A/N: Written for the Hummel Holidays prompt 'vacation', but I waited on posting it because it was just too angsty for the holidays. Warning for discussion of illness.
"If we catch the three a.m. flight, we'll get to Heathrow at…" Sebastian yawns, blinking to stay awake, but that only makes his dry eyes itchy. "No," Sebastian decides, backing out of the screen he's on, yawning again until his eyes squeeze shut. "No, that might not work with Kurt's medication schedule. It'll have to be later."
"Sebastian?" Kurt calls from their room. "Aren't you coming to bed? It's almost midnight."
"Yes, sweetheart. I'm just about to pack it in," Sebastian lies.
"You said that two hours ago," Kurt says, and Sebastian can hear the pout in his voice.
"Don't be like that, baby. What about you?" Sebastian walks into the bedroom, his cell phone in hand, focused more on the screen than on his husband. "You took your night time pills at ten, and they usually knock you out."
"I fought them so I could go to bed with you." Kurt crosses unnaturally thin arms, swimming inside the long sleeves of his thermal Henley, over his narrow chest. "You and I haven't gone to bed at the same time for about a month, Bas. I miss you."
"Yeah, well, I have work I need to do," Sebastian says without looking up, not meeting the eyes of his husband at all.
Eye contact is only one on a list of things that Kurt's lost over the past few weeks. Casual touches were first – the hand to his thigh, the arm around his waist, the head on his shoulder. Conversation went next. Anything longer than, "Have you taken your medication?", "Do you want a drink of water?", or "Do you need help going to the bathroom?" Every time they talked about something more substantial, conversation always turned to those things that Kurt wouldn't be able to do or have. But it wasn't Kurt who decided to stop talking about them. It was his husband.
Their daily outings are almost gone since Kurt becomes exhausted simply climbing into his wheelchair; he can't really blame Sebastian for that. But now, sleeping together seems to have gone, too.
When kisses and hugs disappear, Kurt won't care when he dies. He'll have lost everything anyway.
"No, you don't have work you need to do," Kurt argues. "You're avoiding me."
"Don't be stupid," Sebastian snaps without thinking. "I'm not avoiding you. What I'm doing is for you."
"If what you're doing is supposedly for me, shouldn't you ask me if I want it first?"
"Of course, you want it," Sebastian says condescendingly, sitting on the edge of the bed when he feels like he's going to fall off his feet. "It's your Goddammed bucket list. You've had it since high school."
Kurt looks at Sebastian's iPhone with wide eyes.
"Where did you get my bucket list?" he asks.
"I downloaded it from your Cloud," Sebastian says, handing over his phone when Kurt reaches out for it.
Kurt looks at the list on the screen, scrolling back and forth through it, reading entries he hasn't seen in close to a decade, with notes Sebastian made underneath each item.
"Oh my God." Kurt giggles, looking at the hopes and dreams of teenaged to mid-twenties Kurt Hummel – ride to school in a hot air balloon, become CEO of Logo, find the right combination of colognes to match his unique body chemistry. "I didn't even know this thing existed anymore. I've changed phones so many times. I was pretty sure I'd erased it after my diagnosis…"
"You've got, like, eight hundred things on it," Sebastian says, watching Kurt remember his past self through this list. "Some of them are pretty impossible for anyone to do, so I crossed those out straight off the bat. But if we're going to get to even a quarter of the doable ones, you've got to let me…"
Kurt scowls at the screen. He swipes through the controls and hits delete. Then he tosses the iPhone back on the bed, the list cleared from the phone's memory.
"There," Kurt says. "It's gone. Now you can fucking come to bed."
Sebastian's breath hitches when he sees his phone.
"Kurt?" It takes close to a minute for Sebastian's foggy brain to comprehend what Kurt did, but when he does, he just about explodes, jumping on Kurt as if he had flushed the last of his medication down the drain. "Why the fuck would you do that, Kurt?" He grabs the phone and scrolls through the options, checks his memos, his messages, everywhere the list might be, but it's gone. He's sure he could find a way to get it back, but that's not the point. "That was your bucket list! Everything you wanted to accomplish! Now it's gone!"
"That's not my real bucket list," Kurt says. "Not anymore."
"Stop being so fucking dramatic," Sebastian says.
"I'm the one dying and you're the one screaming over a stupid list!" Kurt counters, breathing heavier as the argument escalates. "So who's the one being dramatic?"
"Well, Captain Calm, if that wasn't your bucket list, then what is, huh?" Sebastian asks, strangling his phone with his shaky right hand. "What do you want to spend the last year of your life doing?"
"How do you not know?" Kurt asks, his voice thin from exasperation.
"Because you're apparently keeping it some great secret." Sebastian throws up his hands in frustration. "Knowing you, you'll make it some huge reveal the day before you die, just so you can prove what a huge failure I've been this whole time for not being able to read your mind."
"Sebastian," Kurt says, hurt by his husband's harsh words but willing to overlook them under the circumstances, remembering that he's said some out-of-line things, too, "it's not a secret."
"Well, if you've told me, I don't remember," Sebastian says, dropping his fists to the mattress. "So why don't you enlighten me? That way, I can stop wasting my fucking time on the stupid vacation planning I've been doing, while you've sat quietly and watched me do it all for nothing!"
Kurt waits a moment for his husband to calm down. He doesn't want to fight. He doesn't have time left to spend fighting with his husband.
"You, Sebastian." Kurt sighs. Sebastian's forehead wrinkles, confused. "You're my bucket list. I appreciate everything you're trying to do for me, but none of it matters if I don't get to spend time with you. And I…"
Kurt's lip starts to tremble, and it's enough to stop him from speaking. Sebastian uncurls his fist and takes his husband's hand.
"You, what?" he asks.
"I feel" – Kurt takes a breath in, clears the tears from his throat – "like you're using planning this vacation as an excuse to stay away from me."
"I'm not…I'm not trying to stay away from you," Sebastian says with true regret. "I'm trying to find a way to keep you around. If I schedule our life together minute by minute, if I keep you moving, away from here, then maybe I can…"
Kurt shakes his head.
"I know," Sebastian admits. "I know that's not the way it works."
"There's no running from this," Kurt says. "There's no hiding from it. Whatever's going to happen is going to happen."
"But…there's so much" – Sebastian chokes – "so many things you didn't get to do."
"It's alright." Kurt shrugs. Sebastian knows it's not actually alright, but Kurt needs to believe it is. "The only thing I want to do, to be honest, is rest, relax, and be wherever you are, because that's all that matters."
Sebastian looks at his iPhone, the screen dark, the list he'd been holding on to since they discovered Kurt's cancer was inoperable, gone. It had been a talisman for him, a way to keep Kurt alive. As long as Kurt still had unfinished items on his list, he'd have to stay alive, by sheer force of will, to finish them. But Sebastian was lying to himself. That's why he'd been avoiding talking to Kurt about it.
He knew his husband would eventually help him acknowledge the truth.
"Okay," Sebastian says, moving his iPhone to the table by the bed, carefully shoving Kurt's army of pill bottles aside to make room. He's not about to argue and make Kurt feel worse than he does. He's already done that enough. "If that's what you want."
"That's what I want." Kurt sighs, putting his arms around Sebastian's shoulders. Sebastian climbs up on the bed, resting his head against shoulders that aren't as broad as they once were, but are still stronger than his. "That, and a cheesecake, and everything will be fine."