for Kurt, Blaine's Kurt, he keeps looking at the other Blaine too but not warily, more like a concerned dad than anything. "You look like you need a few good meals and a very long sleep," he says, as if it's a hard thing to say, as if it's hurting him.

The other Blaine looks up at him and looks almost guilty. "Uh, yes." he says, and gives a nervous laugh. "And probably a really good shower, shave and haircut. And some hair product, and then maybe I might actually look - like less of a caveman."

"You look fine," Kurt says softly. "Just like you need some care."

The other Kurt puts his coffee cup down, says, "I need to call work, I'm definitely not attempting it today. Do you two need anything before you go?"

Kurt looks at Blaine, and smiles, and leans to put his cup on the kitchen counter without leaving Blaine's lap. "We have everything we need."

The other Kurt stands up. "I need to sleep for about a week," he mumbles. "I'll make up the sofa, you can - take the bed."

"No, no, really, don't let me take your bed, the sofa's fine, I've slept on worse believe me -"

Kurt stands up from Blaine's knee and stretches, as Blaine flexes and rubs his own thigh - Kurt isn't light, though he doesn't mind his weight, especially after last night. Kurt flexes an arm overhead, bends it down his back by the elbow, says, "When did you move here, anyway? Did Rachel move in with Finn?"

Something - passes through the other Kurt's eyes. It's the strangest thing, Blaine's seen it on his own Kurt before in some of their worst moments, that second of swallowed horror. "No," he says, and clears his throat. "Rachel moved back to Ohio after Finn was killed on duty."

- and Blaine sees, in his own Kurt's eyes, that same choking moving flash of No.

He doesn't think, it's clearly not a chosen response, the apartment is small and they're already practically on top of each other and Kurt just snaps his arms around the other version of himself, holds him tight, says and his voice is thickening, "Oh my god." and after a pause, as the other Kurt stands stiff and stares over his shoulder at nothing, voice choking on it, "I'm so sorry -"

The other Kurt stands rigid, angled oddly, pulled into Kurt's body like this. And his face creases with suddenly more pain than he can contain and he presses his face into the hood around Kurt's shoulders, his hands come up, grip in the pale cloak, and Blaine can see the tight shaky grip of Kurt's own hands on him. How weird to hug yourself, he thinks, but distantly; mostly his throat is hurting because he knows that for all the complexity of Kurt and Finn's relationship over the years, Kurt loves Finn, his family is everything to him, and this . . .

"I wasn't there," the other Kurt says, with some difficulty, into the side of Kurt's neck. "I wasn't -"

"It's not your fault."

"Clearly your brother isn't dead so maybe it is," the other Kurt snarls, and Kurt just grips him tighter.

"I don't think for a minute that a world that does this kind of violence to supers is squeaky clean in every other respect, this world killed Finn, it wasn't - you would have done anything to save him." His voice is uneven, Blaine knows his eyes will be wet, his own throat hurts. "You would've done anything -"

There's silence from the other Kurt, and Blaine knows he's really crying, now, Kurt always goes silent in tears, hates the ugliness of his own voice when he cries. He puts his own cup aside, looks at the still shellshocked face of the other him, and thinks . . .

He says, "When did you last get a hug?"

The other him jumps, panics at his cup, puts it down before he can spill it. "I, uh, I . . . probably Cooper at the airport when I got to New York, I . . ."

"Okay," Blaine says, because that was almost five years ago. "You need a hug too." He gets up and squeezes past the coffee table, hikes himself up by the arms to stand and hugs him happily. "You're going to be okay," he whispers to him, while the two Kurts, heads close, are murmuring to each other in urgent, painful ways. "Look after him. He's been through a lot, he needs you to remember that - that he needs the things he needs for a reason. Please be patient with him. He's worth it, honestly, you will be so grateful for being patient -"

The other Blaine mumbles into his shoulder, "He's the actual Ghost, I think I'm dreaming."

"He's a lot more than just the Ghost. That's the first lesson."

The other him is quiet, then tips his head and gives him a strained sort of smile. "I think I'm good at patience," he says, and Blaine looks into his eyes and thinks, Five years. You're better than me at it.

Good. He can take the time to properly look after Kurt, then.

The two Kurts are separating, unsnapping compartments on their belts and handing each other tissues and then noticing what they're doing, flicking their eyes to the ceiling and just using the tissue they took for themselves. "Okay," Kurt says, and blows his nose. "Are you going to be okay?"

"I've been okay on my own for years," the other Kurt says, and looks, wary, confused, at the other Blaine. He says only a little dubiously, "This . . . will be a different way of being okay."

Kurt smiles, still a little damply, looks at Blaine and holds out his hand; Blaine takes it, immediately, and smiles back. Kurt unhooks a wrist cuff from his belt and passes it to Blaine, but pauses as Blaine takes it. "We'd better head up for the roof to do this, on our world we don't know whose apartment this is."

"Oh, yeah. No-one needs this first thing in a morning," Blaine says, imagining the poor New Yorker who gets the two of them appearing next to their bed first thing.

"Invisible," the other Kurt warns, and Kurt rolls his eyes.

"We're not new, you know. Look . . . look after each other." He looks at the other Kurt and then the other Blaine and back again, troubled in the eyes. All these years, Blaine knows that Kurt really does try to rescue everyone, and it hurts him so much when he can't. He's seen Kurt desperate to save him before, it's just unusual to watch him want so badly to save himself. "Look after yourselves."

The other Kurt looks at their held hands, and then at the other Blaine, just for a second, as if he can't stop himself. The other Blaine smiles, says, "Thanks, you guys. All three of you. I would . . . I'd still be in there if you hadn't . . . thanks. You saved a whole bunch of lives today."

Blaine looks at the other Kurt, who is looking back at Blaine's Kurt as if silently pleading help me too. Kurt just gives him - maybe the gesture only makes sense to Kurt himself, a helpless sort of one-armed shrug, hand still held in Blaine's; but the other Kurt watches him, and then folds his own arms loosely, and he is at least standing easier than he was when they first arrived in this apartment.

The other Kurt says, "If we can be okay eventually, we'll just have to make 'eventually' enough. No-one else gets more than that."

Kurt touches his arm, says, "Thank you for helping me get him back. Thank you."

The other Kurt shrugs. "Thanks for getting Schuester out of this universe for me, at least now I can go sneak around that place at my leisure."

"Be careful, though," the other Blaine blurts, such sudden obvious fear at the thought of the Ghost going back there, and the way the other Kurt looks at him then, arms loosely folded and so - surprised, in such an open way, at such simple concern, that's when Kurt makes them invisible, and Blaine feels him tugging him for the window, for their escape.

"Do you think they'll be okay?" Blaine whispers on the rooftop, watching the barest-there suggestion of the cuffs made just visible, for Kurt to put it on him. The sun is up now and New York is noisy already, and Blaine knows that below them the city is full of escaped supers making people come face to face with the cost of their hatred or indifference, and just below them Kurt and Blaine have only just met, and between those facts the whole world is different.

"Yes." Kurt says. "In their own way, in their own time. They'll look after each other. This world, though, I don't . . . I don't know how they . . ."

He'd sounded so much surer about the changes they could make in there, in front of them where they needed to hear it. Blaine thinks about it as Kurt fixes the cuff around his wrist, slips one over his own. "I think we don't get to control the world around us, but I still think they can choose to make their lives in it . . . choosing each other, choosing themselves, that they can do. And that's - that changes everything. For them, that changes everything." He runs a thumb across the knuckles of Kurt's gloved hands at his wrist, barely there, pale grey like mist, and he swallows; a few hours ago he didn't know if he'd ever see him again, stupid to doubt that Kurt wouldn't walk into Hell itself to fight for his return to him. "It did for us."

Kurt's hands squeeze his, and he murmurs, "My clever husband," before he pushes the button on his cuff.

*

The people on all of Blaine's websites probably imagine that after getting home after a near-miss like that, the two of them fall into sweaty, marathonesque I'm-so-glad-you're-still-alive sex, but they are tired. After Agent Sylvester's extensive debriefing they fall together onto the bed in their apartment that is the single most expensive thing they own (it was a mutual agreement that they don't care how big the TV is but they are getting the mattress with the memory foam and 'sleep technology' and they are enjoying every single fucking second that they actually get to spend asleep in that bed) and pass clean out, side by side, for a good five hours.

When Kurt first wakes and shifts in the sheets Blaine presses his face deeper into the pillow, murmuring as if it's reflex the same way a struck nerve will jerk the knee, "Five more minutes." Kurt looks down at his face, at the wildness of his hair, and the balled-up want to cry is unbearable in his chest in that moment. He gets up and gets a shower instead, washing the dust of a ruined building on another world out of his hair, and he has dealt with some shit as the Ghost - supervillains, nuclear bombs, the FBI monitoring for him all the 'credible' death threats social media teems with and which he has to day-to-day ignore, but looking himself in the eye really was more than he thinks he can cope with. It's not just seeing his own life play out differently, seeing things that he didn't even realise he thought were inevitable were chance just as much as the roll of a die, but -

He sits on the edge of the bath to call Finn, eyes on the frosted window where it's already dark out, he knows neither of them will be patrolling tonight - besides his own and Blaine's obvious exhaustion he just keeps remembering how young, how frightened, how frail that other Blaine had looked, his husband's face looking like that, he needs Blaine close and safe tonight, he needs to look after him. But when the line clicks through and Finn's voice says, "Dude, I heard about the whole alternative dimension thing, are you okay?" his face is already wet and his throat is like a knife wound and he puts his free hand under his nose, then grabs for the toilet roll, chest jumping ungainly as a three-legged frog -

Part of him wants to scream at Finn, You were dead! You died! I had to - without you - I had to face -

And part of him does know that it must be eerie as a foot touching the soft soil of your own grave to be told that, and he can't, like this while he's still so emotionally raw about the whole thing himself, he can't do that to Finn, so he just gives up and cries and Finn makes a confused, uneasy noise, and then some awkward, "Hey, hey, dude," sort of hushing attempts, never easy with feelings, definitely never easy with Kurt's feelings which he admits openly he never understands. Kurt gives up and puts his face into his hand and just cries, because out of everything he never knew to focus his fear on, losing Finn . . . every night he slips life out of the pinching fingers of death, and still he doesn't know how to face what that really means.

Eventually he's cried the worst of it out of himself and he's just breathing in an ugly, graceless way, wiping at his eyes, blowing his nose, while Finn makes uncomfortable attempts to ease him, and he says thickly, "Yeah, it kind of sucked. We're okay, though. Now."

He will tell him, one day, he'll have to. Right now he just wants to hear his brother's voice.

He texts his dad again - he can't face crying again, so he'll put off talking until tomorrow. Then he looks at himself in the mirror, rolls his eyes, washes his face and moisturises gently until Blaine won't see the worst evidence of tears on him. Then in just a towel and a scar looped around his chest and his own everyday skin he walks through into the bedroom, where Blaine rolls in the bed to face him, rubbing his eye, stretching a leg out down the sheets, stretching an arm up, muscles bunching and unfolding underneath the lamplit gold of his skin . . .

Kurt stares at him for a moment, and thinks, Fuck the fanfiction writers. and it only takes a touch of intangibility to make the towel drop. Blaine's eyebrows - notice.

On top of him and hands in his hair and kissing him like if they can get close enough then they can never be separated again he thinks how painfully he needs this before Blaine licks his lips and says, "Hey, uh, can I . . . can I shower first? I feel kind of . . . prison grungy, um."

Kurt sits back on his heels over Blaine's lap and thinks of the idiocy of the fanfiction writers, and sighs.

While Blaine's in the bathroom he goes to the window to raise the blinds, sit in his dedicated city-gazing seat and stare out at New York, looking no different to the New York he just left behind. He thinks about the way some people do hate supers, really hate them, with real violence and venom. He thinks about how some people don't care, don't care about that violence and venom which makes so much space for all that hatred to flourish in, to set its roots down deep and let its ugly outcomes bloom. And he thinks about everyone else, watching videos of supers who've been imprisoned, some of them for years, no word to or from their families, none of them legally charged with anything, just people who were taken and put in cages and a government with a whole lot of questions to answer and how the entire planet will be watching what they've done and what they do now . . .

The hairs on the back of his neck are alert. He thinks . . . he thinks of that other him, who knows exactly what it cost Kurt to trust Blaine, and has seen what it's paid him in return that he did, more, he thinks with a thickening throat, than he could honestly say he deserves. He looks over the apartment - their bedroom is about the same size as Kurt's whole place was on that world, they're waged through Sue Sylvester's agency now, the Ghost and Phalanx have been decreed much more important to the world than Kurt and Blaine. He thinks of the legions of kids who dress up as them for Hallowe'en. He thinks he can maybe stop hating quite so much some of the excessive admiration he has to navigate, though he'll never love it. The alternative . . .

He just keeps thinking of that other Blaine, how fragile he looked, and Finn, and the grief he feels is - it's the strangest feeling - for himself. For that other him, for thinking of what he has to deal with, how hard it is for him. For the first time in his life he's actually facing the thing his therapist has spent weary years trying to get him to say out loud, words he's been openly derisive of, found ridiculous, refused to ever utter and now he whispers them, quiet in the bedroom, picking at the thumbnail of one hand and staring out across his evening city, alone. "Poor Kurt."

Having said it, having really seen his pain - it eases, there's softening, a gentleness falls down. He can't feel compassion for the other him without acknowledging that he must deserve it too, they're the same person, and that simple act of rationality calms him, calms the panic of the pain of it all. He sits quietly, and thinks of that other Blaine, and his Blaine, his husband, who comes out of the bedroom and walks to him, kisses the back of his neck and slides his hands around his body, says into his skin, "Putting a robe on is no fair."

Kurt turns in his seat, arm reaching up for his naked husband, and lets the blinds drop.

They're still in honesty too tired for anything very athletic, it's the comfort and familiarity of it really, and that gorgeous warm afterglow, once the clean-up's done and they can just enjoy each other's skin, tracing muscles with fingertips, shaping the body with the palm, trading slow kisses now and then as the easy whim arises. Blaine's combed his hair back neater and seems more content in himself for it, and Kurt feels the edges of the wedding ring on his hand between the pads of thumb and finger, and Blaine's smile twitches the scar on his lip.

"When I realised that was gone I freaked out probably more than a superhero should."

"Always freak out exactly that much," Kurt says darkly, lifting his hand to kiss the ring. "If anyone ever dares taking it again."

He knows from their long debriefing with Agent Sylvester that Blaine doesn't remember being undressed, he must have been unconscious for it, and he said to Kurt - turned to him in her office and looked him in the eye right then, because he knows how Kurt thinks, he knows the horror it would be for Kurt, and he held his hand and said very seriously to his eyes, "I'm fine. I don't love it, but I'm fine." and he needed Kurt to believe him so Kurt does. He knows they think differently about these things. He knows that that's fine too.

"You didn't even need me to come rescue you, did you?" Kurt says, smiling, proud of this. "You and your little insurrection."

"Hah. That alarm you set off really helped, actually, those agents got very nervous when they heard the Ghost was there, it made my 'little insurrection' a lot easier." He rubs an eye. "I keep - thinking and thinking about that world, what they'll be doing right now. That other me - he can't leave that apartment. It's better than a prison cell but if anyone ever sees him -"

"I don't know," Kurt says. "Maybe . . . there might be backlash, it might put public opinion on the side of the supers. Maybe things will move faster there than we know. I just keep hoping . . . I know that other me is dealing with a lot, I still really hope he's looking after you, I worried about that other you."

". . . yeah," Blaine says, looking away, troubled. "I don't . . . I don't even know who I'd be after five years locked up. I think they kept them in solitary for most of the day, that's . . ."

"Torture." Kurt is being literal, not dramatic. Blaine glances at him with a pained smile.

"Yes. So he . . . maybe it'll help, in a weird way, though. That other you - needs him to be tentative while he's stuck in that apartment with him, he doesn't need - I mean, who I was when we first met, that overexcitable puppy climbing up your leg all the time -"

Kurt laughs. "That's what you think you were like?"

"I mean, yeah, don't you?"

"Well, yes." Kurt smiles, neatening Blaine's hair a bit with his fingers, which for him means loosening it a bit from the over-tightness of how Blaine's styled it. "But he knows he can trust you, he knows I did."

"I've never understood why," Blaine says. "Seeing them in that apartment - knowing what you'd been through and then having me just, dumped on you like that -" Blaine watches Kurt's eyes, and Kurt looks back easily, because he doesn't have anything to hide from him and there's a relief in that like he's never known. "It really wasn't that much more fraught than when I just turned up in your life, right? But you . . . how were you that brave?"

"Take off the admiration goggles," Kurt says. "I talked to the other me about that too and I really don't need the hero worship on that point." He rubs his eyes, sighs up to the ceiling. "Once you knew the secret you became literally the only man on the face of the planet I could haunt whenever I wanted to without blowing a thing, which made you weirdly safe to be vulnerable around. Which is a lot less romantic than 'ah, my heart just knew' or whatever-"

Blaine barks his laughter, rubs Kurt's side so he squirms ticklish, says, "Oh my god, that's perfect-"

"It doesn't freak you out? You've never been haunted." He runs his thumb along Blaine's hairline at his forehead, frowns at him. "It doesn't scare you?"

"You've survived it, more than once. I don't know, you know I even get curious about it sometimes? What it feels like."

"You don't want to find out." Kurt says, and it comes out more bitterly than he thought he'd intended.

"No, I know, I know that. I just . . . I know you've been through it, and it . . . there's a lot you've been through that I might understand better if I had too."

Kurt looks into his husband's eyes and says, "I think that's always mutual, Blaine."

". . . yeah." Blaine tucks a pillow up to his chin to lean near Kurt's face, sliding his fingers into his hair, brushing through in a way that feels wonderful. "I think those two have that, at least. They both know what being a super on that world feels like. I just . . . I worry about that other me, I worry that - he came to New York for the same reasons I did and he needs all the same things I have, over the years, but instead what he got was a cell for years on end, and I worry - that he needs those things too much now to always - to see what you need. I know I've hurt you, over the years, not managing my own needs better."

"I think that's mutual too," Kurt murmurs, and lets his scalp be stroked, and feels lulled near sleep again, the bliss of it. "I worry about that other me feeling too much guilt to really . . . I think I'm worried about the same thing. That he won't know how to look after that other you. Basically, Blaine, shouldn't the fact that all either of us care about is that the other version of our husband is safe tell us that we left them in exactly the right pair of hands?"

Blaine grins. "Yeah. I guess you're right. It'll be different for them. Who knows, maybe they'll find it easier, maybe meeting us before they met each other means they're more mindful of their own baggage. They'll be fine." He strokes his hair. "They have each other. Yeah. They'll be fine."

Kurt says sleepily against the pillow, "I worry that if we die our therapists are going to cash in on books about all the completely crazy shit we tell them."

Blaine laughs delightedly, and kisses Kurt's cheek like it's an impulse he doesn't even think to fight. "God, yes. That next appointment's going to be pretty wild."

"What would Freud think? God, Freud, probably he'd be disappointed it wasn't a foursome."

"Him and the fanfic writers," Blaine says, mock-ruefully, and Kurt laughs, soft with the rising tide of sleep. "What was - I know hearing about Finn on that world must have been - hard, for you."

Immediately the pain is back in his throat like a rock lodged there. He says, quietly, "Yes."

Blaine is watching his eyes, uneasy. "What did you say to him? The last thing you said? I was telling the other me - to just, be patient, I knew I couldn't tell him why, that's for that other you to choose whether to tell him or not, I just - needed him to be gentle with him -"

"I think he will be," Kurt says roughly, and swallows. "We . . . I just couldn't stop saying how sorry I was. To lose -" He stops, sucks his breath in. "To lose Finn. I know I'd feel - superpowers and a mask I couldn't even save my own brother, I'd feel . . ."

Blaine hugs his head in, kisses the crown of it, says through his hair, "It couldn't be your fault. It couldn't."

"I told him that. I don't know if hearing it from me helped. But he wanted us to go, he was exhausted and dealing with a lot and just - didn't need us there making even more to be dealt with. So the last thing I told him, the last thing I told him, was to let that other you win the fight over who sleeps on the sofa because it would break him to be forced to be unchivalrous enough to take his bed from him."

Blaine's laughter is low, there's pain in that too, Kurt knows that he's thinking about Finn as well, though trying to be what Kurt needs right now. "That's - painfully true, that's - thank you for doing that for him."

"He'll be fine," Kurt whispers, warm in Blaine's arms. "I trust him in there. He's you, Blaine, even besides everything else, it's inconceivable you'd do anything to hurt that other me in that situation. He's a guest in that apartment and it would be rude. Manners will carry the day until love does."

"My clever husband," Blaine says warmly, stroking his hair. "If you know me that well, you can trust that I know you that well too. Of course he'll look after the other me. He looks after everyone."

Kurt's smile tightens, and he lets it release. He knows that that's not always been true, looking back over his own life, the things he's said about himself and how he's treated himself, cruelty he wasn't even aware of until he looked himself in the eye. He thinks of that other him, how Kurt knows, knows, that he didn't choose for Finn to die and how that forces him to admit, baffled that he even needs to admit it, that he didn't choose for some sociopath in college to sexually assault him, some things just happen. And not for the first time in his life, he hopes to be haunted. As he's always wanted to remember Blaine's esteem, Blaine's love, through all danger and difficulty, he hopes to remember that other Ghost too, to see himself as a human being, the hardest task for a person to do, to step back and see themselves from outside, just a human amongst humans, doing the best they can with no power to make it all perfect and no blame, then, if it isn't. Not tonight - god he needs to sleep more - but someday soon he'll tell Blaine what that other Kurt told him, and what it's made him realise, the things he believed were inevitabilities that were actually just someone else's opportunism, what he thought he was when really, always, he's just been a person, moving through a life.

Moving towards him, he thinks, settling his arms close around Blaine's warm shoulder. Always, always closer to him. He went to another world for him, and he'd go further. The closer to Blaine he gets, the more he finds of himself there. And that other Blaine, and Kurt . . . they'll remember them, the two of them, ghosts at the sides of all their interactions. The them who were lucky, and found each other sooner; the them who were brave, and rewarded for that with more and more cause to be brave, but more and more courage welling from inside too, like the muscle stretching and firming. Loving each other brought them closer to themselves, to the version of themselves that they wanted to be all along; braver, and kinder, and wiser in the end.

He thinks of all those other ghosts, all those variations his life could have had, all those other Kurts, and every last one, he thinks, won the Kurtish lottery as long as he found Blaine. Impossible to know which choices jar your course into the path of other people's choices, impossible to know what grief was necessary to lead you to the joy you have now, or what wasn't. So many versions of him must have lived through so much worse than he ever has, and alone. Because right now, exhausted and warm clasped to Blaine as he yawns over the top of his head, here on their stupidly expensive mattress in the city he loves, safe with his husband, wiser than last night, he looks at his life and understands its shape as if seen from outside; with everything he could have lost set in the scales against everything he has lost, he feels in the solidity of Blaine's safe body the weight of what he's gained.

He thinks, I give that dark cloak six months, and then he goes to sleep.

Comments

[beshrew_my_very_heart]

Absolutely amazing. Thank you so much for writing this.

[alumiere]

i didn't know how much i needed this today! thank you for a fabulous story to wake up to & please keep doing what you can to take care of yourself!

[jcd1013]

AHHHHH!!!!

This made my day so much happier, getting back into your world, and how things might have been different, but how in the end, Kurt and Blaine will always be Kurt-and-Blaine and the Ghost-and-Phalanx.

This was just lovely and wonderful and perfect and I just want to clutch it to my bosom forever.

[fadagaski]

Rainjooooooooy. I saw you updated and started hyperventilating and then I read it (in fits and starts omg be a working adult is such bullshit) and now I am grinning madly because thiiiiiiisssssss. I LOVE this verse like I can't even say how much, and I am so thrilled you've come back to it twice in a year!!!! I love everything about this. You always do such stunning things with familiar tropes. Like, obviously Alternate Universe is meant to hold up a mirror, I get that, but your characters are so rich and pained and trying that it becomes so much deeper. And to look back at the Kurt from the very beginning of AtoG - how wildly different are all our lives since then? That was years ago, multiple fandoms ago, a pandemic ago. I dunno, rainjoy, I just have a whole bunch of feelings in this Chili's tonight.

[perryavenue]

Thank you! This fic is wonderful!! The world of ATOG can be complicated and difficult, but always defined by love. This time, you show us the growth and self-awareness Kurt has achieved as he shares his most deeply felt emotions with… himself! The idea of Kurt and Blaine meeting alternate versions of themselves was brilliant. I also enjoyed the mild shade thrown at fan-fic writers. Everything about this fic was stellar. I am very grateful that against all odds, you still create these gifts for us from time to time. Please take good care of yourself. Wishing you a better 2021.

my god

[flyingcapybaras]

srry for throwing this comment at you twice *oop* - i just read your note on not responding to anonymous comments, so i'm double posting this actually logged in *yeet* <3

ohhh jeepers when i opened my email today i was *not* expecting *this* uwu but - *wow*. it could be 50 years from now and, if you're out there posting supers!fic, i will be there reading it. i fell out of glee fandom years ago, but i will *never* fall out of love with your writing. you prose is just...stunning. your themes and social commentary astound me. just...thank you. for sharing this. it is miraculous.

now is probs a good time to pop up and actually tell you that i first read atog and grey my freshman year of college, and they both *touched me* and *changed me* on a fundamental level. i was too shy/intimidated to comment at the time, but know that those fics have been a literal *lifeline* for me at times. still, *years and years* later, i find myself returning to atog and grey on a semi-regular basis. these fics transcend their source material. you have truly tapped into something *divine*, and i know i will carry them close to my heart for the rest of my life.

they're especially meaningful to me now, having since discovered and fallen in love with the poetry of a one mr. richard siken

so. again. thank you. from the bottom of my heart.

all the best, love. <3

Thank you

[calliope_melpomene]

for making my day. This was unexpected and marvelous.

[aerinsol29]

Hello,

I was just doing a reread of ATOG & Grey and decided to check the Tumblr tag and was DELIGHTED to find not one, but TWO new(ish) fics. Thank you so much.

Love reading about the super babies as I myself have gone from 0 to 3 children since I last read a new fic of yours. (Two of whom are twins and boy do Draxie’s comments at the end of Grey hit differently now.)

The caring and bravery of these characters honestly inspires me to be better. Thank you again.

Lovely!

[greeniron]

Thank you for sharing this!