A/N: Written for Kurtbastian Week 2014 Day 4. Summary: After Kurt's husband slips into a coma he goes to unusual extremes to try and save his life. Rated NC17 for talk of suicide and death of a major character.

"So, you're sure you can do this?" Kurt asked the wizened old man for the hundredth time in ten minutes. The patient man smiled wider and nodded.

"Of course, Mr. Hummel-Smythe," the man said with a small bow. "It's actually a very simple procedure."

"Well, then why don't more people do it then?" Kurt said with a shaking voice and quivering lips. Blaine held his hand tight, trying to offer his support. "Why don't you here about people doing it all the time, walking around in other people's bodies?"

"Kurt," Blaine said, tugging on Kurt's arm and pulling his focus. "It's all going to be okay. I promise."

"And what about you?" Kurt turned on his former lover. "Are you actually okay with this?"

"Yes, Kurt," Blaine said with a sigh, looking more at peace than nervous. "It'll be a relief. I promise. I have no regrets."

Blaine's enthusiasm was comforting, if not a little disturbing.

After not having seen Blaine in over a decade, Kurt ran into him here, at the hospital of all places. Sebastian had just been in a car accident and slipped into a coma.

Blaine was being released from his 72 hour watch. He had tried to kill himself. After the awkwardness of that piece of information dissolved away, they went to the cafeteria for coffee and rehashed all the details of their lives for the past ten years.

Kurt told Blaine how he had started his own fashion line (finally) with his husband as his main backer, and that they were finally going to start a family.

Blaine told Kurt about one failed record deal after another, rejection on top of rejection until he ended up where he was now - occupying a cramped, shoebox apartment in a seedy section of downtown.

It broke Kurt's heart to see Blaine like this, giving up in what Kurt felt was still the prime of his life, but Blaine didn't see it that way. As far as he was concerned his life ended three failed contracts ago, and now he was just biding his time, floating along at coffee house open mic nights with no hope in sight.

It's okay when you're 25, but at 37 it's just pathetic.

Kurt decided then and there to take Blaine on as kind of a 'pet project'. He told Blaine to give him a week to try and help him out. He had some contacts in the music industry. There had to be something he could do. Besides, helping Blaine gave Kurt something to do other than sit by his husband's bedside waiting for finger twitches or other changes, no matter how microscopic and ultimately meaningless. There was a point when Kurt feared old feelings might resurface, and a combination of loneliness and depression would push him into Blaine's arms again, but they never did.

Blaine kept his side of their deal for exactly four days.

The next time Blaine ended up in the hospital, Kurt decided he needed to find a new and unconventional approach to all of his problems. He went to a New Age shop in The Village in search of something a out of the ordinary, or at the very least some interesting incense. The store wasn't really much more noteworthy than any of the other hippie shops in town but Kurt was at the end of his rope. Guru Shamban was the only thing unique in the cramped little knothole, and when he came out from behind the counter and asked Kurt if there was something he could do for him, Kurt immediately got the feeling that this man would be able to help him.

"Well, what would you recommend for my husband who's in a coma and my friend who keeps trying to kill himself?"

"Perspective," the kindly old man said, and to Kurt's surprise he asked about Blaine. They sat at a lowered table on colorful pillows and Kurt told the man everything, pretty much starting from high school till the present day; how his and Blaine's engagement fell completely apart and then how he got reacquainted with Sebastian. After years of acting like asses to each other it was love at first (or fifth) sight.

The man listened dutifully, absorbing all Kurt had to say, never interrupting, nodding here and there.

"My husband still has some brain activity left, but it's fading every day," Kurt confessed. "I need a solution quick and at this point I'm ready to try anything."

"So, you value your husband's life," the man surmised, "and your friend doesn't value his. Do you think your friend would be willing to swap places with your husband?"

When Kurt had said 'ready to try anything', he hadn't expected that. He was infuriated that this man would waste his time and then tease him like this, until he introduced Kurt to his young daughter…a girl of about seventeen, who was actually the man's 89 year-old mother.

Kurt was prepared to be skeptical. In fact, he wanted to tear this cockamamie idea apart with both hands, but the girl was just too convincing. Kurt still didn't necessarily believe the man, but what could it hurt to try. He wasn't sure Blaine would agree or just think he was crazy, but when Kurt laid the whole plan out for him, he actually seemed excited.

"I'll do it! Of course I'll do it! I mean, I'm trying to check out of life anyway."

That's how they ended up in the hospital, surrounding Sebastian's comatose body, preparing for what, Kurt wasn't exactly certain. Bright lights? Choirs of angels? A floating God head descending on Sebastian's room?

"I wonder if you see all the moments in your life when you die or just the significant ones," Blaine mused.

"I imagine it's a combination of the two," Kurt said, even though he didn't quite believe in that 'life passing before your eyes' stuff, but there was no reason not to humor his friend. Blaine had a goofy smile on his face and Kurt couldn't help the overwhelmingly massive pang of guilt that filled him head to toe.

The guru said a blessing over Sebastian's body in a language Kurt couldn't even begin to identify, laying prayer beads around Sebastian's neck and anointing his face and hands with some sort of sweet smelling oil. Then he turned to Blaine and held out a hand to him.

"Are you ready, young man?" the guru asked.

Blaine smiled and nodded, taking the offered hand, and then taking Sebastian's hand.

"There will be no pain," the guru said to Blaine. "There's no reason to be scared."

Kurt couldn't help but notice that Blaine looked far from scared. He turned to Kurt with that shy smile that Kurt remembered first falling in love with. Now it made him look so young it was almost heartbreaking.

"I always loved you, Kurt," Blaine whispered. "I never stopped. I could never give you anything, even when we were together, but now I can give you this."

The pang of guilt exploded into a full-fledged super nova of guilt, threatening to engulf every inch of him – body, heart, and soul.

"No," Kurt gasped, shaking his head slowly. He loved his husband. He couldn't live without his husband. There was no way he could wake up to another sunrise if his husband didn't survive. But this was wrong, so wrong. There had to be another way. There just had to. Sacrificing one life for another seemed so medieval. He reached for Blaine's hand to pull it out of Sebastian's, so they could take a moment and talk this through, but Blaine put out an arm and kept Kurt away, feeling his body already fill with a warm, radiant light, images from his life spiraling around his head, just the way he had imagined.

"I always loved you, Kurt."

"I'll do it! Of course I'll do it!"

"I don't have to be your pet project."

"Okay. I lied. It's not just coffee. Don't drink it."

"We're really doing it! Making a future together."

"So, Kurt Hummel, my amazing friend, my one true love…"

"I will sign whatever you want, just please say that you and I could be boyfriends again…"

"I was with someone."

"Kurt…there is a moment…"

"I've got your back…"

"Beat the shit out of me, if that's going to make you feel like a big guy! It's never going to change me…"

"Mom…dad…there's something I need to tell you…"

"Cooper! Give it to me! It's mine!"

"But, moooooom…I know I don't like Brussels sprouts…"

"Dad-da…dad-da…dadadadada…"

The flat line alert sounded just as Blaine's body collapsed to the floor. Hazel eyes shot open and looked up at Kurt with shock.

"K-Kurt?" the confused man said, his arms flailing. The voice was Blaine's, but Kurt could hear Sebastian in it. "Kurt? What's going on? What am I doing here?"

Kurt sobbed, grateful and mortified all at the same time. Watching his husband's body die, knowing that the man he once loved more than anything was trapped inside, was almost too much to bear. Kurt saw nurses with a crash cart flood the room. The patient guru with the sad eyes was nowhere to be seen.

Kurt hedged. He and Blaine had discussed this, but Kurt didn't know if he could go through with it.

He squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head, hoping it would be easier to say in the dark behind his eyelids.

"DNR!" Kurt choked out, trying hard not to bend down and cradle the fallen man by his side. "He has a DNR!"

The head nurse scowled and checked the chart.

"When did this happen?" she asked, eyeing him suspiciously.

"I got the order a few days ago," Kurt sniffled, holding tight to Sebastian's hand where his body lay still and nonresponsive in the bed. "It's what he wanted."

It wasn't a lie. That wasn't Sebastian anymore, it was Blaine, and Blaine didn't want to live.

Still with a wary eye in his direction, the nurse shooed the crash cart away, and started turning off machines and detaching IV's.

"Should we find a place for your friend?" she asked bitterly, but he made it a point not to notice.

"Yes, please," he said, not looking down where Blaine's body lay sprawled on his tailbone, a look of confusion on his face. A male nurse helped Blaine's body with its new owner settle into a nearby chair, checking his eyes and his pulse to make sure he didn't suffer a concussion from his fall.

Kurt looked into his husband's face, struck hard by disbelief that it was Sebastian's body, but not his soul.

It was Blaine.

Blaine died.

Blaine died so Sebastian could live, and in Kurt's heart there would always be an empty space where Blaine once stayed.

Kurt leaned over the bed and kissed his husband's forehead, smoothing out the lines of his face and brushing back silky brown hair from his smooth brow.

"Thank you, Blaine," Kurt whispered, resting his head on the man's chest. "Thank you for giving me my husband back."

Kurt followed the line of Sebastian's body down to his knee, then turned to the shell-shocked man sitting on the chair watching him. Kurt waited until all the nurses left and knelt down beside him.

"It's alright," Kurt soothed the catatonic man whose panic stricken eyes stayed glued to the body in the bed. "You're going to be fine now."

"What the fuck is happening to me?" Sebastian asked, his voice too strange, too unnerving to his ears.

"You're going to live out the rest of your life, baby. You're going to be with me for years to come and live to be an old man."

"What did you do to me, Kurt?" Sebastian asked, not sure yet if he was furious or ecstatic.

"Sebastian," Kurt said, taking a deep breath, wrapping his arms around him and holding him close. "You're body died, baby. There was nothing we could do to save it. Long story short…" Kurt swallowed hard, "…you're Blaine Anderson."