Rated M for thematic content and graphic imagery this chapter.
Kurt could barely remember being a child – because that would require remembering his mother. She always put up with his bitch fits – he had them in spades as when he was young. He used to throw things, scream, make fun of other kids. It was the only way he could express his anger at being different in a way that made the other kids hate him. The teacher put him on "Behavior Reports", and he never managed to get a smiley face one. It was always a sad face or a half happy, half sad face. He stole from other kids, too, because they just didn't deserve things that made them happy when he was so... not happy.
For a long time, it was hard for him to express his feeling clearly. Words failed him easily in those years. He just screamed wordlessly, throwing tear-filled hissy fits that had his parents tearing at their hair. At least until his mother introduced him to music. The classic rock his mother listened to managed to convey so clearly what he could not express, even though he couldn't perceive that, being as young as he was. All he knew was that he liked it.
Not many people knew that Kurt liked more than musicals and female pop stars. He had a secret addiction to rock music. It was the only link he had to his mother that he could bear to have without crying.
And sometimes he did cry.
After his mother died, he'd started to calm down. He couldn't say exactly why it was, but he dimly recognized that something inside of him had died with her, some part of him necessary to feel honestly and wholeheartedly. Now, he wasn't broken beyond repair – he just hadn't had the necessary tools to cope with his grief, and still had more unresolved issues regarding that grief than he should have had, and was unable to feel with the full force of emotions that a standard human being has access to.
That was probably why he had such a big "crush" on Finn.
It was a safe crush, one that wouldn't be reciprocated, because even if Finn was gay, Kurt was not his type in the slightest. Everyone liked Finn because he was so sweet and perfect, and Kurt did like that about him.
But maybe not as much as he pretended to.
There were these social norms that must be adhered to, ones that dictated: "You must never be alone too long; you must cling to another, you must feel happy, you must feel sad, you must feel everything in quick succession."
Easy to pretend. Kurt lived by pretending. He pretended to have an absurd crush on Finn, because that was a clear route for their anger to take – people were always angry at him for some unknown reason, a reason that neither party could define, and it was best to be a bitch, to have forceful and unrequited feelings, to hurt people, so that they had a reason to be mad. If they were angry over something he never meant, it wouldn't hurt, because it wasn't real.
Kurt wished he knew how to fake cry in a pretty manner like Rachel did. If he had to do it so often, he might as well look good while doing it.
Looking good was another pretense that society demanded. As a gay man, he must be pristine, angelic looking, or else he was a cradle-robbing, corrupting devil.
Most days he really wanted to roll out of bed, put on a t-shirt and jeans, and brush his hair and go. But he'd started something he couldn't stop, something people expected of him – at first it was for the measure of control it afforded him (and retail therapy actually was rather therapeutic, if we're being honest) but then it ceased to satisfy as it used to and he began to extend the facade.
It was now high school, and Kurt Hummel had a carefully crafted persona he wore everywhere he went, one that was so cleverly grafted to his real self that no one ever saw through it.
Most days, he himself had a hard time seeing through it. He hated himself on those days, because he truly hated the character he played for these people.
It was hardest in Glee, as much as he hated to admit it. There, his false self was accepted. It hurt deeply that they accepted so easily what he himself created for other people to hate. He wanted them to like him for who he truly was, and he secretly hated them all for not caring to pierce that veil he'd draped over himself, that veil of silk and moisturizer and diva-like personality.
As much as he'd cried when Finn had started throwing the word "fag" around, it was a relief that someone was airing out the dirty laundry. He wanted Finn to hate him. Hate made things easier.
He actually kind of hated Finn, as much as he admired him. He was one of those people who had everything that Kurt wanted. Hell, Finn had everything that everyone wanted. He always got the girls, the solos, anything he cast a net for. Not that Kurt wanted girls, or even solos, but it was the philosophy of the thing.
Kurt's entire life was built on pretending. He kept his friends close and his enemies closer. You could gauge his feelings about a person by how he treated them – the more he liked them, the more he pretended to hate them. The more he hated them, the more he pretended to like them.
He liked Puck for his brutal honesty. The guy was a bully, but Kurt was obviously a bit of a masochist if he wanted people to hate him so much, and that is exactly what Puck did – he hated Kurt. Threw him in dumpsters. Poured slushy on him. Kurt didn't mind these as much as he pretended to. It was lovely to watch the amount of hate that went into these acts.
He hated the same Kurt Hummel they did, after all.
He liked Rachel because she was always undeniably herself and had a self-confidence big enough to fill the auditorium and then some. It was admirable. Kurt wished he was that honest, that willing to be open.
But there was a society full of people to please.
He hated Mercedes more than words could express for the way she'd so easily latched on to his lies. He hated her most of all. The others fell in varying degrees, ranging from Santana and Ms. Sylvester (lovely women, they were) to Mike and Matt (who never talked) to Brittany and Tina, who were "Accepting of Who He Was", which annoyed him.
He wondered what would happen if he came to school as the REAL Kurt Hummel one day. No one would recognize him or believe him, he was sure.
He gets in his car (one of the few things that he honestly does like that he owns) and drives to school, the same way he always does: playing something with guitars and people screaming till their throats bleed on low, because he doesn't want to draw attention or let this little secret of his out.
It's his, and his alone. He doesn't want that camaraderie of "Oh, you like (insert band name here)? Me too!" because as much as he hates his false self, he's scared to throw it away. He's scared to let people in and see the real him.
That is how he will get hurt, he reasons. When things become real, the pain becomes real too. He can never stop acting, stop this ridiculous cycle of self-hate, because if he does, then the hate other people have for him will break through.
He ignores the fact that no one has ever really met him, not the real him, and therefore can't hate him. It's hard to change something he's been doing for so many years. And he reasons (perhaps rightly) that they will hate him anyway, because homophobia pervades everything. The homosexuality, like the car, is one thing he owns and accepts and treasures. It's a useful tool in his smear campaign against himself.
Make it easy for them, he tells himself. If it's the easiest thing for them to do, then it's just easy, not the truth. Not what's right. Plenty of people do things because they are easy, not because they are what they want to do.
He trudges his way through the same day he always does, stopping somewhere around 4th period to rinse out slushy. It wasn't meant for him, but sometimes there are casualties if you're standing next to someone being slushied.
He kind of misses it. Ever since Finn and Puck stepped in to try to stop the bullying (and Kurt's starting to not like Puck these days) people are almost accepting him. Well, they tolerate his existence. And that's not what he wants at all. Maybe he just needs to be an unbearable ass to someone like Karofsky.
Glee practice is boring, as usual. He joined because he liked music, but the music they sang was always – wrong. It never expressed what Kurt wanted to express. Kurt wasn't even sure what that was – he still had problems with expressing his feelings.
He watches, bored. Gives Finn a ride home because he'd run late that morning and had his mom drop him off. Pretends to fawn over him, hanging on every word and relishing in just how inane the whole conversation was.
Goes home, wonders how hard it would be to sever his fake self from his real self, if their flesh is the same, or can he peel a layer of flesh off and find the real him inside?
He tries, running a steak knife along his skin, loosening a flap and watching the blood pour out. Even this pain is fake, he muses. Because it doesn't really hurt. He wonders if he should cry, and decides to when Finn walks in. Explains he accidentally sliced himself putting dishes away, gets driven to the hospital. Pretending is how he survives, and it's so easy.
The sutures turn a weird pink-brown by the next morning, and Kurt decides it was more trouble than it was worth. Even if the real him is down there, he's obscured by the thick, red blood that explodes out. If he could get rid of all that, maybe then it would be clear, but then what would he do? He'd be dead.
He knows the way he's thinking isn't clear or sensible at all, but he does still see the difference between life and death, and while he has no aversion to the idea of death, what's the point of finding himself and then dying?
No, there must be another way.
When he goes out of his way to piss Karofsky and Azimio off, he gets a fist to the face, and more of that blood falls out, like an angry waterfall, and he laughs in spite of himself. Maybe it will help, maybe it won't, but it's funny how things don't hurt anymore, not really, how even the fear is fake.
They look at him uncertainly when they see him laughing, looking at his reflection in the drops of blood pooling on the floor from his nose. It's not broken (his fake flesh is tougher than that) but it's bleeding like a motherfucker, and that's funny.
The blood is always in the way. Things won't break if the blood gets in the way.
Puck and Finn get mad at Karofsky and Azimio when they come around the corner and see the blood and see how Kurt is shaking, assuming he's crying. When they come over to see if he's all right after bruising the two bullies up a bit, Kurt quickly ensures that he's crying, but not before Puck gives him a strange look.
Kurt's getting slow.
That's too bad. He wonders if it would even hurt if people hated the real him. He wonders if the real him still exists underneath it all, or if it's just a dark emptiness, if the real him imploded in on itself and made a black hole.
It would explain all the blood. It's dark and it's what fills the emptiness where he used to live.
There's so much. The more he pisses off the jocks, the more they hit him, but he doesn't bleed when they don't hit him as hard, and that gives him an idea.
He starts small. One by one, he throws out the things that make him who he is, metaphorically or literally, and he's only a little scared when he realizes he is becoming nothing at all, and that maybe there really is nothing but an empty shell underneath and blood, all that blood.
But he keeps going, peeling the skin away slowly, until he's left staring at the musculature and the thin veins and the pockets of fat, and begins to clip those out one by one. All of that blood that gets in the way? Ounce by ounce, he drains it into water bottles, gallon jugs emptied of milk.
The organs are next, and he takes his brain, stores it carefully in a jar. His lungs and heart go in a box, and he puts everything else in assorted places around his room – stringing his intestines around the ceiling like party streamers.
As the Glee club watches him come apart, they become more and more concerned.
When Kurt is left staring at his skeleton in the full length mirror, he takes out his eyes, and then he can't see anymore. He can't hear the pleas of his father, of Mr. Schuester, of Ms. Pillsbury, of Finn or Mercedes or Puck or Rachel.
All there is is the overwhelming sense of his bones settling into his bed at the end of the day, endlessly white and hard and neverending and unbreakable.
It's weeks before he puts his eyes back in.
He watches their mouths move, but still can't hear them. His father seems to be saying something about sending him away to a hospital.
Kurt knows that wouldn't help once he replaces his brain inside his skull.
He reattaches his heart and realizes he's lucky.
He gets to rebuild himself from the inside out. To reinvent. It will be his masterpiece, the epic makeover he's always dreamed of.
Now that everything is out of the way and he is looking at the building blocks of his life after a long, blind, silence, he sees how everything goes together like Legos.
He rearranges some things as he goes, and when the guts come down off the walls, Finn and his father are relieved. Those were the most gruesome decorations Kurt ever indulged in.
He grafts the muscles and fat back onto his bones, taking the tendons out of the closet to reattach things with. He sews the veins in through the striated lines of muscle, examines the blood.
That will go last, he decides.
He takes the bits of skin and carefully glues them back on in the right order. People offer their help constantly, but Kurt doesn't trust them to put the jigsaw together properly, to create the picture he sees in his mind.
This is something he must do himself.
He's back in front of the full length mirror, and he can see the skeleton poking through his skin. Without a stomach, it has been very hard to find a way to eat. This is the way it should be – he needs to see his shape for a while before he can trust himself to fill out the skin properly, in the right shape to fit the skeleton. He takes the bottles and jugs of blood from the various places they've been, pours them in, and when his heart starts pushing the stuff through his dried out veins, he sighs with satisfaction.
He'd been going about it all wrong the entire time.
When he shows up in jeans and a t-shirt with a small, knowing smile on his face, people stare. It's a different staring, a curious, slightly scared staring. Kurt realizes he has no idea what's been going on in his classes for the past few months, and makes a mental note to ask his teachers if he can stay after to catch up.
When Mercedes tells him he's still not himself, he laughs. He laughs hysterically until he's crying. Because he's never been more himself in his life.