The first time Kurt opens his eyes, all he can see is dust flying, backbit by red. He tries to take in a deep breathe, and is rewarded with a lungful of searing debris. He chokes and tries to roll to his side, but there's something keeping him flat on his back.
Through the dust, he see there's a man lying near him – the drummer of Gwen's band, he thinks – a man whose eyes are streaming, his face contorted in agony, his mouth wide in what must be a scream. But Kurt can't hear it.
He can't hear it, and that's enough to jolt his entire body with panic as he reaches up to brush away whatever is covering his ears. A sharp burning pain in his leg overwhelms him. His vision flashes to blinding white and he passes back into unconsciousness.
*****
The second time Kurt opens his eyes, the dust has settled. It's dark and he can see what must be flashlight beams of people moving towards him.
He turns his head to look for the man next to him, but the man has turned his face away and Kurt can't see his expression. It's a few seconds before Kurt realizes he's not sure if the man is still breathing.
Kurt thinks this should bother him – thinks he should do something to help. But he's starting to feel chilly, the only warmth is on his legs – which are still pinned to the ground. His arms are feeling heavy and useless. He's definitely cold. He calmly watches the lights coming closer to him. He briefly wishes they'd bring him a blanket. He closes his eyes again.
*****
The next time Kurt opens his eyes, it is involuntarily. Someone is flashing a bright light at his left eye, while roughly pulling the eyelid up. Kurt wants to scold them – the skin around the eye is delicate and should only be handled with delicacy, in order to prevent wrinkles. But his tongue is heavy and thick in his mouth.
The person behind the light nods – he can see her mouth moving but no sound is coming out. She raises her head, mouth open wider as if calling to someone.
She looks back down at him, her face smudged with dirt and ash and blood. She smiles reassuringly at him, and Kurt tries to smile back. She pats him on the shoulder, then looks up to greet whomever has just arrived to help.
Kurt is wondering why he feels so detached, so dispassionate. He's still cold. There's grit in his eyes. His fingers and hands are heavy and tingling. He definitely can't hear and he definitely cannot move his legs. He thinks he should be more upset, but he can't summon the energy.
Dimly, he's aware of someone grabbing his hand. He turns his head to find himself staring, however improbably, into the wide, anxious, golden eyes of Blaine.
Blaine is holding his hand -- gripping it tightly, Kurt thinks, because that's just how Blaine is.
Kurt feels – he finally feels – a rush of panic. He needs to make Blaine understand that he can't hear – knows Blaine will understand why that's important, will understand because Blaine always understands him.
Kurt is breathing in short pants and his mouth is so dry and full of dust that he chokes.

The rotors of the Teenage Dream have barely slowed to a stop when Blaine is frantically unbuckling his straps, flipping final switches and leaping from his seat.
“You go find him,” Jim says quietly. “I'll make sure she's good and parked, then I'll be right behind you.”
Blaine sucks in a breath to say thank you, but instead nods shortly. Jim nods in return. No need for words.
He vaults from the cockpit and out of the plane. He joins the straggle of men leaping from their planes, pelting their way across the airfield towards what is left of their base.

*****

Blaine barely recognizes the HQ when he arrives there – what should be a small hangar is now a twisted pile of smoking metal and rubble. He sees Ginger, already at work, her green fatigues soaked with blood at the knees, her red hair pulled severely back out of her way. She has a cut on her neck that is still oozing blood down and she's impatiently swabbing at it with one hand while using the other to take the pulse of the soldier in front of her.
Blaine grabs the swab from her startled fingers, spreads it over the cut and firmly applies pressure to stop the bleeding. He's impressed with how steady his hands are, despite the frantic hammering of his heart.
“Kurt?” His voice is anything but studay.
“He's here. Somewhere,” Gwen gestures at the ruins in front of them. “I was busy with other things so I wasn't watching him when it hit – but I'm pretty sure he and Gwen and the rest are over there.” She pointed at the far corner.
“And we've got to clear our way from here to there,” Blaine sucks in a deep breath and coughs at the acrid air. “Okay, let's go then.”
He jumps right in, following behind the doctors and nurses moving over the wreckage, shifting and pulling debris out of the way, carrying wounded to safer areas. He always keeps an eye on where they think Kurt might be, always working towards it, across the shortest distance to Kurt.
He's just reached a nurse kneeling beside a man she needs help moving when he hears a shout behind him.
“THAT WALL'S NOT STABLE! IT'S COMING DOWN!”
Blaine launches himself across the wounded man, grabbing the nurse's shoulders and tucking her head against his chest. He braces himself not to fall directly on the ground, as the wall collapses on top of them – the bits of metal and rock bouncing off his shoulders and back instead of directly into their faces.
Blaine will find bruises there tomorrow, but for now, he doesn't feel a thing. Another impromptu corpsman comes to help, they shift the rubble and the wounded man is carried off.
Kurt. Kurt Kurt oh god where's Kurt.
He can't stop now.

*****

Kath was kneeling next to someone – maybe even a pile of people, judging from the number of splayed limbs in front of her.
“Corpsmen! I need some help over here!”
Blaine came closer, scrambling over the piles as he recognized that forehead – that chin he'd kissed so many times. Those lips. Kurt.
Kurt's eyes blink slowly and Blaine has a flash of thankfulness Kath is in the way so he is unable to throw himself down on top of Kurt and kiss every available inch of him.
Blaine darts his eyes over Kurt, searching for injury. He sees blood oozing down from Kurt's ears – not surprising given how close he was to the bomb when it went off – some blood already drying in his hair. He rakes his eyes down – Kurt is covered in rubble from the waist down.
The other corpsmen begin to excavate him, gently pulling rock and metal away from his legs.
One of them eyes the pile of rubble doubtfully, “Can he sit up? We might be able to pull him out instead of moving all this stuff.”
Kath and Blaine put their arms behind Kurt's shoulders, pulling him up to a sitting position. Kurt's eyes briefly close as a wave of dizziness hits him. But then they pop open, searching frantically until he finds Blaine again.
Blaine kneels down next to him, supporting his shoulders. Kurt's lips are trembling, Blaine can see tears in his eyes. He presses their foreheads together, whispering “it's okay, it's okay now. You're okay. I've got you. I'm here. Stay with me, baby. It's okay.”

*****

Kurt thinks his hearing might be returning, impossibly slowly. Instead of the shocking absence of sound, he's start to hear low rumbles, from far away – like he's underwater. He turns his head, resting his forehead against Blaine's cheek. He can just see Blaine's lips – those rosy, full, deliciously kissable lips that he's been dreaming of.
Because he spent a lifetime, surely, of looking at Blaine's lips, watching them in every expression of emotion, in every laze of sleep, he can tell what Blaine is saying over and over again.
“I've got you, baby. It's okay. I've got you.”
Kurt's mind wanders – he knows what those words look like in Blaine's mouth, because he's seen them before – the first time Kurt cried in front of Blaine. Kurt's father had had an attack of some sort – blue at the lips and gasping and collapsed and Carole could barely speak from crying when she'd telephoned Kurt in New York to tell him. Kurt had gone numb with shock, absolutely numb, even though his dad had woken up and was grumbling good naturedly and the doctor's said he'd need to be cautious, but he'd recover. He'd been numb to everything, until Blaine had passed by him in the kitchen and gently wrapped his arm around Kurt's waist briefly – Kurt seized hold of him, kissing him wildly. He could feel now.
But it wasn't until they were in bed, Kurt demanding and begging and asking for Blaine, however whenever Blaine wanted – it wasn't until Blaine was moving strongly inside him that he cried, sobbing as the shell covering his heart shattered. Blaine had wanted to stop, but Kurt begged him to keep going.
So, Blaine had leaned close, his lips so close to Kurt's, their foreheads almost touching.
“I've got you, baby. It's okay. I've got you.”

*****
The corpsmen are back to shifting the rubble. There's something stuck on Kurt's legs and they can't pull him out.
Blaine is watching Kurt – Kurt's fair skin is looking beyond pale, waxy and nearly gray. There is sweat beading on Kurt's nose, on his forehead and he tries to find something to wipe it away.
Then, from beneath the rubble, he sees a flash of hair. Blonde hair. Gwen's hair.
Oh god, Gwen.

*****

Kurt is leaning heavily on Blaine, panting shallowly. He's nauseous, his mind is whirling. He can't believe Blaine's safe, Blaine's sitting next to him. He can smell him – his cologne nearly lost beneath the sharp scent of sweat and fear, but so very Blaine. Blaine is here. His mind grasps that before spiraling off into nothingness again.
The corpsmen are frantically scrabbling in the rubble. They've found two soldiers at the edge of the pile they're working on, stunned and trapped.
Kurt's attention is drawn to the men working to pull the large piece of metal that has his legs pinned. As they wrench it out of the way, Blaine lets out a loud moan.
Kurt doesn't understand his reaction. That's not one of the moans he usually hears from Blaine, moans between gasping breaths of pleasure, or the quiet moans when he's been ill. This is...Kurt doesn't know what that sound was.
Kurt doesn't know why he still can't move his legs. His eyes are flit down to them, trying to discover what's wrong. He doesn't understand – he can't understand why someone has laid a very large piece of meat, bloody and raw, across his legs – that's why he can't move them. He tries to hold hard to the thought – he just wishes they'd move it so he could get out of here and Blaine could hold him properly.
It's not until he recognizes the hair that he realizes the piece of meat is all that is left of Gwen Andrews.
He begins to scream and can't stop.

*****

“Oh Christ,” Blaine chokes back a wave of nausea, holding Kurt tightly, burying Kurt's screams in his shoulder. The corpsmen are gently moving Gwen out of the way, wrapping a blanket around her, covering her face.
“Gwen!” Kurt's voice is too loud and full of panic, “BLAINE!”
“Shh, Kurt. Shh” Blaine wraps his arms around him tightly, scooting closer to him to hold him down.
Kurt, his legs now free, tries to rise, tries to get to Gwen – Blaine holds him back.
Blaine is suddenly aware of a hot pulsing on his own leg and looks down, astonished, to see blood spurting from a wound in Kurt's leg.
“HELP!” Blaine yells, clamping his hand down on Kurt's leg.
Kath sprints across to him, clamping her own hand on top of his. “Femoral artery. Keep that pressure on – HARD – or he's going to bleed out in a matter of minutes.”
Blaine grabs Kurt's leg viciously tight. Kurt's color has gone entirely Grey, and he passes out.
“Let's go, boys!” Kath helps the corpsmen hurl Kurt onto a stretcher. “Surgery. Now!”
Blaine desperately keeps his hold on Kurt's thigh, running along with the stretcher, holding Kurt's life in his hand.