When Sebastian was six-years-old, his favorite person in the world – his grandmother – died of complications from advanced heart disease. Sebastian always believed that her heart became ill after her soulmate died. He knew that having your soulmate with you, that being with him or her every day, was that important. In the last few days of her life, she told Sebastian not to worry about her because after she died her soul would rise up to the golden gates of heaven, and she would be with her soulmate again.

Sebastian was with his grandmother when she passed away, standing by her bedside. He stared at her body while his mother wept and his father held her hand, but he didn't see anything rise out of her. No apparition, no soul floating up to the heavens. While all the adults consoled one another with the thought that she had joined her true love again in a place where she would never be sick or frail, where she would always be happy and carefree, Sebastian was terrified that they had buried his beloved grandmother with her soul locked inside her body. That idea haunted him. He couldn't sleep for weeks. He would run away, trying to make his way to the cemetery to dig his grandmother up and rescue her soul, but he was always caught before he left the estate.

It took long months of enduring horrible nightmares and running away before he came to terms with the facts of life.

There was no such thing as an immortal soul.

Soulmates were bullshit – not a perfect love chosen for you by the universe, but a biological response to centuries of evolution, leaving humanity in this bizarre dystopian quagmire which nobody understood.

And now, this thing that didn't exist to him, this soul that he didn't believe in, this connection he thought was complete and total crap, has gone missing.

Kurt's soul is missing.

It takes a minute for Sebastian to absorb the doctor's words, and then another minute for him to form a response.

"Wait, wait, wait…back up a minute," Sebastian says, shaking Kurt's head in confusion, "what do you mean, his soul is missing?"

"Come with me, Mr. Smythe," the doctor says, gesturing ahead and leading him down the hallway. "There's something I need you to see."

Another long walk down another hallway, one that Sebastian had allowed himself to hope would take him to his soulmate and the beginning of their lives together. Is this his punishment for not believing, for not wanting a soulmate - to have the universe acknowledge that he and Kurt should be together and then rip him away?

The doctor leads Sebastian to a brightly lit room – painfully bright after the soothing glow of the waiting room. On the walls hang several black X-ray films set inside the frames of light boxes, each X-ray showing a different view of a human brain – his brain. Some areas are starkly defined, some are dark voids.

"Here we have several scans of your brain, Mr. Smythe," the doctor says, pointing to the films with his hand. "We have mapped all the areas where soulmate bodyswap's affect the brain." The doctor indicates the largest void on one of the X-rays. "After a bodyswap, this reservoir here is where we tend to see the most activity."

Sebastian swallows unconsciously as he stares into a kidney-shaped hole of nothing.

Nothing. There's nothing there.

"To make sure, we took the scan again," the doctor says, cutting in right before Sebastian can ask if the doctors are positive – are they absolutely positive? Did they take the scan over? Did they get a second opinion? Short of cutting open his head and carving up his brain, did they do everything they could do? Did they consult Catholic priests and shamans, or other people who might be able to contact Kurt's spirit if he is wandering about on an alternative celestial plane?

The doctor takes down the first X-rays and puts up new ones.

"We did the scans again using a different machine." The doctor points to the three identical scans hanging side by side by side. Then he runs a hand through his salt-and-pepper hair and sighs. Sebastian sees the distress on his face, the physical exhaustion lining his skin, and almost feels sorry for him. If possible, he looks about as broken as Sebastian feels. "I wish I could tell you that this was common, Mr. Smythe. I wish I could tell you that it happens in one out of every hundred cases and we know exactly what to do. Hell, I wish I could tell you that it's rare but at least we've seen it, but I won't lie to you. Never in the history of this hospital have we seen such a disconnect of a soulmate's soul from its host body. Right now, I have colleagues phoning hospitals all over the globe trying to find one case like yours, but for now…"

The doctor's words drift off to that place where there are no answers, just endings.

Sebastian feels the knees fighting desperately to hold him upright wobble. The doctor takes his arm and leads him to a nearby chair, anticipating Sebastian's abrupt need to sit.

"So…what do we do now?" Sebastian asks, the question weak in light of the rage bubbling up from within the body he's trapped in.

This is not how this is supposed to go.

If someone was going to be hurt, in pain, in danger, it was supposed to be him – not Kurt. Sebastian in Sebastian's own body struggling for his life, not Kurt.

Sebastian is lost as to how this could have happened.

"We wait," the doctor says, his response anti-climatic. "We watch and wait and hope, because frankly…" The doctor pauses again, and Sebastian feels that cold apprehension that tells him the worst has yet to be revealed. "We don't know what's going to happen when your time as swapped soulmates is up."

Sebastian sits up straight, gripping the arms of the chair until Kurt's entire body shakes.

"What…what does that mean?" Sebastian asks, finding no comfort in the sound of Kurt's voice speaking his words.

"It means that when you guys switch back, we don't know for sure what's going to happen. Everything could be fine. You both could return to your own bodies and this will all be fixed. That's the best case scenario. Or he could come back, and you could go to where he is now…or there's a possibility you both could disappear."

"Or we both could turn into fucking pink elephants!" Sebastian says in a wavering voice. "You guys don't seem to know anything at all!"

"You're right," the doctor says apologetically. "We don't know anything yet. But we're working on it. I promise you."

Sebastian nods, partially ashamed of his outburst but too devastated by this news to consider recanting. He feels so hopeless the doctor might as well have told him that Kurt is already dead, because Sebastian can't see a way out of this.

The mystical forces he was determined not to believe in have come back to bite him on the ass.

"Can I…" Sebastian looks down at Kurt's hands, at his skin, at the entirety of him, "can I go see him?"

The doctor's smile is a hollow expression of pity.

"Of course."

Sebastian pays no attention to the route that they take to get to Kurt's room. He has the feeling that neither of them are going to be leaving this hospital, so what's the point?

He knows the moment they step off the elevator that they're on the floor with the ICU. It's dreary and grey, and the sound of beeping machinery can be heard even before they go through the locked entryway for staff and family only. He wonders if Lydia might be there somewhere, hooked up to machines, waiting for Chelsea to come say her final good-byes.

It's a horrible thought, but this is a horrible place. He should hope for more for Chelsea and Lydia, but all of his hope has been sucked out of him, and there is none extra to be found here.

"If you need to leave and want to come back, enter this code…" The doctor punches the numbers 3-6-9-1 into the keypad on the wall and the metal doors swing open. He takes Sebastian past a row of beds, each bed shielded by a curtain with a nurse sitting out front. There are no doors anywhere in case a crash cart needs to be rolled in immediately – this much Sebastian knows. He's seen it.

They walk to the farthest end, to the very last curtain.

"Your soulmate is in there," the doctor explains as if it isn't obvious.

Sebastian nods.

"What…what should I do?"

"Try talking to him," the doctor suggests. "Who knows? Maybe he'll hear you."

Sebastian takes a long breath and looks down at Kurt's shoes. Such stylish shoes – Kurt always has such great taste in clothes – but now they have a scuff, and he knows Kurt would kill him right now if he saw them.

Sebastian should start by telling him that. Knowing that his shoes are scuffed up would definitely bring Kurt back from the abyss.

"Do you need a moment to prepare?" the doctor asks.

Sebastian looks up at the doctor's worn out face and rolls Kurt's eyes, hoping he at least managed to get Kurt's bitch face right, and steps through the curtain.

Sebastian thought for sure that he was ready for this, but immediately he realizes he should have taken that moment.

There was no shock in seeing his own body lying there without him in it, even with the addition of the IV lines stuck in his hand and the breathing apparatus on his face. He had seen his body loaded onto a gurney in the street and then into the ambulance. He had ridden beside it, had studied it, had seen the traces of Kurt in his own unconscious face.

But now those traces have vanished. Any hint of Kurt he could see in his features, any new color those bits of his conscious had given him, are gone.

When Sebastian stares at his body, he only sees himself.

No Kurt anywhere.

Sebastian isn't sure if he wants to stand vigil beside his own empty body. The thought sends the bubbling rage that had been slowly simmering inside straight to the surface.

"You know, you're an incredible ass, Kurt Hummel!" he yells from the foot of the bed. He hears the nurse shush him from beyond the curtain, but it doesn't sway him in the slightest. Then the thought of Chelsea in the ICU somewhere makes him rethink, and he starts spitting out his vitriol more quietly. "Always trying to one-up me! You couldn't just let me rescue you this time."

His rant has no effect on the body lying in front of him. The monitors don't change the speed of their beeping, the body in the bed doesn't move. Sebastian raises Kurt's hands to run fingers through his chestnut hair, bunching the strands in his grasp, mussing their perfect design. He paces back and forth, trying to think of something else bitter and hurtful to say. If he pisses Kurt off enough, it could lure him back.

But their time together isn't set in stone. Bodyswaps last on average a week, but they could last longer or less depending on arbitrary circumstances. Kurt could be God-knows-where for a month, or they could switch back any minute. Sebastian doesn't want to spend the time they have berating Kurt, especially since he has yet to tell him that he loves him.

And he should really tell him.

Sebastian walks up beside the body on the bed.

"We're fucked, Kurt," Sebastian says, reaching out a hand to grab the one resting above the sheets. "We're really fucked. I don't know what to do." Sebastian chuckles. "And talking about fucked, think about all the incredible sex we could have been having, Kurt! If you had just given in all those times…all that time wasted!"

Sebastian wanted Kurt, but that didn't mean he spent his nights alone. For a while, he indulged in a long string of random relationships in an effort at pushing any thought of Kurt out of his mind, but he couldn't make those relationships work. Every man he met he immediately compared to Kurt, and not a single one of them measured up. So they all became one-night stands - him masturbating with another man's body in an effort to fuck any thought of Kurt away. But one night, after rolling out of some guy's bed and heading for the door he realized that he might accidentally stumble upon his soulmate that way.

He ended the practice full stop.

Kurt knew about them, all of them, all those men, and he still stuck by him.

Kurt never gave in to those urges. He never slept with anyone. He stuck to his romantic ideals that the perfect man was out there somewhere, saving himself for Kurt.

Sebastian was far from the perfect man, and he didn't save himself. Sebastian was selfish and monumentally stupid.

He doesn't deserve Kurt.

"Why, Kurt?" Sebastian asks, holding his hand. "Why did this happen now? After all the times we touched each other, all the hand holding, sleeping together on your couch? Why did the universe pick now? You're the one who believes in all this spiritual, mystic-y bullshit. Well, I'm ready to listen. Just come back. Wake up and explain it all to me because I'm having a hard time understanding how the universe thinks we deserve this."

Sebastian looks left and right for a chair. He sees one not too far off, but not willing to let go of the hand he's holding, he reaches out with a leg, hooks a foot around the base of it, and drags it across the floor with an unpleasant scraping sound. He drops down into it and simply stares. He stares at his body, stares at his face, staring at his eyes, praying for some miracle to open them.

After several long hours or sporadic confessions and quiet pleading, his prayers remain unanswered.

Sebastian thinks about Chelsea sitting in her circle, exercising her belief to an invisible Goddess, and him mentally mocking her. Now here he was doing the same. The only difference is that little girl always believes. His belief is driven by desperation. When this is over he'll either be cursing God or going back to being apathetic about the subject, depending on how his prayer is handled.

No wonder no one out there is listening to him.

Kurt has said it a million times, and he's right. Sebastian is an insufferable ass.

In the long hours he waits, Sebastian thinks about calling Kurt's dad. He pulls out Kurt's iPhone from his pocket several times, but stops when he tries to imagine how that conversation would go.

"Hello, is this Kurt's dad? No, this isn't Kurt, this is Kurt's soulmate in Kurt's body. Yes, that's wonderful. Actually, no, you can't talk to your son. Well, I was shot and now he's trapped in my body, and the whole of medical science has no idea where he is…yes, it was nice meeting you, too."

Sebastian groans, resting against the cold metal frame of the bed in front of him. This whole thing is beginning to sound like a bad SciFi movie - something lame and implausible, but slightly entertaining to watch because you're absolutely certain it's never going to happen in real life. Right now he can hear tons of jeering movie watchers moaning at the stupidity and throwing popcorn at the screen.

Popcorn.

The thought makes Kurt's stomach growl, but Sebastian refuses to leave his seat. He looks up to check the time on the clock. ICU has no windows, and neither did the waiting room he was in for most of the night, so he doesn't have the benefit of the sun to remind him what time of day it is. He catches sight of the time, and then the whole room shifts, the walls sliding back and forth like a wave before coming into focus.

10:33.

Sebastian knows it's in the morning, not the evening.

He feels woozy from all the running around and the worrying. He either needs sleep or food, or else he's going to pass out.

He doesn't want to sleep for about a hundred different reasons, but among them is the very real fear that he might not wake up.

"Alright," he says, kissing the hand he's been holding onto like a lifeline, "I'm going to go get something to eat. I'll just be a second. I promise."

He stands up slowly, feeling unsteady on the feet beneath him. He backs away from the bed, hoping that any second Kurt will open his eyes and stop him, but he has no such luck. Sebastian passes through the privacy curtain, acknowledges the nurse sitting outside of it with a small nod, and heads for the double doors at the end of the hallway. He doesn't want to go all the way to the cafeteria, and leaving the hospital is not an option. He vaguely remembers seeing a vending machine somewhere in the vicinity and tries to search it out.

He walks all the way to the elevators and back before he finds them – two lone machines standing side by side, one selling snacks, the other coffee. Sebastian wants to do a tiny dance when he sees the coffee machine, but then he remembers - Kurt tossed his wallet to robber. He pats down his pockets once to make sure but finds it stuffed into the coat pocket – not in the back pocket Kurt was struggling to get it out of. Sebastian must have picked it up, or maybe someone handed it to him. Either way, he isn't going to look a gift horse in the mouth. He opens the wallet to look for some singles, avoiding Kurt's driver's license or the few pictures he has stuck in there of the two of them. He fishes out a few worn dollar bills and prays they'll work. He goes for the coffee first. Kurt is a non-fat mocha person, but right now Sebastian needs his coffee straight-up black.

Sorry, babe, he thinks to himself.

The candy machine is another matter, and Sebastian grins as he looks over the selections. He knows that Kurt would rather be caught dead than eat something from a vending machine, but if pressed into it, he'd choose something ultra-healthy – a granola bar made with twigs and berries, held together by a drop of honey, made by self-sustaining bees on a family farm in California. Meanwhile, Sebastian would go straight for a Snickers bar, but Kurt would never speak to him again if he knew that he had put partially hydrogenated soybean oil into his body.

"Alright, babe," Sebastian mutters out loud, putting the dollar into the machine and buying the only healthy thing he can find, "you win this round."

The granola bar is gone before Sebastian makes his way back to the ICU. He enters the code the doctor showed him into the keypad on the wall and the doors swing open. He avoids making eye contact with other patients and nurses, needing to be alone in his head as he tries to think of what he's going to say next to Kurt.

He already knows what he should say. He should tell Kurt that he loves him.

That's the only important thing he has left to say, and he should say it a thousand times – once for every time he thought it and didn't say it - but he doesn't want to say those words to his own sleeping face.

Each step that brings him back to that privacy curtain and the bed hidden behind it is pure heartbreak for Sebastian, because Kurt isn't there, and staring into that face is simply Sebastian staring into the inevitability of his own future.

To his right, another privacy curtain slides open and a nurse steps quickly through. In that second, Sebastian catches a glimpse of chunky black boots and spiky purple hair. The nurse walks off down the hallway and out the double doors, and as far as Sebastian can tell, Chelsea is sitting on the other side of the curtain alone. Sebastian walks up to the curtain, keeping an eye out for the nurse.

"Chelsea?" he whispers against the fabric.

"Come in," a solemn voice calls back. Sebastian opens the curtain a sliver and sneaks into the room. Sebastian was right. It's only Chelsea. Her mother and Lydia's mother aren't there. Over in the bed lies a young girl asleep, like Sebastian's body lies asleep, but with numerous IVs sticking in her arm, a half dozen more beeping monitors and machines, and a much larger breathing mask covering her face. She looks years younger than Chelsea – her face peaceful in sleep. It seems to be Chelsea who carries all the worry, and it shows in the purple bags beneath her eyes and her sagging shoulders.

Chelsea doesn't look up to greet him, only puts a hand on the chair beside her, offering him a seat.

"She needs a bone marrow transplant," Chelsea says without being asked, her words accompanied by a heavy sigh, "and she needs it, like, yesterday."

"Ah," Sebastian says, occupying the chair beside Chelsea. "That sucks."

"Yeah," she agrees with a bob of her head.

"Well, at least you know where your soulmate is," Sebastian says. "They can't seem to find mine."

Chelsea peeks up at Sebastian sideways, furrowing her brow.

"But…isn't he…"

"They have my body," he explains. "There just doesn't seem to be a soul in it."

"Oh," Chelsea says softly, her eyes drifting back to whatever spot on the floor she had been staring at when Sebastian walked in. "I'm…I'm sorry. That's…I've never heard of that before."

"Yeah," Sebastian chuckles dryly. "Take a number. It seems that no one has."

Chelsea nods. Sebastian slouches. The misery in the air grows with every tense breath the two take.

"So, she needs a bone marrow transplant," Sebastian repeats, trying to restart the conversation. He furrows his brow, too. "But, you're her soulmate. Doesn't that automatically make you a perfect match?"

"Yeah, the whole imprint on the DNA thing, but our insurance won't cover the procedure," she explains, kicking her feet, knocking the base with the heels of her boots. "Some stipulation about underage donors. We'd have to pay out of pocket and we don't have that kind of money."

Sebastian chews on Kurt's cheek while he thinks - a habit of Sebastian's that Kurt hates.

"What about her mom?" he asks. He's not comfortable prying but he needs to know that there's a solution available – that this is going to turn out alright for them.

It just has to.

They both deserve a happy ending. At least one of them should get it.

"Her mom has some rare genetic disorder," Chelsea says, sounding more and more despondent with each word. "She can't donate, and my mom's not even close."

Sebastian sits back in the chair and watches Chelsea from the corner of his eye. He doesn't want to focus on the girl lying in the bed. It feels inappropriate. Chelsea stops kicking her legs and sighs again, sinking into her chair, looking smaller than before.

"Maybe this is the way it was planned from the beginning," Chelsea says. "Maybe the universe knew we weren't going to be together that long and that's why we swapped so early."

That confession seems to take every last breath out of her.

"Come on," Sebastian says, bumping her with an elbow, "don't give up faith. Didn't you say you had faith enough for both of us?"

Chelsea nods and tries to smile, but her expression doesn't change.

Sebastian has an impulse to grab her by the shoulders and shake her. She had been such a bright light for him, with these beliefs she has that he doesn't, like Kurt and his belief in soulmates when Sebastian couldn't care less. Now that light is slowly extinguishing – just like Kurt.

He wants to shake her and beg that light to come back.

No, he wants to shake his body and beg Kurt's light to come back.

Sebastian takes her hand in his and squeezes gently.

"How do you think this deity thing works?" he asks. "I mean, you pray and pray, and you ask for a miracle…how do you think it gets delivered? Did you think the Goddess was going to come down in radiant, sunlit robes and lay hands on your soulmate? Or maybe Lydia was just going to wake up all of a sudden and be cured?"

"I don't know," Chelsea says with a defeated shrug.

"I don't know either," Sebastian admits. "But then again, I don't believe. Not like you, not like Kurt. But I think that if I were a higher power, I wouldn't grant the wishes and the miracles myself. I would put people together here on Earth who could help one another. You know, teach the whole humanity lesson and shit." Chelsea laughs, probably at his cursing, but she still doesn't look too convinced.

"So, you're saying someone's going to come along out of the blue and help us?" she asks, still not understanding.

"Exactly," Sebastian replies, reaching into Kurt's pocket and pulling out his iPhone. "I think you and I are here to help each other."

Chelsea raises her violet eyes and stares at him, her lips quirked with disbelief.

"How am I supposed to help you?" she asks.

"You are going to keep praying to that Goddess of yours that my soulmate wakes up," Sebastian says, "and I promise that I'll try to get your prayers answered. Deal?"

Chelsea gawks at the man with the phone in his hand and the strangely determined look in his eye, and begins to hope again. She reaches for the charm hanging from the chain around her neck and smiles.

"Deal."