Monday 14 November, 2039

Becoming a shell of one’s former self was not a pill easily swallowed. In fact, as Kurt stood before the small mirror in his tiny bathroom, one hand braced on the sink and the other running through his hair, he could barely swallow at all around the tight knot of soul-wrenching grief lodged in his throat like a piece of dry toast. He carded his fingers across his scalp, the skin providing little resistance to each sharp tug, and with every clump of hair that came away in his dry hands, another sob tore desperately at the ulcers in his mouth as the morphine wore off.

“Kurt, where are—”

There was nowhere to hide in the bathroom, so Kurt could do nothing but stand there as Blaine rounded the doorway in an isolation gown, mask and gloves, stopping dead in his tracks at the sight before him.

Kurt had been in his fifteen-by-fifteen isolation room for two weeks. On his third night, he had finished his round of pre-treatment and began a cocktail course of ATGAM and Cytoxan, administered via a broviac that made his skin itch. The vomiting had started on morning four, bile flooding his throat as a substitute for the food he hadn’t eaten. The nurses were patient and kind, only their eyes visible behind their masks and the hoods of their rustling isolation suits.

It had felt oddly and unsettlingly like being the subject of some perverse experiment, and if Kurt let himself drift into the heady veil of pure oxygen, he had found that he could pretend, just for a few minutes, that it wasn’t happening to him, that it wasn’t his life.

Each afternoon, whilst waiting for Blaine to pick up the twins from school and come by the hospital, Kurt had sat by the plate glass window of his room and looked out onto the courtyard, just as he had done from the window of Daniel’s office on the day of his official diagnosis. Nurses would bring out groups of five or six patients at a time, taking them on a winding circuit around the small garden, letting them stop by the benches if they needed a moment to catch their breath, and as Kurt had watched, the daily blood transfusions keeping his mind clearer than it had been for months, he’d had time to think. The small television had provided the background noise he’d sorely needed in his world of silence and the steady beep of his heart monitor, and he’d thought about everything. He had thought about his phone conversations with his dad, where so much history went unspoken but still hung between the lines like a dark specter.

Often, Kurt had pictured his mother sitting in her own isolation room, the thin drapes and bed linens typical d�cor of the century’s first decade. He had wondered if she spent her lonely afternoons sitting by her window, the sunlight warming her skin as the world continued outside the confines of the hospital, unnoticing and heedless to her plight. For the first time in a long time, he had wept for the years with her that he had lost, and yearned to be at home where he could have climbed up to the attic, pulled out all of the drawers of the dresser that had long since lost her scent, and laid down before it on the uneven floorboards until the ache in his limbs superseded the one in his heart.

Mostly, he had thought about Blaine.

Blaine, who was his first and last love, his high school sweetheart. Blaine, who he hadn’t been able to kiss or even hold hands with, skin to skin, for two weeks. Blaine, who had offered himself up to save Kurt’s life without a second thought for himself.

Kurt had remembered the look in his eyes when Blaine turned around at the bottom of the staircase, lighting up and shining through the mask he wore. He’d retraced the steps of their shared history, the life they had built together, every shining triumph he had celebrated and each dark storm he had weathered, all of it with Blaine by his side. When he’d tried to picture what life without Blaine might have been like, he hadn’t seen himself finding another man to write songs with in Central Park, or to marry at the Lighthouse, or to talk about starting a family with on Gin Beach. He hadn’t seen himself rising, or becoming.

Kurt hadn’t seen anything. Life without Blaine had simply been unimaginable.

He had lasted until day nine before the sores in his mouth had left him unable to speak for the pain, and it had finally hit him that every cell in his body, right down to the bone, was in revolt, and that that was actually the calm before the storm. It was easily the most terrifying moment of his life, like standing on the precipice of a great cliff and knowing that he was already losing his balance, about to fall and being able to do nothing to stop it. Every night after that, sleeping fitfully and waking every hour when the nurses would come to check the infusions, Kurt had dreamt.

On Day Zero, fourteen days after he had first been admitted and two days after his treatment cycle had come to an end, Kurt woke up with clumps of hair on his pillow, and Blaine found him in the bathroom not twenty minutes later.

“Kurt, where are—”

There was nowhere to hide in the bathroom, so Kurt could do nothing but stand there as Blaine rounded the doorway in an isolation gown and mask and stopped dead in his tracks at the sight before him. It struck Kurt, as it did every day, how out of place Blaine looked in the hospital garb, like Floridian humidity in the depths of bleakest winter. It drained the colors of him, reduced him to just another cog in the wheel of the machine that had been put in place to save Kurt’s life.

As Blaine hesitantly approached, he turned back to face the pale, ghostly figure in the mirror and looked over his crooked handiwork. His hair was much thinner, and there were patches here and there where none was left at all.

“At least I don’t have to be worried about male pattern baldness, now,” he said, using the sleeve of his robe to wipe at his eyes while wincing at the flare of pain in his mouth.

Blaine stood behind him, running feather-light fingers down Kurt’s arms to entwine with his, and he wrapped both of their arms around Kurt’s waist, resting his forehead on Kurt’s shoulder and letting out a trembling sigh. “You’re still—“

“Don’t, Blaine. Not right now.”

He felt Blaine nod once, the motion fraught with tension, and let Blaine lead him from the bathroom, trying to forget the image of long strands of hair collected in the bottom of the spotless bathroom sink.

“Do you remember my first year of college, when you called me that day in April?” Kurt asked slowly as he sat on the edge of the bed, his teeth gritted to keep the movement of his mouth to an absolute minimum. Blaine crouched in front of him and raised his eyebrows a little at Kurt’s question; over the course of the separation, it had descended into one of their darkest, most desolate times, the air wearing thin and much too hard to come by. It wasn’t something they looked back on fondly, or even really at all. “It was the day that you got The Book in the mail, and you called me. We didn’t say a word for twenty minutes, and yet… It felt like the first time in six months that we were actually listening to one another.”

“Then you sang The Scientist to me.”

“I did.”

“What made you think about that?” Blaine asked, after a pause.

“I’ve been thinking about a lot of things. Mom, Dad, the kids… Things I still have left to do. Cheesecake,” Kurt listed, smiling weakly. “Mostly about you, though. How much you’ve grown, how far you’ve come, and how I’ve been here to see it.”

“Kurt, don’t—“

“I’ve been thinking about that year because it… It set us up for life,” Kurt continued, locking his eyes to Blaine’s. “We managed to grow together even from so far apart, but we also learned how to survive without one another, and I—“

“Don't you dare, Kurt,” Blaine interrupted, his voice rising as he took Kurt’s hand between his own in a vice grip. “Don't you dare. You made me a promise to me when you were seventeen years old that you’d never do this, and you can’t break that promise now just because you're scared. I’ll survive this, of course I will, and so will you. You have to. You can't leave me.”

“Blaine, listen to me. Listen. You...” Kurt paused, steeling himself to give the speech he’d been rehearsing for days. “You've always done so much for me. Right from the start, you—you gave me a lifeline. From that first coffee in the student lounge back at Dalton, you were my knight. I don't think you understand how much you saved me, because I was really floundering. Managing to keep it together, but still floundering, and all it took was one word from you, seven letters, and suddenly there was light.

“You saved me then, and you're saving me now. And it's more than that, it's... Blaine, you've helped me become the man that I always wanted to be. I was always self-assured, but deep down, losing so much... There was this voice that was telling me I'd never measure up. But all I had to do was open my locker, or look at my phone, or drive a couple hours, and I'd be reminded of this beautiful boy who made me want to be better. Not just for myself, but for him, too.

“Having you in my life has always been a blessing, Blaine, always. I've taken you for granted, sometimes, but I've always felt lucky. Because who gets everything that they ever wanted? Until you, there were so many... gaps in my heart. And somehow, you bridged them all. I need you to know that it’s been an honor to have had you in my life, and if something—if something goes wrong, in two hours or in two hundred thousand, you haven't just made me happy. You've made me.”

Blaine crumpled, tears already staining the edge of the mask, and he pitched forward, dropped his forehead to their clasped hands, and let out a single, gut-wrenching sob. Long and silent minutes passed with Kurt’s cheek pressed to the top of Blaine’s head, wishing for and missing the familiar feeling of Blaine’s soft curls against his bare skin.

“Come up to meet you, tell you I’m sorry, you don’t know how lovely you are,” he sang in a rasping whisper, his own tears slipping free at both the pain in his mouth and the need that thrummed through his bloodless veins.

“I had to find you, tell you I need you, and tell you I set you apart,” Blaine’s reply came, muffled by both the mask and his position. All at once he reared back, dropping Kurt’s hand and standing up so quickly that it almost made Kurt’s head swim. He watched as Blaine’s eyes darted wildly about the room before coming to settle on the glove dispenser, mounted on the wall at chest height just to his left. He yanked one from the box, gaze falling back on Kurt, and the latex squeaked where he twisted it around his own gloved hands. “Let me try something.”

Slowly, Blaine pulled his mask down, and it felt like a little of the color returned to Kurt’s world. He bent to place the glove’s flat side loosely over Kurt’s mouth and moved closer, close enough for Kurt to feel the warmth of his breath, and held the glove in place with his thumbs. His fingers splayed beneath the prominent line of Kurt’s jaw, tips pressing into the dips at the nape of his neck, and Kurt let his raw eyes flutter closed at the mere touch.

Moments later, there was a warm, firm pressure against his lips through the layer of latex, Blaine’s nose against his cheek, and Kurt exhaled in relief. He could imagine the soft, smooth texture and the fullness of Blaine’s lips—he’d been doing so for two weeks, after all, and countless times before then whenever they had been separated—but it was the warmth that he had so quickly forgotten in all of his stark detachment, and it was that warmth that had him scrabbling for purchase on Blaine’s arms, his shoulders, the hollow of his neck. Fresh tears built in the corners of his eyes at the sudden and overwhelming sense of gratitude—everything fell away, like the first bite of a meal on an empty stomach, and although by anyone else’s estimation it was probably far from the perfect kiss, in that moment Blaine’s mouth upon his own was the only thing that Kurt cared about.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” he whispered brokenly when Blaine pulled back, discarding the glove and quickly replacing his mask. He pressed his palm to his chest, closing his eyes and feeling his heart race as fast as a March hare. “How long until you… have to go?”

“I’ve got time,” Blaine answered, climbing up onto the bed beside Kurt, settling back against the pillows and holding out his arms. “Just let me hold you for now. We can do that.”

Kurt turned and slid his legs onto the bed, curling so that he was lying half on top of Blaine, ear to his chest and listening to the steady heartbeat there. The material of Blaine’s isolation gown rustled as Blaine wrapped his arms around him, and it was the one time that Kurt didn’t care, cocooned as he was in warmth and a feeling of love that had never been more tangible.

“I can’t wait ‘til you can eat cheesecake again,” Blaine murmured.

“I love you, too,” Kurt replied, smiling despite himself. Despite everything.

Blaine held him tighter, gloved fingers playing piano chords up and down the length of his arm, and Kurt thought back to the summer that Blaine was writing his third album, where they’d been shirtless and stretched out in the long grass of their back yard. Blaine had composed across the bare skin of Kurt’s back, kissing his freckles and picking out melodies on wavering staffs before taking a pen and filling the expanse with quavers and crotchets and treble clefs until Kurt had felt like he was made of Blaine’s music, like he was a being of Blaine’s own creation.

The vibrations of Blaine’s quiet humming lulled Kurt, let him drift and float, until it petered off into a repetition of three words, “I love you,” and Kurt closed his eyes, capturing the light and taking it with him.

Carefully, Kurt maneuvered himself out of bed and stood. He easily removed the tubes from his broviac, having watched the nurses doing it often enough to know the method, and pulled on his robe, tying it at the waist. He wanted one last breath of fresh air before the transplant, before he would be absolutely confined to his room for the long stretch of time that the doctors were estimating as eight weeks but that Kurt was adamant would be over before Christmas.

Not a single member of hospital staff tried to stop him as he made his way through the stark corridors and down to the ground floor, and outside the sun was shining with a welcoming, unseasonable warmth. He stepped through the doors and onto a road that was walled in on either side. When he turned around, the hospital had vanished.

The road was impossibly long, stretching off in either direction as far as he could see. Kurt stood in place, watching the dark walls undulating and hearing them whisper to him. Looking closer, he got fleeting impressions of faces—eyes here, a mouth there—all the same, yet graduated incarnations: some youthful and at play, some lined with earned wisdom and gifted life. They ebbed like a tide in the obsidian smoke, inching gradually forward, and the motion pulled Kurt toward a horizon that was moving closer, blossoming daylight presenting a tundra unlike anything Kurt had ever seen.

The sky overhead had the appearance of an oil painting, the clouds looking more like smudges and swirls of white and grey, and the afternoon sun beat down on him with a punishing heat. Strands of the finest silk thread fell in torrents from above, spinning and floating and twirling through the open air to land and blanket the ground in white. Spindled red arrows littered the cobblestones upon which he walked carefully, all pointing straight ahead, to where the sky darkened and dipped into a mess of ocher, fuchsia and mauve.

It was there that Kurt found himself walking through a flowered meadow. Wind whipped up around him, buffeting his frail body as he clung to a walking stick made of bones. He needed to get to the very edge of the meadow where, just beyond the fence, there was a wide expanse of mahogany floor. The flowers around him were blood red in his peripheral vision, yet whenever he turned to look, they appeared drained of color entirely, their petals shimmering hues of white and cream. Strains and snatches of music assailed him, piano keys and guitar strings and a honeyed voice that spoke of love and remembrance and the fickle nature of time. Nutshells crunched underfoot, and he walked onward.

Passing through the cardboard trees lining the meadow’s white picket fence, he came to it soon enough: a grand spiral staircase that stood solitary. A slim woman sat in one of the two plush chairs at the bottom, beneath a wooden archway strung with cloth and lilacs. Around them, cherry blossoms fell like snow onto the ground, melting out of sight before they could settle. Kurt approached her slowly, and when she turned to look at him, she smiled beatifically.

“It’s not supposed to be you here, little one,” she said, but patted the chair next to her all the same, the sleeves of her white dress moving and spreading out as if underwater. “It’s too soon to be seeing you again.”

“Who’s supposed to be here if not me?” Kurt asked, taking the offered seat and laying down his walking stick; he had a feeling he didn’t need it any more. When she didn’t answer, he asked instead, “where do the stairs lead?”

“It’s not a stairway to heaven, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“Always with the Zeppelin,” Kurt said fondly, taking her warm hand. “I’ve missed you so much. Can I stay a little while?”

“A little while means a long while here, little one. It’s time to run along upstairs, now,” she told him, pulling him back to his feet and tucking a spray of flowers through the buttonhole of his jacket; an allium for strength, a white carnation for luck, and sweet pea for goodbye. She pressed a four-leaf clover into his palm and curled his fingers over it. “Give that to Blaine when you see him. I miss our little talks.”

Careful of his boutonniere, Kurt wrapped his arms around her and rested his cheek on her shoulder. “When will I see you again?”

She laughed into the kiss she placed upon his forehead, the sound buoying him up as he stepped back. “You have a lot of time left, yet,” she said, before nodding toward the staircase, sitting back down and wagging a finger at him. “Don’t keep him waiting too long. I love you, little one.”

With one last look, he placed his hand on the banister and smiled. “I love you too,” he said, and started to climb.

Kurt woke up alone, lying on his back, groggy-eyed and warm from the blankets that had been pulled up to his waist. He could still feel phantom impressions of Blaine left all over him, and one of his nurses was hanging a fat bag containing a dark red substance on his IV stand. At first glance it looked like a regular bag of blood, but when he looked closer, he could see the hand-written label clearly.

DONOR
NAME: HUMMEL-ANDERSON, Blaine
DOB: 17 Oct 1994
MRN: 520 14 12
ABO/Rh: O Pos

RECIPIENT
NAME: HUMMEL-ANDERSON, Kurt
DOB: 27 May 1994
MRN: 520 65 29
ABO/Rh: A Pos

“Morning, sleepy-head,” the nurse said, pausing and looking down at him.

“Are you Lydia or Cheryl?” he asked, bracing his hands on the too-firm mattress in order to sit up a little straighter.

“I’m shocked and appalled that you can’t distinguish our dulcet tones yet,” she said, affronted, before laughing. “It’s Lydia, sweetie. Before you ask, your gorgeous husband is doing just fine. We’re actually about ready to get started here.”

Kurt swallowed and folded his hands in his lap, noticing for the first time the clear, empty tube that had been connected to his broviac.

“Ready?” Lydia asked, her gloved hand light on his trembling shoulder.

It’s not supposed to be you here, little one.

Kurt closed his eyes, breathed in, and said, “Ready.”