Blaine woke up on a Saturday, and Kurt was not there.

It was always the same dream. Kurt would open his eyes to find that he was soaked with nervous sweat and his teeth were painfully clenched. The first time it happened, he bolted from his bed and stumbled deliriously into the living room, where Rachel was asleep on the couch—she'd been staying with him since he got back to New York—and begged her to wake up because they had to go home, back to Ohio, Blaine was awake, but Rachel only shook her head softly and waited for him to realize it wasn't real.

Only a dream.

He wouldn't leave the bed this time. Rachel needed her sleep—she had auditions in the morning, meetings in the afternoon. Her life was going on. Kurt's was...well, it was going on, but he didn't really feel it happening anymore.

He'd returned to New York only a week after Blaine was admitted to the hospital. He couldn't miss any more school, and as understanding as Isabelle was, he couldn't miss any more work, either.

Two weeks later, he thought he might as well have stayed at home. He wasn't focused. He wasn't present. He did not feel alive. He was the least productive he'd ever been, and even when he was working, he was always conscious of the weight of his phone in his pocket, always waiting for it to ring with news of Blaine.

There was no news. All that Kurt knew had come from that first day at the hospital, when he saw Blaine in that bed for the first time...he shuddered remembering it. After his visit, he and his dad had pieced together what they could from the accounts of doctors and police, and from whatever the Andersons were willing to tell them.

"Bartender found them on the sidewalk. Micheal was already—"

"...Internal bleeding, broken bones, brain swelling, possible permanent neural damage. We won't know until the swelling goes down or until he wakes up."

"...brought in around two in the morning, had been out there for an hour at least..."

"If he wakes up, he might not be the same."

"It's lucky they found him when they did."

"He might not wake up."

Kurt curled into his blankets and fought back sleep. He had to do something. He had to go back to Ohio. School was going to end soon, anyway; he could take his exams early. Blaine needed him. He was his best friend. And maybe a little more.

Kurt reeled in his thoughts, frustrated. He shouldn't be thinking of Blaine that way right now. They had been broken up for years—it wasn't like that anymore. He didn't need to complicate this situation any further, especially not over something so trivial.

They had remained good friends. The break-up was mostly mutual. They didn't want to do long distance, Kurt wanted to explore, Blaine was going to be so busy with Glee club and student government and everything else. It took months, and a few collegiate hook-ups, for Kurt to feel sort of okay about it. But once he felt okay about it, he stayed that way. He barely thought of what their relationship had been or what it could have been had they stayed together. He didn't have time for it. And neither, he assumed, did Blaine, especially not when he started college, and all the boys flocked to him, as Kurt knew they would. Admittedly, he had been forced to set some rules for himself about Facebook stalking Blaine's new friends. But he'd been okay. Great, even. He'd had a boyfriend here and there, some casual, some more serious. He was always busy with job interviews, schoolwork, and Rachel's ever-present drama. He'd been great. He had not thought of KurtandBlaine, the entity that was separate from Kurt and Blaine, in over a year when the accident happened.

Kurt shuddered again. The "accident." Was that what he was going to call it? It wasn't an accident. It was a hate crime. He had steered clear of the news, so afraid he might see the faces of the men who did this. He didn't want to know what they looked like. He didn't want to know that they were real people.

No matter what horrible things he might read or hear—a woman raped in an empty subway car, a bomb near a shopping mall, a school shooting—he had always felt safe. Those were not things that could happen to him or anyone close to him. They were far away and impossible. Kurt didn't even realize how ignorant that feeling was, or that he even had such a feeling, before Blaine got hurt.

Kurt just wanted to pretend that those kinds of people could not possibly exist.

He felt himself slowly drifting off to sleep. He was going to have the dream again, he knew it as he sank further, but that was okay. In his dream, at least Blaine was awake, even if Kurt was not there to greet him.

His mind's eye had just begun to pan down over the pale yellow curtains that covered Blaine's bed when he heard his phone ring.

Groggily, he reached for it, and pressed "answer" without even looking at the caller ID.

"Hello?" he asked.

"...Kurt?"