[FIC] Hard Lines: Chapter 1
Rating: PG-13 (Likely to turn NC-17 later, but undetermined)
Beta: My lovely Laura aka- gottriplets and the lovely Rebecca (andiheardeverything) both of whom are the only reason this fic looks anything remotely coherent or medically accurate ;)
Warnings: Cancer, discussions of terminal illness and infidelity (NO character death ;), for those of you who are triggered by that )
Summary: Blaine’s elaborate plans for the “best senior year ever” get brought to a halt and his dreams of a future are stripped away when he discovers that the headaches he’s been having, aren’t really headaches at all and all of his strange behavior lately, including cheating on Kurt, can all blamed on one thing - there’s a tumor growing inside of his brain that’s doing it’s best to kill him. (AU post “The New Rachel”)
AN: Thank you for all the lovely responses I got about this story. I'll be posting every Friday for now and you can track the fic with this tag : "Fic: Hard Lines"
On Tumblr // On AO3 // On FF.Net
****
When Blaine finally came to after thirty minutes of unconsciousness, it was to a light shining in his eyes while somebody else poked and prodded at his abdomen. The room was full of disorienting noises: a machine beeping out a steady rhythm, somebody was screaming in pain next door, unfamiliar people spoke loudly around him in numbers and acronyms that made little sense to his foggy mind. It would have made little sense even if his mind was clear. He tried to move his head around to find a familiar face, but there was something holding him down and preventing him from turning his head.
That was when he began to panic, gasping for breath as he felt his throat close up. He was in a hospital-that much was obvious to him. The Emergency Room was not an unfamiliar place to him and he recognized the frantic pace that doctors and nurses were moving around him, coming in and out and calling for consults.
He just didn’t understand what he was doing there.
“Huzzzb,” his mouth said when what he’d really wanted to do was ask what was happening to him.
“Blaine?” a doctor with an all too bubbly smile on her face, given the situation, said to him. “You’re in the hospital. You had a bit of a fall and we just want to check you out, okay?”
”Othmm,” he said, realizing that he was incapable of forming words yet again. He continued to breathe heavily and pulled free from the restraint he was under so that he could turn his head and look around for a familiar face. He found Kurt and Sam on the other side of a glass window, both with tense, worried looks on their faces that did nothing to settle his fears. Not too far behind them was Tina, Rachel, Finn and the rest of New Directions most of whom were still in their Grease costumes.
What had happened? Why couldn’t he even remember the show?
“It’s going to be alright, we are going to take care of you,” the doctor said, gently pushing him back down into the bed. “We need to you stay still until we are able to clear your neck and spine.”
“Spaannn?” he said, his words still not coming out, but the doctor seemed to understand him enough.
“It’s protocol. I’m sure you’re fine. Please try to breathe for me; it’s not good for your blood pressure. We’re doing everything that we can to figure out what’s going on. Your only job is to breathe nice and slow for me.”
He did his best to calm down, despite the fact that his head was pounding in a way that was entirely different than the headaches he’d grown used to. It felt like somebody had hit him in the head with a baseball bat-a feeling he knew all too well.
Oh, God. Had he been attacked? Did the doctor say something about a fall?
He watched a nurse as she talked him through deep breaths in and out, struggling for each gasp of air but trying his best. The doctors continued to check him over for injuries while his mind caught up with the rest of him and he began to ache all over his body.
He screamed out in pain as somebody twisted and pulled at his wrist until he heard a popping sound.
“Well, that was dislocated, I put a splint on to immobilize the leg but definitely needs an x-ray once everything else is checked out,” he heard a man say, but he couldn’t tell which doctor it was.
He wanted to close his eyes and slip into the fogginess that his mind was starting to offer him, but he was scared of not waking up again. His heart was racing as he began to put two and two together. It was opening night of Grease. He was supposed to be playing Teen Angel. He had been all set to go, getting ready for the show to start when he’d run into Kurt and Rachel.
Had he not even made it to curtain call without fainting?
“Get him to CT stat and page neuro as soon as you have the results,” she directed somebody by the door that he couldn’t see from where he was strapped down to the bed.
He reached out and grabbed onto the doctor’s hand, desperate and needing her to say what was happening to him. Blaine’s eyes must have relayed his fear because she was immediately smiling down at him again in a way that didn’t ease his mind in the least. Was her smiling a way for her to stop him from panicking when there was something seriously wrong with him? Maybe he was overreacting. Maybe it was a genuine smile because she was happy that he was perfectly fine?
Then again how could any of this be fine, he argued with himself. He knew there had to be something wrong with him. If he was being honest with himself, he’d known that something wasn’t okay for months now; he’d just been ignoring the problem.
“Don’t worry, we’re going to take good care of you,” she said to him as a nurse began moving around him and prepared to take him to get a CT.
The last time he’d needed a CT, was after the Sadie Hawkins dance. He’d been holed up in the hospital for weeks after that. This couldn’t be the same thing. He’d needed all kinds of surgery after that and he lost half of his liver in the process. The last thing he wanted was to be stuck in the hospital again. It was his senior year, he was supposed to be worrying about college applications, not surgeries.
“Idddda,” he tried to say, his tongue glued down and useless.
He’d been talking to Sugar, hadn’t he? He’d been talking to her and she thought he was drunk because his words sounded strange.
His hand moved up to his neck, pleading with the doctor to just tell him why his mind felt so muddled and his words were slurred. Why he couldn’t remember how he’d even gotten to the hospital in the first place. Why was everything so lost?
“Slurred speech can simply be a sign of a concussion. After the fall you took, it’s very likely you’ve got one. We just want to make sure it’s nothing more,” she explained, as the nurse pushed him out of the room.
He didn’t have the time, or the verbal capacity to explain to her that he’d been slurring his speech before this mystery fall that he couldn’t remember. He had been slurring his speech before, hadn’t he? It was hard to keep track of things at the moment, but he could remember standing next to Sugar and being unable to speak properly and it stood to reason that had been before the fall.
Had he gotten dizzy and fainted in front of Sugar? Was that when the fall had happened? He had been feeling lightheaded for awhile. Oh God, he could already hear the shit she was going to give him for this.
“Is he okay?” Blaine heard Kurt’s frantic voice ask the nurse as he was pushed down the hall. “Tell me that he’s okay.”
“We’re taking him up for some tests to make sure,” the nurse said.
Blaine reached blindly behind him, trying to get Kurt’s attention. His eyes filled with tears of relief when he felt the familiar warm grip in his own. The grip was strong and sturdy and so real that it helped ground Blaine who felt like he was floating into the clouds, never to return.
“Hey, Honey,” Kurt said, moving around the bed so that Blaine could see his tight, worried smile. The term of endearment flowed out naturally, like he hadn’t been ignoring Blaine for the last several weeks. As if Blaine still deserved to be called anything after what he’d done to Kurt.
“Maaaa,” he said, choking again on fear and the nurse moved to put a breathing mask over his face to help him. He took several strangled breaths, the machine making it easier for him to do so.
He looked at Kurt with foggy, pleading eyes, hoping that he could tell he was asking for his mother. She needed to know that he was in the hospital. As much as her presence annoyed him at times, he needed her there to hold his hand through all of this. There was nothing like a potential brain injury to turn a full grown teenager into a tearful toddler.
Kurt looked a bit surprised by everything, but he managed to hold it together for Blaine’s sake, and for that he was grateful. He didn’t think he could handle anybody else’s stress because he was enough of a panicked mess as it was.
“Your mom is on her way,” Kurt said, running a loving hand through his hair. “She’ll be here by the time you get back, alright?”
He nodded his head, knowing it was futile to try and speak again. When the nurse reminded him that they needed to get upstairs for testing, he let go of Kurt’s hand regretfully and the nurse pushed him into an elevator to go for his scans.
There was no time for Blaine to think about what it meant that Kurt was there for him and calling him pet names. He couldn’t even put the last twenty-four hours together without all of his memories swimming together in an unrecognizable fog, he certainly couldn’t try and process relationship drama.
“I know you’re scared,” the nurse said to him as they rode the elevator towards radiology. “Nine times out of ten, these things turn out to be nothing, they heal on their own.”
Blaine nodded, knowing that it was pointless to try and ask her about the one time out of ten they didn’t. Or ask what things exactly healed on their own. He wouldn’t have been able to say it with the way his tongue had betrayed him completely at a time when he desperately needed to be able to speak. To ask questions.
“Stress doesn’t help,” she said, causing him to give her a confused look. “The speech slurring? Stress doesn’t help the problem. You need to try and remember to breathe. The body is a remarkable thing. It can usually heal itself, but you have to let it do its job. So relax.”
Blaine closed his eyes and tried to focus on breathing in and out slowly, but his body wasn’t doing a very good job of calming itself down and he knew it probably wasn’t going to heal itself either. It was called Karma for a reason. He’d destroyed Kurt’s trust and now he was paying the price.
They had to wait a few minutes to get into CT, but the only good thing about being a trauma patient was getting moved to the front of the line. His nurse-call me Emily she’d said after he’d embarrassingly spent two minutes trying to ask for her name-did a good job of keeping him distracted but it only helped so much. The dark thoughts were beginning to sink in as the loud hustle and bustle of the Emergency Room was left behind and they waited in the much quieter Radiology Wing.
He was already picturing the worst possible outcome-dying from a broken heart that was causing him to have a stroke. Didn’t old people slur their speech when they had a stroke? Perhaps he’d contracted some rare, undiscovered STD from Eli. What if Kurt had found a way to poison his food to punish him for cheating?
He couldn’t imagine all the crazy things his mind would come up with if he had to wait over an hour for his scan, so he was thankful that they were setting him up for the CT within five minutes of arrival.
Blaine was anything but calm, but he did his best to cover it up with a brave smile so that Emily wouldn’t realize how messed up he was and send him to a mental hospital. He was sure they’d be able to see it on the scan though. They’d be able to tell what an idiot he was as soon as they took a picture of his brain. They’d see how badly he’d failed at the one thing he’d always thought he was good at-loving Kurt.
The machine was loud and sounded like nails on a chalkboard to his pounding head, which made it hard to not to fidget, but he was tired enough that his mind was floating in that odd place between dreaming and reality despite all the noise. He tried to focus on the soft pop music that the technician had put on for him to listen to when she’d seen how scared he was. He hummed along to the familiar Rihanna ballad, trying to stay awake because he wasn’t entirely sure if he was supposed to be sleeping or not and he didn’t like the possibility of never waking up. The probability of it...
That’s when his mind went blank as if all of his previous thoughts had just vanished and as much as he tried to reach out for them, for anything, there wasn’t anything but black. There were no words, no song lyrics, no pictures or memories, nothing.
“Blaine, we need to you stay completely still,” the technician said over the intercom but he didn’t hear it.
He felt his eyes roll up into his head before they started moving around rapidly and with that he found his thoughts again, though they were useless to him when his entire body started to betray him and jerk around uncontrollably. He tried to tell his body to stop but it didn’t do any good as he continued to convulse and he was vaguely aware of Emily pulling him out of the giant machine and moving him onto his side while she called for a doctor.
His eyes hurt so much from jerking to the right that he was scared they would rip out of their sockets. Then suddenly, just as quickly as it came, it passed and everything went black for the second time that night.
When he came to, the same peppy doctor from earlier was talking to Emily and they both looked at him with concern.
“Hi, I’m Doctor Green. Can you tell me your name?” the doctor asked while she shined a light into his eyes.
“Blaine,” he said clearly, wincing at the way his jaw ached.
“Do you know what day it is?” she asked.
“Friday. It’s opening night of the show,” Blaine said, rolling onto his back again and trying to keep his exhausted eyes open. His face flushed a deep red as he realized that underneath the hospital gown, his underwear was wet. How had that happened?
“Can you tell me where we are?” Dr. Green asked with an understanding look.
“They were going to give me a CT,” he said, turning to look at the machine behind him, wondering what had happened. The last thing he remembered was the technician explaining the process to him and Emily reminding him to be completely still the entire time.
It seemed like confusion was going to be a new regular for him.
“Good,” Dr. Green said. “Now, I’m really sorry about this, but we’re going to need to do the CT again so that we can get a clear image and find out what’s going on, alright?”
“Okay,” he said, still feeling out of it. “Again?” he asked.
“It’ll only take a few minutes,” Dr. Green said with a smile as she instructed Blaine lay still.
“You don’t think he’ll seize again?” Emily asked.
Seize... Like a seizure. Blaine had had a seizure, he was starting to remember it now in all of its terrifying glory.
There were only two reasons that he could think of that people had seizures. They were epileptic or they had a serious brain injury and Blaine didn’t have epilepsy.
“I certainly hope not,” the doctor said quietly, and Blaine was sure he wasn’t supposed to hear that.
They both left the room, leaving him alone. He knew that they were only in the next room over and it was silly of him to feel abandoned, but he did. He closed his eyes tightly, willing his body to relax so that he didn’t seize again. He didn’t know if it was something that could be willed away, but he prayed it was. He had enough issues in his life without becoming that awkward kid who had seizures during class.
“Alright, Blaine, we’re going to get started now, okay?” Dr. Green said over the intercom and Blaine had been in the hospital enough times to know that the doctor didn’t usually stand around and wait for test results personally, not for something that could possibly ‘heal itself.’
“Am I dying?” he asked, his voice trembling.
“You had a seizure; it’s not uncommon with a brain injury. Just relax, this will only take a few minutes,” Dr. Green said, but Blaine didn’t miss how she avoided the question.
True to their word, a few minutes later Dr. Green was walking back into the room with Emily on her tail, incredibly fake smiles on their faces.
“What did you see?” he asked, biting his lip nervously until the copper taste of blood was on his tongue.
“Emily is going to take you up to a room,” Dr. Green said. “Hopefully your parents will be here by now.”
“Give him 15 of Phenytoin and monitor him closely,” Dr. Green said quietly to Emily and Blaine strained to hear their conversation, knowing that they were purposefully not telling him what they’d found. It was unfair; he was eighteen years old and had a right to know. He had a right to ask...
“I’ll send Briar in to talk to his family after he gets out of surgery. Page me if he seizes again.”
He could have easily demanded to know what was happening but he didn’t dare ask anything. He wasn’t sure he wanted the answers to the questions that were running through his head. It was all too much.
Emily helped him back onto the gurney, mindful of the splint on his leg and guided him to a room, promising that he could get changed once he got there. The hospital gown he was wearing was starting to smell and it made him feel ashamed. What grown man wets himself?
“It happens all the time with seizures, nobody is judging you,” Emily said.
He was judging himself, wasn’t that enough?
She brought him into a private room where his mother was pacing the floor and talking on the phone. She promptly hung up when she noticed him entering.
“Sweetheart, are you okay?” she asked, rushing to his side as the nurse moved to get him a new gown and helped him sit up to take his off.
“Is he okay?” she asked Emily again as they both helped Blaine maneuver around his clearly broken leg. It was mortifying to have his mother and a woman he barely knew undress him in such a way.
“You’re aware that your son fell?” Emily asked and his mother nodded, watching as tubing was hooked up into the IV in his arm.
“His friends told me that he fell down the stairs during a performance,” she said.
“During the performance?” Blaine asked, his jaw dropping as he thought about an entire audience watching him faint. How humiliating was that? Nobody was ever going to trust him again. Tripping over the girls during rehearsals was one thing, but now this?
“You don’t remember?” his mom asked, stroking his hair lovingly, a concerned look on her face.
“I don’t really, I’m not… No, I don’t remember it,” he said, feeling his face heat up in shame. The last thing he wanted to do was worry his mother, but he couldn’t exactly lie to her when there was apparently bad news coming.
“What’s going on?” His mom asked, turning to look at Emily. “The lady at the desk said that he was getting a CT done to check for possible brain injury?”
“We did a head CT to look for any damage to his brain; we’re still waiting on the results. As soon as we’ve got them the head of neurosurgery is going to be in to talk to you about them.”
“Neurosurgery?” she asked and Blaine’s hands twisted in the sheets. “Are you saying that my son is going to need brain surgery?”
“It’s unclear at the moment,” Emily said, grabbing some additional pillows from a closet and gently placing them under his leg to elevate it. “Right now the best thing that Blaine can do is rest up until the doctor can come in and talk to you both.”
His mother slumped into a chair ungracefully, and Blaine had only ever seen her this uncomposed one other time; the night that he’d woken up in the ICU after Sadie Hawkins. Usually she was bouncy and full of energy, always smiling and annoying Blaine with her constant optimism in any situation. To see her just sitting there and not even attempting to give him a motivational speech only increased his growing anxiety.
“Is that all?” she asked, looking older than her thirty-nine years.
“His wrist was dislocated, which luckily the orthopedic surgeon was able to put into place again without surgery. He’s going to need an X-Ray on his leg, but we are holding off on that until we get the results of the CT.”
“Why? Why wouldn’t you just do the X-Ray while you wait? Wouldn’t that save time?” his mother asked, giving the nurse a suspicious look.
“Blaine had a grand mal seizure during the CT exam,” Emily said and his mother let out a loud gasp that gave Blaine goosebumps. Even though he’d known about the seizure, it was so much worse to hear it vocalized. “He’s fine now and we’re putting him on anti-convulsants to try and prevent it from happening again, but right now he needs his rest. The X-Ray can wait. He would need the swelling to go down before we could cast his leg anyway. There’s a splint on to help keep the bone immobile and we’ve given him something for the pain.”
His mom watched in horror as Emily continued to move around him and position him so that he wouldn’t jostle any of his injuries. A sling was brought out for his arm so that his wrist would be immobile until the Orthopedic surgeon could determine if he’d need a cast or not.
“Oh, Blainey,” his mom said and suddenly her head was on his stomach and she was crying. He tried his best to tell her that he was going to be alright as he ran his good hand soothingly through her hair. He was growing tired and he couldn’t put off sleep much longer.
“It’s okay,” Emily said as she pushed some medicine into his IV. “Get some sleep; we’ll still be here when you wake up.”
“If I wake up,” he mumbled, quiet enough so that only Emily could hear him.
“When,” she clarified with a playful glare. “You’re not dying on me tonight. I’m not facing the wrath of your boyfriend out there.”
“My boyfriend?” he asked, feeling his speech start to slur but this time due to fatigue and not a painful numbness of his tongue. Whatever she’d just given him was strong.
“The tall boy outside with the tight pants and perfect hair? He’s been threatening half the staff that you’d better come out of this in one piece.”
“Kurt,” he whispered fondly, knowing that he was probably wearing a stupid grin on his face, but he couldn’t help it. He could tell that she’d pushed some kind of pain meds into his IV and he always got embarrassingly loopy on drugs. “He’s not my boyfriend.”
“You adorably dense boy, there’s only two kinds of people that scream at hospital staff like that, family or lovers. Don’t try to tell me you guys are family.”
“He’s my ex,” Blaine said, burrowing himself further into the blanket as his mom finally lifted her head to help tuck him in. “He broke up with me.”
“There is nothing ex about the way he’s yelling,” Emily said with a wink. “Get some sleep, I’ll be checking in on you often.”
****
Blaine woke up early the next morning to find his mother, in the same wrinkled business suit from yesterday, reading something on her phone with bloodshot eyes.
“Mom?” he said, his voice scratchy from sleep. “Did you sleep here?”
“What do you think?” she said with a small smile. “That’s what mother’s do.”
“Did you sleep at all?” he asked, knowing that she hadn’t, but she told him that she’d slept just fine. She didn’t like to worry people unnecessarily. He knew the feeling.
He gave her a kind smile. Being a teenage boy, he was never allowed to say it out loud, but he was grateful she’d stayed the night. The only thing worse than waking up in the hospital was waking up alone in the hospital.
She pulled the chair closer to his bed, careful of his IV when she pulled his good hand into both of hers.
“Kurt’s picking your father up at the airport right now, they’ll be here in an hour or two,” she said, giving him a sad look that set off a million alarms. His mom didn’t give sad looks. She didn’t believe in them. She was the woman who gave lectures on the health benefits of smiling. She believed that positive thinking could change the world. She’d written two books on that belief alone.
“Kurt?” he asked, surprised because neither of his parents had ever been thrilled with Kurt and now that they were broken up they weren’t even forced to try. He really must be dying if they were willing to mend the bridge with Kurt.
“He was here all night and when he asked if I needed anything… Well, it was better than your dad paying for a taxi all the way here,” she said, clearly holding back tears.
“What is it?” he asked, knowing that there was something she was holding back. “What did the doctor say to you?”
“When you fell, you hit your head pretty hard,” she explained carefully. “Your brain is bleeding and they need to go in and fix it.”
“I’m having brain surgery?” he asked, eyes growing wide as he thought about lying on the table with somebody cutting into his brain. He’d had surgery before, on his eye, on his liver, on his appendix, even some plastic surgery on his nose after the attack so that it wouldn’t heal so crookedly, and each time had been scary, but he’d never had anybody cut into his brain before. What if they messed something up and he lost all of his memories? What if he lost his ability to speak or see? What if he ended up brain dead?
“It’s going to be alright, we just need to think positively,” she said with a false smile.
And there it was, he thought bitterly. For a moment, for a few minutes he thought that his mother was going to talk to him like a normal person and not one of her loyal readers, but this was the same speech he got every day of his life.
“I don’t want to think positively,” he said, a bit hysterically. “I don’t want to do this!”
“Calm down, sweetheart. It’s going to be perfectly fine,” she said.
“And how do you know that?” he asked. “Did you repeat ten self-affirmations as your ‘Hail Mary’ and now I’m magically cured?”
“Sweetheart, you need this surgery and you’re going to have a good doctor in there. There’s nothing to be worried about,” she said.
“Right,” he chuckled dangerously. “Is that why you slept here and couldn’t go pick up dad yourself?”
“You’re going into surgery in an hour; your dad might not even make it back in time. Of course I stayed here with you,” she said, giving him a stern look.
“Can you go get me breakfast or something?” he asked, needing a moment to himself because as much as he loved his mother, if he had to hear any more of that ‘positive thinking’ crap, he was going to explode. There was no positive thinking with this. His brain was bleeding and the only thing that was going to save him was allowing somebody to cut into his head.
“You can’t eat before your surgery,” she said, sympathetically.
“Of course I can’t,” he grumbled as her phone went off and she moved to answer it.
“Oh hey, Coop,” she answered, causing him to roll his eyes.
“You called Cooper?” he asked with a groan.
“Oh good, I’m glad you could catch such an early flight. Call your dad, Kurt should just be picking him up now but they can wait for you,” she said, completely ignoring him.
“He’s here?” Blaine said, throwing his head back on the pillow.
“You’re going to have brain surgery,” his mother said to him with a pointed look. “I called him last night.”
“Of course you did,” he said with a roll of his eyes. “You called everyone to come and say their last goodbyes then tried to convince me that everything was going to be fine.”
“Blaine, you are going to be fine,” she said. “But you had a seizure and even if the doctor hadn’t said you needed surgery, Cooper was still worried about you.”
“Fine,” Blaine said. It wasn’t that he was upset to see Cooper, but the thought of his brother coming all the way out from LA to visit him in the hospital just drove the point further home-nothing about this was okay, no matter what his mother might say.
What if this really was going to be his last goodbye with everybody? What if he only had an hour left to live?
“I’m sorry about that, your brother is having a bit of a meltdown,” she said to the phone again, causing Blaine to scream out in frustration at her treating him like he was some toddler throwing a tantrum over not getting to buy a lollipop. Of course, this only served to make a poor, old, unfamiliar nurse come running into the room to check on him.
“He’s fine,” his mom said to the nurse. “He’s always been a bit dramatic.”
“It’s not being dramatic,” he grumbled. “My brain is bleeding and I’m about to have surgery, I’m just having a bad day.”
“It’s alright, Dear,” the older nurse said with a smile. “It’s normal to be scared; they are cutting into your brain. It’s a big deal.”
“Thank you,” he said, feeling vindicated.
“Of course you know what’s scarier than having this surgery?”
He shook his head.
“Not having this surgery,” she said with a smirk that reminded him too much of his grandmother’s.
“Where’s Nurse Emily?” he glared at her while his mother chuckled fondly in the background at him, Cooper still on the other line.
“She won’t be back in until tonight,” the nurse explained before leaving again.
“Wonderful,” he grumbled to himself as his mother shoved her phone in his face. “What are you doing?”
“Cooper wants to talk to you,” she explained.
“Why, so he can say his last goodbyes in case I don’t make it?” Blaine asked.
“How in the world did your father and I manage to raise two drama queens?” she asked before forcibly putting the phone into his hand.
“You didn’t have to come,” he said in lieu of a greeting.
“Of course I did, baby brother,” Cooper responded with his overly loud and cheerful voice. “I’m up for a part in the new Nicholas Sparks movie and this will make the perfect audition tape.”
“Unbelievable,” Blaine said, pulling the phone away from his ear, only to have his mom put it on speaker phone so he was forced to listen to Coop whether he wanted to or not.
“I’ve come to learn that predictions don’t mean much. Too much lies outside of the realm of medical knowledge.”
“What are you even…” he tried to cut in but Cooper just kept talking.
“A lot of what happens next comes down to you and your specific genetics, your attitude. No, there’s nothing we can do to stop the inevitable, but that’s not the point. The point is that you should try to make the most out of the time you have left.”
“Did you just give me a monologue about death?” Blaine asked not knowing if he wanted to kill Cooper or curl up in a ball and cry.
“Cooper!” his mother yelled into the phone. “Blaine isn’t dying. You’re not dying,” she reassured him, running a hand through his hair.
“It’s Nicholas Sparks, I told you there’s an audition and I’m trying to record something to give to my agent,” he said.
“Emotions come and go and can’t be controlled so there’s no reason to worry about them,” Cooper continued on and Blaine could hear the overly-dramatic tears through the phone. “That in the end, people should be judged by their actions since in the end it was actions that defined everyone.”
“Please stop,” Blaine grumbled.
“Just one more,” he said and Blaine knew it was pointless to fight him on this. He’d just do it anyway. “Sometimes you have to be apart from the people you love, but that doesn’t make you love them any less. Sometimes you love them more.”
“Okay,” Blaine said, grateful that he was finished.
“That last one was Nicholas Sparks but I like to think that it came from me, too. Because I really do love you, Squirt.”
“I love you, too,” Blaine said, unable to deny his brother that much when he’d flown all the way out here to see him on what could possibly be his last day. “But if you continue to say goodbye to me or quote some lame Miley Cyrus movie, I’ll never speak to you again.”
“Fair enough,” he said. “I’ve gotta go find your boyfriend and Dad, but I’ll see you soon. You’d better still be alive when I get there.”
“I’ll do my best,” Blaine said.
“Of course he’ll be alive,” his mother chastised both of them before hanging up and Blaine realized that he hadn’t bothered correcting Cooper when he’d called Kurt his boyfriend. It was the first time since the breakup where Blaine didn’t feel an immediate need to remind people that Kurt had kicked him to the curb and they were no longer together.
He didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad thing?
“I, um…”
He wanted to tell his mom thank you for getting Cooper to fly out, but he couldn’t exactly do that. It was part of the sibling code that you couldn’t act like you liked each other or were grateful for one another, even when you were. Cooper might be overly dramatic and too much to take at times, but he wasn’t completely oblivious. It wouldn’t surprise him if there was no Nicholas Sparks audition and Cooper was just trying to distract him from everything that was happening. It wouldn’t be the first time.
“I know,” she said, taking the phone from his hand with a smile. “You’re welcome.”
****
“Dr. Briar will go in with very small instruments and stop the bleeding. It will be relatively non-invasive,” Dr. Green explained to Mrs. Anderson and Blaine as she looked Blaine over one last time and began prepping him for surgery.
“You’re not going to operate?” he asked, looking at her nervously. She was the first smiling face he’d seen upon waking up in the hospital, and while he knew it was forced so that he wouldn’t panic, he still felt better with her than he did some random surgeon they’d met for a total of five minutes.
“I’ll be in the OR with you, but Dr. Briar will be the one operating,” she said. “He’s an attending and I’m just a resident, you’re in better hands with him.”
“But you’ll be there?” Blaine clarified, trying to ignore the razor that she’d just put on the tray in front of him. He didn’t want to think about the bald spot he was going to have that he wouldn’t be able to cover.
“I’ll be in there,” she said patiently as she turned on the razor and Blaine flinched at the sound of it. He knew it was silly and vain to be concerned over such a stupid thing like hair in the face of everything, but it was one more thing that was being taking away from him that he couldn’t control and he hated feeling out of control.
“Have you heard from them?” Blaine asked his mother, wanting to know if Kurt had gotten back with his dad and Cooper yet. He didn’t feel comfortable going into surgery without seeing them first. He’d talked to Sam and Tina earlier; reassuring both of them that he would be fine despite not quite believing that to be true, but it wasn’t enough. He couldn’t go into surgery without talking to Kurt. Without talking to his family.
“They are ten minutes away, you should be able to see them before you go in,” his mom answered, squeezing onto his hand as the small patch of his hair was shaved away.
“So the surgery will fix the speech thing? It won’t happen anymore?” Blaine asked what was probably the thousandth question in the last five minutes. He couldn’t help it; he was nervous and couldn’t help but blurt out every thought racing through his injured brain.
“The fall that you had caused bleeding and swelling in your brain, which led to the speech problems. Once we stop the bleeding and get the swelling down, it shouldn’t be a problem anymore,” she said.
“It didn’t though,” he said, confused.
“What do you mean?” Dr. Green asked.
“The fall, it didn’t cause my speech problems,” he said. “I had that before I fell.”
“Are you sure?” Dr. Green asked. “Things can get kind of jumbled up.”
“I’m sure,” he said. “I was talking to Sugar before the curtain call and I just, I don’t know, it was like my tongue was glued to my mouth and I couldn’t move it. Sugar thought I was drunk, but I wasn’t.”
“And this happened before you fell?” she asked.
“I know it did. You said after I fell, I was unconscious until I got to the hospital. I know that it happened before.”
Dr. Green gave him a curious look before checking his pupils again and frowning.
“Were you feeling sick at all yesterday?”
“No more than usual,” he answered.
“What does that mean, how sick do you usually feel?” she asked.
“Is everything alright, Doctor?” his mom asked, concerned.
“Of course,” she said. “I just want to make sure we have a complete history from Blaine before we go into surgery. Can you tell me how you were feeling yesterday?”
“I had a headache, but that wasn’t new,” he said.
“How often do you get headaches?”
“Almost every morning, sometimes throughout the day if it’s really bad. I wake up with them around 3 or 4 in the morning,” he said.
His mother gasped. “You didn’t tell me that it was that bad.”
Blaine shrugged, “I guess I didn’t want to bother anybody. I thought it was just stress.”
“So you had a headache yesterday, what else?” Dr. Green asked.
“I was feeling a bit nauseous; it’s part of the headaches. They make me dizzy and it makes me sick sometimes,” he explained, picking at a loose thread in the sheets.
“Have you experienced vomiting?” Dr. Green asked and Blaine nodded. “How often?”
“It comes and goes throughout the day,” he explained. “I’ve thrown up most mornings after third period Chemistry. The smell gets to me.”
Dr. Green put her hands by his ears and told him to tell her as soon as he saw her fingers, he notified her almost immediately and she frowned, almost confused.
“Hey, Blainers!” Cooper’s loud voice interrupted them as everyone made their way into the room to give him a big hug. Blaine did his best to hug him back with only one functional arm. He didn’t miss how Kurt stood in the back, fidgeting on his feet awkwardly, like he was going back and forth between wanting to be seen and trying not to be noticed.
“You guys made it,” Blaine said with a smile, accepting a kiss on the head from his usually stoic father.
“They’re just giving Blaine one last check-up before he goes into surgery,” his mother explained, gesturing for Dr. Green to continue her exam, but it was hard to concentrate on his doctor when his mother was whispering to Kurt in the corner like they were old friends.
“Blaine,” Dr. Green said, stealing his attention back.
“Sorry, what?”
“I asked you if you’ve experienced any change in behavior or mood swings recently?”
“I’m a teenager,” he said with a small chuckle, unsure of where she was going with this. Why was she asking him all of this now? What did it have to do with the surgery? He’d fallen and hit his head, now it was bleeding. Who cared how his behavior was?
“Mr. and Mrs. Anderson, have you noticed a change in Blaine’s behavior lately?” she asked. Both of his parents looked at each other for a moment before shaking their head.
“He’s been feeling a little under the weather recently, but other than that, he’s been perfectly normal,” his mom answered.
“Yeah, except for the fact that he had sex with another man,” Cooper said, causing Blaine’s face to turn bright red as he sputtered about, unable to say anything.
“Cooper,” Kurt said, his own blush filling his cheeks. “That’s hardly what she’s asking.”
“Blaine, is that true?” his father asked, looking at him like he didn’t even know him.
“I… um…” Blaine fumbled around for words before sending Cooper a warning look. He had better fix this and he’d better fix it fast or Blaine was never telling him anything of importance again.
“What?” Cooper threw his hands up in defense. “She asked if Blaine was acting weird. This is weird. The kid thinks Kurt walks on water and can do no wrong. He talks about true love and marriage while in high school and yet doesn’t end up sounding crazy like most teenagers do.”
Everyone in the room looked at him in confusion, unsure of where he was going with this, but Dr. Green was looking down at her clipboard and making notes. Notes about his incredibly embarrassing personal life.
“I’ve watched Blaine get openly hit on in very obvious ways by incredibly attractive men and he doesn’t even notice it because he’s too busy looking at Kurt to care,” Cooper continued, not caring that everyone in the room was gaping at him and silently begging him to stop talking. “He doesn’t want anybody but Kurt and then four weeks after the love of his life moves to New York, a place where Blaine will join him in less than a year, Blaine up and sleeps with another man he barely even knows.”
“Cooper!” Blaine yelled, praying that his brother would shut up while he still had a shred of dignity left. It was bad enough that Kurt was in the room and had to be reminded of the horrible way in which Blaine had torn out his heart, but now his own parents knew every detail.
“I’m trying to help,” Cooper said, annoyed. “She’s about to operate on your brain and wants to know if there’s anything wrong with you-well that is something that’s seriously wrong. Like traumatic brain injury level of mistake.”
Blaine threw himself back onto the bed and pulled a pillow over his face, wondering if there was a way he could bury himself in deep enough that they wouldn’t be able to find him. He was humiliated.
Dr. Green pulled the pillow off of his face, saying something about the lack of oxygen flow being dangerous for him.
“Have you been acting out more recently?” Dr. Green said. “Have you experienced some lowering of inhibitions that you haven’t before?”
He crossed his arms over his chest and stared blankly ahead, willing this conversation to be over quickly. At this point, he was almost praying the surgery would start so that he wouldn’t have to look at Kurt’s sad eyes or his parent’s disappointed ones.
“It might not seem like it, but these questions are important,” Dr. Green said, placing a comforting hand on his arm.
He met her eyes and knew that he should answer-that he had to answer her. Even if she thought he was crazy and there was nothing wrong with him except for the fact that he was a shitty boyfriend, he should at least give her the chance to try and help him understand what had happened. She wasn’t a psychiatrist, but then again, Blaine had seen one of those a few years ago and they were a joke.
He gave her a significant look, nodding subtly over towards his parents, letting her know that he couldn’t exactly answer any of her questions with his family in the room. She nodded in understanding.
“Listen, why don’t you guys give Blaine and I a moment to talk. There’s some embarrassing details of the surgery we need to go over and he might feel more comfortable if you’re not in the room,” she said with a bubbly smile and moved towards the door. His mother and father tried to protest, but despite Dr. Green’s bright smile, she was a force to be reckoned with and even his mother-who had never heard the word ‘no’ a day in her life-was forced out.
“Tell me what’s been going on,” Dr. Green said as the door shut behind his family and Kurt.
“I slept with a guy I barely knew,” Blaine said looking at Dr. Green and silently pleading with her to understand what he was about to tell her and not just assume he was a horrible cheating boyfriend that was looking for a way out of the doghouse. There was no way out of this one and he was a horrible cheating boyfriend, but he was honest when he said he didn’t mean it.
“Were you safe?” was her first question and Blaine let out a strangled laugh.
“You know, I don’t know,” he said. “I remember so much of that night clearly, but it’s like it wasn’t me. It’s how you remember a movie playing out. You want the characters to do one thing, but you have no control over them. They are playing out a story you didn’t write…”
“You didn’t want to have sex with him?” she asked.
“I didn’t give him any indication that I didn’t. In fact, I begged for it. But I don’t… I don’t even know how I got that guy’s number,” Blaine said.
“Do you know where you met the guy? Was there any chance you were drugged or forced unwillingly?” she asked, completely professionally without an ounce of judgment in her eyes.
“I wasn’t drugged,” he said. “When I went to his house, it was my idea and I loved it. I loved having sex with that man, it was like a switch was kicked in my brain and I couldn’t feel anything except what was happening in that moment.”
“Sex can do that to a person.”
“This was different. It wasn’t me. The boy that did those things? It wasn’t me.”
“So this is unusual behavior for you?” she asked.
“Unusual?” he repeated with a dark laugh. “Do you know it took me four months to kiss Kurt for the first time? It took us another seven more months before I even touched him below the belt. I knew I wanted to marry him from that very first kiss but I still waited because I believe sex means something. It’s not something I just throw around. I would never just throw myself around like that. If I wanted to cheat on my boyfriend, there were better options. There were people my own age who I at least knew weren’t rapists or murderers. I didn’t want this and I don’t understand how any part of my brain had said yes.”
“Alright, I believe you,” she said. “Have there been other men?”
“I don’t remember,” he said. “I mean, logically, I can tell you yes. I can look on my phone and see several conversations of a sexual nature in my chat log, but I don’t remember having a single one of them. Yet I did.”
“Teenagers do a lot of impulsive things,” Dr. Green said. “It doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with them. Making mistakes is part of growing up.”
He could see that she was writing down his every word so he took it as a sign that even if she didn’t say so, she was taking this seriously.
“They do,” Blaine agreed, but not without a healthy amount of snark. “Do you want to know the kind of impulsive things I do?”
She nodded.
“I ran for student class president because the poster was hanging next to the Zombie Survival Club that I was signing up for and I thought, why not,” he said. “I dress up as a superhero once a week for a school club I founded because I’m class president now and I can. There’s no reason for the club other than the fact that I think it’s fun so I made up some excuse about keeping the school safe so my principal would agree to it.”
“Acting on sexual desire isn’t always a bad thing so long as you’re doing it safely,” she said.
“Do you know that I spontaneously serenade people with ridiculous songs just because I know it will make them laugh?” he continued on, unable to stop now that he’d got the ball rolling.
Now that he’d opened his mouth and started talking about all the things that were wrong about his ‘impulsive act’ he couldn’t stop the nauseous feeling in his stomach. The feeling that maybe there was something seriously wrong with him. If not physically then maybe he really did need to get put into a mental hospital because he’d been going crazy for the last few months.
“I’ve been drunk twice in my life and both of them have led to incredibly misguided decisions, none of which include having sex with a total stranger though or picking up old men though sexts, because even when I’m drunk I can see what a horrible idea that is. The impulsive decisions that the real Blaine Anderson makes involve Disney Channel appropriate things and getting up in the middle of the night to make my sleeping boyfriend cookies because if I watch him sleep for another minute, looking so beautiful and perfect and everything I want from the future? If I stay in that bed, I’ll propose to him and he’ll say yes and my mother will lose her mind because I promised not to get married until I was at least out of high school.”
“You love your boyfriend,” she stated, a fact, not a question.
“More than I love myself, and that’s not just a silly high schooler who doesn’t understand love saying that. I would die for Kurt and I gladly, happily, took that love away from him. I ripped apart the one thing we both had to hold onto and I did it without a second thought. So if you’re telling me that there might be a reason for my behavior, that there might be something wrong with me besides sheer stupidity, I’d love to know.”
“I don’t know,” she admitted honestly. “For now, we know that your brain is hemorrhaging and we need to take care of it before it can do any permanent damage.”
“That’s it?” he asked, shocked. “You obviously have some idea of what’s going on with me or you wouldn’t have asked the question.”
“We need to get you into surgery. After that we can try to run some more tests and see if there isn’t a reason that you’ve been getting headaches and been sick for so long,” she said, giving him a look that said she wasn’t going to argue about this.
She moved to open the door and let everybody in to hug and kiss him before going off to surgery.
“You’re going to be great,” his mom said with a big smile, leaning over to give him a big hug.
“You’ll pull through this just like you’ve done everything else, Champ,” his dad said.
“If this shall be our last words together, dear brother of mine who I hold closely in my heart with every breath that I…”
“Coop,” Blaine cut him off with a roll of his eyes, reaching out to grab the camera from his hands. “Can you just say good luck like a normal person and not try to turn my near death experience into your next big break?”
“Good luck,” he said, with an Irish accent and Blaine chose to ignore it for the time being, figuring it was the best he was going to get. As Cooper pulled him into a hug, he was happy to hear his brother whisper into his ear in his regular voice, “I love you so much. Don’t die on me now, okay?”
“I’ll do my best,” Blaine said, pulling away with a few tears in his eyes.
Last came Kurt, shuffling to his bed, like he wasn’t sure if he was welcome.
“Kurt,” Blaine said the name as reverently as he always had. He didn’t believe in religion, Kurt knew that, but Blaine had always believed in people. He’d placed his faith in the two of them-in Kurt-and that would never change despite the mistakes Blaine had made.
“You have to be okay,” Kurt said, biting his bottom lip and reaching out to squeeze Blaine’s hand. “Promise me that you’ll be okay.”
“I’m not okay,” he admitted. “I won’t be okay until I know that you forgive me.”
“You don’t want my forgiveness,” Kurt said sadly. “Not like this at least. You want me to say it’s okay because I mean it, not because I’m scared that I’ll never see you again.”
Blaine nodded in understanding, even though he could feel the tears starting to fall down his face. “I love you,” he whispered as Dr. Green began pushing him out of the room and towards the Operating Room that would decide his fate.
Beta: My lovely Laura aka- gottriplets and the lovely Rebecca (andiheardeverything) both of whom are the only reason this fic looks anything remotely coherent or medically accurate ;)
Warnings: Cancer, discussions of terminal illness and infidelity (NO character death ;), for those of you who are triggered by that )
Summary: Blaine’s elaborate plans for the “best senior year ever” get brought to a halt and his dreams of a future are stripped away when he discovers that the headaches he’s been having, aren’t really headaches at all and all of his strange behavior lately, including cheating on Kurt, can all blamed on one thing - there’s a tumor growing inside of his brain that’s doing it’s best to kill him. (AU post “The New Rachel”)
AN: Thank you for all the lovely responses I got about this story. I'll be posting every Friday for now and you can track the fic with this tag : "Fic: Hard Lines"
On Tumblr // On AO3 // On FF.Net
****
When Blaine finally came to after thirty minutes of unconsciousness, it was to a light shining in his eyes while somebody else poked and prodded at his abdomen. The room was full of disorienting noises: a machine beeping out a steady rhythm, somebody was screaming in pain next door, unfamiliar people spoke loudly around him in numbers and acronyms that made little sense to his foggy mind. It would have made little sense even if his mind was clear. He tried to move his head around to find a familiar face, but there was something holding him down and preventing him from turning his head.
That was when he began to panic, gasping for breath as he felt his throat close up. He was in a hospital-that much was obvious to him. The Emergency Room was not an unfamiliar place to him and he recognized the frantic pace that doctors and nurses were moving around him, coming in and out and calling for consults.
He just didn’t understand what he was doing there.
“Huzzzb,” his mouth said when what he’d really wanted to do was ask what was happening to him.
“Blaine?” a doctor with an all too bubbly smile on her face, given the situation, said to him. “You’re in the hospital. You had a bit of a fall and we just want to check you out, okay?”
”Othmm,” he said, realizing that he was incapable of forming words yet again. He continued to breathe heavily and pulled free from the restraint he was under so that he could turn his head and look around for a familiar face. He found Kurt and Sam on the other side of a glass window, both with tense, worried looks on their faces that did nothing to settle his fears. Not too far behind them was Tina, Rachel, Finn and the rest of New Directions most of whom were still in their Grease costumes.
What had happened? Why couldn’t he even remember the show?
“It’s going to be alright, we are going to take care of you,” the doctor said, gently pushing him back down into the bed. “We need to you stay still until we are able to clear your neck and spine.”
“Spaannn?” he said, his words still not coming out, but the doctor seemed to understand him enough.
“It’s protocol. I’m sure you’re fine. Please try to breathe for me; it’s not good for your blood pressure. We’re doing everything that we can to figure out what’s going on. Your only job is to breathe nice and slow for me.”
He did his best to calm down, despite the fact that his head was pounding in a way that was entirely different than the headaches he’d grown used to. It felt like somebody had hit him in the head with a baseball bat-a feeling he knew all too well.
Oh, God. Had he been attacked? Did the doctor say something about a fall?
He watched a nurse as she talked him through deep breaths in and out, struggling for each gasp of air but trying his best. The doctors continued to check him over for injuries while his mind caught up with the rest of him and he began to ache all over his body.
He screamed out in pain as somebody twisted and pulled at his wrist until he heard a popping sound.
“Well, that was dislocated, I put a splint on to immobilize the leg but definitely needs an x-ray once everything else is checked out,” he heard a man say, but he couldn’t tell which doctor it was.
He wanted to close his eyes and slip into the fogginess that his mind was starting to offer him, but he was scared of not waking up again. His heart was racing as he began to put two and two together. It was opening night of Grease. He was supposed to be playing Teen Angel. He had been all set to go, getting ready for the show to start when he’d run into Kurt and Rachel.
Had he not even made it to curtain call without fainting?
“Get him to CT stat and page neuro as soon as you have the results,” she directed somebody by the door that he couldn’t see from where he was strapped down to the bed.
He reached out and grabbed onto the doctor’s hand, desperate and needing her to say what was happening to him. Blaine’s eyes must have relayed his fear because she was immediately smiling down at him again in a way that didn’t ease his mind in the least. Was her smiling a way for her to stop him from panicking when there was something seriously wrong with him? Maybe he was overreacting. Maybe it was a genuine smile because she was happy that he was perfectly fine?
Then again how could any of this be fine, he argued with himself. He knew there had to be something wrong with him. If he was being honest with himself, he’d known that something wasn’t okay for months now; he’d just been ignoring the problem.
“Don’t worry, we’re going to take good care of you,” she said to him as a nurse began moving around him and prepared to take him to get a CT.
The last time he’d needed a CT, was after the Sadie Hawkins dance. He’d been holed up in the hospital for weeks after that. This couldn’t be the same thing. He’d needed all kinds of surgery after that and he lost half of his liver in the process. The last thing he wanted was to be stuck in the hospital again. It was his senior year, he was supposed to be worrying about college applications, not surgeries.
“Idddda,” he tried to say, his tongue glued down and useless.
He’d been talking to Sugar, hadn’t he? He’d been talking to her and she thought he was drunk because his words sounded strange.
His hand moved up to his neck, pleading with the doctor to just tell him why his mind felt so muddled and his words were slurred. Why he couldn’t remember how he’d even gotten to the hospital in the first place. Why was everything so lost?
“Slurred speech can simply be a sign of a concussion. After the fall you took, it’s very likely you’ve got one. We just want to make sure it’s nothing more,” she explained, as the nurse pushed him out of the room.
He didn’t have the time, or the verbal capacity to explain to her that he’d been slurring his speech before this mystery fall that he couldn’t remember. He had been slurring his speech before, hadn’t he? It was hard to keep track of things at the moment, but he could remember standing next to Sugar and being unable to speak properly and it stood to reason that had been before the fall.
Had he gotten dizzy and fainted in front of Sugar? Was that when the fall had happened? He had been feeling lightheaded for awhile. Oh God, he could already hear the shit she was going to give him for this.
“Is he okay?” Blaine heard Kurt’s frantic voice ask the nurse as he was pushed down the hall. “Tell me that he’s okay.”
“We’re taking him up for some tests to make sure,” the nurse said.
Blaine reached blindly behind him, trying to get Kurt’s attention. His eyes filled with tears of relief when he felt the familiar warm grip in his own. The grip was strong and sturdy and so real that it helped ground Blaine who felt like he was floating into the clouds, never to return.
“Hey, Honey,” Kurt said, moving around the bed so that Blaine could see his tight, worried smile. The term of endearment flowed out naturally, like he hadn’t been ignoring Blaine for the last several weeks. As if Blaine still deserved to be called anything after what he’d done to Kurt.
“Maaaa,” he said, choking again on fear and the nurse moved to put a breathing mask over his face to help him. He took several strangled breaths, the machine making it easier for him to do so.
He looked at Kurt with foggy, pleading eyes, hoping that he could tell he was asking for his mother. She needed to know that he was in the hospital. As much as her presence annoyed him at times, he needed her there to hold his hand through all of this. There was nothing like a potential brain injury to turn a full grown teenager into a tearful toddler.
Kurt looked a bit surprised by everything, but he managed to hold it together for Blaine’s sake, and for that he was grateful. He didn’t think he could handle anybody else’s stress because he was enough of a panicked mess as it was.
“Your mom is on her way,” Kurt said, running a loving hand through his hair. “She’ll be here by the time you get back, alright?”
He nodded his head, knowing it was futile to try and speak again. When the nurse reminded him that they needed to get upstairs for testing, he let go of Kurt’s hand regretfully and the nurse pushed him into an elevator to go for his scans.
There was no time for Blaine to think about what it meant that Kurt was there for him and calling him pet names. He couldn’t even put the last twenty-four hours together without all of his memories swimming together in an unrecognizable fog, he certainly couldn’t try and process relationship drama.
“I know you’re scared,” the nurse said to him as they rode the elevator towards radiology. “Nine times out of ten, these things turn out to be nothing, they heal on their own.”
Blaine nodded, knowing that it was pointless to try and ask her about the one time out of ten they didn’t. Or ask what things exactly healed on their own. He wouldn’t have been able to say it with the way his tongue had betrayed him completely at a time when he desperately needed to be able to speak. To ask questions.
“Stress doesn’t help,” she said, causing him to give her a confused look. “The speech slurring? Stress doesn’t help the problem. You need to try and remember to breathe. The body is a remarkable thing. It can usually heal itself, but you have to let it do its job. So relax.”
Blaine closed his eyes and tried to focus on breathing in and out slowly, but his body wasn’t doing a very good job of calming itself down and he knew it probably wasn’t going to heal itself either. It was called Karma for a reason. He’d destroyed Kurt’s trust and now he was paying the price.
They had to wait a few minutes to get into CT, but the only good thing about being a trauma patient was getting moved to the front of the line. His nurse-call me Emily she’d said after he’d embarrassingly spent two minutes trying to ask for her name-did a good job of keeping him distracted but it only helped so much. The dark thoughts were beginning to sink in as the loud hustle and bustle of the Emergency Room was left behind and they waited in the much quieter Radiology Wing.
He was already picturing the worst possible outcome-dying from a broken heart that was causing him to have a stroke. Didn’t old people slur their speech when they had a stroke? Perhaps he’d contracted some rare, undiscovered STD from Eli. What if Kurt had found a way to poison his food to punish him for cheating?
He couldn’t imagine all the crazy things his mind would come up with if he had to wait over an hour for his scan, so he was thankful that they were setting him up for the CT within five minutes of arrival.
Blaine was anything but calm, but he did his best to cover it up with a brave smile so that Emily wouldn’t realize how messed up he was and send him to a mental hospital. He was sure they’d be able to see it on the scan though. They’d be able to tell what an idiot he was as soon as they took a picture of his brain. They’d see how badly he’d failed at the one thing he’d always thought he was good at-loving Kurt.
The machine was loud and sounded like nails on a chalkboard to his pounding head, which made it hard to not to fidget, but he was tired enough that his mind was floating in that odd place between dreaming and reality despite all the noise. He tried to focus on the soft pop music that the technician had put on for him to listen to when she’d seen how scared he was. He hummed along to the familiar Rihanna ballad, trying to stay awake because he wasn’t entirely sure if he was supposed to be sleeping or not and he didn’t like the possibility of never waking up. The probability of it...
That’s when his mind went blank as if all of his previous thoughts had just vanished and as much as he tried to reach out for them, for anything, there wasn’t anything but black. There were no words, no song lyrics, no pictures or memories, nothing.
“Blaine, we need to you stay completely still,” the technician said over the intercom but he didn’t hear it.
He felt his eyes roll up into his head before they started moving around rapidly and with that he found his thoughts again, though they were useless to him when his entire body started to betray him and jerk around uncontrollably. He tried to tell his body to stop but it didn’t do any good as he continued to convulse and he was vaguely aware of Emily pulling him out of the giant machine and moving him onto his side while she called for a doctor.
His eyes hurt so much from jerking to the right that he was scared they would rip out of their sockets. Then suddenly, just as quickly as it came, it passed and everything went black for the second time that night.
When he came to, the same peppy doctor from earlier was talking to Emily and they both looked at him with concern.
“Hi, I’m Doctor Green. Can you tell me your name?” the doctor asked while she shined a light into his eyes.
“Blaine,” he said clearly, wincing at the way his jaw ached.
“Do you know what day it is?” she asked.
“Friday. It’s opening night of the show,” Blaine said, rolling onto his back again and trying to keep his exhausted eyes open. His face flushed a deep red as he realized that underneath the hospital gown, his underwear was wet. How had that happened?
“Can you tell me where we are?” Dr. Green asked with an understanding look.
“They were going to give me a CT,” he said, turning to look at the machine behind him, wondering what had happened. The last thing he remembered was the technician explaining the process to him and Emily reminding him to be completely still the entire time.
It seemed like confusion was going to be a new regular for him.
“Good,” Dr. Green said. “Now, I’m really sorry about this, but we’re going to need to do the CT again so that we can get a clear image and find out what’s going on, alright?”
“Okay,” he said, still feeling out of it. “Again?” he asked.
“It’ll only take a few minutes,” Dr. Green said with a smile as she instructed Blaine lay still.
“You don’t think he’ll seize again?” Emily asked.
Seize... Like a seizure. Blaine had had a seizure, he was starting to remember it now in all of its terrifying glory.
There were only two reasons that he could think of that people had seizures. They were epileptic or they had a serious brain injury and Blaine didn’t have epilepsy.
“I certainly hope not,” the doctor said quietly, and Blaine was sure he wasn’t supposed to hear that.
They both left the room, leaving him alone. He knew that they were only in the next room over and it was silly of him to feel abandoned, but he did. He closed his eyes tightly, willing his body to relax so that he didn’t seize again. He didn’t know if it was something that could be willed away, but he prayed it was. He had enough issues in his life without becoming that awkward kid who had seizures during class.
“Alright, Blaine, we’re going to get started now, okay?” Dr. Green said over the intercom and Blaine had been in the hospital enough times to know that the doctor didn’t usually stand around and wait for test results personally, not for something that could possibly ‘heal itself.’
“Am I dying?” he asked, his voice trembling.
“You had a seizure; it’s not uncommon with a brain injury. Just relax, this will only take a few minutes,” Dr. Green said, but Blaine didn’t miss how she avoided the question.
True to their word, a few minutes later Dr. Green was walking back into the room with Emily on her tail, incredibly fake smiles on their faces.
“What did you see?” he asked, biting his lip nervously until the copper taste of blood was on his tongue.
“Emily is going to take you up to a room,” Dr. Green said. “Hopefully your parents will be here by now.”
“Give him 15 of Phenytoin and monitor him closely,” Dr. Green said quietly to Emily and Blaine strained to hear their conversation, knowing that they were purposefully not telling him what they’d found. It was unfair; he was eighteen years old and had a right to know. He had a right to ask...
“I’ll send Briar in to talk to his family after he gets out of surgery. Page me if he seizes again.”
He could have easily demanded to know what was happening but he didn’t dare ask anything. He wasn’t sure he wanted the answers to the questions that were running through his head. It was all too much.
Emily helped him back onto the gurney, mindful of the splint on his leg and guided him to a room, promising that he could get changed once he got there. The hospital gown he was wearing was starting to smell and it made him feel ashamed. What grown man wets himself?
“It happens all the time with seizures, nobody is judging you,” Emily said.
He was judging himself, wasn’t that enough?
She brought him into a private room where his mother was pacing the floor and talking on the phone. She promptly hung up when she noticed him entering.
“Sweetheart, are you okay?” she asked, rushing to his side as the nurse moved to get him a new gown and helped him sit up to take his off.
“Is he okay?” she asked Emily again as they both helped Blaine maneuver around his clearly broken leg. It was mortifying to have his mother and a woman he barely knew undress him in such a way.
“You’re aware that your son fell?” Emily asked and his mother nodded, watching as tubing was hooked up into the IV in his arm.
“His friends told me that he fell down the stairs during a performance,” she said.
“During the performance?” Blaine asked, his jaw dropping as he thought about an entire audience watching him faint. How humiliating was that? Nobody was ever going to trust him again. Tripping over the girls during rehearsals was one thing, but now this?
“You don’t remember?” his mom asked, stroking his hair lovingly, a concerned look on her face.
“I don’t really, I’m not… No, I don’t remember it,” he said, feeling his face heat up in shame. The last thing he wanted to do was worry his mother, but he couldn’t exactly lie to her when there was apparently bad news coming.
“What’s going on?” His mom asked, turning to look at Emily. “The lady at the desk said that he was getting a CT done to check for possible brain injury?”
“We did a head CT to look for any damage to his brain; we’re still waiting on the results. As soon as we’ve got them the head of neurosurgery is going to be in to talk to you about them.”
“Neurosurgery?” she asked and Blaine’s hands twisted in the sheets. “Are you saying that my son is going to need brain surgery?”
“It’s unclear at the moment,” Emily said, grabbing some additional pillows from a closet and gently placing them under his leg to elevate it. “Right now the best thing that Blaine can do is rest up until the doctor can come in and talk to you both.”
His mother slumped into a chair ungracefully, and Blaine had only ever seen her this uncomposed one other time; the night that he’d woken up in the ICU after Sadie Hawkins. Usually she was bouncy and full of energy, always smiling and annoying Blaine with her constant optimism in any situation. To see her just sitting there and not even attempting to give him a motivational speech only increased his growing anxiety.
“Is that all?” she asked, looking older than her thirty-nine years.
“His wrist was dislocated, which luckily the orthopedic surgeon was able to put into place again without surgery. He’s going to need an X-Ray on his leg, but we are holding off on that until we get the results of the CT.”
“Why? Why wouldn’t you just do the X-Ray while you wait? Wouldn’t that save time?” his mother asked, giving the nurse a suspicious look.
“Blaine had a grand mal seizure during the CT exam,” Emily said and his mother let out a loud gasp that gave Blaine goosebumps. Even though he’d known about the seizure, it was so much worse to hear it vocalized. “He’s fine now and we’re putting him on anti-convulsants to try and prevent it from happening again, but right now he needs his rest. The X-Ray can wait. He would need the swelling to go down before we could cast his leg anyway. There’s a splint on to help keep the bone immobile and we’ve given him something for the pain.”
His mom watched in horror as Emily continued to move around him and position him so that he wouldn’t jostle any of his injuries. A sling was brought out for his arm so that his wrist would be immobile until the Orthopedic surgeon could determine if he’d need a cast or not.
“Oh, Blainey,” his mom said and suddenly her head was on his stomach and she was crying. He tried his best to tell her that he was going to be alright as he ran his good hand soothingly through her hair. He was growing tired and he couldn’t put off sleep much longer.
“It’s okay,” Emily said as she pushed some medicine into his IV. “Get some sleep; we’ll still be here when you wake up.”
“If I wake up,” he mumbled, quiet enough so that only Emily could hear him.
“When,” she clarified with a playful glare. “You’re not dying on me tonight. I’m not facing the wrath of your boyfriend out there.”
“My boyfriend?” he asked, feeling his speech start to slur but this time due to fatigue and not a painful numbness of his tongue. Whatever she’d just given him was strong.
“The tall boy outside with the tight pants and perfect hair? He’s been threatening half the staff that you’d better come out of this in one piece.”
“Kurt,” he whispered fondly, knowing that he was probably wearing a stupid grin on his face, but he couldn’t help it. He could tell that she’d pushed some kind of pain meds into his IV and he always got embarrassingly loopy on drugs. “He’s not my boyfriend.”
“You adorably dense boy, there’s only two kinds of people that scream at hospital staff like that, family or lovers. Don’t try to tell me you guys are family.”
“He’s my ex,” Blaine said, burrowing himself further into the blanket as his mom finally lifted her head to help tuck him in. “He broke up with me.”
“There is nothing ex about the way he’s yelling,” Emily said with a wink. “Get some sleep, I’ll be checking in on you often.”
****
Blaine woke up early the next morning to find his mother, in the same wrinkled business suit from yesterday, reading something on her phone with bloodshot eyes.
“Mom?” he said, his voice scratchy from sleep. “Did you sleep here?”
“What do you think?” she said with a small smile. “That’s what mother’s do.”
“Did you sleep at all?” he asked, knowing that she hadn’t, but she told him that she’d slept just fine. She didn’t like to worry people unnecessarily. He knew the feeling.
He gave her a kind smile. Being a teenage boy, he was never allowed to say it out loud, but he was grateful she’d stayed the night. The only thing worse than waking up in the hospital was waking up alone in the hospital.
She pulled the chair closer to his bed, careful of his IV when she pulled his good hand into both of hers.
“Kurt’s picking your father up at the airport right now, they’ll be here in an hour or two,” she said, giving him a sad look that set off a million alarms. His mom didn’t give sad looks. She didn’t believe in them. She was the woman who gave lectures on the health benefits of smiling. She believed that positive thinking could change the world. She’d written two books on that belief alone.
“Kurt?” he asked, surprised because neither of his parents had ever been thrilled with Kurt and now that they were broken up they weren’t even forced to try. He really must be dying if they were willing to mend the bridge with Kurt.
“He was here all night and when he asked if I needed anything… Well, it was better than your dad paying for a taxi all the way here,” she said, clearly holding back tears.
“What is it?” he asked, knowing that there was something she was holding back. “What did the doctor say to you?”
“When you fell, you hit your head pretty hard,” she explained carefully. “Your brain is bleeding and they need to go in and fix it.”
“I’m having brain surgery?” he asked, eyes growing wide as he thought about lying on the table with somebody cutting into his brain. He’d had surgery before, on his eye, on his liver, on his appendix, even some plastic surgery on his nose after the attack so that it wouldn’t heal so crookedly, and each time had been scary, but he’d never had anybody cut into his brain before. What if they messed something up and he lost all of his memories? What if he lost his ability to speak or see? What if he ended up brain dead?
“It’s going to be alright, we just need to think positively,” she said with a false smile.
And there it was, he thought bitterly. For a moment, for a few minutes he thought that his mother was going to talk to him like a normal person and not one of her loyal readers, but this was the same speech he got every day of his life.
“I don’t want to think positively,” he said, a bit hysterically. “I don’t want to do this!”
“Calm down, sweetheart. It’s going to be perfectly fine,” she said.
“And how do you know that?” he asked. “Did you repeat ten self-affirmations as your ‘Hail Mary’ and now I’m magically cured?”
“Sweetheart, you need this surgery and you’re going to have a good doctor in there. There’s nothing to be worried about,” she said.
“Right,” he chuckled dangerously. “Is that why you slept here and couldn’t go pick up dad yourself?”
“You’re going into surgery in an hour; your dad might not even make it back in time. Of course I stayed here with you,” she said, giving him a stern look.
“Can you go get me breakfast or something?” he asked, needing a moment to himself because as much as he loved his mother, if he had to hear any more of that ‘positive thinking’ crap, he was going to explode. There was no positive thinking with this. His brain was bleeding and the only thing that was going to save him was allowing somebody to cut into his head.
“You can’t eat before your surgery,” she said, sympathetically.
“Of course I can’t,” he grumbled as her phone went off and she moved to answer it.
“Oh hey, Coop,” she answered, causing him to roll his eyes.
“You called Cooper?” he asked with a groan.
“Oh good, I’m glad you could catch such an early flight. Call your dad, Kurt should just be picking him up now but they can wait for you,” she said, completely ignoring him.
“He’s here?” Blaine said, throwing his head back on the pillow.
“You’re going to have brain surgery,” his mother said to him with a pointed look. “I called him last night.”
“Of course you did,” he said with a roll of his eyes. “You called everyone to come and say their last goodbyes then tried to convince me that everything was going to be fine.”
“Blaine, you are going to be fine,” she said. “But you had a seizure and even if the doctor hadn’t said you needed surgery, Cooper was still worried about you.”
“Fine,” Blaine said. It wasn’t that he was upset to see Cooper, but the thought of his brother coming all the way out from LA to visit him in the hospital just drove the point further home-nothing about this was okay, no matter what his mother might say.
What if this really was going to be his last goodbye with everybody? What if he only had an hour left to live?
“I’m sorry about that, your brother is having a bit of a meltdown,” she said to the phone again, causing Blaine to scream out in frustration at her treating him like he was some toddler throwing a tantrum over not getting to buy a lollipop. Of course, this only served to make a poor, old, unfamiliar nurse come running into the room to check on him.
“He’s fine,” his mom said to the nurse. “He’s always been a bit dramatic.”
“It’s not being dramatic,” he grumbled. “My brain is bleeding and I’m about to have surgery, I’m just having a bad day.”
“It’s alright, Dear,” the older nurse said with a smile. “It’s normal to be scared; they are cutting into your brain. It’s a big deal.”
“Thank you,” he said, feeling vindicated.
“Of course you know what’s scarier than having this surgery?”
He shook his head.
“Not having this surgery,” she said with a smirk that reminded him too much of his grandmother’s.
“Where’s Nurse Emily?” he glared at her while his mother chuckled fondly in the background at him, Cooper still on the other line.
“She won’t be back in until tonight,” the nurse explained before leaving again.
“Wonderful,” he grumbled to himself as his mother shoved her phone in his face. “What are you doing?”
“Cooper wants to talk to you,” she explained.
“Why, so he can say his last goodbyes in case I don’t make it?” Blaine asked.
“How in the world did your father and I manage to raise two drama queens?” she asked before forcibly putting the phone into his hand.
“You didn’t have to come,” he said in lieu of a greeting.
“Of course I did, baby brother,” Cooper responded with his overly loud and cheerful voice. “I’m up for a part in the new Nicholas Sparks movie and this will make the perfect audition tape.”
“Unbelievable,” Blaine said, pulling the phone away from his ear, only to have his mom put it on speaker phone so he was forced to listen to Coop whether he wanted to or not.
“I’ve come to learn that predictions don’t mean much. Too much lies outside of the realm of medical knowledge.”
“What are you even…” he tried to cut in but Cooper just kept talking.
“A lot of what happens next comes down to you and your specific genetics, your attitude. No, there’s nothing we can do to stop the inevitable, but that’s not the point. The point is that you should try to make the most out of the time you have left.”
“Did you just give me a monologue about death?” Blaine asked not knowing if he wanted to kill Cooper or curl up in a ball and cry.
“Cooper!” his mother yelled into the phone. “Blaine isn’t dying. You’re not dying,” she reassured him, running a hand through his hair.
“It’s Nicholas Sparks, I told you there’s an audition and I’m trying to record something to give to my agent,” he said.
“Emotions come and go and can’t be controlled so there’s no reason to worry about them,” Cooper continued on and Blaine could hear the overly-dramatic tears through the phone. “That in the end, people should be judged by their actions since in the end it was actions that defined everyone.”
“Please stop,” Blaine grumbled.
“Just one more,” he said and Blaine knew it was pointless to fight him on this. He’d just do it anyway. “Sometimes you have to be apart from the people you love, but that doesn’t make you love them any less. Sometimes you love them more.”
“Okay,” Blaine said, grateful that he was finished.
“That last one was Nicholas Sparks but I like to think that it came from me, too. Because I really do love you, Squirt.”
“I love you, too,” Blaine said, unable to deny his brother that much when he’d flown all the way out here to see him on what could possibly be his last day. “But if you continue to say goodbye to me or quote some lame Miley Cyrus movie, I’ll never speak to you again.”
“Fair enough,” he said. “I’ve gotta go find your boyfriend and Dad, but I’ll see you soon. You’d better still be alive when I get there.”
“I’ll do my best,” Blaine said.
“Of course he’ll be alive,” his mother chastised both of them before hanging up and Blaine realized that he hadn’t bothered correcting Cooper when he’d called Kurt his boyfriend. It was the first time since the breakup where Blaine didn’t feel an immediate need to remind people that Kurt had kicked him to the curb and they were no longer together.
He didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad thing?
“I, um…”
He wanted to tell his mom thank you for getting Cooper to fly out, but he couldn’t exactly do that. It was part of the sibling code that you couldn’t act like you liked each other or were grateful for one another, even when you were. Cooper might be overly dramatic and too much to take at times, but he wasn’t completely oblivious. It wouldn’t surprise him if there was no Nicholas Sparks audition and Cooper was just trying to distract him from everything that was happening. It wouldn’t be the first time.
“I know,” she said, taking the phone from his hand with a smile. “You’re welcome.”
****
“Dr. Briar will go in with very small instruments and stop the bleeding. It will be relatively non-invasive,” Dr. Green explained to Mrs. Anderson and Blaine as she looked Blaine over one last time and began prepping him for surgery.
“You’re not going to operate?” he asked, looking at her nervously. She was the first smiling face he’d seen upon waking up in the hospital, and while he knew it was forced so that he wouldn’t panic, he still felt better with her than he did some random surgeon they’d met for a total of five minutes.
“I’ll be in the OR with you, but Dr. Briar will be the one operating,” she said. “He’s an attending and I’m just a resident, you’re in better hands with him.”
“But you’ll be there?” Blaine clarified, trying to ignore the razor that she’d just put on the tray in front of him. He didn’t want to think about the bald spot he was going to have that he wouldn’t be able to cover.
“I’ll be in there,” she said patiently as she turned on the razor and Blaine flinched at the sound of it. He knew it was silly and vain to be concerned over such a stupid thing like hair in the face of everything, but it was one more thing that was being taking away from him that he couldn’t control and he hated feeling out of control.
“Have you heard from them?” Blaine asked his mother, wanting to know if Kurt had gotten back with his dad and Cooper yet. He didn’t feel comfortable going into surgery without seeing them first. He’d talked to Sam and Tina earlier; reassuring both of them that he would be fine despite not quite believing that to be true, but it wasn’t enough. He couldn’t go into surgery without talking to Kurt. Without talking to his family.
“They are ten minutes away, you should be able to see them before you go in,” his mom answered, squeezing onto his hand as the small patch of his hair was shaved away.
“So the surgery will fix the speech thing? It won’t happen anymore?” Blaine asked what was probably the thousandth question in the last five minutes. He couldn’t help it; he was nervous and couldn’t help but blurt out every thought racing through his injured brain.
“The fall that you had caused bleeding and swelling in your brain, which led to the speech problems. Once we stop the bleeding and get the swelling down, it shouldn’t be a problem anymore,” she said.
“It didn’t though,” he said, confused.
“What do you mean?” Dr. Green asked.
“The fall, it didn’t cause my speech problems,” he said. “I had that before I fell.”
“Are you sure?” Dr. Green asked. “Things can get kind of jumbled up.”
“I’m sure,” he said. “I was talking to Sugar before the curtain call and I just, I don’t know, it was like my tongue was glued to my mouth and I couldn’t move it. Sugar thought I was drunk, but I wasn’t.”
“And this happened before you fell?” she asked.
“I know it did. You said after I fell, I was unconscious until I got to the hospital. I know that it happened before.”
Dr. Green gave him a curious look before checking his pupils again and frowning.
“Were you feeling sick at all yesterday?”
“No more than usual,” he answered.
“What does that mean, how sick do you usually feel?” she asked.
“Is everything alright, Doctor?” his mom asked, concerned.
“Of course,” she said. “I just want to make sure we have a complete history from Blaine before we go into surgery. Can you tell me how you were feeling yesterday?”
“I had a headache, but that wasn’t new,” he said.
“How often do you get headaches?”
“Almost every morning, sometimes throughout the day if it’s really bad. I wake up with them around 3 or 4 in the morning,” he said.
His mother gasped. “You didn’t tell me that it was that bad.”
Blaine shrugged, “I guess I didn’t want to bother anybody. I thought it was just stress.”
“So you had a headache yesterday, what else?” Dr. Green asked.
“I was feeling a bit nauseous; it’s part of the headaches. They make me dizzy and it makes me sick sometimes,” he explained, picking at a loose thread in the sheets.
“Have you experienced vomiting?” Dr. Green asked and Blaine nodded. “How often?”
“It comes and goes throughout the day,” he explained. “I’ve thrown up most mornings after third period Chemistry. The smell gets to me.”
Dr. Green put her hands by his ears and told him to tell her as soon as he saw her fingers, he notified her almost immediately and she frowned, almost confused.
“Hey, Blainers!” Cooper’s loud voice interrupted them as everyone made their way into the room to give him a big hug. Blaine did his best to hug him back with only one functional arm. He didn’t miss how Kurt stood in the back, fidgeting on his feet awkwardly, like he was going back and forth between wanting to be seen and trying not to be noticed.
“You guys made it,” Blaine said with a smile, accepting a kiss on the head from his usually stoic father.
“They’re just giving Blaine one last check-up before he goes into surgery,” his mother explained, gesturing for Dr. Green to continue her exam, but it was hard to concentrate on his doctor when his mother was whispering to Kurt in the corner like they were old friends.
“Blaine,” Dr. Green said, stealing his attention back.
“Sorry, what?”
“I asked you if you’ve experienced any change in behavior or mood swings recently?”
“I’m a teenager,” he said with a small chuckle, unsure of where she was going with this. Why was she asking him all of this now? What did it have to do with the surgery? He’d fallen and hit his head, now it was bleeding. Who cared how his behavior was?
“Mr. and Mrs. Anderson, have you noticed a change in Blaine’s behavior lately?” she asked. Both of his parents looked at each other for a moment before shaking their head.
“He’s been feeling a little under the weather recently, but other than that, he’s been perfectly normal,” his mom answered.
“Yeah, except for the fact that he had sex with another man,” Cooper said, causing Blaine’s face to turn bright red as he sputtered about, unable to say anything.
“Cooper,” Kurt said, his own blush filling his cheeks. “That’s hardly what she’s asking.”
“Blaine, is that true?” his father asked, looking at him like he didn’t even know him.
“I… um…” Blaine fumbled around for words before sending Cooper a warning look. He had better fix this and he’d better fix it fast or Blaine was never telling him anything of importance again.
“What?” Cooper threw his hands up in defense. “She asked if Blaine was acting weird. This is weird. The kid thinks Kurt walks on water and can do no wrong. He talks about true love and marriage while in high school and yet doesn’t end up sounding crazy like most teenagers do.”
Everyone in the room looked at him in confusion, unsure of where he was going with this, but Dr. Green was looking down at her clipboard and making notes. Notes about his incredibly embarrassing personal life.
“I’ve watched Blaine get openly hit on in very obvious ways by incredibly attractive men and he doesn’t even notice it because he’s too busy looking at Kurt to care,” Cooper continued, not caring that everyone in the room was gaping at him and silently begging him to stop talking. “He doesn’t want anybody but Kurt and then four weeks after the love of his life moves to New York, a place where Blaine will join him in less than a year, Blaine up and sleeps with another man he barely even knows.”
“Cooper!” Blaine yelled, praying that his brother would shut up while he still had a shred of dignity left. It was bad enough that Kurt was in the room and had to be reminded of the horrible way in which Blaine had torn out his heart, but now his own parents knew every detail.
“I’m trying to help,” Cooper said, annoyed. “She’s about to operate on your brain and wants to know if there’s anything wrong with you-well that is something that’s seriously wrong. Like traumatic brain injury level of mistake.”
Blaine threw himself back onto the bed and pulled a pillow over his face, wondering if there was a way he could bury himself in deep enough that they wouldn’t be able to find him. He was humiliated.
Dr. Green pulled the pillow off of his face, saying something about the lack of oxygen flow being dangerous for him.
“Have you been acting out more recently?” Dr. Green said. “Have you experienced some lowering of inhibitions that you haven’t before?”
He crossed his arms over his chest and stared blankly ahead, willing this conversation to be over quickly. At this point, he was almost praying the surgery would start so that he wouldn’t have to look at Kurt’s sad eyes or his parent’s disappointed ones.
“It might not seem like it, but these questions are important,” Dr. Green said, placing a comforting hand on his arm.
He met her eyes and knew that he should answer-that he had to answer her. Even if she thought he was crazy and there was nothing wrong with him except for the fact that he was a shitty boyfriend, he should at least give her the chance to try and help him understand what had happened. She wasn’t a psychiatrist, but then again, Blaine had seen one of those a few years ago and they were a joke.
He gave her a significant look, nodding subtly over towards his parents, letting her know that he couldn’t exactly answer any of her questions with his family in the room. She nodded in understanding.
“Listen, why don’t you guys give Blaine and I a moment to talk. There’s some embarrassing details of the surgery we need to go over and he might feel more comfortable if you’re not in the room,” she said with a bubbly smile and moved towards the door. His mother and father tried to protest, but despite Dr. Green’s bright smile, she was a force to be reckoned with and even his mother-who had never heard the word ‘no’ a day in her life-was forced out.
“Tell me what’s been going on,” Dr. Green said as the door shut behind his family and Kurt.
“I slept with a guy I barely knew,” Blaine said looking at Dr. Green and silently pleading with her to understand what he was about to tell her and not just assume he was a horrible cheating boyfriend that was looking for a way out of the doghouse. There was no way out of this one and he was a horrible cheating boyfriend, but he was honest when he said he didn’t mean it.
“Were you safe?” was her first question and Blaine let out a strangled laugh.
“You know, I don’t know,” he said. “I remember so much of that night clearly, but it’s like it wasn’t me. It’s how you remember a movie playing out. You want the characters to do one thing, but you have no control over them. They are playing out a story you didn’t write…”
“You didn’t want to have sex with him?” she asked.
“I didn’t give him any indication that I didn’t. In fact, I begged for it. But I don’t… I don’t even know how I got that guy’s number,” Blaine said.
“Do you know where you met the guy? Was there any chance you were drugged or forced unwillingly?” she asked, completely professionally without an ounce of judgment in her eyes.
“I wasn’t drugged,” he said. “When I went to his house, it was my idea and I loved it. I loved having sex with that man, it was like a switch was kicked in my brain and I couldn’t feel anything except what was happening in that moment.”
“Sex can do that to a person.”
“This was different. It wasn’t me. The boy that did those things? It wasn’t me.”
“So this is unusual behavior for you?” she asked.
“Unusual?” he repeated with a dark laugh. “Do you know it took me four months to kiss Kurt for the first time? It took us another seven more months before I even touched him below the belt. I knew I wanted to marry him from that very first kiss but I still waited because I believe sex means something. It’s not something I just throw around. I would never just throw myself around like that. If I wanted to cheat on my boyfriend, there were better options. There were people my own age who I at least knew weren’t rapists or murderers. I didn’t want this and I don’t understand how any part of my brain had said yes.”
“Alright, I believe you,” she said. “Have there been other men?”
“I don’t remember,” he said. “I mean, logically, I can tell you yes. I can look on my phone and see several conversations of a sexual nature in my chat log, but I don’t remember having a single one of them. Yet I did.”
“Teenagers do a lot of impulsive things,” Dr. Green said. “It doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with them. Making mistakes is part of growing up.”
He could see that she was writing down his every word so he took it as a sign that even if she didn’t say so, she was taking this seriously.
“They do,” Blaine agreed, but not without a healthy amount of snark. “Do you want to know the kind of impulsive things I do?”
She nodded.
“I ran for student class president because the poster was hanging next to the Zombie Survival Club that I was signing up for and I thought, why not,” he said. “I dress up as a superhero once a week for a school club I founded because I’m class president now and I can. There’s no reason for the club other than the fact that I think it’s fun so I made up some excuse about keeping the school safe so my principal would agree to it.”
“Acting on sexual desire isn’t always a bad thing so long as you’re doing it safely,” she said.
“Do you know that I spontaneously serenade people with ridiculous songs just because I know it will make them laugh?” he continued on, unable to stop now that he’d got the ball rolling.
Now that he’d opened his mouth and started talking about all the things that were wrong about his ‘impulsive act’ he couldn’t stop the nauseous feeling in his stomach. The feeling that maybe there was something seriously wrong with him. If not physically then maybe he really did need to get put into a mental hospital because he’d been going crazy for the last few months.
“I’ve been drunk twice in my life and both of them have led to incredibly misguided decisions, none of which include having sex with a total stranger though or picking up old men though sexts, because even when I’m drunk I can see what a horrible idea that is. The impulsive decisions that the real Blaine Anderson makes involve Disney Channel appropriate things and getting up in the middle of the night to make my sleeping boyfriend cookies because if I watch him sleep for another minute, looking so beautiful and perfect and everything I want from the future? If I stay in that bed, I’ll propose to him and he’ll say yes and my mother will lose her mind because I promised not to get married until I was at least out of high school.”
“You love your boyfriend,” she stated, a fact, not a question.
“More than I love myself, and that’s not just a silly high schooler who doesn’t understand love saying that. I would die for Kurt and I gladly, happily, took that love away from him. I ripped apart the one thing we both had to hold onto and I did it without a second thought. So if you’re telling me that there might be a reason for my behavior, that there might be something wrong with me besides sheer stupidity, I’d love to know.”
“I don’t know,” she admitted honestly. “For now, we know that your brain is hemorrhaging and we need to take care of it before it can do any permanent damage.”
“That’s it?” he asked, shocked. “You obviously have some idea of what’s going on with me or you wouldn’t have asked the question.”
“We need to get you into surgery. After that we can try to run some more tests and see if there isn’t a reason that you’ve been getting headaches and been sick for so long,” she said, giving him a look that said she wasn’t going to argue about this.
She moved to open the door and let everybody in to hug and kiss him before going off to surgery.
“You’re going to be great,” his mom said with a big smile, leaning over to give him a big hug.
“You’ll pull through this just like you’ve done everything else, Champ,” his dad said.
“If this shall be our last words together, dear brother of mine who I hold closely in my heart with every breath that I…”
“Coop,” Blaine cut him off with a roll of his eyes, reaching out to grab the camera from his hands. “Can you just say good luck like a normal person and not try to turn my near death experience into your next big break?”
“Good luck,” he said, with an Irish accent and Blaine chose to ignore it for the time being, figuring it was the best he was going to get. As Cooper pulled him into a hug, he was happy to hear his brother whisper into his ear in his regular voice, “I love you so much. Don’t die on me now, okay?”
“I’ll do my best,” Blaine said, pulling away with a few tears in his eyes.
Last came Kurt, shuffling to his bed, like he wasn’t sure if he was welcome.
“Kurt,” Blaine said the name as reverently as he always had. He didn’t believe in religion, Kurt knew that, but Blaine had always believed in people. He’d placed his faith in the two of them-in Kurt-and that would never change despite the mistakes Blaine had made.
“You have to be okay,” Kurt said, biting his bottom lip and reaching out to squeeze Blaine’s hand. “Promise me that you’ll be okay.”
“I’m not okay,” he admitted. “I won’t be okay until I know that you forgive me.”
“You don’t want my forgiveness,” Kurt said sadly. “Not like this at least. You want me to say it’s okay because I mean it, not because I’m scared that I’ll never see you again.”
Blaine nodded in understanding, even though he could feel the tears starting to fall down his face. “I love you,” he whispered as Dr. Green began pushing him out of the room and towards the Operating Room that would decide his fate.