Not Outta The Woods Yet

Kurt Hummel was in the middle of acquiring an addiction, to a very lovely fellow. It wasn't because the boy was handsome, toned, and groomed to perfection.

Blaine Anderson had a habit of constantly reaching for Kurt that greatly embarrassed Kurt when they were out in public like at the Lima Bean, Kirkland's, and The Gap (although Blaine had to be in disguise for that rendezvous, which the both of them agreed on for the sake of form-fitting knits).

Now, Kurt tentatively looped his arm through Blaine's, keeping the weight light and his hold breakable in case the other boy didn't want to be touched. Though Blaine had appeared confident and untouched by their loss at Regionals, Kurt would not forget.

Blaine flexed his arm and shrugged which placed his gloved hand over Kurt's. Kurt shivered, and he averted his goofy smile from that knowing twinkle shining out of Blaine's gaze.

It was the chill, damn it.

He stated as much, and Blaine pulled him closer.

No one was around, or rather, no one was around who would object to him kissing Blaine's cheek. It was a date night and late enough that the shop lights winked out one by one and the older couples who aggressively ignored the two boyfriends retired to their homes. Kids their age didn't give a flip.

Feeling emboldened in the romantic lighting and the dark of the night, Kurt leaned in for a peck and got a surprise when Blaine steered them into a cozy little nook that removed them from the winds.

Kurt was pressed into a glazed door which boasted a CLOSED sign, and then he had his breath stolen away in a series of light, sweet, and chilled little kisses.

Though he was taller, Kurt was often surprised by how much strength Blaine had. Karofsky would have been surprised for far less sexy reasons had Santana backed down that night at McKinley's failed charity concert.

"My God, Kurt, what the hell did I do to get you?" And Blaine was always so intensely grateful. Perhaps that was why Kurt felt safe around him all the time.

"This," Kurt smirked, rubbing his flushed cheek into Blaine's cold neck. "Keep doing this, and I might keep you forever."

"I wish," Blaine said wistfully and his smile, gleaming perfectly in their cozy shadow, seemed far too sad for the mood.

"What are you thinking right now?" Kurt asked. He let up on the plan of seduction he had going, sensing that Blaine was going to say something about his past. Kurt accepted Blaine, without question, but sometimes, sometimes, he felt like he was in over his head, when Blaine lapsed into his sadness, and Kurt tried to comfort him without knowing the exact cause.

He looked perfect and scared and Kurt really did want to keep him forever.

"Would you ever, I mean, you don't have to, but would you like to meet my… father?"

There were layers of reverence and fear and hope in that question that triggered alarm bells in Kurt's head. He himself had been afraid for Burt, about Burt's heart, of Burt's disappointment... but he'd never been afraid of his dad, not once, not even when Kurt did stupid things like Rachel Berry house parties.

"I'd love to," Kurt said, perhaps more fiercely than the question called for. Maybe Kurt was being paranoid.

"I love you," Blaine said, and it felt like he was letting out all that sadness, and Kurt did that, not some dude at The Gap.

Jere-meh-don't-care-bout-his-name had admitted to a couple cups of coffee with Blaine, but Kurt wasn't fooled, not after weeks of tongue and hands in exciting new places and he could tell that Blaine was always holding back.

Like, right now, actually. Perhaps it should have worried Kurt how quickly Blaine bounced back from his melancholy when Kurt was loving him. It really should.

Blaine moaned his name a couple times, and Kurt let his head and his eyes roll back in pleasure momentarily before the shots rang through the bitter air.

He was pretty sure that this was the closest he'd get to a heart attack; the source of the banging noise were a pair of rednecks in a truck that seriously needed to be in a landfill somewhere, never mind a muffler replacement. With all the junk piled up in the bed of the trunk, it really looked like they'd parked their trunk under a land fill.

The things they yelled at Kurt and Blaine were trashy enough.

"How stereotypical can you get?" Kurt muttered as Blaine pressed him protectively into the door, turning the glare of his eyes down the road distastefully.

"C'mon, let me take you home," Blaine said, reluctantly.

Kurt seethed with hatred. He had expected at least one more hour with Blaine, and maybe he'd fibbed about tonight's Warbler outing. He hadn't lied to Burt, technically, since Kurt and Blaine were Warblers and they were out.

They still held hands as Blaine walked Kurt to his car in a mostly empty plaza.

"Are you sure I can't drop you off?" Kurt asked anxiously. He thought of those loud drunks from earlier and fought back the images of Blaine hurt because of their intoxicated driving.

"I will always get home safely," Blaine said with such conviction. He kissed Kurt on the lips, firmly, and fixed the boy's scarf after he pulled away. "Text me or call me when you get home safe, okay?"

He didn't need to say why.

"Expect a text. The Hudson-Hummels have been on my case about using up all the family minutes," Kurt admitted, grinning.

"Really? We should get a couple's plan or something."

"But you're on Whore-izon," Kurt said, wrinkling his nose.

"I could change. I'd change for you," Blaine said, and he was so earnest about it and Kurt wanted to gush over how adorable it was, except that he himself knew how painful it was to be adorable when one was aiming for heartfelt and sincere.

"Aren't we a pair of star-crossed lovers?" Kurt chuckled.

"Good night," Kurt crooned, before putting in his key.

Blaine simply smiled in his mysterious way, and Kurt grudgingly steered his baby on to the road. Usually playing cute worked.

He was maybe five minutes away from the train tracks that marked Lima's city limits when he remembered that Blaine had a test first thing tomorrow morning. Knowing that Blaine would stay up until he got that text, Kurt fiddled with his phone to key in "I'm home, baby. Less-than-3."

Normally, Kurt was extremely conscientious of his driving and his texting as Burt had made him work on cars that were supposedly a result of cell phones. However, there was literally nothing around, and he'd been on cruise control for twenty minutes.

Kurt squinted and thought he saw something in the distance. Because his night vision wasn't spectacular, he put on the high beams.

"No fucking way," he said when he saw a familiar looking truck piled high with trash. Their hood was up and a plastic bag tied to a bent antennae billowed and puffed as it caught the light.

He should just drive on by, and no one would be the wiser. No one would accuse him of being a bad person for refusing to help strange and ugly men who were likely discriminated against him for his sexuality. While he did have his tool box in the trunk of his Navigator, he didn't have to poke around their engine in his date clothes.

Except that it was late at night, and he'd occasionally notice headlines about hikers being picked off by hypothermia even in the summer. The least he could do is stop and offer to let them use his phone.

All the doors would stay locked though.

He rolled down the passenger's window barely an inch down. "Do you need help?"

"Thank you, ma'am, we'd be much obliged," the man said politely as he stepped up cautiously to Kurt's car. His grateful expression froze, and Kurt coughed discreetly.

"I doubt there are any towing services still open. Do you have a phone? To call…" Animal control. "… a friend?"

"What the hell you doing, lunk head? Take the phone and call that brother of yours," the man's companion called out from behind him. He was clearly the thinker. As he walked up to shake his friend, Kurt could see his face more clearly. Whoa. He was also the looker.

The one dubbed "lunk head" snatched the phone out of Kurt's hand. Kurt reminded himself that he was doing a good deed by letting lunk head put his dirty fingers all over the touch screen. He would have to drench his iPhone in Germ-X before the night was over.

"You gotta scuse my friend. Sober or not, he ain't got no manners; spirits make him meaner than mean." The looker shook his head. "He got no sense, no sirree."

Kurt decided to keep his mouth shut and nod along. He remembered two sets of voices lobbing the "f" bomb at him and Blaine earlier. He should have called the police and reported the stranded men. In theory, he'd be moseying on home except that they had his phone.

Lunkhead cursed and yelled things into Kurt's phone, presumably at that brother of his. Unfortunately, he was standing over the engine yelling things, and then he went ballistic, flailing his arms and kicking the engine.

"That misrubble son of a gun," the looker muttered. "You got old scratch in you or what? What are ya doing?" His head moved from his friend to the engine, and then to Kurt, back to the engine, and then Kurt.

The phone was nowhere in sight.

It was Kurt's turn to get angry, only he was quieter about it. He put the key in his pocket, with his finger on the alarm button, as he slid out the safety of his car. The pair watched him dumbly as he stomped to his trunk and pulled out a heavy-duty flashlight and his toolbox.

"The least you can do is hold this and point it here," Kurt said evenly, his thumb jerking into the scummy, rusted mess. He held out the flashlight, and the better-looking one took it.

"As for you, where did you drop it?" Kurt asked, not able to resist putting a snap in his tone towards the dumber and uglier one.

The two men exchanged looks.

"He talk like a lady," the better-looking one said.

"Don't he?" the uglier one agreed.

At Kurt's impatient glare, the uglier one dutifully pointed at a thin space in the back. Luckily, Kurt's height worked to his advantage. He could bend down comfortably and get a clear look.

"I don't see anything," Kurt protested, as he gestured for the flashlight to move closer.

Everything was pain.

He had broken from the pack to survive. That was all he was doing, surviving, all this time.

He forgot the song of the pack moons ago.

The cold earth pounded in his head, his heart, his paws, and the wolf kept going anyway. He was alone. He was hungry. He needed to stop.

As long as he never had to go back. He did not remember why. If going forward was pain, looking back might kill him.

The scent of an enemy nearby halted him. His snout curled over his fangs in disgust, and his tongue lolled out with the memory of sweet blood.

The cuts on his back were marks from hard lessons, about crouching silently into the attack. His fur was dark. The night was dark. Dark was good.

The danger, the abomination could never hide itself from the wolf. The wolf recalled miles of white skin cracking between his jaws, and his mouth watered.

He snorted, and cringed at the blood coating the air. This was not the blood he craved. This was not the blood of the enemy.

His battle lust ebbed away, and he whined as the fatigue caught him. Then he growled in case the little creatures heard his moment of weakness. He nosed the stones on the ground and breathed in harder.

The scent would take him out into the open. It was strong enough to knock the sorrows from his body. He sniffed once more and suddenly bounded down the scent trail.

It was difficult to follow the salty metal flavor of blood with all the metal around him. Usually, he never strayed into man's lot. However, the blood called to him. It was alive, and he remembered the baying of his brothers with sudden clarity as he answered the call.

Train tracks. He had memories of them, running along them when the rivers thinned. The train tracks ran the way blood flowed.

He followed them to a body. It stank very badly, but he couldn't run away from this.

The wolf's fine hunting vision could pick out many bumps and colors that he vaguely knew shouldn't have been there. He went up to the thing and licked it. His tongue came away a brilliant red.

The human opened one blue eye and wheezed painfully.

The wolf recognized the gaping mouth as a scream; his prey had looked the same way as he taken them into his jaw and chewed at their lungs and stopped their heart.

Pink foam trailed down the human's pale neck. It didn't have long.

Humans were frail like that. Past the song of the pack cluttering his mind, he knew that. He understood that weakness intimately.

When that blue eye faded and closed, Jacob Black regained himself. The knowledge had him keeling, and the fur melted away and the paws curled into fingers as he bent over the white boy bleeding all over the tracks.

"White boy, hey, white boy stay with me!" Jacob croaked. He looked over the white boy critically and finally noticed the ropes tying him down to the rungs.

Asking himself what kind of fucking monster would do this to a kid, Jacob gnawed at the braided loops and gingerly cradled the broken little body in his arms. Unconscious, the poor little guy shivered helplessly and moaned in pain, in protest of Jacob's fever hot skin.

If it were anyone else, this skinny little white kid would be a goner. However, this was Jacob Black, descendent of the great Ephraim Black and son of Billy Black.

He practically flew as he kept his nose in the air to guide him to the nearest hospital. All he needed to do what locate the stench of death and despair. Jacob listened hard for the wail of ambulances, but remembered that in small enough towns, they could be idle for hours.

He stopped on someone's rooftop when he realized that his pants were still tied to his ankle. Face hot, Jacob reluctantly put down the white boy.

He knew from the time Bella lost herself in the woods that the authorities would have a lot of questions, and that under Chief Swan's gratitude, Sam and the pack had been spared the prying questions of why they were half-naked in the cold woods, how they had found Bella so quickly, and without the aid of flash lights and walkie-talkies.

It was cowardly to finally put the white boy in the back of an ambulance. He hadn't had much time, no way of knowing how soon the medics would return to their truck from the hospital.

Jacob ripped the locked doors open, and with that same strength, made sure the boy did not take any more jolts.

He took one last deep sniff of the boy. He was going to live, and he'd be miserable for months, but he'd live. There was also something else that was on the boy, but not really part of him. A faint, but sweet fragrance.

"Leeches!" Jacob hissed. His head turned suddenly as he sensed humans approaching.

"I swear I'll find the monster who did this to you," Jacob vowed. He leaped on to the ambulance to the ledge hanging over the hospital's quiet front entrance.

"Don't take it to heart, rookie. Sheila's a major bitch to everyone. She'll tear your balls off soons as she—holy shit." The medics found their surprise of the night.

The older one instantly began to resuscitate the white boy, as the younger one did as he was told and radioed dispatch for the police.

The news would be all over Lima before the morning traffic report.

A/N: I'm officially lower than slime. Twilight x Glee, you guys! I don't own anything; thank god for anonymity.