Title: And All I've Got Is Her

A/N: A short follow-up/prequel to the earlier ask/chapter. I've been wanting to write something from Kurt's POV for a while. For extra misery, listen to 'One' on repeat by Damien Rice while reading.

Once they're led into the operating room and left alone, he helps her change. He unties her shoes for her, and takes off her socks, and helps her remove her bloody pants and underwear. His vision swims at all the red; his stomach gags at the smell, but he forces himself to focus, and do this for her. He wets a handful of tissues and does his best to wipe away as much of the blood between her thighs as he can, and then he ties her into one of those surgical gowns with the open back. For once, she says nothing about him babying her. She does not tease, does not complain, does not say a single word. More than once he has to keep an eye on her stomach so he can be certain she's still breathing.

After she's changed and settled on the exam table, he grabs her soiled clothes and crosses the room to deposit them into the red metal bin marked 'Infectious Waste' in all caps. He steps on the footpad to open it, and is just about to shove the evidence of their loss inside its dark depths when she finally speaks.

"Please don't," she whispers from across the room.

He starts at the sound of her voice—he can no longer recall the last time she spoke to him, or what she said—and he turns. He finds her head twisted to the side around the headrest, watching him. He can't help but think that she looks just like she did the first time he ever saw her: in a harshly lit exam room, lost and overwhelmed, pleading for recognition.

"Please don't throw it all away."

He swallows, hard, his throat tearing at him as he tries to breathe. "Jane…"

"It's all I have left," she whispers. "Please, Kurt." Her words scrape against each other as they comes out, and he wants to close his eyes, wants to turn away from her and her pain and her begging, but he cannot. He just stares at her, and watches her chin start to shake, and her eyes fill and spill over with tears, and then her body's wracking back and forth on the exam table, and finally, he snaps back into himself. He closes the lid of the infectious waste bin without filling it, and hurries back over to her side.

She takes the clothes from him without pausing to draw a breath or organize them. She just grabs her bloody jeans and her bloody underwear and she balls them up into a pile and hugs them to her chest. He watches, numb, not knowing what to say or do as she presses her face into the denim. Her nose is mere inches from the bloodstain, and he forces himself to beat back the urge to throw up.

He used to imagine her doing something like this, with their child. He used to fantasize about it, during late night when he couldn't sleep and early mornings when he would rise before her and just lie there in bed, watching her. He'd pictured her with their baby: pictured her holding it, nursing it, rocking it to sleep. Pictured her singing to it, and cooing to it, asking it to say Ma-ma.

Watching her now, he can't help but think he jinxed things. He'd imagined too much, hoped too much, expected too much. Loved too much.

And this is what he gets.

He stays with her in the operating room just long enough to watch her be put under for the D&C. In the minutes before the "ten-nine-eight-seven" countdown, he holds her hand and promises that he won't leave her side, that he will be there with her the whole time, because that's what she asked of him, begged of him.

Once she's out, though, he slips his hand from hers and all but runs to the door. The attending obstetrician starts a bit at his rush, but does not call him back, or ask what he's doing, or where he's going. Watching the husbands fall apart and turn tail: that must all be part of a day's work for these doctors.

He wants to say he's different from the others. He wants to say he's a brave man; he wants to say he's a loyal husband. He wants to say he's taken bullets and he's lowered himself to one knee; he wants to say he loves that woman lying there on the table more than he loves himself, or anyone else. He wants to say a lot of things; he wants to say so many things. But just like everything he said to Jane in the seconds before she went under, he knows anything that might come out of his mouth right now will be a lie. So he says nothing as he flees.

The door swings shut gently behind him with a barely audible woosh. He wishes it would slam instead.

He ends up down the hall, in the only private space he can find: one of those double-sized family bathrooms, the only place here with a lock he can bolt himself and a room that can be all his own. It's squeezed in between the men's and women's rooms, and he makes a beeline for it the second he spots it. He barely manages to lock the deadbolt on the door before he sinks to the floor, sobbing.

Even as he curls into himself, shaking and struggling to breathe through the tears, the irony of the setting is not lost on him. He does not belong in this place made for families, not even if it is to grieve.

He makes it back to the operating room just as the procedure's wrapping up. The obstetrician sends the assisting nurse out of the room just after Kurt enters it, and he lingers by the door, suddenly frightened. He looks at the woman standing there in scrubs before him, and he wonders if he's going to get yelled at now. Is that part of the job? After the doc patches up the wife, does she chew out the husband?

But all the redheaded woman does is give him a weak nod of acknowledgment, and explains quietly what will happen next. She talks about recovery time and residual bleeding and cramping. She warns against infection and mentions a number of medications to use if the pain becomes too intense. She talks about reasons to come back for further treatment and reasons not to.

Kurt nods at it all, but he's hardly listening. He can't stop staring at Jane. Though she's been weaned off the anesthesia, she's still out of it, not yet conscious. Part of him, very briefly, hopes that she never wakes up, for her sake. Surely whatever nothingness she's lingering in now will be endlessly better than the reality waiting for her.

Kurt jumps when he feels a hand touching her arm. It's the obstetrician, offering him what sympathy she can behind her official veneer.

"I'll go over it all again once you're wife's awake," she tells him.

Kurt knows the words are supposed to be comforting, reassuring. Kind. But all he feels when she says them is a deep, violent tearing throughout what feels like his entire body.

The woman leaves without another word, and then a pair of nurses come in, to help wheel Jane down the hall.

She's conscious by the time they've settled her into the temporary recovery room.

"We'll give you a couple hours alone," one of the nurses says kindly. She indicates a little blue button on the wall, within Jane's reach. "If you need anything, or if you're in pain, or have questions, please don't hesitate to call. We'll come right to you."

Jane nods numbly, her head hardly moving. Kurt watches her and thinks her head must feel heavy. His certainly does. It hasn't stopped pounding since his flight to the bathroom, or maybe since the drive here, but he doesn't mention this to her. She is dealing with enough, he knows. There is not room, or reason, for his pain right now.

After a minute of awkwardly standing by her bedside like an out-of-town guest, he takes the seat next to her and attempts to settle himself. He watches her do the same: watches her gingerly situate herself so she can receive the most comfort possible. He doubts it's much.

He is relieved when she finally stops moving, and sees that she's curled herself a bit towards him. He would be lying if he said he hadn't been scared that she might put her back to him, that she might cut him off like he cut her off earlier in the operating room. It takes him a couple seconds to remember that she didn't see that, that she'd already been unconscious. But still, the guilt tears at him.

He had promised, when they'd married, that he'd stand by her side: in sickness and in health, in good times and in bad.

And today, the second she had her back turned, the second she needed him, he ran. Like a fucking coward.

He opens his mouth to confess, to apologize, to beg forgiveness and accept condemnation, but before he can say a word, she starts speaking. Her eyes are closed, and her face is pressed into the pillow, and she says it so quietly that he thinks he isn't meant to hear.

But he hears anyway.

"I wish I could just up and die, too."

They do not speak on the ride home. The obstetrician gave them a list of expectations, of approved painkillers, or to-dos and to-donts. She smartly gave it to them in writing, because neither Kurt, nor Jane, had listened much. Jane holds it in her hands as they drive, along with a plastic bag that holds her bloody clothes and, a new addition, the bloody towel she'd sat on on the ride over. When he opened the passenger door for her and saw it sitting there, Kurt almost threw up again, like he did in the bathroom earlier. But Jane picked up the towel as if it were something to be treasured, and held it close by its clean edges for a moment before adding it to the bag.

It's only after they're home, and she goes into the bathroom and comes out a moment later, that she finally speaks.

"I need to go to the store," she says, and he closes his eyes, fighting back the urge to refuse. He hardly managed to drive them home safely without getting into an accident; how does she expect him to drive back out? How does she expect him to so much as walk down the street?

"What do you need?" he asks finally, covering his eyes with a tired hand. God, it feels good to close them. It feels good to not look at her. "Whatever it is, we can get it tomorrow."

"No, I need to go now," she presses.

"Jane, please—"

"There's going to be bleeding, Kurt. There already is. I need to go to the store now; I don't have anything here."

He drops his hand, and without thinking, his gaze falls to her stomach, then lower, to her crotch. He'd forgotten about the bleeding.

"Right," he says finally, averting his eyes from her as if he is doing something dirty by looking at her, and instead turns to stare at the wood panelling of their apartment's floors instead. "Right, I forgot."

A silent moment passes between them. He's only just realizing how dull and insensitive those words must've sounded when she speaks.

"That must be nice," she whispers. And then she grabs her wallet and walks past him to the door. He follows after her simply because he doesn't know what else he's supposed to do.

She cries that night, all throughout the night, and though she does so in almost near silence, the weeping still keeps him awake. He can sense her sorrow as easily as his own, and yet it is more painful, more horrible, to be a witness to her suffering than it is to endure his own.

It is made even more horrible by the fact that he doesn't know what to do in this situation. He doesn't know what to say, or how to hold her, or even if he should hold her.

For a while, he just lies next to her and cups her cheek, wiping away each tear as it falls, but after a while that becomes nothing more than an exercise in futility. Together, they become one of those perpetual motion machines: No matter how many tears he wipes away, there are always more to come. And his touch does not seem to be healing or helping like it used to. He briefly considers pulling away, getting up and going to sleep on the couch, but even the thought of leaving her here alone makes him so sick that he can hardly refute the thought without vomiting.

"I'm sorry."

She's the first to say the words, the first to say that little, over-used phrase he should've already said a thousand times today, and yet, somehow hasn't said once.

"I'm so sorry."

Her eyes spill over once more as she whispers the apology, and it isn't until she's repeated it four more times that he finally finds his voice to contradict her.

"You don't have to be sorry," he interrupts her seventh apology gently, his thumb hard at work again at clearing half her face of its tears. "You know this isn't your fault. You know—" He tries to say more, but his throat it too tight, his head hurts too much, and if he sees her shed one more tear, he's going to fucking jump out the window, because he cannot stand to see her suffer like this.

She's silent for a long moment. Such a long moment that he thinks, with something that might've once been joy, She believes me! But then there's a rustle amongst the sheets, and he catches her shaking her head. She's biting her lip, trying to hold in the tears—for him now, he knows; she's trying to do this all for him—but they spill out anyway.

"I couldn't keep him," she cries out finally, the dam breaking once more. "I couldn't keep him safe, I couldn't keep him alive, and I—I—I want you to know that I'm—I'm—"

He's almost grateful when she dissolves into sobs, burrowing himself into her arms, because it means he doesn't have to listen to her try to apologize for something that is, so clearly, his fault. At the end of the day, she had been the home for their baby, the carrier for it. But he'd been the one to put it there, the one to force it into existence.

He should be apologizing to her, for what he's done.

And he does.

When her sobs don't let up and her shaking doesn't stop, he brings her fully into his arms, crushing her to him, pulling her whole body on top of his. "I am so sorry," he whispers, burying his face in her dark hair, breathing her in as if she is life, or absolution. "Janie, I'm so sorry…" He repeats the words again and again, ignoring the soreness in his throat, ignoring the numbness in his limbs. "I never meant to do this to you, sweetheart. I never meant to hurt you…"

At some point in the night, their roles become reversed, and he is the one weeping inconsolably, and she is the one whispering meaningless comforts. She says her "sorry"s; she says her "I love you"s; she says every right thing in the book.

None of them help.

Near dawn, when their sobbing has stolen both their voices, they grieve silently and hold one another. She's brushing her hand against his stubbled cheek, and he's hugging onto the little rise of her hip, when the sun starts streaming in through the half-closed shades. Jane catches him looking at the coming dawn, and glances over her shoulder and stares as if she does not remember what it is. When she turns back, she's pressing her lips together, and her whole face shaking in an effort not to cry again.

He doesn't even put forth the effort anymore; he just lets the tears go. No point in trying to control what cannot be controlled; he's learned that lesson more than enough in this life already.

After they finally manage to get out of bed in the morning, and get dressed, they make their way over to the kitchen and make breakfast in silence. Neither of them eats much. He tries to muster up some courage to tell her to eat, to tell her she needs some strength, some nutrition, but he feels like a hypocrite even thinking such things when his bowl of cereal in front of him is untouched and quickly becoming soggy.

After ten minutes, he finally abandons it, and gets up to dump it in the trash. Jane's right behind him, throwing her yogurt and granola into the mix. He takes the bowl from her hands and sets them both in the sink to soak. He watches the water fill one, and then the other, and then he watches them overflow. He can't turn off the faucet. He just stares and stares and stares, watching water cascade over the surface…

Her hand reaches forward and turns off the faucet for him. And then her arms reach forward, circling around his middle and hugging him tightly to her from behind. He thinks about turning, about taking her in his arms as he did last night, but it seems so impossible in the daytime. It seems horrible and ugly and too real. He feels like they should keep their suffering for the nighttime–that way they can try to survive in the interim, right? Isn't that what people do?—but even as he thinks the words, his eyes start to fill again. He grips the edges of the counter, hard, and stares down at his white knuckles as his vision blurs, and clears, and blurs. The tears make very quiet ploping sounds as the meet the metal of the sink, and the stone of the counter.

"I'm here," Jane whispers into his back, her breath warm even through his t-shirt. "Kurt, I'm here."

He nods at this, sucking in a breath, struggling to keep himself under control.

I'm here.

He wishes so much—probably more than she does—that those words meant something real. He wishes they were enough.

He wishes she were enough.

A/N: Thoughts would be lovely. Thank you for reading.