“Oh, Blaine,” Kurt moaned into the dark of Blaine's bedchamber as his husband claimed him ruthlessly from behind. “Oh, Blaine! Yes! Yes!”

Sleeping in the bedchamber beside Beth's didn't afford Kurt and Blaine much opportunity to make love, wary as Kurt was of waking the girl with any expression of amorous affection. But the rains from that first evening seemed to continue for several days afterward, and its steady cadence on the roof of the manor seemed to help Beth sleep. Four days of storms had racked Blaine's joints till he could scarcely walk, but it had also given them the best cover, and Blaine wasn't going to let this opportunity pass him by, screaming muscles be damned. They had decided to take advantage of the driving rain to stifle any sound that might wake her up, but as an additional precaution, they snuck away to Blaine's bedchamber for the act, returning to Kurt's right afterward to sleep. Kurt quite enjoyed the sneaking about aspect, making the whole delicious adventure that much more sinfully taboo.

Kurt reached behind him, groping blindly for some part of his husband to hold on to. Kurt could just about touch his husband, but his hands fell short of grabbing hold whenever Blaine pulled back. Feather light strokes from Kurt's fingertips slid down Blaine's skin as Kurt grunted his frustration at not being able to touch Blaine's body, to hold his shoulders, or wrap an arm around his waist.

“Oh, Blaine,” Kurt moaned, whining as his fingers found the leather straps that attached Blaine's false leg to his hips. Kurt curled his fingers around them and tugged, pleading for Blaine to move faster. Blaine unwrapped his husband's fingers and laid him out over the bed, grabbing hold of Kurt's hips and pounding into Kurt harder.

“Yes!” Kurt pleaded. “Oh, yes! That's it. But not too fast, my lord. I wish to savor the feeling of you inside my body.”

“You are going to tire me out, husband,” Blaine said, teasing but a little as he tried to siphon some of his husband's energy while he pleasured him.

“Is there any way I can help you, my lord?” Kurt asked, wishing he could grab hold of that leather strap again. He liked the way it let him maneuver Blaine, let him pull the earl into him farther than ever before.

But he knew why Blaine wouldn't let him touch it.

It was a part of Blaine's false leg, and for now, that was off-limits.

“Bend your leg up, my love,” Blaine instructed, putting a hand beneath Kurt's right knee and bending it up to lift his leg on the bed.

“Are you…are you sure?” Kurt asked with an embarrassed chuckle as Blaine helped him lift his foot up onto the bed, raising his knee to the level of his nose, and stretching his body out absurdly.

Blaine didn't draw attention to Kurt's discomfort, sneaking a hand underneath Kurt's body to fondle his balls and stroke his cock while he moved inside of him with greater ease.

Kurt's knees nearly buckled.

“Alright, you are sure,” Kurt gasped, grabbing at the covers on the bed so frantically that he almost yanked them clear off the mattress, and this time, Blaine did laugh.

“Is that better, my love?” Blaine asked with no real need of an answer.

“Yes.” Kurt breathed, unable to articulate the word.

But Blaine knew what Kurt wanted. He wanted more – more intimacy, more touching, and not just the way Blaine was touching him now, alternating between stroking him and fondling him, deftly turning climax from a simmering desire to a burning need. Kurt wanted slow, drawn out kisses on the lips, he wanted fingers laced together as Blaine held his hands above his head, he wanted to see his husband's eyes roll back when Blaine came. Kurt wanted that connection that came from seeing his lover face to face.

Blaine compensated with kisses to Kurt's shoulder, with bites to his neck, with one hand sliding up his sweat slicked chest to toy with his nipples, but most of all by saying his name over and over till it echoed in the room around them like a single strain of music.

“Kurt…oh, Kurt…my darling Kurt…”

Kurt called out Blaine's name all throughout the act, and Blaine loved how vocal Kurt could be, but it was when Kurt's voice completely failed him and Blaine's name turned into a sigh, a squeak, or a moan that Blaine loved to hear it best.

“Blaine,” Kurt moaned, long and loud beneath the cover of the thunder that rumbled outside. “Blaine…Blaine…Blaine…”

Blaine felt his husband's balls draw up and tighten, felt his cock bob in his hand, felt Kurt's body shudder against him, and Blaine knew.

He knew that Kurt was close.

He loved that he knew.

“That's it, my love,” Blaine said over a groan as his body responded in kind, following Kurt in his moment of ecstasy, linked to the signals from Kurt's body, the very act of making Kurt cum enough to finish Blaine a hundred times over.

“Blaine…” Kurt said, the sound weak, swallowed before it even exited Kurt's mouth when he came, painting Blaine's hand with his heat.

“Kurt…” followed Blaine's final, splintered groan as he came inside Kurt's body – this phenomenal temple where only Blaine had been given the honor to worship.

“Kurt, my love,” Blaine whispered, dropping his head onto his husband's bowed back and kissing a trail up his spine. “Kurt…”

Kurt raised a hand, still quivering from the strain of grasping the bed sheets so hard, and reached around his body for Blaine, but Blaine caught his hand and bent to kiss it, first each fingertip one at a time and then his palm, before returning it to its place on the bed. Panting for breath, Blaine inched away from his lover, regretful at having to leave Kurt's soft skin and tremendous heat.

“Let me clean us up, love,” Blaine said, struggling a bit to stand upright, and then making his way to the water basin.

Kurt stood where Blaine left him, dutifully still with his head to the mattress and his eyes shut.

“Blaine?” Kurt heard the basin being filled, and then the pitcher returned to its spot on the table.

“Yes, my love?” Blaine asked with the tired sigh of satisfaction that comes from pleasing someone you love.

“May I…may I see it, my lord?” Kurt asked. He had held his tongue the past few days, but now, with the pain Blaine was in, it wasn't a matter of morbid curiosity that made him ask. He wanted to help his husband. He wanted to see if there was anything he could do to ease Blaine's suffering.

“See what?” Blaine responded in an attempt to stall, hoping that Kurt would rethink his request.

“Your leg,” Kurt said, recognizing Blaine's tactic.

“I...I wish you wouldn't ask, my love,” Blaine admitted. “I just…I don't think I am ready for you to see it yet.”

Kurt sighed.

“My lord, I am your husband,” Kurt argued.

“Yes, and I…” Blaine bit his tongue before he said too much too soon. An admission of love at this very moment, while they were arguing about his leg, was not the way he saw confessing his feelings to Kurt. “How much of your innocence am I to steal? You need not have such a gruesome initiation into the world as to see fully what I hide.”

“I know what you hide, my lord.” Kurt said.

“It's not as simple as that,” Blaine said. He returned to where Kurt lay on the bed, patiently waiting for Blaine to clean him. “It never properly healed, and the skin…” Blaine swallowed, running the wet cloth over Kurt's sensitive skin. “I am fine, really, but the remaining flesh looks…dead.”

Kurt could sense his husband's unease at the topic of conversation through his skin as Blaine touched him, and he felt guilty that he had pushed him. Of course, Blaine could keep his secret for as long as he wished to. Kurt had no right to pry.

“As you wish, my lord,” Kurt said, truly sorry but sounding disappointed since he did not quite understand. The wet cloth disappeared from his skin and a dry one followed.

“Kurt,” Blaine said, patting Kurt's skin dry, “the man who removed my leg was a butcher at an inn. Do you remember the one we stay at when we travel – The Rose and Crown?”

“Yes, my lord,” Kurt replied, bringing to mind the image of the crowded roadside inn that Blaine seemed to demand they stay at every time they traveled.

“Well, believe it or not, it was in much worse condition when I first encountered it. But several people there helped to save my life, so I have become their most generous benefactor.”

Blaine tossed the towel and turned Kurt to face him, his shirt already on and his pants pulled up. He reached for Kurt's pants and helped his husband step into them.

“Anyway, my leg was removed by a butcher, not a doctor,” Blaine continued, and Kurt did his best not to gasp at the thought. “My horse had been shot, and I had no other choice than to leave him for dead, the poor beast. I was sick with a fever and drenched to the bone. I had no other choice, nowhere else to go.” Blaine brought Kurt his shirt now that his pants were on, and slipped it over his husband's head. “I had seen an injury like mine before, when one of our servants had fallen accidentally into the smithy's fire, and I knew the limb could not be saved. My only chance at surviving was to have it removed, but I couldn't risk going to a doctor and having him refuse me.”

Blaine took up his cane and Kurt grabbed hold of a lamp. Quietly, both gentlemen left Blaine's bedchamber and walked down the hallway to Kurt's bedchamber, where they had to sleep in case Beth woke up and needed Kurt.

Blaine slept there because he needed Kurt, too.

“He chopped it off slightly above the knee,” Blaine went on in a hushed voice so as not to wake the sleeping girl in the next room, “and after, he gave me a place to stay while I convalesced. They did the best job they could looking after me there. They even fetched me a doctor, but I got terribly ill, and no one seemed to know what to do to make me well.”

Kurt climbed into bed, facing the wall so that Blaine could remove his false leg.

“What did they do?” Kurt asked, worried over the outcome of Blaine's tale - nonsensically so considering that the man was standing in the same room with him.

“They couldn't do anything,” Blaine said, climbing under the covers after he redressed. Kurt turned to face him, pressing his forehead against Blaine's while he listened. “On the night that I was so hideously ill that everyone present thought I would die for certain, Carole Hudson showed up at the inn, looking for lodging.”

Blaine paused and Kurt frowned.

“Carole Hudson,” Kurt repeated. “Is that…Finn's mother? Rachel's Finn?”

“The same,” Blaine confirmed. “Her father had been a battlefield doctor in the army with no sons, so he taught his only daughter everything that he knew about medicine. She heard about me and begged the owner of the inn to see me, to see if she could help.”

“Why would she be so inclined to help a stranger?” Kurt asked. “Not that I am complaining, it's just…serendipitous.”

“Not so much,” Blaine said. “She had stopped at The Rose and Crown on her way home from her husband's funeral.”

“Oh,” Kurt said, dropping his eyes away from Blaine's gaze. He had remembered that time of sadness when Finn's father had passed and his mother needed to away because of it. The whole story had never been recounted for him, so the whys of her leaving hadn't been explained. He just remembered seeing Finn and becoming more fond of him, thinking that Finn was like him – a son missing a parent.

“Yes,” Blaine said. “I think she needed to help me to help herself, if that makes any sense.”

“It does…and it doesn't,” Kurt said. “But, please continue.”

Blaine grabbed Kurt's arm and pulled it over his waist, keeping them connected, needing him close.

“She took care of me. She knew exactly what to do, and she arrived in time to save me, but much of the skin on my leg was necrotic, and she had to remove a lot of the remaining limb.”

“How much?” Kurt asked, afraid Blaine wouldn't give him an answer.

But he did, reaching beneath the covers to find Kurt's leg and mark a line on Kurt's upper thigh with his index finger.

“Why so much?” Kurt asked in an unsteady voice. He hadn't imagined that so much of Blaine's leg was missing.

“To save my life, she had to get rid of all the dead flesh…and then some extra, to be sure.”

Kurt nodded, feeling himself on the verge of tears but unwilling to give in.

Blaine was alive, he was safe, and he was Kurt's. His was a bittersweet story, but with a mostly happy ending – this was no time for Kurt's tears.

“This is the debt you repaid by helping Finn and Rachel to marry?” Kurt asked as all the clues clicked into place. “But this happened years ago. Why wait so long to pay her back?”

“It's not that I didn't offer to repay her,” Blaine said. “I did, and quite a sum. But she didn't want money. She already had a house and some property that wasn't really worth much, but she had it nonetheless, and it would pass along to Finn when her time came. What she wanted was a better life for her son.”

“But would not the money have done that?” Kurt asked, kissing Blaine's cheeks as a way to bury his sadness.

“Sometimes money isn't all that is needed for that to happen,” Blaine explained. “Finn Hudson is not, shall we say, a book smart man, but he is very good with his hands. He made my first prosthetic…” Blaine gestured in the direction of where he kept his false limb, which helped for nothing since he always kept it covered when he didn't wear it. “His best hope for a secure future was a trade. Finn just needed to find the right one, and when he did, he was apprenticed. It took him a little longer than anticipated, or he would have gotten the living I had set aside for him earlier.”

Kurt nodded, dazed and silent at Blaine's tale.

“That is…incredible,” Kurt said. “I do not know what to say.”

Blaine grinned, but it didn't reach his eyes, didn't set the honey-gold in them to sparkle the way his smiles often did. It was a shadow brought about by the story he had told, all of its goods and bads, bringing them here to a point where a man in bed with his husband had fear of revealing his body to the one he cared for most.

“Actually…” Kurt said, “I do.” He brought his hands up to cradle Blaine's head. “I know you don't want me to see your leg because you think it disgusting. You think that it is something I should not see. But I am not delicate, Blaine. I will not break, and I will not run away…I promise.” Blaine's eyes closed, his focus on the sound of Kurt's voice as he spoke. “There is nothing about you that is disgusting or ugly, and you are no less a man without it.” And here, Kurt choked a little. “But, I see you in pain. Every day, this injury gives you pain, and I feel so helpless.” Blaine took Kurt's hands from behind his head and kissed them, his eyes still closed. He didn't need his eyes to see Kurt. He knew every line of him, every angle and every curve. “I want to help you, Blaine.”

“The pain will always be there, Kurt,” Blaine said. “There is nothing anyone can do to make it go away.”

Those words struck at the soul of Kurt, and his hopelessness showed on his face.

“But,” Blaine said, ducking his head to meet Kurt's lowered eyes, “you are everything to me. Everything I need – simply by being my husband, and when I am with you, Kurt…there is no pain.”

It was a sweet thing for Blaine to say, but difficult for Kurt to believe when the evidence of Blaine's agony was written all over his face.

“I wish that was true,” Kurt said.

“You are so stubborn,” Blaine laughed, pushing himself into Kurt's arms, wrapping his husband's arms around him. “Just because you don't believe something, doesn't make it untrue.”

Those words did not soothe Kurt, so Blaine tried kisses instead – the kisses Kurt was bereft from when they made love.

Kisses to the neck - slow trails from behind his ear to the juncture of his shoulder.

Kisses to the hand – starting from the wrist and traveling through the palm ending at the tip of each finger.

Kisses across his shoulder –returning to the start with his tongue sweeping across Kurt's collarbone.

Kisses to his mouth – with words spoken softly against his lips.

Kisses that were gentle, and some that were urgent. Kisses that stoked the fire of Kurt's desire for Blaine only enough to fill him with the warmth of his affection.

Blaine kissed his husband until any thought of tears and pain and heartache were erased from his mind, putting him at ease to sleep.