“Blaine. This doesn’t go. Now you are gonna come down to the car with me, and we’ll drive home so you can get a shower and an hour or two of sleep. Burt and Finn are staying with Kurt, so don’t you worry about that.” Carol cupped Blaine’s face in her hand with a maternal look in her eyes, but her voice was sharp and determined.

Blaine was holding Kurt’s hand firmly, even though Kurt had been asleep for over an hour. Blaine had tried to get some sleep himself by resting his head on the bed, but he hadn’t succeeded.

It was around noon and the hospital was buzzing, alive with voices and people walking in the halls.

Earlier that day Kurt’s doctors had been in to check up on him, and while a nurse had changed the sheets Blaine had helped Kurt taking a bath. He was way too weak to take care of those things himself now.

Blaine’s eyes were hurting, and his eyesight was blurry from his lack of sleep. His muscles were sore, and his head had started to become constantly unfocused.

“I knew this would come. I’m really fine, Caro -” Blaine started, but Carol stopped him before he could finish his objection.
“I don’t wanna hear any of that. You are not fine, and it’s completely okay. Just come, Blaine. We’ll get you back to Kurt as quickly as possible.”

And that was it. Blaine was perfectly aware that when Carol talked in that tone she was not to be argued with.
He looked at Kurt in front of him, and squeezed his hand as hard as he could.
Did Kurt squeeze back, or was he imagining things?

Blaine stood up from his chair, eyes locked on Kurt, feeling Carol’s fixated gaze on him as he bend down to kiss Kurt’s forehead.

“I’ll hurry back. I promise. You won’t even have time to miss me. I love you,” Blaine whispered before he stood up and followed Carol out of the room, where Burt and Finn were waiting in the hall to go in.

Nobody said a word, they just shot him sympathetic smiles. Carol hugged Burt tight before they left. Still not a word. Did Burt look like he had been crying?

*

The drive to the Hummel-Hudson house was silent. They didn’t even turn on the radio. Blaine felt awfully guilty about leaving Kurt behind, and kept turning his wedding ring over and over on his finger while staring blankly out the windshield.

Out of the corner of his eyes he saw Carol sending him concerned glances, whenever the road allowed her to look away for a brief second, but neither of them spoke.

Once they entered the house Blaine realized that he had to go to Kurt’s room. Without Kurt. The room that Kurt hadn’t been to for almost a month.

Blaine twisted and turned his brain to find an excuse to postpone it just a minute or two longer, but he couldn’t.
Carol let a hand softly stroke over his back, and he knew that it was his cue to get it over with.

Kurt’s room felt oddly like a mix of home and the unknown. It was strange.
The silence of the room was pressing on his lungs, making it hard for Blaine to breath.

Blaine couldn’t understand how this was the room where they had once laughed, cried, danced and cuddled in. This was the bed where they had spent hours of closeness, talking, watching movies and having sex - making love.

Now it was silent and alienated. Like a replica of that room he had come to know as home, when his parents’ home couldn’t house him anymore.

Blaine walked to the bathroom and started stripping off his clothes in a catatonic state, doing his best not to recall the memories that were clashing in on him, even though they were fighting each other to get his attention before the others.

As he entered the shower he felt confused, and realized he had forgot how to do every day stuff such as showering or brushing his teeth. His brain just didn’t hold room for such trivial things anymore.

Now it didn’t matter how long he was standing with the water running down over him; the healing effect he had once imagined the water to have on him was gone. The cancer was everywhere.
He could smell it in his clothes, on his fingers, even in the smell of Kurt’s room even though it had been so long since Kurt had been there himself.

When he was done he put on his boxers and went back into Kurt’s room to sit on the bed. He couldn’t be bothered to put on his clothes yet.
Carol had told him that she had to run some errands in town, so he could get a nap while she was away. Then what was the point in him getting dressed if he couldn’t go back to Kurt?

Blaine laid down on Kurt’s bed to wait, and fell asleep. The pillows and the bedspread still smelled like Kurt, but as if they were in some distant memory. It was the old smell of Kurt; the smell of Kurt without the cancer, the smell of a happy healthy boy, the smell of his shampoo and deodorant, the smell of his laughter and gentle touch.

*

Puck woke up Blaine making him panic. He had forgot how it felt to sleep in a bed, instead of in the chair next to Kurt’s hospital bed, holding Kurt’s hand faithfully only just enough asleep to still hear the hushed conversations around him, and the tapping of the nurses tripping around the room so he would be able to wake up if anything was to happen.

Blaine was just too scared to close his eyes. A horrifying voice in the back of his head kept saying that he couldn’t miss a second because it might be the last. He did his best to push the voice away, even though in his heart he knew that it was the truth. He heard the doctors tell him that they were optimistic, but he didn’t believe the tone they said it in. They talked with that voice doctors use to distance themselves from a patient in an ill-fated state.

As he had been sleeping the same nightmares had tormented his dreams. The well-known nightmare of the small vicious creatures feeding off Kurt’s blood, the creepy scene of him singing Blackbird at Kurt’s funeral holding the hand of his mom and Kurt‘s ghost, disturbing frames of Kurt; lifeless and pale dressed in black - the same horrible views that returned every time Blaine closed his eyes, even blinking.

“Hey man. Easy. It’s just me,” Puck said carefully when Blaine woke up in a rush. It wasn’t until he saw Puck’s disturbed look that Blaine realized he had screamed and his cheeks were wet.
“I’m sorry, Puck. I just - bad dream, you know,” Blaine explained, still trying to shake off the terrifying images.

“Yeah, I know. I keep having them too. I can’t even begin to imagine what it must be like for you.” Puck looked around the room, as if he could smell the changes as well.
“I dream about him being like - you know, and you just being all…” Puck didn’t finish the sentence. He just sat with his mouth ajar for a second, before he closed it and sent Blaine an apologetic glance - as if he wanted to apologize for even thinking of such a thought.

That was the second the guilt hit Blaine. He had no idea how long it had been since he had left the hospital, so he started frantically fumbling around for his phone before he realized that he was clasping it in his one hand.
No messages, no unanswered calls.
“No news is good news," Blaine thought to himself before he stood up and put on his jacket.

“I met Carol in town and she said that you were here asleep, so she asked me to come and drive you back to the hospital while she fixed some things. I hope it’s cool,” Puck explained, his brows furrowed in a worried expression.

“We’d better get going. I’ve been gone for way too long. I just -” But Puck stopped him with an understanding look, and made a gesture reminding Blaine that he was still in his underwear.

Blaine rushed embarrassedly off the bed and hurried to put on some clothes, and then they left the room.

As neither of them spoke during the ride to the hospital Blaine was sure that Puck was avoiding the elephant in the room as much as he was. The thing they didn’t talk about. The unmentionable. The unspoken knowledge.

It was too much. The air in the car was thick and Blaine needed so heart achingly to talk about it. To let all of his pain and stinging spill on the floor and not give a care in the world about who he was talking to - but he had a constant fear in the back of his head that if he spoke it out loud it would come true. Too many Disney movies, he was well aware, but he wasn’t planning on taking that risk.

*

When they got to the hospital they found Burt in the hall talking to Blaine’s mom. Finn and Rachel were with Kurt, so Burt and Susan had decided to go for coffee to not overcrowd Kurt.
Blaine could feel it as a slap in the face the second their eyes met. His mom’s sympathy. It felt as if she didn’t see him as her son, but as if she saw him as a poor boy who needed someone to take care of him. Didn’t she know that he needed his mom?

He knew that he was being irrational, and that the stress was making him draw far off conclusions. Blaine and Puck walked over to them, hugging his mom and greeting Burt.

“How is he? Is it very bad?” Blaine asked before either of them could say anything. He couldn’t help feeling that while he had been away the whole world had changed without his knowledge.

“He’s very tired, but keeps saying that he’s fine. As always with Kurt. But the doctors are coming in two hours and they’ll tell us the results of the latest tests. Kurt asked them to wait until you got here,” Burt explained, his voice soft and his face exhausted.
Blaine wondered how much sleep he was getting.

Burt and Susan asked if he and Puck wanted to join them for coffee in the cafeteria, but Blaine declined. Puck sent Blaine and asking look, as if to get his permission to follow them. Blaine nodded at them and watched as they disappeared down the hall.

Blaine wanted to go in to join Finn and Rachel with Kurt but instead he stayed outside and looked through the little window in the door. He watched as Rachel crammed Kurt’s hand close with dried tear trails down her face, and Finn a foot apart trying to hide his own tears.

After some time the door opened and Finn and Rachel left Kurt’s room.
Rachel’s eyes were swollen and puffy and she did her best to send him a smile, but it looked more like a forced grimace than anything else.

Finn let his arm brush against Blaine’s shoulder as if in recognition that he wanted to hug Blaine, but felt it awkward to do so in front of Rachel. Instead Finn settled for stroking Blaine’s arm and leading Rachel down the hall as he saw how Blaine was tripping to leave them behind so he could see Kurt.

As Blaine entered the room he realized how noticeable it had become that Kurt was so drained for power that it was starting to look like his skin was stretched out directly over his bones. His hair was free off the shine it had always had, his eyes were glasslike and his skin was ashy.

“Hey gorgeous. I was starting to fear that you had forgot about me,” Kurt said in a rasp voice when Blaine came around the bed to stand by his side.
Blaine swallowed, trying to not focus on how fragile Kurt looked in front of him, struggling to force a smile.

“I could never forget you, you airhead,” Blaine responded thickly as he let his fingers slide in between Kurt’s.
Kurt fought a heated battle to return his smile, his lungs fighting their own war to keep him breathing.

Blaine sat down in the chair, and listened to Kurt talk about Finn and Rachel’s visit, and how Sam had promised to stop by the next day.

Whenever Kurt tried to talk, Blaine had to help him with the oxygen mask every second word.
Blaine would stroke his hair, hold his hand and hum quietly to him, and Kurt would try desperately to at least smile at Blaine in gratitude, but most of the times he couldn’t.

Kurt quickly had to sleep, because even keeping his eyes open had turned into an exhausting struggle.
It was painful for Blaine to even be in the room, but it was even more excruciating to not be there. If he left for just a minute all he could think of was that he needed to hurry back to Kurt, he couldn’t stop thinking about all the things that could happen while he was away, so in the end he just refused to get up.

*

When it was time for the doctors to come Kurt started talking around Blaine being there during the meeting. He kept asking whether he was sure that he didn’t want to go somewhere to relax instead, but all Blaine had to say was: “You’re my husband, and I am not leaving your side” and Kurt had known that there was no way around it.

The whole setting was unbelievably uncomfortable. Blaine was standing next to the bed, Kurt sitting up, with Burt and Carol sitting in the chairs, their hands locked waiting for whatever news the doctors might have to bring them.

The two doctors who had been following Kurt throughout the entire process of his disease that was standing in front of them with grave looks on their faces. This made a chill creep under Blaine’s skin and he had to stop himself from squeezing Kurt’s hand too hard.

“Listen, Kurt - the last blood tests we ran on you didn’t show any increasing in the cancer cells; but they didn’t show any less either. We still see an opportunity in you getting better though, so don’t lose all faith just yet. You’ve been standing strong, and your family has too. I can’t promise you anything, because there has really been no development in any direction for you, but I can tell you that I am keeping my spirit optimistic for you,” one of the doctors explained with a pokerface that was Gus Hansen worthy.

Nobody responded. It felt like a nuclear bomb had just been dropped in the room and all that was left now was the ear pounding silence of the aftermath.
Blaine wanted to shift to see Kurt’s reaction but he couldn’t bring himself to do it, so instead he kept staring at the doctor; a nice man in his mid-thirties who was crazily good looking and had revealed that he had spend most of his teenage years with a boyfriend rather than a girlfriend.

Blaine felt like he was staring, but in reality he didn’t even see the man. All he saw was fog in front of him, blur, mist - a mixed of colors before his eyes making it harder for him to focus and follow what was happening around him.

“Thank you, doctor. I guess there’s not much we can do then,” responded Burt after long silence. It sounded like a boulder was weighing on his chest, and Blaine felt a need to throw his arms around his father-in-law. His dad.

“Unfortunately not. I wish there was something I could say, but as for now I’ve got nothing. How about you, Kurt? Do you have any questions? Anything to add?” The doctor addressed Kurt in a soft voice speaking to Kurt as more of a hurt friend, than a patient, a stranger.

Blaine still didn’t look at Kurt, but he felt him shaking his head, hearing his breathing rasp and fighting in Kurt’s throat.

“If there’s nothing more I will have to get on with my schedule, but you know where to find me if you should need anything, right? A nurse will come and take some new tests next week as usual.” The doctor shook hands with everyone, letting a hand stroke over Kurt’s cheek before he wished them good luck and left the room followed by his colleague.

Blaine didn’t understand why he always brought the second doctor. He never said anything, so why did he have to stand there and hover over them like that? It was creepy and uncomfortable.

The atmosphere in the room was thick with taboo after the doctors left. They all knew that if anyone tried mentioning the conversation Kurt would tell them to leave, so none of them dared to bring it up, and the rest of the day was uneventful, except for Sam’s visit.

Sam had brought Kurt a little box that had held a little silver G clef pin. Sam fastened it on the pillowcase of Blaine’s pillow that Kurt still held religiously onto.
Kurt had thanked him with tears in his eyes, a battle to hug back when Sam embraced him.

Sam left after an hour of talking about all and nothing, and Blaine followed him to the hall where he hugged Sam long and closely in a desperate attempt to show his gratitude.
As they had let go off each other Sam had squeezed Blaine’s tricep as if to show that he knew exactly what it was Blaine couldn’t put into words.

Blaine returned to the room where he found Kurt on Blaine’s pillow ready for Blaine to sing him to sleep.