absence complicated by an overflowing heart
Rating: PG
Pairing: Kurt/Blaine
Summary: The darkness can come and go at any time. All Blaine understands is that when he's in it, there's a boy whose existance he cannot comprehend, and that when he's out of it, all he knows is pain.
Title from: Fire's Reflection, by Rainer Maria Rilke
Reccommended listening: Will I? from Rent
The darkness comes suddenly, and it's both painful and blissful at the same time.
Blaine's body feels like lead, a dead weight obscuring the fluidity that should exist with movement. It's like there should be some kind of ache there, but there's nothing. It takes effort to make each step, each flick of the wrist, curve of the mouth, blink of the eye. It scares him.
He has no idea where he is, either, or perhaps he's nowhere, because only nothingness surrounds him. All he knows are vast expanses of white, things that stretch to the bounds of infinity as he can comprehend it.
But then there is something else there, a dark, Fresnel-esque shadow, somehow illuminated. The etchings become slowly sharper and all Blaine can do is stare, open-mouthed, at what he's seeing.
There's a boy there, about his own age if not just a little older. A boy whose presence, whose very being, exudes the fragility of all that is beautiful in this world; it's breathtaking.
Yet there's something not-quite-there about him, and Blaine can't quite work it out. He seems to be separate, distant, as if seen through an icy sheet of glass or a bridal veil. It's ethereal and heartbreaking at the same time and Blaine doesn't know what to do.
"Who - ?" he asks, but his voice falters as the boy raises a single finger, pressing it against the air just in front of Blaine's lips, not touching but almost. And maybe it's because he won't touch, or can't touch and Blaine just wants to know but what?
The slick of blood on a fragment of china.
It's then that all Blaine can comprehend is pain and the biting smell of disinfectant and the clinical glow of a strip light and screaming but from whose mouth?
And then he's back.
And the boy is there, clearer, sharper and more defined.
There's something devastatingly haunting about his face that Blaine will see for nights on end whenever he closes his eyes, the ghosts burned into his retinas.
He knows better than to speak, than to question.
But fascination can't stop him from trying to reach out, to touch, and the other boy stretched out too, his movements mimicking Blaine's precisely.
A hopeful smile crosses Blaine's face, and the boy's, but then crumbles to dust when Blaine realises that no, he can't touch. There's a whisper of a distance between their two hands that can't be crossed.
Blaine tilts his head to the side, leaning it against his shoulder, and curling it upwards again, eyes fixed on the other boy's mockery of his gestures, the mockery of existence that either of them must be.
Then Blaine closes his eyes, and everything's gone.
A weak, helpless groan clatters in his throat.
There's hushed voices, a distant, laboured beeping, a flash of blonde hair, and then nothing.
What infuriates Blaine the most about these encounters is not the inability to place himself amongst the many dimensions of space and time, or the uselessness of his words, or the feeling that something's missing that keeps him constantly hanging onto the edge. It's the complete lack of physical contact, the absence of the intimacy and delicacy that skin-on-skin creates, the spark of almost-unbearable heat of the touch of flesh and bones and hearts.
The crush of a glass heart.
More and more, Blaine finds himself wondering if it's possible to love someone who isn't really there.
Every time he meets the boy without a name, there's a part of him that wants to return to the burn of reality, to make his brain stop teasing him in this way, to suppress the forbidden feelings rising in his blood and to decipher the inevitable tragedy forming in his mind.
But every time he faces reality, all he wants to do is to fall back into oblivion.
This isn't a love story, it's a mockery.
The frayed ends of a twist of ribbon.
The ladder falling through it.
Not everything can be simple. Not everything can be easy.
And eventually, Blaine reaches a point where he must let go of the rock and open himself out to the tide to drown or be rescued.
But which is which?
Every time Blaine looks at the other boy, he finds something new. The shard of crystal in his eye. The fluid, waxing-crescent of his spine. The soft crook in his smile.
But it takes him a while to really see him properly. To see the utter vulnerability and frailty that makes up human flesh hidden beneath a facade, a fortress succumbing to ruin.
The endlessness in him is endearing.
And it's on one of their encounters that Blaine sees something new. A bruise blushing purple on his wrist, seemingly days old but the memory still fresh.
He seems to notice Blaine staring at it, looks down.
His mouth falls open, just a little.
Oh.
Blaine doesn't know if he imagined it, but there's the visceral sound of something breaking that's a crunch and a snap and a shatter and a glitter and it pierces him somewhere deep inside him that he didn't know even existed with a crack of glass.
Because now the boy is visibly falling apart in front of him, his skin a patchwork of a galaxy of colours blooming and scars tearing open, a life held together by stitched and gauze, the ghosts of a forgotten past released and the unhealed nerve endings in a heart aching. There's a great and terrible beauty that exists only in the barest of human forms, in the slow flight of blood and the frozen river of a broken bone and the champagne sparkle of a teardrop; a great and terrible beauty that's being revealed in its most horrific form to Blaine right now in the form of a living, breathing being tearing at the seams and releasing the frayed ends of fabric.
And all he can do is look at Blaine and cry.
Before he goes, Blaine realises that it's not something that's been broken. It's everything.
And as he fades, he hears three words in a voice that cuts through the darkness.
Run, Blaine. Run.
Silence.
Blaine Anderson comes round to the cloying scent of acid and the whispers of his parents.
"Blaine. Blaine, honey?"
But all he knows is pain.
Pain not only from the map of stitches, the weight of a cast, the drag of grazes, but the harrowing wound of a broken heart.
He cries.
beep
beep
beep
.