AN: Hi,everyone. This is more of a chapter that establishes some prior context and does virtually nothing for the plot. I'm sorry i'm not getting to Klaine as quickly as some of you probably would like. This is my first real story and i have no idea where it's going. This chapter contains death. You've been warned. Please review. I would love critiques and ideas about where you guys want this story to go.
Kurt's stomach was still reeling from this morning's odd string of events. The retched dream replays like some twisted slideshow in the theater of his mind. Why was some wolf, or worse, some creature so intent on stalking his every move? And why did it sound so painful. Kurt's heart twisted in empathy at his inner ramblings. With a sigh of confusion, he smoothed his russet-hued hair in his usual coif until he was satisfied. He pulled his favorite gray turtleneck with tiny flecks of black thread throughout the material over his head. Kurt paired the sweater with tight black skinny jeans and brown suede Chelsea boots. One final look in the mirror and he deemed himself presentable for the day to come. He nearly forgot to wear his lucky necklace; a jagged shard of fluorite framed by a silver clasp encircled around a thin, black leather cord. He wore the necklace faithfully for he had promised to uphold his late mother's dying wish.
* ~Flashback~*
Kurt never liked hospitals. They were entirely too large, and the smell of antiseptic made him feel nauseous. He especially didn't like them because his beloved mother had been here, cooped up in a hospital bed and not safe at home with him. Today the nurses looked at him with such pity. Their eyes were emphatically shining with it. Kurt was only six, but he was always a precociously perceptive child. He knew something was up. Today wasn't like the other visitation days. He looked up at his father for clues as to why. Burt's forest green orbs were dull and tired with streams of blood vessels that snaked their way through the whites of his eyes. He was completely and utterly burnt out. Kurt knew this. He loved his father will all his tiny heart, but he wasn't good at parenting. Not like Elizabeth. Kurt and Burt, despite the similarity of their namesakes, were two completely different souls. He wanted a son who enjoyed football. One who would curl up with his father to watch the latest sports game. What he got was one who would rather wield a teacup than a football and wear a sensible pair of heels rather than cleats. But god did he love that child regardless. He just didn't know how to. Not in the effortlessly graceful way Liz did. But he would have to learn. Especially after today.
"Hey, buddy. I have to talk to you before you see your mom. Man to man." Kurt looked deep into the depths of Burt's eyes to gage his seriousness in a manner that usually unnerved adults. Burt took a breath to steady himself and said, "Your mom isn't doing too well, kid. The doctors say- ", his breath caught in his throat as tears threatened to descend from his weary eyelids. Kurt placed his tiny, manicured hands on top of his fathers calloused and oil-stained palms.
"I know mommy is going to die. I've seen it in my dreams, daddy." Burt's straight brows, the only feature Kurt had inherited from him, furrowed together in bewilderment; almost like he was attempting to solve some impossible puzzle. Kurt knew what he said was true. Each time he visited his mother in the scant hospital bed the putrid scent of death had gotten progressively worse. The blackened aura of decay circled the outline of her body; a sight that Kurt had deduced only he could see. It saddened him profusely. So much so that it kept him up on the nights where sleep seemed to evade his tiny, tiny grasp.
"How? How did you kn-," Burt paused and then shook his head, "never mind. It doesn't matter. This is going to be hard, buddy. But it's time to say goodbye to your mother. I need you to be strong and brave for me. Can you do that, Kurt?" Burt's eyes searched desperately for Kurt's understanding of the brevity of their current predicament. He didn't know how to tell Kurt that his mother was dying of cancer let alone how he would react to Liz's last moments. It seemed as though he wouldn't have to.
"Don't worry, daddy. I'll be brave enough for the both of us. Remember, have courage." Kurt hugged his father with all his small self could muster and proceeded through the narrow hallway of the cancer ward leaving his father stunned in his absence. He stole glances in the doorways as he walked past. Most of the patients lay in their beds motionless, their frail bodies nothing more than glorified skeletons. Their souls, at least what was left, called out to him. He ignored them as best he could for saying his last goodbye to his mother was a more pressing matter. He stopped at door 306A. The plague on the wall next to it read Elizabeth Bishop-Hummel. Kurt walked in slow steps toward his mother.
It was glaringly apparent that Elizabeth Bishop-Hummel had seen better days. Her once beautiful heart-shaped face was riddled with wrinkles and sores, the skin stretched too thin over the gaunt contours of flesh. Various tubes snaked their way around what seemed to be her entire body. The heart monitor beside her bed steadily beeped like a metronome that counted the concluding beats of death. Elizabeth's dull sea-stained eyes, the only sign that life still persisted, peeled open at the sound of her only son's meager footsteps.
"Kurt, my beautiful Kurt," her tired voice rasped out. "To what do I owe for such a pleasure?" She smiled. It didn't reach her eyes. Kurt took her frail hand, his fingers clasping her jointed ones, and gave a tight squeeze.
"Hello, mommy. I've come to visit you. Just like I always do." Kurt tried to sound upbeat but the weight of the situation that rested upon his small shoulders was simply too much. "I don't want to say goodbye. But I know that you're too tired and it would be selfish for me to want you to hang on any longer." His tears fell in fat drops on the floor as he tucked his head into his chin to avoid looking his dying mother in the face.
Elizabeth's gnarled fingers lifted his chin up to face her. Her unsteady hands cupped her son's cheek. "My precious Kurt. You were always so perceptive." Her eyes glistened with unshed tears. "So powerful and so young. It radiates all around your tiny little body." There was a pregnant pause as a mother basked in gazing upon her pride and joy for these fleeting, solitary moments. It broke her ailing heart that she wouldn't be around to teach him and to guide him through who he truly was and who he was to become. "You're special, Kurt. Always remember that. Don't ever let others dim the light that shines through you. Embrace it. You may not know it yet, but you are gifted beyond any our imaginations." Elizabeth held Kurt close and tried to infuse all the love and comfort she would never again be able to provide for her son. No one ever prepare a person to die. The ache that they feel when they realize their time is up and those closest to them must fend for themselves in their absence. No one ever prepares a child for what it's like to lose a parent for that matter either.
"I want you to listen to me carefully, darling." She looked into her son's eyes, the same color of her own, to ensure he understood. "The roads ahead of you will be confusing, dark, and treacherous. Let it wash over you and always keep your wits about you. When times are trouble, I want you to think and I want you to survive." Tears ran down both of their faces. This was it. The final moments between life and death were upon them. They both felt the energy crackle in the air around them. Elizabeth's frail hands reach under the blanket and unsheathed a necklace with a crystal that had swirls of blues, grays, and purples. Fluorite. Kurt recognized it from his mother's many crystals. She placed it in her son's small hands and enclosed it into his fist. "I want you to promise me, my darling, to never take this off. Ever. It will protect you. Always."
"I promise, mommy." Kurt's seriousness was evident even through the tears that continued to fall. He placed the cord around his neck and the crystal rested between his collar bones, just above his heart.
"I love you, Kurt. So, so much. I'm sorry I can't be here to watch you grow and thrive to the beautiful man I know you will become." Elizabeth's voice was getting weaker by the minute. The grip of death was so much tighter than she would have imagined. But she wasn't done prolonging the inevitable. Her work was not yet complete. "One last thing, my love. Always trust the chase for he will be the one to protect you." Kurt nodded despite his confusion at her cryptic message.
Elizabeth channeled her last breaths of life, and the dwindling magic that flowed through her veins, to conjure a single spell that would keep her son safe until he came. Kurt whispered his last goodbyes into the crevice of his mother's neck as she repeated a chant in a language he did not recognize. The room pulsed with energized light as Kurt felt something deep in his chest. Something was binding itself to his soul; hiding what made him special from plain sight. It was the only way Elizabeth could protect her son from beyond the grave.
The binding spell was complete and so was Elizabeth's last moment in the plane of the living. She gave Kurt a searing kiss on the forehead as her final breath escaped the confines of her lips.
The monotonous flat line of the heart monitor hung deafeningly loud through the air as mother and son lay together for one final time.