A/N: This is a re-write. It is purposefully written in a very dark, fairy tale-esque style, language, etc. Warning for hospital setting, mention of biting and blood (no gore), and mention of Adam Crawford.
Eternity is a long time. And like misery, it enjoys company.
Kurt loves Blaine, and Blaine loves Kurt, but sometimes, even though they spend the majority of their existence so single-mindedly wrapped up in one another that the world drips completely away, it's nice to have other people around to talk to, to laugh with, to enjoy the sunless days and the long-stretching, never-ending, and sometimes mind-numbing future.
Kurt refuses to suck the blood of humans. It's not a moral issue. He has no fear of sacrificing his mortal soul. He never believed in God and besides, his soul has been long gone, even before he made the change. It departed him the second he met Blaine, in the area of New York that is now called Central Park, over five hundred years ago - when Kurt looked into the eyes of the demon incarnate and willfully offered up himself to him.
His sacrifice is a matter of compassion. In his dark, monstrous heart, he still retains a measure of it that he carries around, like dry ash in a corporal vial, nestled inside the steel cage of his chest. Blaine thinks of it as an illness, since he would personally love to do nothing but spend the rest of their days ravaging whole country sides like the terrifying vampires of old, striking fear into the hearts of men. But seeing as the scariest nightmares in the twenty-first century are the things that men create, from imaginations so depraved that Blaine could scarcely compete, he gives in to Kurt's whims and leaves the humans be, feasting exclusively on animals himself.
He loathes it, subsisting solely off of soupy, gamey blood. But he loves Kurt.
Love. Another parasite of humanity that he should be rid of.
Kurt, however, deserves better than dogs, cats, and the occasional buck. So, for him, they break into local hospitals and neighborhood blood banks, stealing three or four pints a piece of what might not be missed – common blood types in large supply.
It is on their latest trip to a hospital in Manhattan that Kurt finds him, lying on a gurney, barely alive. Feverish and delirious, he mutters non-stop, his thready voice drowned out by machines constantly beeping.
But Kurt hears him from where he feeds floors below, through multiple levels of steel and concrete. He hears the man mumbling sweetly through his agony, singing softly a song of hope, something religious. Kurt discovers that he knows the words, too, thanks to the unending faith of his mother. That's probably part of what lures him – those familiar words song by that heavenly voice. They draw him upwards through the belly of the hospital, and as he walks toward the sound, he passes by people again – people who clear a path for him because they know what illness looks like, know what death smells like. They expect it. They expect him. Some of them look away as he passes, praying that he'll keep going. Others stare right at him because he's simply too beautiful to ignore.
When he enters the room he's searching for, he does so with arms open wide to the man slowly dying, as if he has found something of tremendous worth amidst the rubble of human weakness and suffering.
"Blaine?" Kurt calls. He doesn't turn to find him, but he knows that he's there. In the many years they have been together, Blaine has never once left Kurt alone. "Blaine, I found him. I found the one who will complete our fold." He turns to his lover and his maker, red eyes beseeching. "I want him. Give him to me?"
"Why him, my love?" Blaine asks, perching on the man's bedside, nimble on his feet like a cat.
"Because he reminds me of me, my beloved." Kurt strokes the back of the man's cold hand. He doesn't perceive the chill in his skin. In these last moments of his life, his hand is as ice laden as death itself, but Kurt's hands are colder. "I can see his past in the notes of that song." He grins wickedly. "He reminds me of someone I could have fallen in love with, if I wasn't already head over heels in love with you."
"Then why do you need him?" Blaine snaps, the love he has for Kurt, the love that should not exist, clearing the way for something even more inconceivable – jealousy.
"I guess I don't," Kurt admits, pouting. "It's just …" Kurt looks at the man and sighs. Within that sound, Blaine hears the faintest strands of his humanity. "I don't want to see him perish. Gone from the earth forever. I have a feeling he had a full and prosperous life ahead of him."
"We all did, love," Blaine groans with a roll of his blood red eyes.
"He had potential," Kurt clarifies. "He would have been special. Renowned. Isn't that why you saved me? Because you thought my life still had potential?"
"I saved you because I love you," Blaine says, his voice so hard, the words grate together like cinder blocks. "And because I'm a selfish ass bastard."
"Okay, well, then be the vampire who loves me, who's a selfish ass bastard, and wants to see me happy."
Blaine adjusts his position on the bed, waffling between moving higher towards the man's neck and giving Kurt what he wants, or leaping to his feet, grabbing his mate, and launching them both out the window into the night, never to return here for another two decades.
"And if he falls in love with you? And chooses to stay with us?"
Kurt softens his grin. "I belong to you, my love. And only you."
The man in the bed sings a little louder, his head turning toward Kurt, as if calling for him with his song. Kurt gasps, puts a hand above his rotting heart, and sighs.
Blaine glares at the man, eyes burning red. "I don't share," he growls.
"I wouldn't want you to," Kurt answers.
Blaine lowers himself to his feet. He crouches close, taking a moment to breathe the man in, determine what exactly is wrong with him. Certain maladies don't disappear during the change. Some of them carry over, often turning demons into something so extraordinarily profane, even vampires fear them. He sees Kurt watch him with a worried expression on his face, waiting for a diagnosis. Kurt can read minds, but Blaine can read other things – the flutter of an eyelid, the pace of a pulse, the opening and closing of valves in the veins. As a mortal, his father wanted him to practice medicine. Blaine wanted none of that. He longed to write music and to sing, but his father felt his talents would be wasted otherwise. And as his father held the strings to Blaine's future – or, more to the point, his purse – Blaine had no choice. He did as his father wished, and resented him the rest of his days for it.
Blaine's father was his first victim when he became a vampire.
But the elder Anderson did have one thing correct. Blaine was a perceptive man, supernaturally so, even as a mortal. Logical. Brilliant.
What a grim gift his talent turned out to be.
"Hmm … it's his heart. It's weak. Two chambers malfunctioning. Another almost done. It can go at any time." Blaine tilts his head sideways to listen, to be sure. "What is his name?"
"Adam," Kurt says, eyes bouncing from one man to the other till their faces blur together. "His name is Adam."
"Ah, like the first man," Blaine replies dryly. "How poetic."
"Blaine, please?" Kurt bats his eyes, attempting to look as innocent as he once was when Blaine first loved him – frail and human, with a warmth that came from the heart beating inside his chest, beckoning for him with blood and nourishment. Because of a minor pre-immortality ailment of his own, Kurt hasn't the strength to turn a human into a vampire, but he didn't care about that before. He never thought he'd want to. But now, Blaine is his only hope.
Blaine peeks up over the man's neck, shallow pulse becoming weaker with every second that zips by, and smiles. Sure, he'll do this for Kurt. He'd do anything for Kurt.
That doesn't mean he won't spend the next few centuries making certain Kurt showers him with gratitude.
"Of course, my love," Blaine says, envisioning the next hundred years of Kurt on his knees. "Your wish is my command."
