**SERIOUS TRIGGER WARNING! LIKE I MEAN IT! I WAS ALMOST TOO SCARED TO WRITE THIS BECAUSE OF HOW BIG THE WARNINGS ARE!**

Blaine didn't mean to do it that hard. He didn't mean to do it that deep. He didn't mean for blood to spill out of the cut and onto his mother's nice clean floor. He didn't mean to drop the blade in the sink, where it clink! Clink! Clink!-ed and fell down the drain.

But he did mean for there to be pain, and that's what he got. He tried not to scream as more blood pulsed out, down his hand, dripping off the end of his middle finger onto the floor, into the sink, onto his clean white shirt. He didn't mean for this to happen. But it did.

He didn't realize until the ground was right next to his face that he'd fallen, and that was when his vision started to blur, to fuzz around the edges, like a bad horror movie or someone had dropped a camera in the pool. He was only just aware of the red puddles on the floor, seeping between the shallow cracks in the tiles, creating a criss-crossed dark red river on the bathroom floor.

There were footsteps and Blaine saw his brother's face, plastered in panic, leaning over him. Cooper was shaking his shoulders, frantically crying his name over and over, pushing flimsy toilet paper to the gash on his wrist to no avail.

"Mom!" Cooper cried. "Mom, dad! Help!"

The last thing Blaine saw was Cooper's face, tear-streaked, gnawing on his bottom lip, helpless, powerless. Then everything went black.

Xxxxxxxx

"Please wake up," someone whispered.

Blaine tried to open his eyes, but something wouldn't let him. It was like his eyelids had been stapled shut; he did everything in his power to force them open, but they wouldn't co-operate.

"Please wake up," that someone whispered again.

Blaine tried to move his hand to his face, find out what was preventing him from opening his eyes, but a shooting pain then went all the way up his arm and back down stopped him. He sucked a breath in through his teeth.

"Please… please, wake up," the person whispered.

Blaine started to panic. He was aware of an obnoxious beeping noise in the back of his mind that was beginning to get annoying. It was getting faster, louder, boring into his brain like a woodpecker. It was loud, and it stung.

"Blaine…"

He tried to respond, to open his mouth and say something, anything to let that person know he was alive and yes, he could hear them! But he was stuck, glued to the table, paralysed by something yet every single nerve ending in his body was tingling.

"Blaine!"

Make it stop, make it stop, was all the boy could think as the beeping turned into one, long, piercing wail. Then suddenly there were voices inside his head, shouting, giving orders, though not to him. It was as if he was invisible.

"Help him, please! What's happening?" the voice, now hysterical, screamed. It was a male's voice; distressed, broken, tired. Absolutely terrified.

"Cooper-" someone else said. It was a different, less recognizable voice. Cooper! Why did that name sound so familiar?

"Mom, dad, somebody, help him!"

Why was he screaming? Why were the people in his head shouting? What was a defibrillator? And why couldn't he open his eyes?

"Clear!" someone said, and then there was a jolt that lifted Blaine's whole body off the table. Hey! he wanted to shout. That hurt!

The wailing turned into a screech and why did they not shut it off? Then the other voice said, "Clear!" again and there was another jolt and someone said, "We have a pulse!" triumphantly. The noise dulled down to a slow beeping again and the voices inside his head quietened. He coughed.

The first thing he saw when he opened his eyes was Cooper. It was Cooper who was screaming, who sounded so distressed, and when Blaine saw his face, he knew why. The bags under his brother's eyes weren't bags, they were suitcases, and his eyes were red and swollen from crying. At one point he might have actually bitten his lip so hard it started to bleed and the outside had scabbed over, leaving a tiny dark-red mark just under his lip. His hair was mussed and dirty, shirt creased, and stubble graced his chin and jawbone.

It was the face of a man who'd been sitting in a hospital room for far too long.

"…Blaine?" he whispered. Blaine frowned, and coughed again.

"C-Co…" he tried, but his throat was dry.

"Water," a lady said from behind Cooper, and then she handed him a white plastic cup. Cooper looked at it like he'd never seen water before. Blaine coughed, and he snapped out of it, bringing the cup to Blaine's lips.

Blaine didn't realize how thirsty he was until now. He drank and drank, a little too fast, and ended up coughing half of it back up. He felt the back of the bed lifting up.

"What's going on?" he managed to ask. A new wave of tears filled his brother's eyes.

"You're in hospital, Blaine," the woman behind Cooper said, and she gently pushed him aside and stepped forward. "You had an… accident. Don't you remember anything?"

Blaine tried, he really did, to remember why he was here and why his hand hurt so much. His eyes flickered down to his left hand, where the throbbing sensation that was working its way up his arm and found it bandaged from the elbow to his hand. Only his thumb and the top of his fingers were visible.

Then it all came rushing back. School. Those boys. The names. The taunting. The death threats. The brick wall. The ringleader's fist. The blade. The blood. The floor. Cooper's face…

"I c-cut myself," he said, defeated. The nurse nodded solemnly.

"Why, Blaine?" Cooper said hoarsely. The nurse shook her head.

"Not now," she said. "Let him rest. Mr Anderson, why don't you go take a shower and freshen up? There's a bathroom just down the hall and-"

"No," said Cooper, and it was easy to tell he was trying to be firm but the tears streaming down his cheeks made him look so much weaker than he was trying to be. "I'm staying with Blaine."

The nurse sighed. "Your mother told me you were very protective of him. Oh well, a doctor's coming in soon to ask Blaine a few questions; you can help him out," she said. "Speaking of your parents, where are they?"

"Who knows?" Cooper replied, voice laced with venom. The nurse nodded abruptly and hurried out of the room. Cooper turned to Blaine, who tried to avoid his gaze.

"Don't you ever do that to me again," Cooper said when she was gone, but his voice cracked. He fell into the chair at Blaine's bedside and hung his head in his hands, digging the heels of his hands into his eyes.

"I'm sorry," Blaine said, and to be honest, he still wasn't fully orientated. Cooper looked up at him through his fingers.

"Why?" he asked. Blaine looked down and fumbled with a loose thread on the scratchy, uncomfortable hospital blankets. Cooper sighed.

"Never mind, we'll talk about that later," he said, taking Blaine's good hand. "What matters now is that you're okay."

"Aren't you going to text mom and dad?" Blaine mumbled, unable to look his brother in the eye.

Cooper laughed once, but it was flat and dead. "They'll be here when they get here," he said, quoting their dad.

"What… what happened just then?" Blaine asked, not entirely sure he wanted to hear the answer.

"You went into a cardiac arrest," Cooper replied. "When you… cut your wrist, you lost a lot of blood. They put you on a drip but it wasn't enough. Your heart was failing."

It was only then that Blaine noticed the tubes sticking out from under the bandages. They went all the way to the floor and then up, connecting to a machine next to him and to the bag of blood hanging off a metal rack above his head. He tried to move his fingers and the pain shot up again, and he came to a realization; needles. The colour drained from his face.

"Needles," he choked out. Cooper nodded.

"They had to," he said. Blaine swallowed. Cooper squeezed his hand.

"I'm sorry," Blaine said again. Cooper shook his head.

"It's okay," he said. "It's okay." He rested his head on Blaine's hand and Blaine rested his head back against the rock-hard pillows behind his head. It most certainly was not okay.

Xxxxxxxx

A/N; Here's the deal – if you review, I'll write more. Let's say… seven, just because I'm feeling creative. Seven reviews and I'll write a second chapter; until then, it stays a random, irrelevant cliffhanger. Kurt obviously has to come into it somehow, so that'll be in later chapters and it's up to YOU if I write it or not! So go review, tell me what you think, and we'll see where it goes from there. :)