It was an ordinary trip on the subway, as far as Kurt Hummel was concerned. A Styrofoam cup of a bed-and-breakfast joint's best shot at a non-fat mocha doing its best to spill on everybody around him, a gloved hand reluctantly in the same place as a thousand other sweaty guys' hands around a wrist-strap to stay upright – he'd been flipping through his phone idly, swiping through photos of his old highschool Glee Club with a nostalgic smile. Which was about as far as smiles went, really, in the parts of New York he'd seen. People missing what they had left behind to try to make it here.

Kurt, of course, had only been there for the musicals on Broadway and he had most certainly not tried for every role available (including, but not limited to, the lovely Glinda), only to be rejected. It was just a week-long stay. A fantasy. A sight-seeing trip to New York, New York, which would end in his inevitable return to Ohio, which was actually precisely where he was headed right this second, if he could just catch his flight on time. (For a place referred to as a 'bed-and-breakfast joint', they really weren't good at making sure it was breakfast. He'd barely woken up in time for brunch, let alone packing, and the flight left at 12:30.)

The subway screeched to a stop. The doors slid open. Kurt chanced a disinterested glance up, at least now used to strange voyagers of this particular metro yelling at him for making eye contact, and watched a couple of men step aboard – they were laughing, loudly, over some joke he had not heard. Looked nice enough; their presence in the very end carriage – where next to nobody bothered to walk, meaning it was now empty, save for the three of them - could have been put down to anything. Secret celebrity, for instance. The overlarge sunglasses certainly weren't doing anything to suggest otherwise, but Kurt had frankly been disappointed to find light-sensitive people beneath his dramatic, Scooby-Doo-esque revelations of their secret identity too many times in the course of the past week. Or worse, blind.

They threw a cursory glance at him. He threw a polite smile in their direction and returned to his phone; it was 12:21, and his stop was still three away. He'd have to run to catch his flight. Miss it and he'd never hear the end of it, either. Plane tickets were expensive and everybody who knew Kurt Hummel knew he wanted to live here, at least half of them would think he was running away-

"Whoa! Whoa – hey, I've got you. Wes? You okay?"

A sudden movement caught Kurt's eye; one of the men – the one talking – had had to move quickly in order to catch his friend. Wes slumped forward, not involuntarily but maybe not entirely aware; for a split second Kurt was sure he must have just lost his balance, he'd done so himself on the subway his first time 'round… but he knew that look. Kurt had trained in First Aid following his father's heart attack: that face was the one the people in the stock photos made. At the time he'd thought the instant paling, the panic mingled with confusion, the sheen of sweat – at the time he'd though it was just a re-enactment. Not what it actually looked like.

"Wes?"

"My arm hurts," Wes slurred, almost unintelligibly.

As it turned out, that was precisely what heart attacks looked like. "Get him on the platform," he said, with enough authority in his voice that it surprised him – Wes's friend looked up, startled:

"What?"

But the train was screeching to a stop for a second time and Kurt did not have time to repeat himself. Instead, quite matter-of-factly, he stalked forward and seized Wes's legs, and by some miracle the other man seemed to have caught up to what Kurt had said – the doors slid open and in a movement more coordinated than he'd've thought it could be, they were outside. Kurt helped to lay Wes down.

"Whazzapening?" the young man mumbled, peering up at Kurt, who hesitated. There was no moral guide on… "Am I dying?" Wes asked, with a hint of disbelief in his voice, but in that very same moment his eyes rolled back into his head. His chest was still.

"He's not breathing," Kurt mumbled to himself.

"Oh my god," said Wes's friend, "Oh my god, is he-?"

And it was probably because the other man could not bring himself to say the word that Kurt was reminded of just what was at stake here: a life. A very real, very proper life, hanging in the balance – he thrust his hand back into his pocket for his phone and threw it to the other man. "He's not. He won't, I'll help him. But I need you to call 911 and tell me when the ambulance will be here. We're at Warbler Station, the north side." This was something he had learned: in an emergency, people tended to forget minor details like the fact they could read, meaning they often forgot where they were. That, and they also had a peculiar habit of running off after being told to call an ambulance without actually calling one; knowing when it would arrive meant knowing it would arrive at all. Unthinkingly, he ripped Wes's shirt open. An Alexander McQueen, no less, though Kurt was sure the sin against fashion might be forgiven – he started chest compressions. Thirty beats, two breaths, repeat.

Had quite a rhythm going, for a couple of minutes there, until whats-his-face collapsed back down by Wes's side, Kurt's phone haphazardly discarded beside him.

"Oh my god, oh my god – they'll be here in three minutes, I… oh my god, I was just talking to him—"

"What's your name?" Calm down. He did not have the hands to handle a panic attack on top of this.

"M—my…? Blaine." The man tore off his sunglasses and ran a hand restlessly through his untidy curls: Blaine. Blaine, he said, and in the same moment Kurt recognised him. This was Blaine Anderson, the child prodigy, the teen with at least a dozen hit singles since the moment his feet hit the pavement of New York. Kurt leaned down again, two rescue breaths, not distracted: in any other circumstances, he'd've been freaking out. He'd have just sat there and said nothing but stared and forgotten those cookies in the oven or all of the things he'd rehearsed in front of a mirror, in case such an instance of bumping into a celebrity arose. Instead, he worked methodically; kept his voice low and calm. He'd already sent a bystander in search of an AED. All there was left to do was wait the next three minutes out.

"Hi, Blaine. I'm Kurt. You friend will be fine, I'm working on him right now. Listen – do you want to help?" because Kurt was already breathless with the effort of pumping someone else's heart for them, and he was losing the rhythm he was meant to be doing it to. Blaine hesitated, uncertain; not unwilling to help, by any means, judging by the way his hands immediately flew to assist before he'd even planned how to do so – but he didn't know how. That was okay. Kurt tried to offer a reassuring smile, though he was just the teensiest bit distracted by the life hanging in the balance (and god, his hair must have been awful, he could feel himself sweating with the effort of this).

"Er—what do I…?"

"Sing."

Blaine stared at him blankly. "What?"

"I need to pump to a certain beat and I can't count and sing at the same time. Row, Row, Row Your Boat. That's the beat." There was also Stayin' Alive, but given the circumstances and how unresponsive Wes happened to be at the moment, he figured they'd give that one a pass. Every second that passed without Wes breathing for himself was another second he didn't get the right amount of oxygen, and that could mean brain damage or death or crippling disability or –

As if on cue, Blaine began to sing. It was the same song, the right melody, the very same tune Kurt had been struggling to remember; it was right, and he used it to ground himself. This was just someone who needed help, and he knew precisely how to do that and he was doing it just fine. The compressions slowed down, back to the pace they ought to have been at (when had they gotten a half beat too quick? Oh god, had that killed him?), the man he'd sent to find an AED returned empty-handed but with paramedics in tow, apparently having volunteered to show them the way… and as Kurt shifted to make room for them to take over – his arms were KILLING him – Wes arched upwards, starved for air, breathing in a deep gulp of it before rolling onto his side. Blaine gasped-sobbed.

At once, Warbler Station exploded into excited chatter, paramedics pushing in from all sides to get a chance at helping – Kurt was shoved aside and thankfully so, extracting himself from the mess with only a somewhat vague notion that the man at his feet was breathing only because he'd chosen a poor bed-and-breakfast in an even poorer suburb on the outskirts of New York. If they'd not climbed aboard at the same time they had, he wouldn't've been there. If he hadn't stopped long enough to get that awful cup of coffee (which, he realised suddenly, he must have dropped inside the subway, he didn't remember doing anything else with it), then Wes – friend of Blaine Anderson – would have suffered a heart attack and collapsed on the spot and Blaine, Kurt knew, wouldn't've had the slightest clue what to do about it. Wes would be dead.

Kurt felt light-headed. All that work… his hands felt wrong, now, strangely empty, his limbs itching to do something – to HELP – except nobody seemed to need it anymore; everything was flashing lights and shouted orders and somewhere off to the side Blaine was arguing with someone ("I'm his best friend!" and "Sorry, kid, we need the space to keep him stable,") about riding in the ambulance and oh, god, even if Wes wasn't dead, that was a long time to go without oxygen – would he be all right? Would he be brain damaged? Would it have been better to –

to just –

to –

a hand closed around his arm.

Somewhere in the space between knowing precisely what was going on and being affronted with so many lights and feelings and thoughts he hadn't had at the time (but he wished he had), Kurt had backed himself up flat against the subway station's wall and paled, rather considerably. He startled at the unfamiliar touch, at first, purely out of surprise over the fact that he was still really very corporeal and actually, completely there, and looked up to meet the eyes of one concerned Blaine Anderson. Kurt frowned at him, confused (why were his lip moving?) and then, all at once, it was like someone had turned up the volume on a radio: speaking. That's what Blaine was doing. Speaking. To him. Kurt Hummel was being spoken to by Blaine Anderson. He forced himself to listen.

"—urt? Are you okay?"

"Huh?"

"Do you want to sit down? You're shaking."

Was he? Yes. Shock, probably. He took a long, deep breath, making a conscious effort to regulate his breathing, and although it did not do anything to relieve the feeling of his stomach having been twisted into knots and run over a couple of times, it did sharpen his mind a little. This was real. He had just saved a life, for better or for worse. Someone was going to want to talk to him about it, though not now, not when they were busy finishing what they started. To his credit, Kurt managed a little nod, but it was neither convincing nor very clearly an attempt at affirmation, at all.

"How's Wes?" he asked, instead of answering Blaine's question – which led the young celebrity to frown, and Kurt realised with a jerk that the only information Blain would have had on how Wes was going to be would have come from him, and he had promised with full confidence that he'd be fine. Why had he done that? What if he was wrong?

Blaine's hand dropped away from his arm, so quickly Kurt was sure he had simply forgotten it was there until Kurt had started question-dodging. He shook his head a little, just as ambiguously as he'd nodded it.

"Sorry. I just – my dad… had a heart attack. A while back. He's living, he survived, but I just felt so useless. Even if I'd been there, I never would've… I learned CPR. Because I thought if it happened again, I wanted to know what to do, y'know? If I learnt what to do, then I'd never have to feel anybody being so - they wouldn't seem so…" lifeless. So lifeless. And he had seen Wes arch up for air and cough and splutter and become very much alive again and he'd seen it in his father, too, though in a much less dramatic way in a hospital room, but that wasn't a guarantee. When they're gone like that they're gone. And all Kurt had been able to do was sit there and hope against hope that he was good enough to come back for and now this time around, this time, it had been the same, except he'd known what to do and he'd done it and for at least seven minutes, there, he'd worked, and nothing had happened. For at least seven minutes he'd felt someone just as lifeless. Just as cold.

Suddenly aware that his eyes were wet, he scrubbed at them with the sleeves of his knitted jumper. Today was not about him. This was not about his dad. And that poor man, Wes, he might never be the same again, there was no telling what would happen to him now. All Blaine could do was wait and see and Kurt had been in that position, and he knew how terrifying it was, father or not.

"I get it," Blaine said. Kurt laughed.

"No – really," he insisted, "that's horrible. And not knowing what to do… I'm really glad you were here today, Kurt. Wes is breathing because of you, I can not thank you enough."

"He might never be the same," Kurt confessed, quietly, because the intensity of Blaine's gaze was too much, too honest, too burningly pure. Yes, Wes would not be breathing without him, but that was not necessarily a good thing.

"I don't care."

The absolute certainty startled Kurt out of his self pity. Blaine didn't seem to notice, or care.

"He's my best friend. If that means I've got to make sure every single building this side of Manhattan's wheelchair-friendly then that's what I'm gonna do. You have no idea how thankful I am, Kurt. I mean it."

Of course he meant it. Because when Kurt thought about it, he'd've done the same for his dad. He'd've done the same for any of his friends, for any part of the New Directions. They held gazes for a moment, warm honey on what was probably a greenish blue right now – Blaine's eyes were gorgeous. That, and absolutely nothing other than sincere. With a breathy laugh and an empty swallow, Kurt leaned his head up against the wall beside him, face turned skywards like Santa Claus for AdultsTM could offer some sort of answer.

"I missed my flight," he whispered, and this was purely a knee-jerk reaction, purely said just because it was something to say and everything else, everything that would have tried to have been more meaningful, would have felt too empty. "I was headed home. I'll have to beg that bed and breakfast to take me back. They gave me straight black and told me it was coffee." He hadn't a clue what he'd do about getting another flight. He had maybe $25 on him and that was it; he could get his dad to wire him something and work to pay it back, but that would take a couple of days, at least. "I'll be the next Moondog."

"The homeless composer?" Blaine blurted out, and even in the events of the day he took the opportunity to laugh, startled by the absurdity of Kurt's claim – "Kurt, if you need a place to stay for a couple of nights, come stay with me. I've got a guest room. It's the least I can do, it's my friend's fault you missed your flight."

It was Kurt's turn to laugh, and the way Blaine stared at him when he did it, he was certain that that was what the other man'd been aiming for, all along – but Kurt was quickly shaking his head. He could not imagine what his dad would have to say about holing up with a random celebrity he'd met on the streets, not to mention the fact that wherever Blaine was staying, it was certainly a lot more expensive than what Kurt was used to: what if he broke something? "You can't just do that, Blaine. You're Blaine Anderson, your friend's just had a heart attack. You've got enough going on without me under your feet—"

"I insist," Blaine interrupted, though his voice was as equally as warm as his eyes. Both eyebrows raised, imploring; Kurt wondered if this was his shot at a puppy-dog look. "I'll be following Wes to the hospital once they leave, anyway –" they were still busy making sure they could move him over lumps and bumps without destabilising him – "it's right on the way there. Come on, let me make it up to you, please."

Kurt hesitated; seemed to fight (and best) himself in some internal debate; nodded, once. There was not much to be said for the intimidation factor when it came to Blaine, and it was certainly better than not having a roof over his head, at all. "Which train should we take?"

Blaine rolled his eyes. "C'mon," he said. He grabbed Kurt by the hand and dragged him casually in the direction of the taxi rank.

"I know a shortcut."

A/N: Don't forget to leave a review, guys~ I haven't written fanfiction in a long while, but I wanted to get this one out there. All I need is a little encouragement and I'll next-fanfiction-chapter on up this establishment. :)