Rain didnt come.  Even after all they had been through, the heavens still refused to open up over them and give them a bit of a break.  Bit by bit Blaine could see the toll it had taken on the community.  People looks grubbier from not washing as much.  Hell, some people outright stunk.  Everyone looked more worn down.  Kurt stopped hunting.

"The animals have migrated away... Theres nothing for them around here to eat or drink..." He had explained after coming home empty handed for the seventh day in a row.  Not even the snares and traps were catching anything.  Odder still was that there had been barely any birds passing overhead since their return home.   Even before they had left, when things were still dry, Kurt could still shoot down a bird a two a day to help with the food supply.

There hadnt been as many births to the livestock this year either, which Blaine accounted to the animals knowing when their resources were strained.  What was sadder still was the rumours that people were talking about slaying their dogs for meat if it came to it.

"Its insane.  We have a good rationing system.  So long as things pick up next spring then well be fine.  Why is everyone immediately going to the darkest reaches of their minds?!"  He asked rhetorically to Kurt one evening.  Blaine knew why.  These were people who had already lost their world in their lifetime due to the Others.  They had lost family, friends, their sense of innocence, their hopes and dreams.  It was easier to prepare for the worst than to hope for the best.

Kurt spent his days tinkering on old vehicles in lieu of hunting.  The side of their home becoming something reminiscent of a junkyard with all the pipes and pieces of engines laying around.  Blaine couldnt name half the stuff out there, but it seemed to give Kurt a purpose and some kind of enjoyment.  His old ATV was among the vehicles parked beside the cabin, the once bright yellow paint worn with weather and age.  Looking at it filled him with nostalgia, thoughts of days spent riding free, but days hed happily given up in favour of the simple domesticity he had now with Kurt, drought or not.

Blaine tried to occupy his time caring for the livestock the community had, which included trying to gather dried grass and leaves for the animals to eat.  Without the rain, the ground had become dry and cracked, and the grass followed suite.  Usually by the end of summer it was up to his waist in height, trying to tickle his sides as it snuck up his shirts.  This year it barely curled around his ankles in angry brown coils.  

Water rations were periodically reduced.  Every time it happened people screamed bloody murder in the streets and declared that end times were near.  It was amazing how people became more religious the more desperate they felt about their existence, and, according to Kitty, the church was packed on Sundays now.  Blaine had never gone, and he knew Kurt didnt believe in that stuff at all, but he had to wonder what kind of solace people found in that place that seemed to calm them down enough to survive another week without going on the rampage.  

Trent did note that as people became more involved in the church, they became less interested in borrowing books from the library.  It perplexed him to no end.

"Why wouldnt you want to lose yourself in a good piece of fiction when things seem tough?"

Blaine couldnt give him an answer to that.

One of the small blessings since their return was that people were less frigid towards Kurt.  The wounds he had suffered at the hands of the Others in the attempt to rescue the lost community members seemed to redeem him in the eyes of many.  Maybe they finally saw that he wasn't some spy for the Others, or that at least he wasn't against them.  Whatever it was, when Beth ran to him not long after returning and hugged him in the middle of the street, Quinn and Noah didn't rush to pull her away.  Kurt had savoured that hug.  Blaine could see it in the way his body tensed at first and then melted as he returned the affection to the girl who was rapidly growing into her teenage years.  

“I'm glad you're safe.”  She had told him as she pulled away finally, smiling at him before skipping back to her parents, waiting across the road.  Kurt watched as they walked away after that and murmured so only Blaine could hear.

“Maybe there are such things as miracles….”

"Unca Blaine!  Froggies!"  Isaac yelled at Blaine one day as he was walking towards his home after working the fields, collecting what bits of vegetation he could to feed the animals.

It wasnt something Blaine expected to hear, but, sure enough, when Isaac ran his way and opened up his hands there was a little green frog encased in them.

"Wow Isaac... Whered you find him?  Frogs usually stay near water."  Blaine noted and he knelt down to examine the slimy looking creature contently croaking in Isaacs dirty palms.

"Lots by my house!  Come see!"  

Blaine rushed after the small boy, coming upon Trent and Kittys home and letting his eyes inflate as he took in the scene before him.  Saying there were lots was an understatement.  He pinched himself with a wince to make sure he wasnt dreaming as he took in the sea of brown and green composed of hopping frogs who seemed intent on making their way towards the town.  By her door, Kitty was working on grabbing the frogs by their legs and dropping them into a canvas sack that was moving and pulsing from the creatures caught inside trying to escape.

"Frogs legs are delicious." She explained to Blaine when she saw him staring, letting his stomach sour at the thought of consuming such gross little things.

"Momma said I can keep this one as my pet!"  Isaac declared up at Blaine, having to yell to be heard over the croaking.

"How? Why?"  Blaine uttered and then shook his head.  Kitty wouldnt have the answers to this pseudo miracle, he thought to himself.

"Kurts catching a batch by your place too Blaine.  Enjoy the new delicacy."

His stomach tightened, but his must have been the only one to have that reaction because the rest of the town celebrated the arrival of the frogs, scooping them up in much the same way Kitty had been when Blaine had seen her and having a special dinner that evening.  Try as he might though, Kurt just couldnt make it appealing to Blaine.

"I spiced them up. Theyll just taste like chicken wings."  Kurt had said in an attempt to have Blaine eat the little croakers.

"Sorry... Ill stick to my dry bread."

The frogs didnt move on though once they had invaded the town, and what had been a blessing at first quickly became a nuisance as people had to fight to get frogs out of their beds, their homes, and even their laps when they sat down.  Frog legs became a regular menu item, and still Blaine couldnt stomach the thought of eating them, even though people were consuming them madly now in the hopes theyd get rid of them faster than they seemed to be populating the town.  A task easier thought out than actually achieved.  It didnt seem to matter how many frogs they slaughtered though as new ones always seemed to hop into their place.

"Where do you think they all came from?" Sam asked one evening when they were having him, Mercedes, and the girls over for dinner.

"Jeff figures that there was some marshland southeast of here that must have been destroyed somehow.  Wouldnt be shocked if it were Others spooking them somehow as they tried to get into our safety bubble."  Kurt offered up in explanation, leading Blaine to wonder when his husband and Jeff had become such good buddies.

"Well I dont know if we should thank em or curse them harder."  Mercedes huffed, gnawing on a frog leg bone while a rogue frog hopped over her as Kurt tried to shoo it out with a broom.

"Personally, Im hoping they irritate a wild band of pigs next.  Bacon would be a nice touch to our menu."  Sam said before smacking the frog out of his lap where it had tried to seek refuge from the broom.

"Santana says she figures they have a hold on huge population now."  Kurt added in.  “Besides, they can't really reproduce without water… and our water is all contained.”

"Mmm... Well at least we had a good week of full meals in the meantime."

The frogs did die off over the next week, aside from a few stubborn holdouts that seemed to be happy to exist and annoy under floorboards where they would croak all day and all night long.  Blaine was just glad that frog wasn't on the menu as much and he could get his protein needs filled with beans and jerky again.

Since returning, Kurt hadn't been watching the kids as much.  It was partly due to the limited amount of work their parents had to undertake given the drought, partly because no one dared go on runs anymore, and partly because it had taken a little while before his legs and arms healed up.  So when Kitty showed up on their doorstep one morning pleading with Kurt to watch Isaac, Blaine was confused since Isaac had started in Rachel and Finn's class a couple months earlier.

“Doesn't he have school today?”

“There's a lice outbreak among the kids.  One kid got it, and now a whole bunch of them do.  I treated I don't know how many cases yesterday at the clinic after you left.  It's disgusting.  I don't want him getting it.  Trent has to watch the library, and Gwen has been sniffly so I don't want to risk Isaac getting a cold either if I can help it.”

Kurt agreed of course, happy to have a companion for the day.  Blaine watched, smile on his face, as Kurt led Isaac over the engines and vehicles at the side of the house and explained how he would be teaching Isaac all about motors today.

He wished he and Kurt could have their own child to spend all their hours with, and he wished he could spend the day watching Kurt with Isaac.  Kurt was always more relaxed, and more blissful when he had a child to care for.

However, Blaine was in the clinic that morning, and true to Kitty's word, there was a lice epidemic.  Kids and adults alike came in for help from Blaine and Mike, who did their best to clean out the nits and eggs using measures recommended in several of the textbooks they had - including wet combing, and heating the head with blow dryers (which meant pulling out and using the generators usually reserved for powering the x-ray machine).

They recommended shaving heads, much to the chagrin of the young ladies they worked on, and having anyone else with long hair tie it back in ponytails or tight braids.  

“People aren't cleaning themselves as well as they used to before the drought.”  Mike lamented as they shared a short break between cleaning heads.

Blaine nodded in agreement.  The lack of water for sanitation was taking its toll.  He was glad he and Kurt lived out of the main town because he'd read that living in close proximity to others increased the spread of lice.  Many of the infected were neighbours who'd probably had the lice jump from person to person.  Regardless of the reason, Blaine knew he was going to use up most of his daily water rations cleaning himself silly before he went home to Kurt.  He didn't want to end up with an irritated, lice ridden husband if he could help it.  

Trent didn't open the library during the lice infestation, staying home with the kids after that day while Kitty and Blaine spent their time at the clinic for all the daily wet combing and scalp heating treatments that needed to be delivered.  With school on hold until the lice issue was contained, the library was woefully underused anyhow.  Sam shaved his head as a precaution since he patrolled with several people whose kids were affected, and Santana had her hair pulled back in a tight braid for the same reason.  Kurt only came into town to take care of the generators which were being used consistently, warning the medics that they were old and could only take so much.  Otherwise he stayed away, telling Blaine that lice gave him the heebie-jeebies and he didn't want to risk being close to them.  

Blaine couldn't fault him for that.  They were disgusting little things, and Blaine would be happy to see them go.  

It seemed like the community was bound for calamity though, because as soon as the lice issue began to clear up, they were swarmed by another problem.

Literally, swarmed.

There had been a buzzing in the middle of the night, and in the morning flies were everywhere.  Giant, black things that invaded everything even more than the frogs had managed to do.  At first they had just annoyed the livestock, but then they spread throughout the town until precautions were put in place to make sure they didn't get into buildings.  Mosquito netting was put up in front of windows and doors.  Homemade fly traps were made and hung up on building overhangs, covered in minutes with wiggling little black bugs.  Where they had been able to keep the lice contained to town though, the flies thrived in the grasses by Kurt and Blaine's home, resulting in them hastily adding more clay between the cracks in the wood of their house to keep the flies from getting in while they stayed inside as much as they could to avoid the irritating insects.

Not that it stopped the incessant buzzing from getting in and making it difficult to sleep.

With that in mind, they had both taken to sleeping with headphones in, connected to their phone collection.  Blaine was never so glad for anything as was about collecting those things.  It made him happy, but it gave Kurt peace he never seemed to be able to do by his lonesome.  They were worth their weight in gold.

While Blaine, and most everyone with with a rational mind, was sure these little problems that had come through the town were just coincidences caused by drought related problems, some people had thoughts of their own.

“It's a second coming!”  Screamed one man in the street as flies besieged him.

“That's the second time I've heard someone say that today…”  Mike hummed towards Blaine with a shake of his head.  “What are they talking about?”

“Well… their referencing is kind of off, but there was a story in the old testament about the plagues that visited the Egyptians… frogs, lice, and flies among them.”  Trent supplied, in for his yearly check-up on his leg.

Mike shook his head at that, disregarding it with a snort and a roll of his eyes.  Blaine chuckled and gave his own head a shake.  “Well I guess we'll know if it really is some kind of “second coming” if we end up with the livestock dying off or hail or one of those other plagues.”

He had meant it as a joke.  He really did.  So when Mercedes burst into the clinic a few days later demanding his attention because the livestock were falling down dead for no reason that she could see, Mike shot Blaine a glance that brought him back to the short conversation they had had about the plagues.

Sure enough, half the livestock was down, already stinking up the area around their corpses as the dry heat cooked their carcusses.  The workers were trying to get the unaffected livestock away from the felled bodies of cows, sheep, rabbits, and chickens, but Blaine watched in horror as several fell to the ground with no warning while he investigated the bodies on the ground.

“Near as I can figure, it's some kind of poison…”  Blaine said with a sad shake of his head, knowing well what the depletion in the livestock meant for the wellbeing of the community.  “I'm going to take blood samples and tissue samples and check them out under the microscopes at the clinic.  See if I can match them up to something in one of the books.  In the meantime… burn these bodies.  We can't risk feeding them to people if there is something in them that could hurt our people.”

Blaine couldn't find a match in the textbooks.

“There are a lot of other diseases and illnesses that could have affected the animals…”  Mike offered as Blaine sighed and rubbed his eyes.  “We only have the one microbiology book after all…”

Blaine shook his head.  “Could be… but we have enough panic and people upset as it is.  We need answers to make people calm Mike… what if the flies or the frogs or lice brought in something?  What if people start dropping next?”

Mike frowned and looked away, giving Blaine no solace.

He didn't get any from Kurt either, who looked genuinely perplexed when Blaine told him about the biblical plagues and how they were lining up with what was going on.

“What happened after the livestock died in the story?” Kurt asked quietly, eyes locked on Blaine with worry.  Surely Kurt wasn't actually buying into the idea that the plagues were being visited upon them?  Kurt was more skeptical about those kind of things than Mike was.

“Uh.. well… boils, hail storms…. locusts killing the crops… darkness… and death of the firstborn sons.”

“Death?”

Blaine nodded.

“Oh…”

They had sex after that conversation.  Kurt initiated it and Blaine didn't complain, even if he did feel like something was amiss about it all.  Talking about biblical plagues shouldn't be a turn on for Kurt as far as he was concerned.

Trent scoured the library when Blaine had come to him the next day, asking for help in trying to discern what was going on with the animals.  If there was anyone else who was good with finding answers, it was Trent, and soon Blaine was stocked up with books on animal health and diseases.

“It's got to be the flies….”  Blaine mused to Mike as he peered through one book in the medical clinic.  “.... there's a lot of diseases that have been transmitted by insects….”

“Most of those are in Africa… and not flies….”  Mike murmured, reading over his shoulder.

Blaine shrugged, “Yeah, okay, in this chart it shows that… but I read….”  He reached and grabbed another book he had gone through earlier to show Mike the page, “... here.  Flies eat on decaying matter and can spread bacteria because they carry it and then it rubs off on whatever they land on next… plus, there's piles of dead flies on the ground out there.  The animals could be consuming them inadvertently with their other food, and the chickens are more than happy to eat bugs….”

Mike nodded, “It's a definite possibility.  In fact… the lice could have been carrying something too… they got into the livestock too..”

Blaine nodded in agreement.  “It makes sense.  Plus it gives us something to tell everyone at the least and a plan.  We just have to ensure the surviving animals eat unaffected grasses….”

“Easier said than done.”

“But it's a start anyhow.”

Satisfied with their findings, Mike and Blaine directed Mercedes and her workers on isolating the surviving livestock and burning out the areas where the other animals had died to kill any lingering remains of the disease.  With their herds at less than an eighth of their original numbers, the deaths seemed to stop, and Blaine gave himself a mental pat on the back for figuring something out that helped, finally.

“Chickens were hit the hardest…”  He told Kurt, laying back in bed after a sweaty romp.  “Which sort of confirmed it all for everyone.  We have enough cows left to keep providing milk, albeit at a much reduced rate until I can breed them in the spring, and we'll have to breed some new horses too.”

Kurt nodded, rubbing sweat away from his forehead with the back of his arm.  Sex was a quick event these days, the heat making taking their time unbearable.  Even so, they still managed to become slick in it.  “How are food supplies doing?”

“They're checking that over….. how was your day anyhow?”

Kurt shrugged his shoulders up a touch, glancing up at the ceiling as he recounted his day.  “Checked up on all the kids… Isaac helped me rebuild an engine - he's a quick study that one… Eugene is growing so quickly… and Brittany's really come around.  I would never have thought that Santana would be such a stabilizing force in someone's life… The twins seem to be making up their own language that's driving Sam up the wall… checked the traps and snares… nothing there….”

Blaine continued to listen, though his eyes drifted away from Kurt and towards the little bronze coin that the white-eyed Other had left for Kurt.  It was sitting on Kurt's night table.

“What's that?”  Blaine asked finally, interrupting Kurt.

Kurt blinked and followed Blaine's eyes to the coin sitting there.  It hadn't been there earlier that day when Blaine had left, so obviously Kurt had brought it out at some point.

“It's… you saw what it was… then…”

Blaine shook his head.  “But why did he… she… it?  give it to you?  Why do you keep it?”

Kurt sighed softly, glancing away from Blaine, “I… do you trust me Blaine?”

“Of course I do.”

“Then… trust me on this… I'll tell you when I'm ready….”

It wasn't an answer that satisfied Blaine's curiosity, but it was one that would have to do.  He loved Kurt, and definitely trusted him.   He just hoped Kurt trusted him enough one day to tell him Blaine what it was and why he kept it close.

There was a knock on the door then, prompting Kurt to sit up and pull on his clothing as he yelled “Just a minute!”

Blaine followed suite, the conversation stilled with the interruption.  “Are we expecting someone?”

Kurt shook his head as he stood up, “No.”

Blaine walked after Kurt to the door.  When it was opened, they were greeted with Sam and Mercedes, each holding a girl in their hands and looking utterly lost.

“What's wrong?” Kurt asked, stepping back to allow them in.

“The girls… they have fevers….”

That meant Blaine was up.  He took Whitney out of Mercedes' arms and winced at the heat radiating off of her.  “Oh yeah…. Kurt, can you grab some water and some rags?  Let's get these girls to the living room….”

The parents obeyed, and Kurt was quick to gather what Blaine needed, including the little medical pack he kept at home, and also hovered over Blaine as he took Whitney and Aretha's vitals before undressing them so he could check their diapers.

That's when he sucked in a breath.

“When did they get these?”  He asked, looking up at Sam and Mercedes who shook their heads in unison.

“I… I thought it was just a diaper rash…”  Mercedes whimpered, leaning against Sam who quickly wrapped an arm around her shoulders and drew her in, whispering that it wasn't her fault.

“Are those..” Kurt murmured, stopping and looking at Blaine with wide eyes as he sought clarification.

“Boils…”  Blaine sighed softly as he looked at the red bumps with yellow bulges on the girls bums and thighs.  “They're boils…”