Kurt had never been much for religion. In fact, after all that he’d been through in his still-young life, he failed to believe in God at all most of the time. But after Blaine’s diagnosis, he found himself wondering if his rejection letter from NYADA was some kind of divine intervention. Not because that’s the only explanation for how Rachel Berry got in over him, but because he knew that if he had gotten in, he would have moved to New York and Blaine would have insisted that he stay there and not waste the opportunity, and he wouldn’t have been here for this. For Blaine. And right now, Blaine needed him more than ever. So it felt like things had worked out how they were supposed to. I mean ideally, they wouldn’t have to deal with this at all, but if Blaine had to go through this, Kurt was just glad that he didn’t have to face it alone.

When Blaine had first gone to the doctor, it was after persistent nagging from Kurt, who insisted that it was not normal to bruise so easily and that these bruises were particularly dark and lasted forever.

“You’re probably anemic or something,” he had said, “Just go see a doctor so you can get an iron supplement and stop defacing your perfect body with bruises of unknown origin.”

Blaine didn’t really care for doctors, but who did? If it would appease Kurt, he would go get a physical. No harm in that right? But when the doctor called Blaine into his office for his test results, after insisting that he needed to see him in person and that a parent needed to be with him, Blaine started to worry. And when the doctor had actually delivered the test results, Blaine had blanked out completely. He didn’t register anything that the doctor was saying, only his mother’s hand covering her mouth as she began to sob, which he could see out of the corner of his eye as he stared at the diplomas hanging over the doctor’s head. All he wanted was to tell Kurt, to have him hold Blaine in his arms and tell him it was going to be okay and – oh my God, Kurt. How was he going to tell Kurt?

That night, when he did muster up the courage to tell his boyfriend exactly what those bruises meant, Kurt reacted exactly how Blaine needed him to. He was visibly shaken, but he held Blaine in his arms and whispered in his ear that whatever happened, they would get through it together, and miraculously, he was able to hold in his tears until he left the Anderson house that night. Since then, their lives had been all doctors’ appointments and treatments, though Blaine did stay in school, insisting that he wanted to maintain as much normalcy as possible. He would finish his senior year as normal and then see where they were at the end of the year. So, Kurt would pick him up from school on treatment days and hold his hand while he was poked and prodded, and then they would do crosswords and drabble on about the latest celebrity gossip and fashion trends until the treatment was over and they could retire to Blaine’s house and watch movies or have sing-alongs until Kurt felt satisfied that Blaine was okay and he could go home. Occassionally, he was allowed to stay at the Anderson house, not because Blaine’s parents were truly okay with their relationship, but because they recognized that on particularly bad days, someone needed to be there to rub Blaine’s back while he vomited or stroke his head when the headaches were too much to him to handle. And even though Kurt had quickly gotten used to cleaning up puke and blocking out the noises Blaine made when he was in so much agony, Blaine still apologized every time.

“Stop it,” Kurt would tell him, “if the roles were reversed you know you would do the same for me.”

After several weeks, they had gotten into this routine, and Kurt felt a sense of normalcy with it all, as sad as that was. At least until the Tuesday morning when he knocked on the Andersons’ front door to pick up Blaine for an early morning doctor’s appointment and was met by a distraught hazel-eyed boy with a chunk of thick, curly hair in his hand. Neither boy said anything for a moment, but instead just stared at each other, tears forming in their eyes.

“It’s time,” Blaine said, breaking the silence. Kurt looked down at the chunk of hair in Blaine’s hand, looked back into his boyfriend’s eyes and simply nodded.