The fact that he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer was bad enough. The four percent survival rate was worse. And the fact that he found all this out on Christmas was probably the worst.

As he hung up the call from his sobbing mother, whom he’d calmed down a small amount and told to go rest and sleep off the shock of reading the test results and getting the call from his doctor, he held the phone out in front of him. He felt a sort of gnawing numbness spread from his stomach, and all he could manage was bewilderment at the conversation that he’d just had. He looked as his phone slowly dimmed over time, sitting on the couch he’d used as a bed. Burt and Kurt had gone out again, and he’d been left alone. And then his mother had called.

Blaine had no trouble believing it. Blaine had no trouble being scared of it. Blaine had no trouble accepting it. But for some reason, he just didn’t feel anything, and his face, but for the previously mentioned bewilderment, was blank. He gradually lowered his hand until he set the phone on the coffee table, and he glanced at the clock.

He had just deciphered that it had been a good two and a half hours since the two men had gone out when they opened the door and came inside. “Hey Anderson,” Burt called, as he shuffled inside, shrugging out of his coat and tossing it over the chair’s back, “How much you wanna bet that Kurt takes his scarf off after his coat? Ah, too late,” he mourned the unmade bet jovially, chuckling as Kurt rolled his eyes at his antics, his coat joining Burt’s.

And then Kurt saw his face, and he paused for a moment, concern flashing across his features when he registered it. “What’s up?” he asked, his tone casual but his words purposefully heavy.

“Burt,” Blaine said instead, his eyes shifting to the older man, who looked up in surprise only to have his smile slip away. “I need to talk to you, quickly.” He could feel the flummoxed expression of his melt into one of determination, even though he really didn’t feel determined; he didn’t feel, period, and he knew it was because he couldn’t process the information that quickly, so he was only confused.

“What’s going on?” Burt asked. In response, Blaine rose to him feet and attempted to lead Burt away, but Kurt reached out and grabbed him, holding him to the spot tightly, even though he didn’t struggle against him.

“What happened?” Kurt’s voice joined his.

Blaine looked between the two of them and saw two different emotions behind their eyes; Kurt’s was fearful, and Burt’s was a quelled sort of panic. He didn’t have to take a deep breath, but he did have to hesitate, to make sure he was ready to say the words.

He wasn’t, so he went with, “Both of you should sit down.”

“Blaine, buddy,” Burt said, playing the exasperated-parent card, “I’m the adult here, I think I -“

“Please.”

And though Burt pursed his lips and Kurt pressed his in a fine line, they moved to the couch where he’d just been sitting, and they sat. He stood in front of them, in front of the coffee table, so he looked down to see them. “Last week, I went to the doctor’s for a check-up,” he said, and he found the chair they’d thrown their jackets on and flopped into it. “And they thought they found something, but they needed to run more tests. The results were mailed yesterday and got to my house today, and the doctor called to discuss it, and then my mother called me to tell me.”

“Tell you what?!” Kurt nearly shrieked, his knuckles white as he gripped the edge of the couch, looking ready to pounce.

“I have pancreatic cancer,” he said simply.

Kurt sucked in a sharp breath through his teeth so he created a hissing noise, and color flooded his cheeks. But Burt looked like Blaine had, totally lost, understanding the words, but not feeling their impact. Blaine looked to him for a moment, and then back to Kurt, whose facial expression was rapidly changing; at first, he’d been livid, and then all the color had drained from him and his skin had been ashen, his eyes, usually such a captivating and piercing blue, dulling to the point of almost-gray and filling with clear, hot water. His jaw dropped the tiniest bit and Blaine saw his hands fluttering at his sides, which meant he needed something to do with them but didn’t want to touch anything, and they shook when they moved, just like how he trembled every time he took a silent but long breath.

And the words hit Blaine, too, because he thought of how Kurt looked, and it slammed into him that he would probably look similar to that, too, except his appearance would be permanent - at least until he decomposed. He was going to decompose. He was never going to be on Broadway, or getting a recording contract, or meet his movie-making co-stars on set. He was never going to live in a dorm room. He was never going to experience marriage. He was never going to see his kids come home for the first time or drive them to and from school. He was never going to see his name in lights or on his television at home. He was never going to see everything he wanted to see, and he wanted to see so much. And he’d most likely never get to kiss Kurt again, either, and for some reason that particular brick in the pile that dropped on top of his head was heavier than the others.

And he realized, with a jolt, that he was crying, and the confusion returned, along with disbelief and fear and nonacceptance, and though he understood the words he tried to shove their meaning away from him, from his tongue from which they’d spilled, from his mind from which they’re sprung, and from his body from which they’d been born. But it did nothing and all he could do was stare at the two men blankly, silently, looking at them as if expectant, as droplet after droplet stroked his cheek on their way to his chin, where they fell to his lap underneath them.

“What’s the survival rate?” asked Burt quietly, wary of the question but needing to know it.

“Four percent,” he answered automatically, his voice, though thick, miraculously not strained.

“How long?” he asked in a voice even quieter this time, and Blaine averted his eyes.

“At best, around a year and a half,” he responded.

“Oh my god,” Kurt shuddered repeatedly, his teeth chattering now, too, as if he were cold, even though it was slightly warmer than necessary in his apartment. “No, no, no, no no no no…” he clasped his hands and rocked forward and backwards in sharp, angular motions, his breathing hitched and accelerating, his eyes glassed over and cloudy.

“And at worst?”

“Don’t say it!” Kurt begged weakly, but Blaine was still looking at his feet, attempting not to begin sobbing like Kurt had and instead to simply loose a few tears in calm silence.

“Four months at worst, but it’s more likely just under a year,” he said.

“No!” Kurt choked, and Burt dropped his head to his hands, and the only sound in the room besides the weeping Kurt seemed incapable of stopping was that of a ticking clock. Blaine felt like hurtling that clock against the wall. It seemed like each tick was a measurement, one second less, another second less, his life simply another passing period on a clock.

-~*~-

The thing about pancreatic cancer is that victims don’t usually show symptoms, and when they do, it’s too late to stop it. Sometimes a person gets lucky and they find it early enough to be surgically removed. Blaine was not one of those people.

He researched it. He found patterns, all of which made him grow a little angrier and a little sadder, because almost none of them applied to him, and yet he still had it. He’d known his grandfather on his mother’s side had been diagnosed with pancreatic carcinoma - or, in other words, cancer - when she’d been pregnant with him, and he’d died about two years later. But he knew that was where he must have gotten it from, since none of the other fits described him. Slightly more common in woman - nope. Usually for people with diabetes - nope. Or people with long-term inflammation of the pancreas - nope. Or smokers - definitely nope. He wasn’t past his forties yet; hell, he wasn’t even in his twenties yet. So the only thing that could have happened, literally the only thing, was that it was the few cases where genetic syndromes are passed down through families, and he’d gotten it from his grandfather. Blaine could scarcely remember him.

And that terrified him. He’d never known his grandfather, not really, but his grandfather had known him. His grandfather had had people that cared about him. But when it came to the people that would continue living after him, there were few who would recall. Blaine knew now that he’d be just another person lost to time. He’d never make a mark on the world like he wanted to. He had a year. In that time, the only mark he could make was a scar. He’d rather leave nothing than a scar.

He supposed, laying down and sleeping that night, with Burt using sports an an excuse to stay up and Kurt using talking to Rachel as one - having sworn not to tell what he’d told them until he was ready - that what he wanted was to matter, but in a good way. He wanted a meaning but not a bad one, and he wanted it to be remembered. And among certain people, it would be. But very few people live forever simply by memory and what they’ve done. A lot of people remember Shakespeare and Sonnet 18, but not many tend to remember who he wrote Sonnet 18 about. He didn’t want to be someone written about and then forgotten. But he would be.

And thinking about that caused a minor existential crisis that left him sobbing as softly as he could into his pillow, trying desperately not to let Burt and Kurt hear him, for fear they’d start crying again, too.

He thought over the symptoms he’d read. The cancer had occurred at exactly the right moment; right around the break-up, when he’d assumed his lack of appetite and perpetual exhaustion were results of losing Kurt, and the weight loss from lack of appetite and sleep deprivation from a constantly active and guilty mind. But as he thought back to it he should have realized there was something more going on, especially when he’d felt the slow pain in his back and upper stomach area after a particularly long day that didn’t leave until hours after he woke up the next day.

Of course, he couldn’t possibly have guessed that this was happening to him.

And then he heard a hushing sound from the other side of the room divider, and he tried to quiet his growing sobs with a small margin of success as Kurt’s voice dwindled and the television was muted. Both were listening. And he knew they were listening for him.

He bit his tongue, shut his eyes, scrunched his face, buried it in a pillow - it did no good. He was shuddering with every single hyperventilated breath he took make the bed frame vibrate slightly, and they couldn’t have missed the slight jingling of the bolts rattling, nor how he choked on the huge lump in his throat as he tried to swallow back the tears that kept leaking out of his eyes.

“I’ve got to go, Rachel,” Kurt’s voice was almost impossible to hear, and the couch springs groaned as Blaine imagined Burt rising to his feet. “Tell your dads Merry Christmas for me, okay? Love you too. Bye.” And then the small sound of a button being pushed and there were gentle footsteps. The next time Kurt spoke, his voice was much closer, and projected like he wanted to be heard; it was also a lot sadder. “Blaine? You okay?”

“Of course not, I’m dying,” he snapped without reason, and then stopped the pretenses and flipped onto his back, his face out in the open, his hands clawing at his cheeks as he tried uselessly to get the tears off. His breathing stuttered and carried heavy weight when it didn’t. His sobs were full-blown now, not quiet, and he was bawling, his tears only gripping to his hands and spreading their coating further as he tried to scratch them off himself.

And then a soft hand was restraining his, and there were voices, and they were familiar and comforting and caring and they would always remember him but that wouldn’t even matter and he felt like someone had taken their shoe and kicked his chest so hard it went straight through him, taking out his lungs so he couldn’t breathe and his heart so everything shut down. Everything was still active somehow; and it hurt. It hurt more than being gay-bashed at the Sadie Hawkins dance had hurt, it hurt more than when his grandparents (on his father’s side, not his mother’s) had refused to interact with him for being gay had hurt, it hurt more than knowing Chandler made Kurt happier than he did had hurt, and he was curled into a ball, trying to hold himself together, but gripping so tightly he only shattered further.

“You’ll be okay, buddy,” Burt told him, sincerity ringing clear in his voice, but it didn’t help as much as Kurt’s promises not to leave his side did.

“I’m staying right here,” Kurt informed him as he clambered onto the bed beside Blaine, scooting right up next to him and putting his arms around him, drawing him close so he was leaning against his chest and Kurt rested his head on top of Blaine’s, his cheek on his hair. “I’m staying right here and I’m not leaving until you do, and even then I’m going to always be right there. Got it? For however long I need to be. We said we’d always be there for each other, right? Always? And so here I am. You can’t get rid of me. I’m staying right here.”

“K-Kurt, I d-don’t w-want to die,” he blubbered pathetically, and Kurt’s hand on his arm began rubbing up and down comfortingly, and he bent his neck so his head was directly over Kurt’s heart. For someone who appeared so calm and somber, his heart was racing like Blaine’s, at an insane and random pace.

“Nobody ever does,” Burt spoke up before Kurt could, and the weight on the bed shifted again as he joined them. Neither of them minded as he, too, joined the pile of pitiful people. “Even people who kill themselves don’t want to die. They just want to stop living. The two are entirely different.”

“B-But I don’t want t-to stop living, either,” Blaine tried to convey how frustrated he was but his voice only seemed capable of one extreme emotion at a time and so only projected all the enormous terror that was stabbing him.

“So don’t,” Kurt said simply, as if that solved everything. “You’re going to have to die, but then, so does everybody else. Only some people stop living.”

“I d-don’t understand,” he cried, dipping his head in added shame and trying miserably to stop shaking so badly.

“The way I see it,” Burt told him, “is that once you die, who you are goes up to something beyond this world, so you don’t have to stop living just because you’re dead.”

“And the way I see it,” Kurt offered, “is that the energy your body has created, like all other energy out there, can’t be destroyed, but can be transfered. When you die, who you are as a friend, and a son and brother and everything else, doesn’t stop, because we all remember you, and your energy is being used for something, like grass growing or cars running. You never stop living, not scientifically, or at least, not your energy, which is a huge part of what makes you you.”

“Either option sounds kinda nice, don’t they?” Burt asked him gently, clearly not expecting an answer.

And Blaine didn’t give one. He just cried. And they let him.

-~*~-

When Blaine woke up the next morning, he was more comfortable than he could have imagined being, and though he wondered why, especially after remembering how he’d fallen asleep, it didn’t take long for him to figure it out.

For the first time since they’d broken up, he and Kurt were cuddled up next to each other.

He couldn’t feel Burt anywhere on the bed - there was no weight anywhere but where he and Kurt were - and that meant he’d gotten up at some point to leave the two of them alone. But he and Kurt had fallen into one of their positions that they did when sleeping; the one they automatically fell into when one of them needed comfort and the other needed them comforted. Their foreheads were touching and so were their noses, and their bodies were pressed against each other loosely, their stomach barely brushing and their knees interlocked - and their hands, all four of them, were clasped together tightly, in a vice-like grip, even in sleep, between their chests and right above theirs hearts. Blaine felt Kurt’s breath, still clean from his brushing them last night and spending maybe four hours total sleeping after how late they’d stayed up, wash over him as he inhaled and exhaled steadily, and Blaine couldn’t help but feel how his heart beat feebly as his eyes fluttered open to meet his.

His eyes were always a source of serenity to Blaine, speaking of beauty and peace and goodness and caring, and today was no exception. Today was, if anything, even stronger in that regard. He smiled a small smile at Blaine, as if to reassure him there was nothing odd in their placement of each other, and Blaine’s breath caught at how lovely those long eyelashes were as they brushed his cheek when he blinked slowly, the shadows catching every angle of his face and throwing it into contrast; he looked like he was glowing. For all Blaine thought of him, he might as well have been.

“Good morning,” Kurt said, his voice low but not a whisper, more of a naturally throaty greeting that held promise and yet concern with a dash of hope. Blaine remembered that he had no reason to smirk and yet found himself doing it.

“Good morning,” he repeated the sentiment.

“Do you mind if I do something?” Kurt asked.

“No.”

“Good.”

Kurt’s hand wriggled free of his, but instead of pulling back like Blaine expected him to, he only shifted further forward and put his hands in the crooks between Blaine’s neck and shoulders, so now their chests touched, too, and Blaine could feel his heart beating next to his, pounding, thumping away, arrhythmic and loud, and Kurt’s eyes kept flickering from his lips to his eyes again, and Blaine felt something vaguely akin to what he once had held onto for his life tingle in his freed fingers. In the next moment, his hands were around the lower part of Kurt’s abdomen, pulling him impossibly closer.

It wasn’t a kiss and it didn’t promise anything. But it was enough to make Blaine feel like if heaven or Nirvana or whatever existed he must have already died and been in the presence of an angel, and that if this was death, cancer rocked.

And then Kurt laughed and both their bodies shook with the tremor of it, a good one, and Blaine felt a warmth spread from every point of contact with Kurt through all of him, flooding him with a fuzzy, diluted joy that made not smiling difficult.

-~*~-

By the time they’d been able to stop staring at each other and giggling like idiots, their stomachs were growling, and they plodded out of the room with lethargic motions, even though it was clear from their eyes how awake they were. And when they saw Burt at the stove, whistling and with an egg in a pan and two plates of scrambled eggs at the table, they stopped and stared, curious and confused.

“Dad?” Kurt asked hesitantly.

“Hey, kiddo,” Burt said casually, shifting the plate a bit so the egg continued to sizzle.

“Why are you cooking?” Blaine took his turn to speak.

Burt snorted. “Somebody needs to keep us all fed around here, and Mr. Gourmet was too busy snickering with you in bed.”

“Oh my god,” Kurt said, his hands coming up to cover his I-shouldn’t-be-smiling mouth, his cheeks flushing a delicate pink. “It wasn’t… we didn’t -“

Burt laughed outright, grinning at the two of them, and at first Blaine thought it was sincere - but he saw the muscles in his jaw clench when he looked at Blaine and then back to Kurt, and he knew he wasn’t as okay as he was pretending to be.

And so Blaine moved forward and wrapped his arms around him and murmured a soft “Thank you.”

-~*~-

“Mom?” Blaine asked as he answered his phone for the second time since finding out the news - the first time it had been Rachel, who’d wanted to see how their Christmas was and wanted to talk to him about seeing him when he came home with Burt. And this time it was his mother. All post-what-Christmas-should-have-been joy he’d been experiencing was squashed as he’d held it to his ear.

“Blaine,” his mother said, and she almost started crying again. Kurt and Burt had muted the television and were looking at him intently, as if afraid he’d break down again. He was afraid of that too. But he just closed his eyes and leaned his head against the couch’s back, running his fingers over his slicked hair.

“Deep breaths,” he reminded her as he always did when she was upset.

“Blaine, sweetheart, you’ve got to come home,” his mother begged before she took his advice, her voice growing thicker by the word.

“Deep breaths,” he repeated, demanding this time, and she took heed. He waited for a couple seconds while she calmed herself a bit, and rubbed his temples, hating the headache already forming from all the horrible thoughts that threatened to overtake him again. “Now, why do I need to come home right now? I’ve still got a day before my plane leaves, but I’ll be there soon enough. It’ll be okay.”

“I need you home, baby doll,” his mother admitted weakly, as if ashamed, but still commanding somehow, using her nickname for him she’d use when she was terrified for him but keeping it under the surface. He inhaled sharply but otherwise stayed quiet. After a moment, she elaborated. “I need you home right now so we can talk. Bring Kurt if you can, and the Hummels, and hell, all your Glee Club friends. We all need to discuss this.”

“Nobody but Kurt and Burt even know yet, Momma,” he said, accidentally slipping into the name he’d used as a scared little boy. “I can’t just spring this on them like I did with these two. These two are different.”

“Blaine, you have a good twenty to thirty people who love you and see you as family,” his mother admonished him gently. “They should know.”

“Not yet, Momma, please not yet.”

“Baby doll,” she crooned almost automatically, “please come home. I miss you and your father misses you and Cooper’s flying in.”

“You told Cooper?” Blaine sighed, halfway between irritation and exasperation.

“You didn’t?” his mother challenged.

“Look, I’m getting on a plane tomorrow,” Blaine said, with finality, “and there’s no discussion we’re going to have about that. The ticket’s been bought and plans have been made. I’m not changing my life for some stupid disease just because the disease is going to end it. I’m not going to stop living.”

“Blaine.”

“I’ll see you in a day and a half, Mom,” Blaine assured her. “I love you.”

“Then come home,” she begged.

“Mom,” he berated.

“I love you too.”

“Deep breaths.”

-~*~-

Blaine had to plan things. He hated what he was doing but he had to do it; he spent the entire day he had before he got on his plane arranging how to break the news to all his friends. It would be simpler to do it all at once, and he knew that, so he set up a plan; he texted Finn and Mr. Schue and asked to announce something huge at the next glee meeting, and set of Skype calls with all the graduates but Rachel and Kurt, who would actually be there, for that day. He’d set all the calls on his computer and point his webcam towards where he’d be standing, and he’d say it in front of everyone.

He had a major headache by the end of the day, and it became so bad that before he went to sleep he brushed his hair twice to get the aftertaste of nausea as far from him as possible.

He and Mr. Schue actually agreed that Blaine would stand by him as he told them all about the cancer, putting stats on the board and whatnot so they didn’t ask too many questions; and then Blaine would reveal that he had been diagnosed with it. Mr. Schue became the first person outside the Hummels and his own family who knew; and Blaine gave him permission to tell Emma, so she was in the know, too. Both of them knew to keep quiet. And Blaine was sharply aware that as soon as he hung up the Skype call that they’d both start crying.

It seemed worse at night. When the sun wasn’t slanting softly through the windows and everything cast in the shadow of light from lamps seemed mysterious and dark. Everything jumped out at him in tiny details and he found it difficult not to consider every aspect of the next year.

But when Kurt offered for Blaine to sleep in his bed that night and not on the couch, and when Kurt joined him in bed after an hour or so, he found it much easier to just sleep, especially with Kurt’s arms around him and his front pressed into Blaine’s back, his lips just behind his neck. It confused him to no end about their status, but it did make him a lot more comfortable.

-~*~-

When Kurt and Burt had first decided to accompany Blaine back to Ohio, Blaine had protested fervently due to costs and Kurt’s work and impending NYADA schedule, but he hadn’t been able to talk them out of it. And he was glad that he’d failed at that because as he boarded the plane, he didn’t think he’d have been able to suffer through the long hours of near-silence without dissolving into a puddle of depressed tears and anger, but as it was, Kurt hardly let go of his hand the whole time, telling jokes only Blaine seemed to find funny, and chatting with Burt in quiet voices, disturbing nobody but keeping him happy.

It also made him feel guilty, because it was pretty obvious they were trying really hard not to dissolve, themselves, but he didn’t have the guts to tell them to stop pretending.

When he got off the plane, there were more people there than expected waiting in the terminal; both his parents and Cooper, Carole and Finn there for Burt and Kurt, and Will and Emma all waved at him sadly. He hugged him parents and his mother wouldn’t let go of him; Carole and Finn, totally confused as to why Blaine’s dad and Cooper started crying and why Blaine’s mom took so many deep breaths, asked what was going on, and with a nod from Blaine, Burt told them. People gave them odd looks when Carole started crying, too, and then Emma joined, and it seemed to be a chain reaction where only Kurt had dry eyes in the end. Blaine had hugged and squeezed and held onto more than anybody else, and by the time they left, the box of tissues Kurt had brought to be prepared was empty.

Carole invited the Andersons over for dinner as they were getting into cars, and at first, his family denied, but then accepted on the grounds that it would be later in the week and not that night, because they wanted to spend time with him as much as they could as a tightly-woven family. Finn had patted and rubbed his back and called him ‘bro’ every time he addressed him. Usually he’d have found it annoying. This time he still found it annoying but again didn’t have the guts to tell him to stop.

The Hudson-Hummels drove away and so did Will and Emma, after Blaine confirmed their plan for the next day’s Glee Club, and then Blaine got in his family’s car and let them begin to drive away.

The details from boarding the plane to walking through his front door were basically as described; sparse and blurred. He didn’t feel like everything moved quickly and was therefore blurred as if zooming past, but he did feel as if he was watching it all from behind a murky window, or a bad television screen, like he was watching a play or a movie. Not something actually happening to him. (Though he did remark to himself that everyone seemed to be crying and that that was really sad because he hated people crying.)

But when he walked through his front door, it slammed into him like a ton of bricks, each one leaving an individual bruise as they clattered around his feet, leaving a ringing sound in his ears and tears welling in his eyes. His chest constricted as if he were going to hiccup, his blood suddenly chilled until it felt like freezing water running through him, and the uneasiness in his stomach twisted so he felt bile rise to the lump in his throat, its acid allowing it to move past like his breath couldn’t, and he leaned over the trashcan they kept by the door and threw up.

-~*~-

“Pancreatic carcinoma,” said Will, as soon as Blaine, having made sure everyone was in the room, set his laptop - with its huge Skype chat going on - facing the room. Will’s voice was sad and strained, but clear, and it carried so everyone could hear. “Also known as pancreatic cancer. How much do you guys know about it?”

There was a murmur around the room and the chat. Kurt looked intently at Blaine, ashen-faced and ignoring the odd looks people were giving him (as opposed to Rachel, who was glowing from all the awe-struck attention she was getting from the members). “I can google it,” Quinn volunteered, and heads turned to the laptop.

“Not necessary,” Will told her somberly, uncapping his marker and turning to the board. “What you need to know is that the pancreas is a big organ behind your stomach that make and release enzymes that help absorb foods. The cause of the cancer isn’t exactly pin-pointed to a certain thing, but it can be genetic in some rare cases and be passed down through bloodlines.”

“Why do we need to know this? And Blaine, why did you ask us to this chat to hear about this?” Mercedes asked, confused, and everyone murmured again softly in agreement.

“You need to know these things so you don’t ask questions,” Blaine said, his words coming out slow but loud. Everyone was paying rapt attention, suspicious, confused, and even a bit scared, judging by how Rachel’s eyes were bigger than Texas and how Mike was gripping the edges of his laptop (Blaine could see due to the angle it was at). He nodded at Will before anyone else spoke up.

Will continued, “Over ninety-five percent of people diagnosed with pancreatic cancer are dead within the next five years,” he said, and his cracked on ‘dead’ the same way Blaine’s heart did. He blinked a couple times, and then took a deep breath, and went on in a much shakier tone. “It’s usually caught late because there are no early symptoms. Some lucky people are able to have it surgically removed, but most aren’t. There’s a four percent survival rate. You all…” and he blinked rapidly again, lowering his arm a fraction of the way down as he concentrated on breathing. “You all need to know this because…”

Blaine, seeing he couldn’t actually say it like he thought he’d be able to, moved to stand in front of him, and faced the group and his laptop. “You all need to know these things,” he said, and he fought down the urge to avert his eyes. “Because you all need to know that I have been diagnosed with pancreatic carcinoma, and I have around a year to live.”

Chaos erupted.

From his laptop alone came a good half of the noise. Mercedes started screaming that like hell he was going to die on her, Santana began swearing up a Spanish storm, Puck joined Santana but in English, Quinn covered her mouth with her hands, and Mike fell off his chair and went off-screen. And then, from the non-technological point of the room, Rachel gave a scream like someone in a horror movie and rushed at him, embracing him with enough momentum to have knocked him over if Will hadn’t caught him and held him upright. Marley had gasped and gone stiff, and Tina was blinking in disbelief, while Jake was protesting loudly, on his feet, pointing in a way Cooper would have approved of. Brittany had started asking questions nobody could hear or answer, Joe and Kitty had simultaneously begun to pray, and Artie and Ryder were talking, saying something to nobody in particular, maybe running over information; it didn’t matter.

Blaine wrapped his arms around Rachel loosely, patting her back, soothing her, and sighed when he felt her first tear land on his shoulder, knowing that yet more people would be crying.

He really hated it when people cried.

There was a ball of ever-growing tension in his gut, spinning too quickly, weaving itself firmly into place and expanding as it gained more and more. He’d thrown up from pure nerves just last night (that and nausea/vomiting were side effects), and he tried to stop himself from doing it now, as Will tried to silence everybody and Rachel blubbered incoherently in his ear.

And then Kurt was there, prying Rachel off of Blaine gently, talking to her in a hushed voice she was forced to calm down enough to hear, releasing him from her grasp. He let his arms fall immediately - he hadn’t been holding her very tightly - and he backed away slowly until Rachel went over to Finn and leaned into him instead of Blaine. Kurt walked over to him cautiously. He’d just begun raising his arms when Blaine felt the tension in his gut break and flood him, all his joints stiffening and then thawing so quickly he collapsed into Kurt, clutching him as tightly as possible to stay upright, and Kurt was holding him, and the noise was pounding at his head, and the heat in the room bombarded him mercilessly, and Kurt was holding him just as tightly, just like they usually did, with his chin over Blaine’s shoulder and his lips by his ear, but Blaine’s arms under his but reaching up so his hands almost touched each other between Kurt’s shoulder blades, whereas Kurt’s arms went around his shoulders and tugged him tighter.

He felt a bit like Kurt was holding him together, and but for the fact that everyone else in the room was contributing to his falling apart, he’d have made it through without having to fight back those stupid, stupid tears.

He really, really hated it when people cried. Especially him.

-~*~-

Kurt had pulled him aside and asked him if he needed an escape; and so Blaine now sat in the auditorium, the stage in front of him and occupied only by Kurt and the piano the Glee Club had prepared for their dress rehearsal for the New Years’ dance. The lights were down and he sat almost swathed in darkness, the spotlight he had figured out how to use shining directly on Kurt. It was completely silent; Blaine knew he’d have no trouble hearing him.

“Hi,” Kurt said to Blaine, as if to an audience, though it was obviously going to be words meant for an individual. “I’m Kurt Hummel, former Glee Club member and now intern at Vogue as well as impending NYADA student. And also your best friend.”

Blaine nodded mutely.

“And as your best friend,” Kurt said, “I’ve prepared a song. It’s, um, it’s kind of sad,” he said, loosing his train of thought for a moment and his formality of speech declining, “But I think it fits. I’ve kind of had to hold myself together because you needed comfort and I couldn’t give it if I needed it myself, so hopefully this song is the release I think it will be.” And he turned to the piano and began to play.

Blaine had never seen an expression filled with more hopelessness. And it broke his heart when he recognized the music. It broke further when Kurt began singing.

“Your fingertips across my skin, / the palm trees swaying in the wind. / Images,” Kurt sang, and Blaine found that his memory hadn’t done justice to Kurt’s lower range. The song was naturally in a low key, and hearing Kurt hit the notes flawlessly, with such raw emotion, everything that had seemed wrong with him vanished, and little bursts of counter-acting adrenaline and despair shot through him like drops of heated water. But he couldn’t smile. “You sang me Spanish lullabies, / the sweetest sadness in your eyes. / Clever trick.”

Blaine didn’t dare move, though he was sorely tempted to put his hands over his face to hide it, simply so he wouldn’t have to look at how Kurt was staring straight at him, and how the mask Kurt had worn since that night had just vanished and he was baring everything. It was ridiculously evident in how he appeared and how he held himself and how his voice rang, so evident it hurt.

“I’d never want to see you unhappy. / I thought you’d want the same for me.”

The low notes sent his mind reeling and the words set his conscious throbbing.

“Goodbye, my almost lover,” Kurt sang, taking a step forward as if compelled to by something no one could see, “Goodbye, my hopeless dream. / I’m trying not to think about you, / can’t you just let me be? / So long, my luckless romance. / My back is turned on you. / Should’ve known you’d bring me heartache… / almost lovers always do.”

“Stop,” Blaine whispered, knowing Kurt couldn’t hear him and not meaning the word he’d uttered in the slightest; he didn’t want Kurt to stop performing, he wanted the song he was performing to stop being so damn accurate.

“We walked along a crowded street. / You took my hand and danced with me. / Images,” Kurt wisped, the chords of the piano a bit out of touch; it did nothing but make the performance more on-edge, even when it sounded like Kurt was about to become actual, literal, real Porcelain and shatter into a million tiny, painted shards. “And when you left you kissed me lips; / you told me you would never ever forget these images. / No.” The higher notes somehow melded perfectly to the low ones and Blaine’s ankles uncrossed themselves so he could lean forward and put his elbows on his knees so his hands could hold his slumped head up.

“Stop,” he breathed again, but he had to raise his head to see Kurt again - Kurt with a tear running down his cheek. Blaine was on his feet as quick as possible, but he moved through the empty rows at the tempo of the slow, Kurt’s dripping eyes following him.

“Well I’d never want to see you unhappy. / I thought you’d want the same for me,” Kurt seemed to be speaking, and Blaine heard the words as if he was, but with an aura around them one associates with the mental image of the ‘veil of death’.

“I do,” Blaine contradicted under his breath.

“Goodbye, my almost lover. / Goodbye, my hopeless dream.”

“Don’t say goodbye,” Blaine begged silently.

Kurt had finally caught on to how his lips moved, and his eyes followed them, trying to make out the words he couldn’t hear, and the muscles of his face pulled against each other as the tears took him, his voice thicker, richer, as it poured out, “I’m trying not to think about you, / can’t you just let me be? / So long my luckless romance, / my back is turned on you.”

“No, it’s not, don’t… d-don’t…”

“Should’ve known you’d bring me heartache, / almost lovers always do.”

“Not almost, never say almost, Kurt, please…” he drew nearer the stage, his feet carrying him automatically towards Kurt, his hands shaking as they urged to hold him.

“I can not go to the ocean, / I can not drive the streets at night!” And Kurt’s eyes closed and six, six, fresh tears rolled down from those eyelashes. “I can not wake up each morning / without you on my mind! So you’re gone and I’m haunted / but I bet you are just fine.” His eyes opened again and he gave a watery, weary smile at the last line he’d sung, knowing how false it was but sticking with the original lyrics. “Did I make it that easy to walk in and out of my life?”

“No, it was hard,” Blaine confessed horridly, his gut wrenching at the horrible beauty of the song and Kurt’s blatant grief, “it was the most difficult thing I ever had to do and I never wanted to do it.”

“Goodbye, my almost lover. / Goodbye, my hopeless dream.” And the tears finally started to catch up to Kurt, and he had to gasp between lines where before that had been simple breaths, and his voice was strained in a way that added nothing but a raspy couple syllables that reverberated throughout the huge room. “I’m trying not to think about you, / can’t you just let me be?!” The volume increased, the tone changed, and everything about the song altered, and Kurt was weeping and the tears were making his fingers slip on the keys to they meshed together longer than was necessary and made it seem drawn-out, melancholy. Blaine bit his tongue, don’t speak, don’t speak, don’t ruin it. “So long, my luckless romance, / my back is turned on you. / Should’ve known you’d bring me heartache.”

No, no, don’t -

“Almost lovers always… do.”

His fingers curled around the edge of the stage and Kurt’s voice abruptly curtailed, and his hands stopped flitting about the keys and came up to cover his face. Blaine hoisted himself over the edge of the stage and clambered to his feet, stumbling with his haste to reach him, and when he did he collapsed next to him on the bench and threw his arms around him. Kurt responded immediately and with no reluctance; he actually leaned so far into Blaine’s embrace that he slid on the bench so he was lying on his side, his head in Blaine’s lap and his fingers, wet with the saltwater that had leaked from his oceanic eyes, intertwined with his.

“I don’t need you to be strong,” Blaine murmured brokenly. “I just need you to be here.”

“But I need that, t-too,” Kurt halfway-shouted, “and you’re going to be the one leaving.”

“Don’t say that,” Blaine commanded. “Don’t… d-don’t say that. I’m staying right here.”

“You c-can’t promise that!” Kurt yelled, sputtering, his tongue slipping and his head whirling so the words came out slurred and jagged. Blaine knew the feeling with enough familiarity to recognize it in others. “You can’t promise that b-because you’re dying, B-Blaine! And you can’t… you c-can’t make yourself mean something and then d-disappear, it doesn’t… it d-doesn’t work like that!”

“It always works like that.”

-~*~-

Blaine barely remembered the rest of the day, but for the fact that when he left home he had over fifty missed calls and more than two hundred text messages, all from friends and family and people who wanted and needed to just talk to him. So he did the only logical thing he could do: he turned his phone off and went to sleep.

And when he woke up in the morning, he resolved to get through school that day without once answering a cancer question or bringing it up, and he was going to act like absolutely nothing was different. Principal Figgins had been told, as had Sue, which Blaine knew only because his father had told him when he picked him up, so chances were the school would be aware and/or made aware of his little issue.

The bed felt cold without Kurt in it. Blaine tried not to think about that.

When he pulled into the parking lot and opened his door, Sam was immediately at his side. “Blaine,” he said, his tone somewhere between frustration and anger, “You -“

“Hey,” Blaine said casually, slinging his backpack over his shoulder and looking up at the blond, “Did you finish the reading we had to do over break? I didn’t and I need to be caught up.”

Sam paused in confusion, surprised at either the words he used or the fact that he was using them, Blaine couldn’t tell. “But you’re -“

“Going to get a bad grade if you don’t help me,” he pointed out as he cut across Sam’s voice. “So did you do it or not?” He slammed his car door shut and started striding towards the school purposefully, caught between get-in-so-it’s-over-with and prolong-it-a-bit-to-prepare-yourself.

Sam made a scoffing noise deep in his throat. “No, I didn’t.”

“Damn,” Blaine sighed as Sam hurried to walk beside him, jogging at first to match his pace and then walking when he caught up. “We have to summarize what it was in class, I think, that’s what she always does. At least we didn’t have any Calculus to do,” he snorted humorously. “I don’t think -“

“I texted you last night,” Sam interrupted.

Blaine’s smile turned to a grimace of chagrin. “I know. Everyone texted me last night. I turned my phone off.”

“Why? People wanted -“

“To talk to me, I know. But I didn’t want to talk to them,” Blaine said. He became aware of how, even though he had made sure he was really early so as to avoid too many people staring at him, everyone in the parking lot did so and muttered among themselves as he went by.

“That’s not fair,” Sam insisted. “You’re one of our best friends and you’re dying, Blaine!”

“Voice down,” Blaine ordered, all pretense of casualty gone and hostility replacing it.

“We wanted to talk to you because we needed to hear your voice,” Sam told him. “We have a limited amount of time before we never get to hear it again! Can you blame us?”

“Yes, I can!” Blaine spun on him, his fingers flexing and curling into small fists by his sides. “You didn’t hear me when I needed someone to hear me, not once! Oh, you comforted me, and you reassured me, and you listened, but you didn’t hear. Not when you thought you’d always have the chance to. But when there was a threat of my leaving you’d always rush to talk talk talk at me about how good I am and how much you all think so, and you know what? I have a question for you, Sam - do you really need to hear my voice, or do you need the reassurance that you won’t have to?”

Sam stood looking at him with his mouth agape and his eyes wide, having paled a considerable amount since Blaine started speaking, and actually having stumbled back a step when the acid that had colored his tone gained a forceful vehemence. He didn’t shout the words, but the hissed malevolence he spurned was the loudest thing in the parking lot that had fallen silent, but for a few whispers that traveled through the still and tense air between bystanders.

Blaine could feel the eyes of everyone burning holes through him, and so he took off toward the school, his feet slapping the pavement as he sprinted for the doors.

-~*~-

Needless to say, he didn’t start the day off well.

He refused to speak to all of the friends that approached him in the halls or in the classrooms. He got angrier and angrier at himself, too, because eventually they just stared at him in the halls like everyone else, and he knew Sam was telling them what had occurred, and he just got angrier.

By the time lunch rolled around, he decided, for the third time in his life, that he could do without a day of school, and instead of going to the cafeteria to be bombarded with yet more silence and stares (even the teachers had divulged in this, some of them trying to speak to him alone, only to have him effectively end the conversation by walking back to his seat and sitting down), he went to Sue’s office.

As soon as he appeared in the doorway, she looked up and said, “Make it quick, Anderson, or you won’t be non-flammable much longer. It’s my break.”

“It’s always your break, you can get away with anything you want,” Blaine said flatly, and she raised her eyebrows. “I want to go home,” Blaine continued, switching to the topic he wanted to discuss and getting straight to the point. “And not just in the way that means I got bored and I’m stupid so I won’t appreciate my education like other teenagers. I want to go home, but home isn’t my house right now. I want to leave.”

“You can’t just leave in the middle of the day,” she said, taking her glasses of her nose and setting them on her desk in front of her.

“Yes I can, and I’m going to,” he refuted. “I’m going to go somewhere where people look at me like a person and not a person’s disease. I want you to cover for me. I don’t know how and I don’t care how. I don’t even care if you decide to report me instead. But I have to get away from here and you of all people should understand why.”

She raised her eyebrows, but other than that, her face remained the same. “And where will you go, if I cover for you?”

“A store, a restaurant, maybe a park,” he answered. “Probably with Kurt. I’ve got one life to live and a short amount of time to live it and I want to do so without being treated like I’m already dead.”

“And Porcelain won’t treat you like that?” she asked.

“He’s the only one,” Blaine responded.

She nodded. “Alright. Get lost. I might cover for you and I might not.”

Instead of the traditional goodbye, Blaine left by calling over his shoulder, “Don’t kill anyone and frame me and call that ‘covering’.”

He heard her swear as he walked down the hall to the parking lot, turning over his keys in his hand.

-~*~-

Blaine might have lied a little to Sue. He was planning on going out to maybe a shop or restaurant or a park or something… eventually. But he had other, immediate plans to get to first.

And as he walked down the staircase at Dalton Academy, he couldn’t help but smile at the feeling of fond memories bubbling up, and for once, they didn’t turn bitter.

Before he reached the bottom, a voice he knew well rang out. “Blaine?”

“Hey, Nick,” Blaine greeted his old friend with a friendly smile. “How are things?”

“Depends on how you are,” Nick responded, smiling back with ease. “So there are no… hard feelings?”

Blaine sighed a small sigh and appraised Nick, noticing that he wore a small golf pin of a bird on his right sleeve’s cuff, and then grinned at him. “No hard feelings, Mr. Third-on-the-Council,” he teased, brushing the pin with his finger.

He could see people moving around them eyeing him, but with awe, and not pity, and that restored a bit of the sanity he’d lost earlier.

Nick beamed proudly. “Along with Hunter and Sebastian,” he said proudly, and they began walking in a direction Blaine knew he was going anyway. “So why are you hear?”

Blaine shrugged, trying to see nonchalant. “Well, the Warblers are my friends, even if we’ve had our competitive spats every now and then, and I’ve got some news they deserve to hear.”

“Kurt’s okay, right?” Nick asked, his brow furrowing.

Blaine held in another sigh. “Physically,” he answered.

“What’s wrong with him mentally, or emotionally?” Nick queried, concern growing quickly. “Didn’t he go to New York to go that that one college..?”

“He’s going to NYADA next semester, and yes, he works at Vogue and lives in New York,” Blaine responded, incapable of keeping all the pride from his voice. “That’s not what’s wrong.”

“Is it your break-up?” Nick asked, his voice slightly softer now, more understanding.

Blaine made a face. “Partly.”

“Then what -“

“And we’re getting to my news, which you all should know,” Blaine cut him off, and they stopped right outside the Warbler Hall’s doors. “I’m assuming they’re all in here?”

“Yeah, I’m a bit late for rehearsal,” he said, and Blaine pushed the doors open and walked through.

He was immediately greeted with a shocked chorus of “Blaine!” and then the room grew quiet, and Blaine knew it was because they were unsure of his intentions.

“You guys are still my friends, right?” he asked, to make them clear. “Even you two,” he said, pointing at Hunter and Sebastian, who looked suspicious of what he was doing there but not doubtful of him, which was a plus.

And then another chorus burst out, arrhythmic, and they were rising and clapping and smiling at him - but he held up his hands for them to stop, and they fell silent again. “So you should be aware,” he answered, as Nick stepped into the room and closed it behind him, “of some bad news I bring.”

“Kurt’s okay, right?” spoke Jeff, and Blaine grimaced when Nick told him, “I already asked about Kurt, he says he’s fine physically but there’s something going on emotionally and mentally.”

“Please, guys,” Blaine said, trying not to let his voice be as defeated as it felt. He saw familiar faces, people looking at him like they used to, and he wished with a large part of him that Wes and David hadn’t graduated - he’d have to call them up later. “The bad news is about me, and Kurt’s not really taking it lightly. Nobody is.”

“What’s wrong?” asked Sebastian, and Blaine spared him a sorry glance before turning back to the group at large.

It was easier to tell them, and why, he didn’t know, but it was; he found that it wasn’t as difficult as it had been with the New Directions to force the words past his teeth. “I have pancreatic cancer and about a year to live.”

They didn’t respond like the New Directions. They sat in stunned silence. Nick covered his mouth, and Hunter’s eyes widened, and Sebastian put his head in his hands, but everyone else just stared at him disbelievingly. It was a pleasant change, almost peaceful, if the air hadn’t been filled with such stress. “A year?” Jeff asked, his voice almost silent, wisps of breath rising to a comprehensible volume.

Blaine nodded. “A year and a half at best, and, uh… considerably less time at worst.”

“How long at worst?” Hunter asked.

“Four months at worst,” he admitted sheepishly, as if he’d done something wrong. “I just… you guys are my friends, and you were nice to me, and you didn’t beat me up for being me when other people had, and you gave me all sorts of solos, and… don’t cry,” he said, switching directly to Jeff, whose eyes had started to overflow. “God, I hate crying, there’s been so much of it lately. Please don’t cry.”

“Can you expect him not to?” Sebastian demanded with no force behind the words. “Like you said, we’re your friends, and that makes you ours, and you’ve just told us you’re dying in a year’s time, during which we’ll be going on in a competition you were disqualified from and then to college or something else and we’ll never see you.”

“There’s texting,” Blaine said. “And Skype, and calls. Communication doesn’t have to stop until I can’t do it anymore.”

“But I’m gonna miss you,” Jeff hiccuped. Blaine looked over at him sadly, hit gut clenching at how hard they were trying to hold themselves together - Nick’s lip was trembling but he was obviously refusing to let himself cry - and he wanted nothing more than to sit down on the couches with them and watch old competition reruns like they used to.

Blaine bit his lip before replying, “I know.”

-~*~-

“Kurt?”

“Hey, Blaine. Aren’t you in school?”

“I’m in a school.”

Kurt paused a moment, his voice over Blaine’s cell phone as he called him from amidst the Warblers, an old competition rerun on the screen and his friends sitting around him on the couches. “Are you at Dalton?”

“Damn it,” Blaine muttered, digging in his pocket for a dollar and when finding it handing it to a please Sebastian. “On the first try. Yeah, I’m at Dalton.”

“Did you tell the Warblers?”

“Yeah, I told them. We’re watching old performances like we used to in the rehearsal hall now. There’s popcorn. Want to come?”

“Are they still wearing those blazers?”

“It’s a private school with uniforms, Kurt. Of course they’re wearing their blazers.”

“Do they still have our old ones?”

Now it was Blaine’s turn to pause. “Kurt -“

“Blaine, you want to live your life as much as possible for as long as you can,” Kurt told him seriously. “For one day, I want you and I to sit with the Warblers and talk and laugh like we used to so it’s still fresh when… when it happens.”

“We can do that without blazers, Kurt, they’re still our friends. Actually, when I told them I had bad news, the first thing they did was ask if you were okay.”

“Really?” Blaine knew that tone and he bit back laughter; Kurt was pleased and flattered but trying not to show it.

“Yes, really. So are you coming or not?”

“Oh, I’m coming. I’ll be there in half an hour. You’d better still have popcorn.”

“We’ve got a whole box left, minus one bag.”

“Knowing your love for it, it’ll be gone by the time I arrive.”

“Hey!”

-~*~-

Blaine checked his phone as it buzzed again, and again discarded the text from Sam. Though they’d just had popcorn and Kurt hadn’t hesitated to remind him of that, they sat at Breadstix, the table between them, and ate their food. Blaine had thought he’d be hungrier, but he could barely touch his meat ravioli, no matter how delicious it looked and smelled and tasted. Kurt, however, was digging into the piece of pie he’d gotten, and Blaine found himself content to just stare at Kurt and how his jaw moved and the shadows of his eyelashes shifted on his cheekbones.

Kurt eventually glanced up and smiled at him, swallowing before he spoke. “Too much popcorn,” he chastised, looking at his barely-touched plate. “You spoiled your appetite for a proper lunch.”

“Maybe,” Blaine allowed, tilting his head to the side, looking at how the artificial lights seemed to pale in comparison to him and how the natural light filtered through the window looked like a spotlight particularly for Kurt.

“Definitely,” Kurt corrected, and shoveled the last of his pie into his mouth.

Blaine shook his head softly as he stared, not even bothering to move the food around with his fork on the plate anymore. “You know,” Blaine said, “you’re actually really beautiful?”

Kurt, having sat back with satisfaction at the food, looked at him with mild surprise, his eyes flickering over his face, searching for something, his cheeks gaining a slightly darker tint. Blaine didn’t regret the words, but he did regret that he said them. It was the kind of thing he should have said before, not after, the break-up. “And why is that?” Kurt asked, entertaining the notion playfully.

“Well…” Blaine brought his head back and looked at him square-on, trying to find a way to describe him. “For one, your skin is clear, and it’s all cream-colored, and you have these long, dark eyelashes that brush against those high cheekbones when you blink or look down, and your smile is kind of intoxicating. And your eyes are super easy to get lost in. And your lips look soft, and you seem like you’re outshining the sun right now. And that’s just on the outside, ‘cause on the inside, it gets so much better than that.”

Kurt gaped at him, and then, in one fluid motion, reached across the table and grabbed his hand. Blaine had moved automatically when he’d noticed Kurt doing it, the movement so familiar it was hard-wired into him to respond by mirroring the actions, and their fingers clutched each other mid-way. “You’re not too shabby-looking yourself,” Kurt said.

“That’s all?” Blaine laughed easily. “I give you a thought-out and beautiful paragraph on how amazing you look and are, and I get ‘not too shabby-looking’?”

Kurt’s cheeks reddened further. “Well, you’re good at summarizing. I’m not. You could pinpoint the beautiful things about me. There’s so much about you, I’m not sure if… I could make it that short.”

Blaine squeezed his hand and felt a familiar fluttering in his stomach. “Good enough. But you have plenty of time to work on making it short. Preferably as short as I am,” he joked, and then his voice dwindled at Kurt’s stricken look. “Kurt?”

“Not much time, actually,” Kurt corrected him for the second time that day, this time in a voice that sounded as if he were suffocating. “Not much time at all.”

“Stop that,” Blaine demanded. “Stop thinking like that. We’ve got plenty of time, and it’s not like it’s mandatory to tell me a paragraph’s worth of compliments.”

Kurt regained control then, and just chuckled. “I know,” he said, and Blaine relaxed, finding that easier than pursuing the subject.

-~*~-

Blaine chased after Kurt, counting on his legs to push him forward, to propel him, getting faster as he gained on Kurt. People tended to scoff when you played tag in public (if you were over the age of 9) but nobody was around - it was midnight, and they were sprinting under snowfall in a park. It was heavy snowfall, but not quite a blizzard. Just enough that when people woke in the morning it would look like it had been a blizzard.

Kurt was laughing and shouting as he ran and spun, and Blaine found it difficult to find him in the dark following only his musical voice, but he did. He panted and saw his breath solidify in front of him before he ran through it moments after. The ground had begun to crunch under his feet and his fingers were beginning to grow stiff with the cold that leeched into him through his thin layers when his hands caught someone’s waist.

By the voice that laughed and said his name, close by through the pitch-black-and-spotted-with-white air, he knew it was Kurt.

A playground, at night, it typically a creepy place. A playground at night when it’s snowing is magical. Even if it’s snowing hard and the wind is whisking past your ear and you’ve been awake since five in the morning and are dealing with pancreatic cancer, it’s beautiful. And so when Blaine caught Kurt and skidded to a halt, the snow underneath him causing him to slip, they both fell over onto their stomachs in the soft and increasingly thick blanket of white. It cushioned them and they laughed as they rolled over, onto their backs, and found that they’d rolled so close that their sides were pressed tightly against each other.

And then Kurt was shifting so his arm was around Blaine’s shoulders, underneath his head, so he was looking down at their bodies covered in snowflakes, and suddenly Kurt’s arm was pulling him over so he rolled again, back onto his stomach, but on top of Kurt.

And Kurt kissed him.

The wind made things impossible to hear, and the time and snow made things impossible to see, and how frozen they were made it impossible to react properly, but Blaine felt all the coldness that had seeped into him melt away completely until he felt all watery and thawed inside. And he kissed him back, more hope and elation making him feel like for a moment all his energy had burst out into huge wings and he was going to soar. His fingers, unreasonably gloveless, knotted in his hair, and he brought himself up on Kurt further so he was straddling him while still laying down on top of him; he smiled between soft, buttery kisses, kisses that still tasted like the chocolate Kurt had had earlier, and clean and clear like snow. Blaine didn’t know why it was happening. But he never wanted it to stop.

Kurt pressed onto his lips urgently with his own, his hands coming up and wrapping around Blaine tightly, a vice-like grip holding him down, and Blaine could feel a familiar heat that had been absent far too long spread from their meshing lips all over him, searing through his veins and leaving him tingling all over, sweat starting to bead beneath his clothes. His pushed his whole weight on to Kurt in a manner that was almost crushing him, and even though he could hear nothing, he could feel Kurt groan with pleasure beneath him.

And then Kurt’s hips bucked ever-so-slightly upward, and his leg bent so his ankle hooked on Blaine’s, and a moan tore from Blaine’s lips, too, and he whispered, “Kurt,” his voice lost in the wind, snowflakes landing on his tongue and melting immediately.

Kurt’s foot placed itself in the snow strongly, and with his legs getting the brunt of the work, he hauled them over so he was on top of Blaine now, his lips possessive, his tongue protruding and tasting Blaine’s; he sucked on Blaine’s lower lip and Blaine felt his crotch tighten. It occurred to him then how unfortunate their placement was; though he had no doubt they’d be able to stay warm during, before and after, the sweat on them would freeze and they’d turn into human icicles. But Kurt’s own pants were growing harder on top of his own and he could feel the forceful weight of Kurt’s tent rubbing against his, and the friction made a guttural gasp escape his occupied mouth.

And so Blaine took control quickly, knowing what they both wanted - and would very well get - and deciding to call the shots. Against Kurt’s unheard but obvious protests, Blaine helped them both rise to their feet, and he walked Kurt over to where his car was, parked on the side of the street, heat nearly overflowing his brain before they so much as slid inside.

But when they did slide inside the back seat, Kurt slammed the door shut behind him and was on Blaine in a second, the snow forgotten as it melted on them, their coats off in a flash and on the floor under them. Blaine’s back was on the soft car seats, his hands trying desperately to unbutton Kurt’s vest, but Kurt was literally on top of him with no space between them, his lips sucking and biting on Blaine’s. Blaine’s head was reeling but his dick was having no trouble processing the situation. It rose and hardened painfully, trying to escape the constrictions of his clothing, and it rubbed against Kurt’s obvious hard-on, pressing down on the inside of Blaine’s thigh.

And then Blaine finally managed to get the vest off of him and in his haste to get it off his hand also gripped the shirt and actually ripped it off.

Kurt didn’t seem to mind.

Blaine was, as always, giddy with excitement and desire as he looked at Kurt bare-chested, sweat glistening off of his toned and pale body like crystals clinging to him - but he couldn’t keep his eyes open for long, because surges of heat were bouncing around inside of him and his thoughts got foggy, nearly as foggy as the windows were becoming.

And Kurt somehow managed to slip Blaine’s shirt over his head gently, breaking the kiss for only a moment before his lips darted to Blaine’s neck, sucking and licking so Blaine tossed his head back and thrust his hips forward sharply and without control.

The next few moments were a blur in Blaine’s usually well-organized mind, but later, as he would look back on it, he would consider it close to what car-crash victims said; they’d remember every detail up to the crash and everything after, but not the actual crash itself.

And then suddenly his jeans and underwear were pooled around his ankles and he was kicking them off, and Kurt’s were already gone, and the windows were steamed and the new hickey on his neck was throbbing and so was his dick and he could see and hear every aspect of Kurt, from his exhilarated panting to his swollen dick, and he found a curled toil of copper tension unfurling in his gut, and with each peck of Kurt’s lips as they got lower and lower and he slid off of him so he was on the floor he found it wound itself tighter.

And then Kurt was moaning his name and Blaine shoved himself upright, and curled his fingers in Kurt’s hair once more, spreading his legs so his dick was prominent and sheened with pre-come.

Kurt’s mouth formed a perfect ‘O’, and then enveloped the tip of his cock, its throbs sending tremors throughout his whole body, and he shook and quivered and gasped as Kurt’s tongue started licking up every way it knew how as he swallowed around it, sucking so Blaine felt the force of it cramp his stomach forward and dip his head as he tried to get breath.

Kurt’s mouth moved further up, up, switching tactics, and every time Blaine’s body had a different response, until he was half-way between feral moans and screaming Kurt’s name. Kurt once went so far his nose nestled against Blaine’s balls, and when he pulled back, the dribbling remains of his saliva shone in the shadows of the car. His dick swelled and grew and he convulsed, trying to keep it minimal, trying not to react too much, so much he drew away, for fear of losing the sensation, and then he felt the copper begin to unfurl with such speed he barely had time to spurt, “I’m going t-” when he was gone, coming in Kurt’s mouth, and Kurt was swallowing it gulping it down like it was water and he’d been dying of thirst.

Blaine trembled when he felt the wire begin to recoil, and then Kurt was on top of him again, nearly pouncing from where he’d been, white leftovers around the corners of his mouth he used to kiss Blaine fiercely. His tongue battled with his, and Blaine’s knuckles were white where he gripped Kurt’s sides, squeezing him with all his strength to get him closer, closer, and Kurt’s dick was huge against his, and then Kurt was groaning and choking out the same words Blaine had tried to say before, and then he came, his sperm spurting out over Blaine’s stomach as Kurt curled, and Blaine felt the copper unroll its final toil as he orgasmed a second time, the heat rocking his body, locking both of their limbs in place and them loosening them, so they collapsed on the seat, panting and weak and exhausted and satisfied.

Kurt’s limbs shuddered as his fingers came up, hands shaking, to stroke the side of Blaine’s face, and he said through huge gasps, “I… love you, Blaine.”

And Blaine barely managed to have enough breath to laugh at the absurdity of all that had happened, the temperature in the car enveloping him, making all his thoughts murky and relaxing his strained body, and he said, “I love you too.”

-~*~-

Blaine woke up with his midsection sticky and the rest of him covered in Kurt but not clothing. He found it difficult to dislike the situation, though somewhat unconventional.

Of course, as soon as he woke, Kurt did, too. And they both blinked sleepily and happily, the cold from outside having cleared away some of their late-night (or early-morning) romp effects, especially that of the windows being steamed so nobody could see them. Blaine had never before been so grateful they were so thickly tinted. Otherwise he’d have felt embarrassment on the behalf of people driving by who happened to catch a glimpse of what the situation was.

And then Kurt seemed to remember, and a slow and sad smile stretched across his cheeks, small but genuine, and he laughed a shaky but sure laugh. “Good morning.”

“To you, too,” Blaine greeted, much in the same way as he did.

“I love you,” Kurt burst out, and Blaine felt both their bodies shake when he laughed underneath him, craning his neck the smallest bit to kiss him chastely.

“And I love you.”

-~*~-

“So you decided to disappear yesterday,” said Tina, who had been waiting beside his locker. “And you didn’t answer text messages or phone calls. All you posted on facebook was that you were busy and for everyone not to worry because you were out with Kurt.”

Blaine fought the grin down. “That’s right.”

“Where did you go with Kurt?” Tina demanded as he put in his combination.

Past third base for a home run, he thought. “Out to eat and then to the park,” he said.

“Why didn’t you go home?” she asked. “We called your parents and they said you called at, like, ten, and were planning on staying with Kurt. But when we called Kurt’s house, Burt said he’d said he’d stay with you.”

Blaine shrugged, struggling to keep the corners of his mouth down as he picked out his textbooks. “So we stayed out. We had plans. We weren’t done until early this morning and just slept in my car.” It was really, really, exorbitantly hard not to smirk, and Blaine thought, with no small degree of pleasure, that that was the first time since finding the news he’d had to battle back a smile and not tears.

“Oh,” Tina said simple, walking beside him as he headed to class. “Sue said you’d gone home before lunch because you weren’t feeling well.”

“Yeah, I felt sick,” Blaine lied, the smirk a little easier to fight back when he added a guilty conscience into the mix. “But it was just some passing nausea. Side effect,” he explained briefly, knowing he didn’t have to tell her what of for her to understand. She nodded grimly. He felt a bit of fondness toward Sue begin to form and he nearly rolled his eyes at it. So she’d covered for him. Big deal.

Of course, he had gotten back together with Kurt because of it, which was always a plus to his outlook on life and the people in it.

“So you slept with him,” she stated the obvious, but in a low voice, one that not everybody in the bustling halls could hear.

The smirk broke free. “And how did you know that?” he grinned.

“It’s fairly simple,” she said. “Slept in your car, stayed out all night, lied to your parents, and you love each other and have since you first sang to him. Pretty simple to guess that you slept with him.”

“Going to tell anyone?” he chuckled, pausing outside the first period door, thirty seconds until the bell rang.

“Depends. Are you?”

“I’ll tell them I have my boyfriend back, not what brought it on.”

She pursed her lips. “Then I’ll let you tell them. Now come on.”

And so they entered the classroom.

-~*~-

When Blaine got home that night, he explained to his parents and Cooper what had happened (minus all the details that made it particularly hard to sit in khakis without his legs crossed when he thought about them too much) and that he’d gotten back together with Kurt.

Cooper had celebrated it. He’d patted Blaine on the back and congratulated him, saying he could use the happiness he’d seen Kurt bring him.

His mother had shaken her head sadly, but said she thought Kurt was a lovely boy, and was lucky to have Blaine. Not because she was prejudiced, but because she was sad.

His father didn’t say anything until Blaine asked him why he was being quiet: and then he started a very slow, very long, and very heart-felt speech:

“Blaine, you love Kurt. That much is obvious. You make mistakes and you’ve hurt him and that’s alright if it’s alright with him now. But I want you to think long and hard about this, bud, because considering the bomb you’ve just dropped on him, he’s going to do things on spur-of-the-moment decisions. He’s going to be desperate to figure out right now whether or not he can trust you again. In time, I’m sure he will, but he may be pushing it. He may not be comfortable. I’m not saying he doesn’t love you! But he’s a teenager and he’s scared, and I think he may have done this so soon because he thinks he won’t get another chance and not because he actually wants it to be now.”

Blaine had frozen, and his mother had nodded somberly, and Cooper’s hand had rubbed his shoulder, and he’d responded, “You think he wanted to get back together because of the cancer?”

His father winced. “I’m sorry, Blaine, but yes, that’s what I think.”

Blaine took a moment to think over the information, and then went to his room, and didn’t come out until he left for school the next morning.

-~*~-

For the next two months, Blaine discovered that therapy sucks. Big-time. And that it wasn’t doing anything to help him. And that the cancer was spreading. And that that shortened his time considerably.

He told nobody.

He pretended everything was normal. He acted fine, he didn’t yell, he didn’t get angry or sad for no reason. He was normal and after a while, people started treating him normally, too, except for the fact that whenever he spoke, someone always listened. That didn’t mean they always heard, but they always listened, which means they tried to hear. And it was nice. A good change from the silence he’d been treated like he was saying. He enjoyed it.

He hung out with the Warblers. When they got reinstated for Regionals, he practiced his duet with Marley. He did his homework and he wore bowties. Nobody said anything. Nobody did anything. He was alone with Kurt a lot, and everyone was happy they were together again, especially Burt, Rachel, Sam and, for some odd reason, Puck. He didn’t bring up what his father had said. Neither did his father. Or anyone else, for that matter.

What his mother did bring up was that he seemed to be taking it all in stride and that she was proud of him for being so brave. She said it to him right as he was leaving for school. He managed to wait until he was alone in the bathroom to cry.

No one found him. No one comforted him. No one knew he’d even cried in the first place. All they knew was that he was late for first period. He blamed it on nausea. They believed him.

Blaine had everyone convinced it was true until Glee Club. He broke down.

He didn’t know why. He didn’t know what triggered it. Maybe something somebody said or the tone they used or the fact that he went two months without once letting anybody or anything see what he was actually feeling. All he knew was that Finn was talking about how Regionals were that weekend, and suddenly Blaine was crying again, for the second time that day.

The room went deathly quiet, and then Kitty, of all people, who happened to have been sitting next to Blaine, leaned over and asked, “Are you crying because you’re nervous?”

He nodded.

“And scared?”

He nodded again and tried to swallow around the lump in his throat and the holes in his chest left by their piercing gazes.

“And frustrated?”

“Yeah,” he choked, hunching over and putting his head in his hands, despising how his fingers were instantly coated with saltwater.

“Remember when I saw the cast list for Grease?” she asked, somewhat randomly.

Blaine just nodded again.

“And I said I didn’t understand why I didn’t get the role because I’d been praying really hard for it, and Joe said maybe it was because God was busy helping people with cancer?”

Blaine raised his head and looked at her, loathing every second he spent so vulnerable and choosing to spend it in powerful silence.

Kitty slid off her chair so she was kneeling in front of him, and she reached up to wipe tears off his cheeks. “I don’t understand,” she told him. “I still don’t. Not just about the role, but about how, instead of helping people with cancer, he gave it to you.”

“I already had it at that p-point,” Blaine told her, “I just didn’t know.”

“So see? He did help!” Kitty announced, smiling at him with enough support he felt his eyes stop stinging quite so badly. “He let the doctors know this was happening so you’d understand and be able to get treatment and whatnot. You’re going to get better. God is helping people with cancer! See? He was right!”

And the notion was both so uplifting (because of how hopeful she was and how strongly she believed in what she said) and amusing (because how can one possibly understands the motives of a deity?) he found himself laughing through his tears, and then he was crying harder because he was laughing and it hurt to laugh because it was the first genuine laugh he’d had in months and it was while he was crying that he’d laughed. Then the whole Glee Club was quiet but murmuring to him and holding him and hugging him and telling him they were right there, and offering him things to do and trips to places to calm him down and a drink of water and a break and he just laughed and cried until he couldn’t breath and his throat and stomach hurt.

-~*~-

“Isn’t there a transplant you could have or something?”

Blaine shook his head at Kurt’s desperate ideas as they continued to grow repetitive and more far-fetched. “It could have been a possibility when the cancer first appeared, before we had any idea it was there, but the cancer’s spread since then. Transplant wouldn’t do anything but get the new pancreas infected, too.”

“Can’t you live without a pancreas?” Kurt asked hopefully.

Blaine gave him a look worthy of Santana’s judgement face that he couldn’t see over the phone, like the shaking of his head. “No.”

“But you can’t live with it, either!” Kurt cried out, his voice warped by the technology a bit but still clearly upset..

“I know,” he said calmly. “That’s kind of the point of cancer. It kills because it wants to live. Just like a lot of people.”

“Murderers,” Kurt scoffed.

“A lot of people,” Blaine repeated sourly.

Kurt had left for NYADA a month late and incapable of missing any more work. He called Blaine every day, either on Skype or by phone. This was the first time he’d done it when Blaine had openly brought up the subject of his cancer. And after the news was received by the Glee Club that in the past two months he’d actually spent four - as in, he’d been cut back to around ten months of life from when he’d been originally diagnosed - and they’d told him to break the news to Kurt, Blaine had expected everything, even this constant listing and repeating ideas that won’t work.

“Isn’t the treatment doing anything?” Kurt nearly whimpered.

“Nothing.”

“I don’t want you to die.”

“And I don’t want you to stop living when I do,” Blaine commanded him forcefully. “When I bite the dust, I want you to come to my funeral, say something short that’s going to please everyone even if it’s a lie, and then move on.”

“It’s not that easy.”

“It should be!” Blaine exploded suddenly, rage knocking him back so he fell onto his bed, his fingers curling in on themselves or around his phone. It burned through him, clouding his sense of what he was saying. “It should be! It’s not like I’m ever going to make a difference in the damn world! I’m not going to be someone’s answer to ‘Who’s your favorite musician?’ or ‘Who’s your inspiration?’ I’m never going to walk down a red carpet or drive a car through town and have people recognize me on the spot. I’m never going to be heard when I talk until I can’t talk anymore! I’m never going to matter to the world outside the group of people who know me now, so getting over me isn’t going to be that hard. God knows the rest of the world isn’t going to spare me a glance when I go, so why should you take the time to avidly look back?”

“Because you’re worth looking back at now and you will be then!” Kurt exclaimed, shock and mild horror floating through Blaine’s phone. “Because the only reason the world isn’t sparing you a glance is because it doesn’t know you to know how much you’re worth that and so much more! Everybody’s important, Blaine -“

“Which is just another way of saying nobody is, which is a lie. Some people are, and some people aren’t, and I’m not, so -“

“You are too important!” Kurt was yelling now. “Don’t you dare give a damn thought to that stupid notion that you’re not! If nobody else than to me, and I know you know my opinion matters, and that’s because I matter. And so do you!”

“No, I don’t! The only thing that ever mattered about me was you, Kurt, you and this stupid freaking cancer! When I die that’s going to be it! Some people get to live forever. Okay? Who they are and what they did is remembered forever. I’m not going to be one of them. I’m not going to mean anything once you stop remembering me. So you should do that as soon as possible and find someone else or something else that is going to live beyond when they die. I’m never going to make anything of myself, Kurt. I’m never going to make my dreams come true or help the world. I don’t have the time.”

Kurt said, “You had enough time to make me fall in love with you. That makes you worth something, and if you have a worth you have a meaning. Even if it’s small and only to one person, it’s still a meaning, and it’s there forever, whether or not your memory is. Who you are never fades. What you do never goes away. What disappears are the amount of people who care. That doesn’t mean you didn’t make an impact. All it means is that the impact you made was just as full as someone whose name is known around the world; but your impact was more compact, and all that means is that you mattered a lot more to fewer people. You did make the world better. It just depends on which world you choose to see.”

Blaine shook his head and covered his mouth with his hand, inhaling deeply, trying to stabilize the returning tears into just normal sadness and failing, failing because he wanted to believe Kurt so badly but couldn’t hear anything but the fact reverberating in his own head that nobody cared enough until after he was diagnosed to tell him this. It was his cancer they talked to, not him. He was a disease, not a person. But he had to have that confirmed, had to know it was true - and there was a source right on the other line.

“Do you love me?”

“Yes.” Kurt didn’t ask why he asked him a question with such an obvious answer, and for that he was grateful.

“And it’s not just because of the cancer that you love me, right?”

“What?” Kurt asked, confused now. “Blaine, I love you. I hate your cancer. My feelings for you have nothing to do with your cancer.”

“Really?”

“Do you need me to prove it?”

“No, I believe you.”

“Do you really?”

“Yeah.” he took a deep breath, letting it out with a wavering half-giggle, half-sob. “I do.”

-~*~-

Nothing seemed to help.

His pain medication made it difficult for him to think sometimes, and he got frustrated when he just couldn’t communicate what he wanted to. The therapy wasn’t doing a bit of good, and the doctors were saying that since it wasn’t helping they should stop wasting their money and just wait until he died, and Blaine was with them on that one, but his parents were relentless, which irritated him to no end. Cooper went a little bit crazy, talking over insane ideas like Kurt had over and over until they sounded totally deranged to everyone else but completely reasonable to him. Blaine missed the Schuester’s wedding because of a therapy session that did nothing for anyone but attended the after party with Kurt - he couldn’t dance because he’d forgotten to take the pain pills and he was busy grinning through having his insides stabbed a million times simultaneously and repeatedly. They won Regionals, and came in second at Nationals, and Blaine first had the duet with Marley and then a solo. His grades began slipping, but as time passed, they fell very slowly, so he was still passing everything when graduation came.

Kurt flew in New York. Blaine didn’t have the heart to tell him to stay and why he should have. He’d chosen not to speak to anyone about what was clearly depression beginning to haze his thoughts and make him perpetually sad. But everyone was uplifting and fun and they were, as always, a cooky but loveable group to be around. He wasn’t unhappy all the time. But beneath the thin layers of enjoyment were pits of dark, dreary holes he hated pretending not to fall into. He didn’t cry. He didn’t let himself cry. He didn’t shout. He didn’t break down.

Things only got harder to hold in day after day, because things kept piling up, building up. He was a small person. He was young. He’d been hopeful. He shouldn’t have had to suffer through crippling pain at night when the medicine wore off. It sometimes got so bad he compared it to wolves ripping out his insides, and the area the pain covered only got larger as the cancer spread.

He wanted to eat but whenever he did the indigestion was awful, and so he ate the bare minimum he needed to live (not that it’d do much good in the long run, considering his run wasn’t going to be long regardless of nutrition), dropping weight faster than he could sprint.

He knew they noticed. And it wasn’t an eating disorder, it was an inability to digest and absorb foods so he often ended up vomitting when he ate more than half a serving of anything. It was his pancreas failing and the cancer attacking the rest of him.

But he still smiled and laughed and joked and performed and he helped place their second-place trophy in the choir room, and when it came time for him to graduate, he stood behind his other friends in the glee Club who were graduating, and thought over the past three months since Kurt had gone back to New York but for occasional visits.

He didn’t have much time before Principal Figgins was calling names, and his friends led the group, beaming at the applauding audience as they individually got their diplomas and their future plans told. Sam was called up to the stage, and it was announced he was going to the University of Kentucky on a football scholarship (Finn had been pleased when he’d announced it to them). Then Brittany went up, and her future plans that she’d written down were “Marrying Santana and helping her get famous so everyone else loves her as much as I do.” Santana, in the audience, had screamed, “DAMN RIGHT!” while people laughed (and others glared; they were in Ohio). Tina went up and Figgins told everyone she was going to NYU Tisch, as was Artie when he rolled his way up onto stage. And Blaine had asked permission to go last, as long as they weren’t doing it in alphabetical order, because as long as he had to stand in front of all the other graduates and have his plan for the future told, he didn’t want it to be too obvious he wasn’t going to have one, and Figgins could role right into “Let’s hear it for our graduates!”

People clapped when he got his diploma. He shook Figgins’s hand and then joined his friends, and they’d elected him to speak, for reasons he didn’t know. He’d prepared a speech, but it had turned out to be more of his will, so he’d rewritten it. He had it memorized as he looked out at the faces in the crowd, smiling at him, some frowning, the Warblers in the fact hollering along with everyone else.

“I’m Blaine Anderson,” he said to everyone. “I’ve been in this Glee Club since I transferred here two and a half years ago to be with my boyfriend Kurt.”

A lot more of the smiles turned to frowns. He didn’t care.

“And it has been absolutely insane,” he half-laughed. “The amount of times people would hook up in this club are off the charts. The relationship drama was horrible! But the other drama, the one on stage, I don’t think we’d have been as good at without it. I don’t think we’d be good at standing in front of a crowd of thousands and belting out a high note he hadn’t though we’d be able to hit. I know I wouldn’t be. I’m not sure about Tina, though, she’s pretty kick-ass anyways.” He turned to smile at Tina and she rolled her eyes when he got a few chuckles from the audience. “The thing is, these people, they’re my family as much as my parents and my brother,” he continued sincerely, “and it’s amazing that they all have these future plans. I’m not going to be here to see those plans happen because of this stupid cancer, but knowing that they’ll happen makes things a lot easier.” And the whole room stopped smiling and stared at him, hundreds of eyes boring into him with shock and sadness and confusion. “They’re all going to have their names known everywhere someday, I’m sure of it, and if I’m wrong, their names were known today, and that’s enough. Every single one of them is more like a star than the sun is, because being around them makes you warm and happy and light and easy and they shine so brightly when they stand on a stage it’s blinding. Someday you’ll see Artie’s name in the news as a famous director. Someday you’ll see Tina’s name in the credits as the leading lady in your favorite movie. Someday you’ll turn on your TV to watch a game and cheer for Sam Evans to score a touchdown. Someday you’ll ask Brittany for an autograph because you saw her dance and fell in love with it. Someday, everyone standing behind me, or in front of me, is going to do something, and you’re going to know them and hear what they have to say. And what they say may not always be perfect but it’ll be honest, and it’ll matter, and it’ll mean something. Knowing how bright the futures for these people are, its impossible for me not to be sad about not being able to watch them. But they’ll be great with or without me here. I love them more than anything in the world and someday so will millions of screaming fans. Hopefully they watch each other blossom like I know they will and they don’t drift apart, because if I’m allowed to have one wish I don’t have to put in my will, it’s that they never get so caught up in themselves that they stop appreciating how awesome everyone else is.”

He had to swallow then, and it was thick, and his nose was beginning to run and so he sniffed and ducked his head a bit so keep them from seeing how his tears trembled on his eyelashes. “Thank you for coming today to support us and thank you for showing us we deserve to be supported. And over all, thank you for making this possible, for making the fact that we’re actually being heard and not just treated as silent no longer a rarity, and for letting the invisibles be seen.” He cleared his throat again, couching back the lump that was forming. “Thank you.”

And he stepped away.

The Glee Club had prepared a song, but after that, nobody was prepared to sing it; Kurt started shoving his way out of the row and running down the steps to be at the foot of the stage, rushing over to the steps on the side to run onto it behind the curtain on the side, and Tina had attacked him with a fierce hug, and suddenly all the graduates were there and his friends were crying and he still hated it when people cried.

When Figgins closed the ceremony, Blaine tore away from his friends and ran into Kurt’s arms, and Kurt held him tightly and whispered, “You’re alright, you’re fine, we’ll be okay,” and Blaine kept choking on words as he bit back tears, saying, “You’ll be fine, you’ll get through this, you’ll be strong,” and then they both dissolved and clutched at each other pathetically in silence, holding the other one together because if they didn’t they’d break.

-~*~-

When Kurt opened the door to his apartment a month after that, he squealed with delight at Blaine’s presence, even though they’d planned his four-week sleepover for quite a while. And Blaine dropped all his luggage and hugged him, too, and then Rachel was there, demanding a hug for herself and that they all sit down to watch a movie.

Blaine was glad she demanded that. He sat on the couch between them, curling into Kurt with his eyes closed, Rachel right next to him on the other side and holding his free hand, the one Kurt wasn’t absent-mindedly massaging. He’d spent a good long time on a plane to get there and even longer preparing for the flight and getting his things collected afterward. Kurt had been working when his flight landed and Blaine had seen his car pull into the apartment garage as he drove toward the building. Kurt had shut the door to their apartment behind him just as the elevator Blaine had been in opened, and Kurt had had to reopen the door moments later, smiling.

He listened to the movie with half his mind, and with the other half he drifted. And eventually drifting took over both halves, and he was sleeping soundly, soft snores rumbling in his chest as he slept on Kurt’s.

-~*~-

When he woke up, he was in Kurt’s bed. He was still curled up into Kurt, who was basically wrapped around him, and he realized Kurt must have carried him without waking him and just laid down to sleep. He snuggled in closer automatically before he cracked open an eye to look at the digital clock on Kurt’s nightstand and realized he needed to have been awake two hours ago to take his pain medication.

He attempted to sit up straight but as soon as he actually used his abdominal muscles there was a searing pain behind his stomach and he stiffened and fell back with a moan he tried to keep behind his teeth. Wolves and knives combined couldn’t have measured to the amount of agony gutting him then, and it wasn’t just in the same small area it had started in; it reached his elbows and knees now, acid rippling through his joints and leaving him trying not to scream.

“Blaine?” Kurt mumbled softly, reaching over innocently to wear he was, his hand falling to his chest. Blaine gasped, gritting his teeth immediately afterward to make sure he could still use it, the simple touch feeling as if it had made a crater in his bones. Kurt’s eyes flickered open at the gasp and widened when he rubbed them, and he sat up immediately. “Blaine? Blaine, what’s wrong, what is it?”

“Meds,” Blaine hissed out, squeezing his eyes shut to block out the light streaming through the window. “Pain… meds.”

Kurt sounded shaken when Blaine heard him speak, but he was determined also. “W-Where?”

“Bag,” he groaned gutturally, his insides spasming but his outsides still and stiff. “Top… pocket…”

The sheets rustled as Kurt got off the bed, and Blaine whimpered as he was jostled on the mattress, biting on his cheek a moment later to keep it from happening again. A zipper sound and hands rummaging and then the sound of Kurt finding the bag that held his medicinal syrup and the tiny measuring cup he drank from. “How much?”

“Three,” Blaine answered grimly, knowing the measurements by heart, and then a particularly nasty rocket of pain flared and her curled inward automatically in response, crying out against his will at how the rest of his body responded by locking into place. He vaguely heard the cap of the bottle pop off and a small pouring sound, and then two footsteps, and something was at his lips.

“D-Drink,” Kurt ordered him, panic undisguised. And so when Kurt tipped the cup, Blaine parted his lips and drank. “Better?”

“No,” Blaine gasped, swallowing the thick, bitter liquid, his eyes flying open, trying to find Kurt’s, his vision spotty from the pain. “But it… will… be.”

“Do you want me to get help?” Kurt was almost begging.

“No!” Blaine jerked back onto the bed and took as many deep breaths as he could without feeling like his entire body thrummed and throbbed with air. “Stay. Please… stay… with me.”

“I’ll stay,” Kurt decided, and Blaine saw him amongst the dark black spots that were growing bigger in his sight as his hearing faded randomly. He felt Kurt climb over him on the bed and lay next to him again and with no small level of horror he realized that he was going to pass out. “I’ll stay right here.”

The darkness took him.

-~*~-

When Blaine woke for the second time, not much time must have passed, because the sun was pretty much the same as it had been before. What was different was that the agony he’d felt before was now a dull ache he was sadly used to. And Kurt was talking to someone beside him; Rachel. She was saying something, and as he focused, he began to listen. “I still think we should call someone,” Rachel said. “You gave him his medication and then he blacked out. What if -“

“He didn’t overdose, I checked,” Kurt said forcefully. “I looked at the serving size on the back of the bottle. It was large for his age but it wasn’t too much. And he’s still got a pulse.”

“But he’s not moving,” Rachel insisted, blind fear speaking for her. “Can we at least call his parents and see if this has happened before?”

“They probably never let him forget to take his medication, so I doubt it,” Kurt said, reason speaking for him but with an underlying texture of panic. “And according to the bottle, it’s supposed to take about an hour to kick in, and he’s only been out for around two. You know what happens sometimes to people with too much stress or too much pain, or both; they faint sometimes until they can handle it, and then they wake up.”

“Two hours and he hasn’t moved at all,” Rachel murmured. “I just want to know that he’s okay.”

“He said he would be,” said Kurt, dubious.

And then Blaine opened his eyes and blinked a few times to become adjusted to the light, and Rachel gasped and clasped her hands together and jumped to her feet, and Kurt reached out to take his hand automatically. “Hi,” Blaine said, clearing his throat afterward because it was a bit hoarse.

“You’re alright now?” Kurt asked, his oceanic eyes vast and troubled as they swept over his features. “Do you need more rest? Or food? It is breakfast time, can I get you anything? Or should you not eat? Do -“

“Kurt,” Blaine interrupted, squeezing his hand gently, “I’m okay.” He smiled, trying to emphasize the point.

“You’re alright,” Rachel sighed with obvious relief, and Kurt actually laughed, and Blaine was really glad he hadn’t actually dreamed while he was passed out because if he had they’d have done a lot more than just call his parents, judging from how his mother reacted when he had one of his nightmares and woke himself up screaming. But he grinned at them thankfully and said nothing but that he didn’t need breakfast.

-~*~-

“When was the last time I heard you sing?” Kurt murmured in his ear before kissing his cheek as he bent down on his way to the living room from the kitchen. “I miss hearing it.” Blaine took another glance at the paper he was writing in front of him - the final copy of his will, not that he’d ever let Kurt know it was more than a letter to his grandmother - and rose from his chair at the kitchen table, flipping it over casually and going to join Kurt on the couch.

“What would you like me to sing?” he asked.

“Hm, I don’t know,” Kurt mused lightly, his hand reached over to take Blaine’s, his thumb rubbing against the back of it. “The first song you think of when you look at me.”

And so Blaine looked at him, and how his neck was elegantly held, and how those eyelashes fanned his cheeks, and how the shadows under those illuminating eyes made his skin looked like sculpted and polished and smoothed-over pure marble, and he shook his head. “Something else. You don’t want to hear that song.”

“Why not?” Kurt was minorly alarmed. “Is it a bad song? Like -“

“No, it’s not, and you’ve heard me sing it before and we both love it, but it’s… you don’t want to hear it.”

“If I’ve heard it before -“

“The words mean something different now.”

“Please?”

Blaine sighed, uneasy, and began, looking at how Kurt’s eyes were rounded with intrigue and how hopelessly dopey he looked when he pouted, to sing a capella. “You think I’m pretty without any makeup on,” he sang as a warning, and Kurt’s hands flew to his mouth. He pauses, raising his eyebrows, but Kurt doesn’t tell him to stop, so he continues.

He gets to the word February when he feels it.

He’d had up a mental shield, a blockage, that stopped anything but what other people wanted to listen to from coming out; no complaints or fears or heart-to-hearts had escaped. But the shield evaporated and suddenly things were pouring out of him through the lyrics and Kurt seemed stunned at how suddenly full his voice was, his eyes locking with Blaine’s and trying to read all the information swirling around in them. And the words in Blaine’s head changed automatically, because he wouldn’t have any more Februaries, and Kurt would be someone else’s Valentine, and -

“We can dance until I die, / because I will be young forever,” he sang to Kurt, and Kurt shook his head fervently as if to discard the notion.

And so Blaine moved on to the chorus, and the air was filled with the music of a million violins accompanying him, but only in his head; and he changed some of the notes, sang in a falsetto and his lower range, his stomach giving a sad twinge of nervousness when Kurt started tearing up; but Blaine moved closer, his hands coming up to cradle Kurt’s face, their foreheads touching, and then: “Let you put your hands on me, / in my skin-tight jeans, / be your teenage dream tonight.”

And he had to stop because Kurt had begun sobbing.

And then Blaine hugged him and Kurt hugged him back and he kept saying You can’t, and Blaine would say he had to but that Kurt would be alright, and Kurt cried into his shoulder, and Blaine said I love you and Kurt said I love you too and when Rachel came home that night Kurt was on his back on the couch and Blaine was resting on top of him and they were sound asleep.

She looked at them quietly, reveling in how peaceful they were. The familiar sculpture of Kurt’s features were calm and serene, his arms around Blaine’s waist and Blaine’s hands still in his hair loosely. His chest rose and fell a bit and she could hear him breathing softly, evenly, and smiled at it. At least they’d found some happiness, for a little while, in a time so dark for both of them. And Blaine was still on top of Kurt, a bit pale and thin but still Blaine, a look of utter rest on his face, which rested on Kurt’s shoulder.

She moved over to them silently, still smiling at them like a pleased mother, and she reached over the top of the couch to grab a blanket, which she draped over them - and in doing so, she brushed her hand against Blaine’s arm.

What made her jerk it back wasn’t fear of waking him. It was how abnormally cold it was.

And so she tentatively reached to fingers to the pulsation spot between his jaw and neck, and pressed gently.

And then harder.

And then harder still.

And then she reached over and pressed on his wrists.

And she screamed.

“Rachel?” Kurt asked, blinking quickly, his voice groggy, obviously from the sleep. “What’s wrong?”

“He’s dead!” she screeched, “I can’t - I can’t find his pulse and he’s freezing cold and dead!”

“What?!” Kurt yelled, his voice going through two octaves, and his hands curled around Blaine’s wrists and took them out of his hair, and he gave a start at their temperature, and his eyes went wide and he exhaled as if all the air had been punched out of him, and he started shifting so he was sitting upright, but Blaine was limp and didn’t move and didn’t wake up. “But - but we still have a month! A whole month! He - Blaine! Blaine!”

Blaine didn’t respond and Rachel screamed again, falling to her knees and rearranging Blaine so he lay against the arm of the couch, so he looked like he was sleeping again. “Kurt, stop,” she begged, but Kurt kept shaking Blaine and screaming for him, and tears rose in her eyes that she let fall, and she rested her head on his chest and cried thick, fat tears.

Kurt seemed like he’d cried himself dry already, but he was still gasping and choking and sputtering - there were just no tears. “No, no! No, I had a month! We had a month! A month! Blaine!”

“Kurt, please,” she pleaded uselessly, her voice muffled and thick against Blaine’s shirt.

“Blaine! Blaine, wake up! You have to wake up!” Kurt rattled Blaine’s shoulder uselessly and then his hands flitted about over his body, unsure of what to do as Rachel’s shoulders shook and she sat as if praying over him, though all she was doing was crying and asking Kurt to stop shouting, to stop getting angry because she couldn’t take it, to try and make sense of what happened, to make sense of everything, how half a minute ago she’d been proud and relieved and happy and now she was weeping over one of her best friend’s bodies.

She repeated his name but all he did was lean down and kiss Blaine’s lips urgently before pulling away and screaming things she couldn’t make out, shouting and yelling and hitting the furniture and raging and she sat there quietly and let tear after tear stain Blaine’s shirt. It wasn’t as if he’d be needing it again.

“God damn it, Blaine!” Kurt bellowed at the boy on the couch, now off of it and stumbling around the room blindly, “this is more important than just a normal phone call! I’m calling to you! You promised you’d always pick up! Do it now! DO IT NOW!”

“Please just stop yelling.”

“YOU WERE JUST SAYING YOU LOVED ME, YOU WERE JUST KISSING ME, COME BACK! COME BACK!”

“Stop. Please.”

“BLAINE, I NEED YOU TO COME BACK!”

“He can’t.”

“HE HAS TO!”

“He can’t.”

“I NEED HIM!”

“He’s dead.”

“WE HAD A MONTH!”

“We had two days. We thought it was a month.”

“THIS ISN’T FAIR!”

“I know that, believe it or not,” she lifted her head and turned to glare at him through her swollen eyes. It was the most deranged she’d ever seen him - he was always moving but never properly, always stumbling or nearly tripping or actually tripping and catching himself, his eyes glued to Blaine’s face, not seeing anything else, not hearing what he needed to, and he was so pale he looked a bit like he’d died, too, but for the horrible, horrible grief that rolled off of him in waves. She held out her hand to him carefully, slowly, and it took several moments before his eyes flickered to it, and then he stumbled toward her and his knees gave out right as he reached the couch, and he took her hand and gripped Blaine’s arm and stared at the lifeless face, and she went back to crying, and somehow neither of them could hold each other knowing Blaine wasn’t able to anymore.

“He’s never going to be a musician,” Kurt whispered to her.

“He’s never going to go to college.”

“He’s never going to meet me at the alter.”

“He’s never going to see his child’s face.”

“He’s never going to get to say goodbye to his parents.”

“He’s never going to watch you on Broadway.”

And from there the list went on, and it continued until they were both too numb to shout or cry anymore, just sit in stunned reverence at the amount Blaine could have and should have done and never got the chance to. It ended when Kurt hushed, “He’s never going to know whether or not our dreams came true,” and Rachel responded, “But he did know they will.”

“How could he know that?”

“He knew you. Hell, he loved you.”

“All that did was make this hurt more.”

Rachel looked at him seriously, and told him, “Be grateful for that. You could have never met him at all. And no matter how much this hurts, you’d never go back and change that you met him, right?”

Kurt’s face is a mirror of what Rachel can feel on hers; totally lost and shocked and sad and she knows she’s looked like this before but every beat of her heart is feeble and she can only imagine how hard his had to be working to beat at all. But he still answered, “Right.”

-~*~-

It wasn’t until they realized they had to call people that they started actually acting in a dazed state. Rachel stood and moved robotically and reached for her phone, and before she touched it she paused and looked at him and asked, “What do I do?”

He didn’t know. “Um… his parents,” he said, taking a guess. “Wait, no, don’t do his parents, call them.” He wasn’t joking about it, and neither of them laughed, because neither of them were thinking clearly enough to realize that it might have been funny. And so she grabbed her phone and found the Andersons on her contact list and called them.

As she did so, Kurt knew he had to call people, too. But he’d tackle the Glee Club, he figured, while she tackled the parents and Cooper (which promised to be harder than everyone else combined), and his computer was at the table, plugged in where it had been charging. He stood and walked over to the table, only to stop behind the chair Blaine had been sitting in yesterday.

On the table was a piece of paper. Lined, normal, notebook paper. And though he couldn’t see what, something was written on the other side of it in miniscule writing - something he distinctly remembered Blaine writing right before Kurt asked him to sing.

He reached out and picked it up, carefully, gently, as if it were a newborn child, and he began to read.

To Whom it May Concern (so, basically, Kurt, because I know you’re going to be the one who finds this and reads it first):

I could say a lot of things but I want this to be short and to the point. So, to the official Dispenser of Belongings or whatever it is, I have a box in my bag that I packed. Inside is a scrapbook, a stuffed dog, some pressed flowers, and a ring box. All of these things, everything in the box along with the box itself, belong to Kurt and Kurt only, and they are meant for the eyes of nobody else. My parents can decide what to do with my other stuff, except for my bowties all go to Cooper (because I know he hates them) and my hair gel goes to Mr. Schue (just to tease him about his hair because yeah, I need to). The bank account under my name, and if my parents will allow, my college funds, all go to Kurt. I’d also like it to be officially recorded that, in case my last words aren’t to him and aren’t “I love you”, I wanted my last words to be “I love you” said to Kurt. If I succeed, great. If not, shucks, oh well, I tried.

I have a small personal message for everybody, but I’ll only write down the most important and/or group messages here, because they take less room. Kurt: You’re going to be okay. Better than okay, you’re going to be amazing. This can’t hold you back forever. When you’re ready to move forward again you’ll shoot so far so fast you’ll make a crater in the world, and other people will love you as much as I do (though hopefully not in the same way too soon). Cooper: You were the best big brother I could have hoped to have and I know I’ve said differently on several occasions but your sacrifices and willingness to help, all for me, have proven otherwise. Some advice, though, is get a girlfriend. You’re going to be lonely for a while. A girlfriend might help. Or a boyfriend, whatever you decide you want. To Mom and Dad: I can’t thank you enough for raising me like you did and loving me like you did and tolerating me for as long as you have. And I know that this is going to seriously hurt you because I’ve seen how much it’s already hurting you. So please, for me, don’t try to hold things in. I’ve tried. And if this is as expository as I’m aiming for, I hate myself for succeeding, because it’s miserable. To the New Directions and graduates thereof: You guys had better make something of yourselves. It doesn’t have to be a big or famous something, but make something. You’re worth it and I’d have loved to be able to see you bloom. To the Warblers: Keep being rock stars. Please. But also show each new captain that comes along the schools’ recording of my song to Kurt (and give a copy to him as well, could you?) because I was flawless. Can you deny it? No, you can’t. To the Schuesters and Sylvesters: Please be happy. And Will, if at all possible, if you have a son, could you name it after me? You don’t have to by any means, I guess I want to be remembered kind of as your son since you were kind of my second father. To Rachel Berry: I know you’re Jewish, so you believe in an afterlife, which is great. If there is one, rest assured I’ll be watching your Broadway debut and clapping when you hit the high notes. If not, I wanted to. (Same goes for Kurt. Also, if an afterlife is real, Kurt, I’ll try to get on your mom’s good side.) Burt and the other Hudson-Hummels: I’m including you in this because you’re as much family as everyone else. Seriously. Burt, try not to have another heart attack. Kurt’s lost way too much already. (