After Your Picture Fades
PG-13 | Kurt/Blaine
Content may be triggering
This is what happens when I discover Eva Cassidy's cover of Time After Time and put it on repeat for an hour!
The first thing Blaine notices is that it's cold.
Not just the temperature, but the whole atmosphere of the place. The tiles are blue in the dull twilight of the strip lights, and the only sounds are his footsteps and his breathing and he wonders if he's going mad already.
Someone shuts the door behind him, and he can hear the lock cut through the stagnant air.
He bites his lip.
The steps he takes towards the bed are tentative, like an animal emerging from hibernation, waiting to see how the world has changed. His legs are shaking.
He settles in the chair at the side, and the plastic is cold, like it doesn't get used much, and he wills his eyes to focus, and they take a few seconds to co-operate.
His hand stretches forward, and takes a few tries to find Kurt's. He twines their fingers together without thinking.
He could be sleeping.
His expression could flutter any minute, and he'll wake from his enchantment and we'll get a happily ever after instead of the old glass casket which we'll try to resurrect with flowers and memories.
He'll wake up and he'll turn to me and ask what the time is through his sleep, and I'll answer with a kiss.
And we'll hold each other, hold the constant beating beating beating of each others' hearts to ourselves and treasure them.
Only then does he notice the hand between his is growing colder.
He opens his mouth to speak – but he doesn't know what to say, and the sound gets caught in the spiders' webs, hanging sparking with dew in his throat.
The last time Blaine kisses Kurt, they're thirty years old and it tastes of blood and undiscovered worlds about to be closed.
Kurt doesn't feel it.
The light when he steps out into the corridor is bright too bright.
"I couldn't say anything," he tells the nurse, his voice numbed, anaesthetised.
She says nothing else to him and he goes home.
He doesn't cry, not yet.
He walks like a ghost through the city streets, unfocused and blurry like a sunset. The crowds mean nothing, the sidewalks, the chewing gum stuck to the pavement, the graffiti spreading like poison ivy over the walls.
All he's aware of his is own breathing, his own lack of thought, fixed on nothing but his own mortality.
When he arrives home, he shuts the door a little too hard.
He turns to the mirror, and punches his own reflection a little too hard.
He kicks the wall a little too hard.
And then nothing's a little too hard. It's just hard. The way he smashes Kurt's mug of coffee now gone cold on the table, the photograph of something that means nothing on the mantelpiece, the – he loses track.
And only then does he cry.
When his father had died, his mother had said she wished it was her instead.
But he would never wish Kurt would be alive, if he had to feel like this.
He feels like a storm, and his tears are the rain, and his anger is like thunder and the damage is the lightning, and inside the swirling seething wrecked mass of emotions are the clouds, and he can't decipher one from the other.
Within three days, the alcohol cupboard is empty, and Blaine's only vaguely aware of the fact that he hasn't slept, hasn't shaved, hasn't washed, hasn't eaten.
And it hurts, it still fucking hurts, and so he turns to the medicine cabinet instead.
Somewhere in the Labyrinth, he manages to call Cooper, leaves a voicemail.
"Cooper – it hurts – I don't know – I can't do it – help me – it hurts - "
His mouth twists lazily around the words, as if it physically pains him to say them.
He doesn't know when he hangs up, but somewhere he does.
He didn't intend for it to happen. Not really.
But somewhere, the day and night and the ticking of the clock and the seconds and the five hundred twenty five thousand six hundred minutes all become meaningless.
So it's an easy mistake to make, when all he wants to do is to take away the pain please help me to take a few too many I need to stop it hurting to see if it will help.
It hurts more before it gets better, as he slumps against the sideboard, head knocking backwards, amongst the bottles and the pill packets littering the kitchen floor.
It's long and slow and painful like the drawback of an elastic band and it feels like forever in Blaine's own orbit and part of him can't bring himself to care.
Courage can't last forever, and Blaine thinks he cries before he blacks out again, but he doesn't really know.
The nurse knows how cold the morgue can be. She knows that it's the coldest when no one comes to visit.
Blaine's star swells and burns and dies beautifully, and tragically, and alone.