My awesome beta, voyageasia (HKVoyage on AO3), has written her first fic! You should go check it out.
As they prepare to go explore, Blaine takes a backpack from the ground and tosses it to Kurt.
"Here. You can carry that yourself now."
"Oh...I...you..." Kurt stutters.
"You left it when you went running off. Fortunately, I wasn't freaking out enough yet, so I remembered to take it with me when I went looking for you."
Kurt slumps down on the ground again, hands covering his eyes. He can't believe he was so careless. These backpacks contain everything they own, everything...without them, they wouldn't have a chance. He has always been poor; knows how to make a little go a long way, he knows how to find things and make use of them, but without the tools in the backpack...And if Blaine hadn't been level-headed enough to take them with him...if a high tide had come...
"We'd have nothing," he realizes.
"We'd have our lives," Blaine replies, who was apparently able to follow Kurt's line of thinking. "It's still a lot more than I expected to have at this point, if I'm honest."
That's also his fault. That Blaine's life is in danger at all is all because of him; he's the one who brought them into this situation...
"Stop it," Blaine says sharply, and Kurt realizes he is shaking. Blaine grabs his upper arms and holds him still, speaks to him in a voice that is soft now, comforting and a little worried.
"You forgot something," he says. "It's okay. It happens. You got...emotional and ran away. Don't be so hard on yourself."
But Kurt shakes his head. Blaine doesn't understand, and he himself only realizes now...this isn't him. None of it. He doesn't sit somewhere crying. He doesn't panic, doesn't run away. He doesn't stand somewhere shaking because something has gone wrong, he doesn't rely on someone else to look after him and comfort him.
When he feels sure of his voice again, he says, "I don't get emotional."
Blaine looks at him, smiling wryly. "Maybe it's time you did," he says.
The house is about as bad as Kurt imagined. It smells of decay and emptiness; fortunately, it doesn't smell like death. That's just because the bones have been gnawed clean; there's just nothing left that could smell. It must have been a large family who used to live here. The house is certainly large enough, and it takes them a long time to gather their remains, carried about and scattered by whatever animals had come and eaten them. They move slowly and cautiously around the fallen beams and broken roof, every groan of the ancient wood making them jump.
It's a gruesome task. Kurt can see how Blaine gets quieter and more withdrawn by the second, and he almost wishes he would cry again. If he cried, Kurt could comfort him, but when he's like this, Kurt feels so apart from him he doesn't know how to reach him at all.
They bury the bones, and then they make a fire outside and sit and dine on dried meat and old bread that tastes a little better when they toast it. Neither of them has the stomach to hunt and kill an animal tonight, so that will have to do. They are quiet while they eat, each lost in their own thoughts, but Kurt can somehow feel that Blaine is...a little better, not so far away anymore, and silently, he takes his hand and squeezes it. He is surprised when Blaine looks up and smiles at him.
"What happens now?" he asks."Tomorrow?"
"Well, we start building," Kurt answers. "I really want us to have a roof over our head by...the day after tomorrow at the latest. I have no idea what to expect from the weather, but I think it's getting colder at night, and I don't want us to be caught unawares."
"I have no idea how to build a house," Blaine admits sheepishly. "In fact, I don't think I have a lot of practical skills altogether."
"You caught a lot of dinners," Kurt says. "That was pretty practical. Anyway, I have built one house by myself and helped with a few others. My dad taught me to work with wood, but...well, I don't have the tools or...well, the wood, really. I'm sure I can build something that will keep together, just don't expect it to be pretty."
"But I want to help."
"Oh, you'll have to,. There are a lot of tasks that don't require knowledge on building. Figuring out how to get the beams we can still use to the building site without the rest of the roof breaking down on us among them."
They sit in silence for a while, Kurt making a mental list of all the things they'll have to do tomorrow, finally taking a stick from the fire and using the sooty tip to write on a flat stone.
Then, Blaine takes his hand. "Look," he says.
Kurt looks up into a world tinted pink and the most perfect sunset. It belies anything bad could ever happen in a world where something as beautiful as this exists; no matter they are sitting not a mile from a freshly shoveled grave.
Kurt shrugs a little; he doesn't very much like this particular side of himself, the inability to see beauty for itself, without marring it by seeing the irony in it or the ugliness behind it.
He smiles, mostly for Blaine, and squeezes his hand. He appreciates very much that Blaine is the complete opposite of him in this, that he is able to see beauty everywhere and in everything.
"It is still such a beautiful world," Blaine says, voice full of wonder, face open in awe and gleaming with the beams of the evening sun.
And inexplicably, Kurt thinks, "You are the most beautiful thing in it."
He doesn't know where that thought came from, and it scares him; but at the same time, he is glad that apparently, he is able to see pure beauty in something. There is no irony or ugliness in Blaine.
They work their asses off the next days.. There is not much to do at this point that demands Kurt's questionable expertise. They are clearing debris, sorting stuff they find into things they can still use and things that are too broken, all the time wary of any shift in the ruins that might make their destiny the same as that of the family who once lived here.
Kurt quickly sees that the work will take longer than he thought. They can't move the beams he wants without taking down the roof first, and to do that he has to build a ladder first. The tasks add up, they keep discovering things they must do before other things can be done, and they just hope the weather holds; if not, Kurt thinks, he has to build a temporary shelter.
The are so exhausted in the evenings that they don't even think of doing anything more than kiss goodnight.
At some point, they lean the ladder against the most stable-looking wall of the house, and Blaine climbs up to pry loose the tiles of the roof. He tosses them down to Kurt, who chooses the ones they can still use, and takes away the others as fuel for their fires.
Then, just like that, Blaine falls. Kurt doesn't see how it happens, if something startles him, if he loses his grip on the roof, if he missteps. It's so fast that Kurt stands rooted to his spot for several seconds before he runs to Blaine, who lies on the ground, eyes closed, unmoving.
"Blaine?" Kurt cries, voice shrill with fear. He drops on his knees beside him, listens for breathing, feels for heartbeat. For a fraction of a second he can find neither, and he feels such fear that his own heart threatens to stop. But then Blaine draws a deep breath and opens his eyes, and Kurt feels tears of relieve sting behind his eyelids, but he doesn't let them fall. Instead, he sits up a little and takes Blaine's hand, smiles at him.
"What happened?" Blaine asks.
"You fell down the ladder," Kurt says. "Are you okay?"
Blaine nods, grimaces, and vomits.
Kurt makes up Blaine's pallet beside the fire and helps him lay down on it. Blaine has difficulty walking, he must have twisted his ankle or something, but the real problem is that apparently his head hurts so bad that whenever he moves too much, he vomits from the pain. At least that's how it seems. Kurt doesn't really know, as Blaine doesn't really talk, just closes his eyes and lies there after once whispering, "I'm sorry."
Kurt is worried. He doesn't show it, at least he doesn't think so, but he is terribly, terribly worried. He doesn't continue working on the house, weather be damned, but instead chooses work he can do while sitting by Blaine's side. He finds some moth-eaten sacks in the ruins of the house that he mends and takes apart and sews together again, and fills with moss and grass and other sacks that are too threadbare to use otherwise, and anything soft he can find, and makes a mattress for Blaine and then one for himself. He hates to leave Blaine's bedside even to relieve himself, and at first doesn't trust the signs that he is recovering.
But finally, he can see Blaine is indeed better, and the first time he dares to leave his bedside for more than a minute, he finally goes to recover a treasure.
There is a big chest in the house, barely visible under a pile of debris. He has always postponed its recovery for other projects that seemed more urgent, but he thinks it must be a clothing chest. One side of the lid is a little bashed in, but the rest is okay, and if there is indeed clothing in it, he has hopes it might still be usable.
He sweeps the debris away and drags the chest outside to Blaine, and there he opens it.
He gasps as clothing practically spills out of the chest. He digs through it, careful to hide the children's garments from Blaine. He will be feeling bad enough to wear the clothes of dead people, but there's really nothing to be done. They can build a house, they can grow food, and while both of them are handy enough with a needle to alter and mend clothes, neither of them knows how to spin or weave. Kurt knows; seeing that Blaine was learning to be a fabric merchant, he had some hopes that Blaine might know something about the production of fabric, but no.
"I am a very good judge of the quality of the weaving, and can estimate pretty closely for how much it will sell," Blaine had said. Which...has certainly been useful at some other point in his life.
The clothes they are wearing now barely deserve the name, so they'll have to wear those in the chest. But Kurt knows that while he sees clothes, and sees what they can use and what not, and what has to be altered and how much the moths and the damp have gotten into them, Blaine will see the lives of the people that once wore them, and he will grieve.
There is no help for that. But Kurt can shield him from the worst of it, and so he hides the tiny, lovingly made pants and dresses and onesies. Later, he will ruthlessly tear them apart and use the fabric to mend the others. Although he has some weird feelings about saving them, for...for whom?
It's not likely there will be children here any time soon.
That night, as he lies on his pallet next to Blaine, he realizes that he wants there to be. Not children, necessarily, but other people. He loves Blaine, he has come to terms with that, and is even able to admit it to himself in the darkness. The only thing left to be determined about that is in what capacity.
He loves Blaine, but it is a little bit lonely out here with only the two of them. And...he doesn't like to admit that, even alone in the darkness, but he misses his friends, even if he doesn't know if he can really call them that. Their time together was maybe too short and too tumultuous to call them friends, but...he misses them. He won't cut up the women's garments, even if they are in better condition than most of the men's, he will save them for Rachel and Santana and Brittany to wear if they come to join them.
He wonders what it's like now in the city, after all those weeks, and if, later, when Blaine's recovered and they have built their house and if the weather holds, they might go back. He wonders if they will still be waiting for them at the gate, in a night with a full moon.