Death doesn't hurt.
Provided that you're not being flattened in a compactor or eaten piece by piece by a wild tiger, death shouldn't hurt.
It's as effortless as blinking.
As easy as falling asleep.
It's not a thought or a decision.
It's an outcome.
Or so Kurt had been told. Countless doctors, oncologists, and death preparation counselors all assured him that death was nothing to be afraid of. It's natural, inevitable, and they promised him that with the amount of medication they were keeping him on in the final stages as cancer ate away at his body, painless.
Kurt passes away quietly, cradled in Blaine's arms. The last thing he sees before his eyelids drop is the glittering amber-gold of Blaine's eyes.
The last thing he sees before he dies is a lie.
Apparently, it isn't the only one.
Because death is painful.
Extremely painful.
It sears his body, every inch, heat surging through his veins starting from a point behind his neck and filling him with fire. He wants to scream, but he physically can't. His mouth doesn't open. His limbs are numb, useless. All he can do is wait in agony for it all to end. But there seems to be no end. For hours, he simply burns - inside, outside, in every nook and cranny, ceaselessly …
He hears a rushing through his ears like wind. He wonders if he's falling, and, if he is, when will he land? For the hundredth time he thinks, "Here it is. The end. Now it will be over," but it never is.
Through the swishing and the wooshing, he hears voices calling to him.
No … one voice calling to him.
Reaching out to him in the dark.
Cutting through the pain.
Eventually, though he's not sure exactly how long after, the roaring in his ears stops and the pain finally ends. It dissolves completely without an echo of it to be felt. But where Kurt expects to be absorbed by oblivion, he's still conscious. Aware.
He hears the pattering of cockroaches racing through the apartment walls.
He smells hot dogs cooking at Gray's Papaya – ten miles away.
He feels the individual fibers of his cashmere sweater rubbing against his skin.
But it's the thirst – the overwhelming thirst engrained into every dehydrated cell of his body - that forces him to open his eyes.
Countless signals assault his brain – too sharp, too bright, too much color, too much detail – and he shuts them again. He whimpers; the sound of his own voice so alien to his ears that he bites his lip to silence himself.
"It's okay," another voice whispers. It rings like a bell with the clapper slicing into his brain. "Everything's going to be okay now."
"No," Kurt moans, raising his hands to cover his head and curling his body into a ball. "No, no, no."
"Shhh …" Blaine runs a gentle hand down Kurt's back. "It'll be okay. You'll get used to it. It'll be fine."
Kurt rocks back and forth, trying to ignore the fabric that's insanely too soft for his skin; trying to push aside the smell of cooking meat, which is now revolting to him; and every single noise that's trying to worm its way into his skull. He needs to find a way to block them all out before he goes completely mad.
The thirst, though, refuses to be ignored.
Bit by bit, he comes to his senses.
He's dead. He's supposed to be dead. So is this hell? What's happening to him?
"Just concentrate on my voice," Blaine says. "Listen to my voice and shut out the rest."
"I can't." Red tears slip down Kurt's cheeks. "I can't … it's too much …"
Blaine remembers this. It's a fainter memory now than it was, but he can recall the fear, the confusion, the sensory overload. When it happened to Blaine, he was alone. The vampire who had bitten him left him. Laughing, he abandoned him in the shady hotel room Blaine had rented for the night. Blaine didn't know if the man had ever intended on coming back for him, but once his skin started to prickle with the rising of the sun, his instincts took over. He buried himself deep within the earth, where he stayed all day and into the next, screaming through his insanity, choking on loose soil as it filled his mouth. It pressed down on him until he realized that it wouldn't kill him …
… because he was already dead.
"It won't get any better until you learn to ignore it."
Blaine tries to help, but Kurt isn't listening. He's so thirsty, he feels like he's going to dry up and split in two. Blaine knows it's there, and tries to think of any way to relieve it so that Kurt can cope; bide until the thirst strikes again.
Blaine has an idea, but he doesn't have the time to explain it. And even if he could make Kurt understand, he's not sure Kurt would leave the safety of the apartment and go outside where the noise gets louder and the smells get stronger. Blaine scoops him up in his arms and carries him to the fire escape. Kurt, too distracted to argue, doesn't notice when Blaine bounds up the metal ladder and leaps across the alley, jumping from rooftop to rooftop. Blaine uses his senses to guide him, relying on his supernatural hearing and smell to tell him where he needs to go.
Kurt isn't like him. He wouldn't kill someone to feed his own thirst, so Blaine needs to find the next best thing.
Blaine lands on the helipad of a hospital and stops, taking a deep breath in to make sure he's found the right place. He locates a grate in the wall and breaks into the ventilation system. Awkwardly, he carries Kurt down to the lower level, where the morgue and blood storage is located. Blaine manages to find an exhaust vent that leads straight into the cooler.
Kurt's reaction to a room full of refrigerated blood is instantaneous.
He stops weeping in Blaine's arms as the scent of blood compels him. In the blink of an eye, Kurt is out Blaine's embrace and on his feet, ready to tear through the cooler doors.
"Hold on now." Blaine sneaks in front of Kurt and undoes the bolt before Kurt can rip the door off its hinges. "If you destroy the place, we'll never be able to come back." Blaine hands Kurt a pouch of A-negative and watches him feed, sucking through pint after pint, not leaving a single drop behind in their plastic pouches. He takes more than his fill, but Blaine doesn't stop him. Why should he? The more Kurt eats, the more he'll be able to stave off the thirst.
In minutes, Kurt is sated, sighing with relief, relaxing back in on himself with a content smile on his blood-stained lips, as if he's already forgotten what he is, what he's been doing.
"How do you feel?" Blaine asks.
Kurt looks at Blaine and laughs a giddy laugh. Then he glances around him at the emptied plastic husks that were once full of human blood. The smile on his face fades.
"Empty," Kurt says. "I feel empty."
Blaine locks the cooler doors, and Kurt pitches the plastic pouches into the nearest biohazard bin. They make their way back up the ventilation system, cleaning up any trace that they had been in the room; not too hard since Kurt didn't spill a single drop. They climb through the vents, the scent of putrid night air cluttered with pollution and exhaust guiding them onto the roof. They crawl out, and Blaine fixes the grate back into place.
They walk across the rooftop towards the edge. Blaine stops at the guard rail, but Kurt ducks under and walks out onto the ledge, right to the very end. He crouches low, wind whipping his hair around his perfect, porcelain skin, and looks out onto the city down below.
"How did you do it?" Kurt asks, his voice flat and emotionless. "How did you control it?"
"You never control it," Blaine says sadly. "You learn to ignore it."
"But how?" The desperation in Kurt's voice manages to reach a place in Blaine that he thought no longer existed.
"I had you as my anchor. I can be your anchor, too."
"You had my blood!" Kurt accuses, throwing his hands up over his ears to block out his own booming voice. "I don't have yours! I don't have an anchor! I have nothing!"
"You have me!" Blaine pleads. "We have each other!"
"But I didn't want any of this!" Kurt cries, bloody tears returning, following the tracks of already dried tears and tinging his cheeks a darker, grotesque red.
"I didn't have a choice! You were dying! Right in my arms, you were dying!"
"Then you should have let me die!"
Breathless and broken, Kurt spins around, searching for a way out. Blaine reaches out for him, but Kurt puts a hand up to stop him.
"No! No, leave me alone! I want to be alone!"
"Wh-where … where are you going?" Blaine asks, panic seeping in at the prospect of Kurt leaving him to meet the dawn.
"I need some time. I need to think." Kurt sighs, staring down at the busy street below. "I need to leave."
"No! Wait!" Blaine rushes forward, but Kurt leaps. Blaine runs to the empty ledge. He looks out, up and down, all around the street below. He listens for the sound of Kurt's footsteps landing somewhere in the city, but it's too late.
Kurt is gone.
Blaine tries to track him, catch any hint of his scent on the wind in an attempt to catch up with him, but Kurt is surprisingly fast. All through the night, Blaine searches for Kurt, putting off feeding to give him more time before sunrise. He returns to the apartment, barely making it before the first morning rays of light singe his skin. He hides in the dark apartment, the long daylight hours ticking by slowly, the oppressive sunlight keeping him penned in, unable to do anything but lie still and hope that Kurt is safe beneath the earth.
That he didn't surrender to the light.
Long weeks pass and every day is the same. Blaine leaves the moment the sun sets in search of Kurt, returning before the dawn to hide out during the day, hoping each time that Kurt will be there waiting for him.
A month goes by and Kurt has yet to return.
Eventually, Blaine stops looking. He stays in Kurt's bed, buried beneath the sheets that still smell like delicate, human Kurt. He feels his body shriveling from dehydration, but he doesn't care. The thirst dies down to a numbing ache that no longer drives his existence. He has nothing to exist for. Blaine made a mistake – a horrible, terrible, heinous mistake. Kurt didn't want to be a vampire, but Blaine didn't listen, and now his arrogance is his undoing.
Kurt will never forgive him.
Kurt is not coming back. He has most likely seen his last sunrise.
Blaine has lost everything.
Blaine always swore he would follow Kurt into death, but he waits a few days more - not for the love of his life, who he knows is gone, but trying to find the courage to end his own suffering.
Blaine feels the sun dip below the horizon. He crawls out from beneath the blankets and, with his head on Kurt's pillow, watches as the shadows in the bedroom start to lengthen, the last rays of sunset painting the sky and then disappearing completely.
He had lain awake all day planning his last night as a vampire. He'll travel to the places that were special to Kurt – his childhood home; Dalton Academy, where they shared their first kiss; Breadstix, where they ate dinner every Saturday night; even McKinley High School, specifically the Finn Hudson Auditorium, named after Kurt's stepbrother after he passed away. Finally, he'll find a nice place to rest outside the Anderson family crypt in Westerville and let the light of day take him, leave him a scorch mark on the grass-covered earth.
His legs are weak, but he's determined. He doesn't believe in God or an afterlife, not after what he's been through, but he longs for an end to this. With Kurt by his side, he had hope for a future. Now, if Kurt has been turned to dust, obliterated from the planet, Blaine longs for the same. He stumbles toward the window, confident he can make it to Ohio before his strength gives out completely. But when he reaches it, he sees an angel blocking his exit - wild and terrible, with wide red eyes, skin deceptively pure and white. Strong hands grip the frame of the window as the angel stares down at him - motionless and beautiful.
Blaine knows he's hallucinating. The ethereal creature that looks so much like his Kurt can't be real, but he steps back anyway, tripping over his feet. The angel rushes in, catching him before he falls.
"Blaine!" Kurt cries, carrying Blaine's body to the bed and laying him down. "What happened to you?"
Blaine sighs in defeat, what remained of his energy gone. "I thought you weren't coming back," he says, his throat dry, his voice raspy from disuse. "I thought you went away to … end it."
Kurt shakes his head, a sad smile ghosting his lips. "I wouldn't do that without saying good-bye."
Blaine licks his lips, trying to find moisture in his mouth to help him talk. "Is that why you came back? To say good-bye?"
Kurt pulls Blaine close. "No."
"Why not?" Blaine asks, genuinely confused. "I thought you were angry with me."
"I was," Kurt admits. "But I had some time to think …"
Blaine laughs sarcastically.
"Okay, maybe I took a little longer than I expected." Kurt looks guilty; as guilty as a soulless monster can look.
"But you're back now?"
"Yes." Kurt gazes into Blaine's eyes, the red flame that once burned brightly in them so close to going out. "I'm not saying good-bye to you."
Kurt gathers Blaine up in his arms the way Blaine did on that first night and walks with him to the window.
"Wh-what are you doing?" Blaine asks, not entirely convinced that Kurt isn't planning on them both walking into the daylight and dying together.
"We're going to get you better," Kurt says, laying out his plan for the sad specter cradled in his arms. "And then we're going to travel the world, do everything and anything we could ever dream of. And then, when we're done, we're going to do it all over again."
"And sex," Blaine squeaks with what's left of his voice. "We're going to have lots of sex."
Kurt rolls his eyes. "I guess we can find time to do that." Kurt stops on the fire escape and places a gentle kiss on Blaine's dried, chapped lips.
"We have an eternity," Blaine whispers.
Kurt shakes his head, leaning close enough to brush his lips over Blaine's cold cheek, trailing kisses down to his chin.
"An eternity isn't going to be enough."