Hey-lo. I'm starting to get busier now, so updates might be a bit slower, but I'm doing my best to keep going. Hope you guys enjoy.

"Meeting will come to order!"

Rachel is sitting primly in one of the several tacky modern armchairs in her living room, glaring around at all of them and clapping her hands like an irate schoolmarm. Get her a gavel and she'd out-Wes Wes, Kurt think dryly.

The New Directions have finally all trickled into Rachel Berry's house for this most unpleasant of conferences, and not a single one of them looks like they want to be here. Puck is the only one with any kind of energy—Mercedes was right, he doesn't seem to have burned much of the alcohol out of his system, so he's bouncing up and down on one end of the sofa, his head lolling back and forth as he sings to himself under his breath and every so often giggles at an inside joke of one.

Rory and Quinn are sharing the couch with Puck, Quinn's head on Rory's shoulder and her hair fluttering over her mouth as she breathes deeply and steadily, half-asleep. Artie is parked by the second sofa, clutching a thermos of black coffee; crowded together on the couch beside him are Sam, Mercedes, Kurt, and Blaine, all of them tired and disheveled and eyeing Artie's caffeine with jealous resentment. Santana sits cross-legged on the floor, wearing sweatpants and a t-shirt that says Kiss My Grits, stroking Brittany's hair as Brit lies curled up on a blanket with her head in Santana's lap. Tina and Mike are in a big Asian pile in another armchair and Finn occupies the third, a little to the left of Rachel, blinking red eyes slowly like he's trying to make the world a little less real.

"I repeat, meeting will come to—"

"Done and done, you moron," Santana growls, her voice hoarse. "Get on with it, and let me just make this clear—if you don't say something really fucking important in the next two minutes I am out of here. There's a shot of Kahlua and a bubble bath calling my name at home."

"Mmmm, bubbles, shiny soapy friends," Brittany murmurs. Rachel rolls her eyes and sits a little straight in her chair.

"Fellow glee-clubbers, I have called you here today to discuss a matter of extreme urgency. That matter is, I regret to say, the threat posed to our chances at Regionals by one Sebastian Smythe, of Dalton Academy."

Kurt's stomach rolls over and he fights the urge to lean over and vomit all over Mercedes' lap. He can feel Blaine stiffen next to him, and one blunt-fingernailed hand reaches out and settles lightly over Kurt's wrist.

"Sebastian who?" Mike asks wearily, brushing a piece of hair out of his face and shifting a little so Tina isn't crushing his legs. Rachel's eyes slide right on over to Kurt, and he decides that Quinn's wrinkled dress from last night is suddenly extremely interesting and must be examined in great detail.

"The guy that Kurt got rough and rowdy with last night," Rachel says with satisfied ire, and the glee club perks up a little as they begin to smell the scent of drama.

"I remember that," says Quinn sleepily, raising her head a little off Rory's shoulder. "You and he were like, completely insane. There was blood and stuff, right?"

"Hell yes there was," Puck chirps, waving a loose finger in Kurt's direction. "When Hummel the Destroyer comes at you, there will be no mercy."

"What does that guy have to do with this big Regionals crisis?" Mercedes asks, cutting Puck off, and Kurt says a mental "thank you" to her. Rachel flips her hair and inflates a little, like someone is pumping air in through a spigot in her head.

"Well, you see, this morning I received a phone call from Mr. Smythe. Not being acquainted with the name and intrigued by the cloak-and-dagger aspect of a mysterious message, I agreed to meet with him at an undisclosed location."

"You totally went to the Lima Bean to meet some creepo you didn't know," Santana scoffs. "Finn, if you weren't actually too stupid to live, I'd ask how you felt about your girlfriend sneaking off to play Carmen San Diego with Warblers who act out their monastic sexual frustration by beating up fashionista wannabes."

"Santana, for all our sakes, can you just pipe down for one freaking second?" Finn asks, rubbing the bridge of his nose and wincing. Santana opens her mouth as though to retort, but a sickened, nauseous look suddenly crosses her face and she brings her lips together quickly before anything can escape through that particular route.

"Moving on," Rachel says, trying to recover her spotlight, "I met Mr. Smythe at—all right, yes, it was the Lima Bean, but far from my regular table! Once we'd sat down and he'd ordered me a drink, like a proper arch-nemesis does, he revealed something horrifying."

"Anyone else I'd ask if he got the zipper down okay, but in your case you probably mean something else," says Santana, looking green but triumphant at having managed to interrupt with snark despite her stomach problems.

"Isn't he technically Kurt's arch-nemesis? I mean, they were going for the kill last night, it's like Kurt was Sean Connery and Sebastian was that—um—that other guy," Sam says haltingly, squinting with blurry eyes. Mercedes pats his arm and motions at Rachel to continue.

"Ahem. The first thing he told me was that this morning, having returned to the scene of the—commotion, he retrieved a video tape from the security camera at Warbler Wes' house. It caught the whole thing between him and Kurt—including Kurt throwing the first punch."

Kurt's cheeks start to burn as an icky, slimy, wormy feeling climbs up his spine. No one is looking at him, but every single person in the room is staring.

"There's no sound on the tape—he played it for me, somehow he got it onto his iPad in about two minutes—"

"Of course he did," Tina moans.

"—and so you can't hear anything that either of you say…which, I imagine, Kurt, would probably give you some grounds for provocation," she says with a softened tone, glancing at Kurt from across the room. He doesn't have the capacity to speak right now, but he manages a small nod to convey his gratitude.

"So that's it?" Artie asks dubiously, taking a big swig of coffee. "That's the big emergency? Oh hell no, I did not literally roll out of bed at this hour for that bullshit."

"It's not bullshit!" says Rachel indignantly. "It's bad, Artie, it's really—but wait, let me finish."

"Oh god, there's more?" Blaine asks desperately, his fingers curling around Kurt's wrist. Rachel nods gravely and leans forward in her chair like she's addressing the President.

"Apparently, Sebastian went to that party with a plan. He spent the entire night pumping us all for information, only we didn't realize it because we were all too drunk or too high or too careless to keep your mouths—"

"Rachel, I swear to god, if you say one more pretentious, self-satisfied, judgmental piece of crap, I am going to dropkick you out the window. Sorry, by the way," says Tina flatly, her hair draped over her face like a curtain to keep out the light. Rachel's mouth wags for a moment and then clamps shut; Finn reaches over and rubs her shoulder in a sad attempt at reassurance.

"Okay…um, well," Rachel continues after a moment, somewhat subdued, "the point is, someone must have let something slip eventually, because at the Lima Bean Sebastian lay down a list of every single idea we've had for Regionals. Our ballads, our group numbers, even our duets, as well as all the little themes and the song choices and the assignments we've had in the last couple months. He knows our whole plan of attack, you guys. Unless we start from scratch, we can't use any of what we've been working on so far."

"Why the hell not?" demands Puck far too loudly. Rachel fixes him with a cool stare.

"Because, Noah, not only can he plan the Warbler set list as a perfect counterpoint to ours in every way, but he can take the information elsewhere too—other clubs, for example. Plus, he also managed to get his hands on someone's cell phone last night, and now he has—oh god, I can barely say it—he has Sue Sylvester's number."

"Wait…this…this is actually bad, isn't it?" says Mercedes slowly, her eyes widening. The room is beginning to move from sleepy and irritated to tense and upset; Kurt can feel people waking up to a world they do not like, the electricity of indignation crackling around his ears.

"Yes, it's bad," Rachel says with triumph, basking in her moment of recognition before the awfulness of the situation settles back over her. "And the thing with Kurt is no small deal either. If he shows that video to the right person, Kurt might be suspended from performing. Off-site physical altercations with a member of another glee club can be construed as signs of bad sportsmanship and render the assailant unfit for participation in show choir competitions, as decided by Gary vs. Troy in 1979—"

"So they can steal all our songs, make us look like idiots, team up with the woman who tries to destroy us like the wrath of God, and disqualify one of our senior members?" Quinn asks slowly, her voice growing clearer and sharper and angrier with every word. Artie pounds a fist into the armrest of his wheelchair and Santana gets to her feet so quickly that Brittany's head bounces onto the ground and she yelps with pain.

"Pretty much," says Rachel bleakly. Santana stamps her foot, narrowly avoiding crushing Brittany's neck.

"Oh do not, do not even tell me this is what's happening," she says with fire in her voice, eyes blazing as she looks around the circle of distressed glee-clubbers. "Hell to the fuck no."

"He can't do this!" Finn chimes in, also jumping to his feet. "He can't get Kurt kicked out, you heard how he was talking about him all night, the guy obviously has it in for him and set him up—"

"Sure didn't look like a set-up," Sam mumbles with a sideways glance at Kurt. Somehow this catches Santana's attention and she rounds on Kurt, five foot five of leggy Latina fury.

"You! You haven't said anything the whole time we've been weebling around here because you know you fucked it all up for us! You and your stupid fight with that stupid jackass over your stupid little midget boyfriend, and you don't even have the balls to stand up and admit that—"

"How'd you know it was about Blaine?" It really is the first time Kurt has spoken since setting foot in this house, and his voice sounds weird and scratchy in his own ears. Santana stares at him like he's just sprouted antlers or spoken Japanese or worn clashing colors.

"What the hell does that mean?"

"It means," says Kurt slowly, gazing up at Santana and ignoring Blaine's fingernails beginning to dig into the underside of his wrist, "that no one knows what Sebastian and I talked about on the patio except for me and him. We were alone. Which means the only way you could know that I have issues with Sebastian about Blaine was if you talked to him about it."

Santana's mouth opens, closes, opens again. Kurt's body is tingling all over, a similar feeling to the time he accidently stuck his finger in the electrical socket after applying leave-in conditioner.

"I—he's obviously a tiger-gay and you're a poodle-gay and Blaine is a puppy-gay, and you were obviously going to throw down about him wanting to eat your puppy, and don't change the subject, it's your fault that—"

"I didn't tell him all of our business!" Kurt bursts out over her words, and he's on his feet now, practically chest-to-chest with Santana, their bloodshot-hungover eyes staring straight back at each other. "I was drunk but I never blacked out, I never talked to Sebastian about anything other than the sick way he plays around with me and my boyfriend, and if anyone was going to get weepy and wasted and spill every little thing we've done this year to the first asshole with a lot of time and interest to spare, it definitely wouldn't be me, I know that much!"

The room is silent, everyone staring at Kurt and Santana in the middle of the floor, outrage shimmering around the both of them like a heat haze. Santana's lip curls as her eyes move slowly up and down, leaving poisonous trails all over Kurt's body.

"Okay. Whatever. I talked to him last night, and maybe I said stuff about glee and maybe I didn't, you can't prove what I said any more than you can prove he was talking trash about Blaine when you delivered that beautiful right hook last night. Because let's not forget, Hummel, you're the one on camera, and you're the one who might be sitting in the audience at Regionals, watching us get demolished by the Warblers because one of them, one sneaky little son of a bitch in an ugly blazer, hates your guts enough to screw with all of us."

"The Warblers wouldn't…I mean, they wouldn't mean to…" Blaine says weakly from the couch; after a moment of effort, his voice fades away and he sits back, eyes in his lap. Nobody will meet Kurt's gaze, no one will look anything but sick to their stomachs. Rachel is deflated in her chair now, grasping Finn's dangling hand as he stands helplessly beside her. Rory blinks wide green eyes and swallows once.

"Is this—are we definitely going to lose, then?" he asks in a small voice. Santana gives Kurt one last little surge of loathing from her eyes and then retreats, dropping back onto the floor beside Brittany and taking hold of her girlfriend's hands. She brushes a lock of hair back from Brit's cheek and lays a gentle thumb over her trembling lips.

"Well, cottage-squatter, we sure ain't doin' so hot right now."

Much as he wants to kick her in the face, Kurt is inclined to agree.