Glee!fic, Unscripted: I'll Ne'er Trust Medicine
I'll Ne'er Trust Medicine, an Unscriptedverse ending to the little trilogy of Symptoms and Cough Once For Yes. Fluffy sickfic. Which took a little detour from the fluff in this piece when I remembered Oh yeah Kurt's doing King Lear while all this is going on. *shudders*
Disclaimer: It would actually belong to the creators of Glee and William Shakespeare, two parties not often referred to in the same sentence.
Rating: PG-13? Gentler than Lear definitely, but then they make horror movies gentler than Lear.
Summary: In which Kurt's fever waking-dreams are really not so nice as Blaine's (Seriously, have you *read* King Lear?), but when Blaine Anderson plays doctor, he plays to win.
My sickness grows upon me.
Words, words, words.
He doesn't understand how his skin feels so strangely numb and not cold at all, warm to his touch, but all the world presses icy against him all the same. Heat is the burning hot water bottle Blaine brings him. The blankets he presses over Kurt's heavy body are dead and lifeless, comfortless weights. This cold night will turn us all to fools and madmen.
Words, words, words. Blaine speaks to him but Kurt's throat is an open wound, breath hurts, there will be no reply. There has always been a reply. Words belong to Kurt (No words, no words: hush.). He has always understood how important words are, fumbled for them as a teenager, fought them out over assignments in class, read the right books and thought oh, of course. He is rich in words. He was a precocious child, swallowed a thesaurus as soon as he learned to read; the normal words are so dull.
There are no words now ("Kurt, hey, you going to eat something for me?"). Silenced by the festering sore that is his own throat he thinks how much it matters, the things the words can't touch, the things the words cup but can never replace. His purpose in life now is to tread the places between words and words-can't, what the words can't quite mean is something he has to show with the hesitation in his face and the trip of his tongue, what the words can't quite mean is an expression in his eyes and a tension in his body. The body speaks. The pause before a breath speaks. Acting is making even the silences speak. Words, words, words.
The body's delicate: the tempest in my mind
Doth from my senses take all feeling else
Save what beats there.
("Kurt, Kurt," and warm fingers on his deadened temple. "Kurt, angel, I need you to drink something for me, can you do that? Please?")
Every breath is pain.
*
we are not ourselves
When nature, being oppress'd, commands the mind
To suffer with the body
*
Kurt doesn't get sick.
Like, actual fact, he just doesn't. He acts like he doesn't have the time for it and Blaine does believe that Kurt is BAMF enough that sickness takes one look at him and knows that today is not the day for that fight. Kurt Hummel simply does not get sick. Kurt is busy. Being ill is for other people.
Apparently today is the day for that fight, the day for sickness to take its revenge. Right now Kurt is running about three days behind Blaine, right now Kurt is in the place Blaine was three days ago when Blaine thinks he was probably giving quite long fever-rambles judging by how much he tore his own throat to shreds, not that he can remember anything he said. Kurt isn't talking. Kurt lays like a body in the bed, unco-operative and silent. Blaine can't make him drink and it's inconceivable that he could get him to actually eat anything. And he feels, he feels . . .
So much of Blaine's life before he met Kurt was spent skating on the hollow-stomached edge of inadequacy. So much of his life was just keeping smiling in the hope that people wouldn't mind that he wasn't actually good enough. So much of his life was being polite at compliments, not even trying to understand where they were coming from.
And then there was Kurt. Kurt who is the most brutally honest human being Blaine's ever met, Kurt who (I love you. I'm proud to be with you. You take my breath away.) loves Blaine and fuck, he's Kurt. Kurt chose Blaine.
Blaine now considers doubt somewhere on a par with infidelity: he would never do that to Kurt. He would never not respect himself, because Kurt loves him, and Blaine will protect everything Kurt loves. Kurt is always right. Always. And Kurt, in all his wisdom, chose Blaine.
And now Blaine sits on the bed next to him where Kurt lies in a shapeless hump under too many covers and Blaine can't even get him to drink.
It's easy enough to take his temperature, because Kurt gives no response at all to Blaine lifting his arm and putting a thermometer into his armpit, so Blaine knows that while they are not in good territory, this thing at least isn't boiling Kurt to death from the inside. But he can't get him to drink. Kurt won't lift his head at any entreaty for a sip from a cup. Blaine cracks up ice cubes and tries to press them through his lips but he screws his eyes up and tries to wriggle away, coughs and the pain is so obvious on his face and Blaine can't bear it. He can't bear any of this.
He's supposed to be Kurt's husband.
He's supposed to be a fucking doctor.
He does understand why Kurt had an easier time caring for Blaine than Blaine is finding caring for Kurt. When Kurt pleads with Blaine to do something, Blaine does it. He'd do it for anyone, frankly. Someone wants him to do something and Blaine trips over himself to do it (This will make you happy? Oh god yes right just let me-) but Kurt is not so easily influenced, never has been. Blaine desperately needs people to like him, feels their dislike like a smack to the skull. Kurt knows that his disdain will always outweigh other people's and so he doesn't tend to give much of a fuck. But -
It's appalling, doing it. He finds it physically distressing, the things he knows he'd do for any patient. Clinically lifting his head to make him drink when Kurt wriggles and whimpers and doesn't understand and it hurts him, Blaine can't. He can't. He just can't.
But pleading endlessly and desperately, trying to talk him into it by incessant patient negotiation, all he's doing is exhausting him. Kurt clearly doesn't understand why Blaine won't just let him alone to sleep and Blaine knows what dehydration does to a healthy body, let alone an already compromised one. 'It's only flu' is meaningless, it's never only flu, the fact that it can be survived doesn't mean that it isn't dangerous, Blaine walks those hospital wards every day and now Kurt -
What exactly the hell is the point of Blaine if he can't even look after Kurt?
He manages to get Kurt to accept a couple of spoonfuls - 'spoonful' is relative, they are really not 'full' spoons - of that non-dairy frozen yoghurt he likes so much before the pain of swallowing puts him off and he turns his face back into the pillow to avoid Blaine again. Blaine sits on the covers next to him, back propped off the headboard, fingers and thumb running through Kurt's hair. "You're going to be alright," he says, sings, soft under his breath. "You're going to be fine."
He doesn't think that Kurt can even hear him. What the hell are the point of words now?
*
Love, and be silent.
Weighted down with fever Kurt puts his hands on the textures of the words, feels them fill his mouth with their smooth shapes without having to pass his sliced-open throat. He's aware of Blaine in the room, Blaine around him, Blaine as constant to Kurt as the sun in the daytime, Blaine a simple fact of life. But.
Blaine loves Kurt. He knows that. Fact: Blaine loves Kurt. Who is Kurt? Kurt is (words, words, words) the things he does and the things he says, this inner Kurt he's stuck with all the time Blaine has no actual access to. If Kurt isn't doing and saying things then is Kurt even Kurt, the Kurt Blaine loves (since, I am sure, my love's/More richer than my tongue)? Without words, who is he?
Nothing, my lord.
He feels really too crappy right now to have an existential crisis.
Who are you? He interrogates himself, pokes at himself so small on the inside, so small and containing so much. He's all full of words and feeling, when he punctures himself he springs a leak and out they come, a helpless rush of it all, Unhappy that I am, words/feeling/words. He feels things too much. He thought he was defective when he was a teenager, the things he couldn't contain, he should be able to contain it, be as glossy and contained as a porcelain vase. He understands the excess feeling now, because all the excess is there for Blaine. Half my love with him, half my care and duty. Anything left over he spends on stage, but Blaine comes first. The things Kurt does actually do for himself are curious things, done mostly in the service of wiping himself out. On stage they're someone else's feelings. Kurt Hummel ceases to exist once he steps onto those known/unknown boards. Who does Blaine love while Kurt's on stage and gone? Kurt does the deeds of other people, feels the feeling of other people, says their words, someone else's heart beats in his chest and sometimes he doesn't know why he's not afraid of it.
yet he hath ever
but slenderly known himself.
When it's someone else's tongue in his mouth and someone else's heart in his chest, what happens to Blaine's love? If Kurt isn't living his own life, doing his own deeds, who is Blaine even looking at under the spotlights . . . ?
Now he doesn't do anything, now he lays at the bottom of his pit of fever and can't make sense of Blaine when he speaks, has no way to reply. He is not someone else and not himself. Someone else could conceivably be worth Blaine's love. No-one at all?
(But now her price is fall'n.)
Blaine will love him anyway, he thinks. Blaine is too good to abandon Kurt even when Kurt is (Is man no more than this?) little worth it. He's mad that trusts in the tameness of a wolf, a/horse's health, a boy's love, or a whore's oath. Trust is not madness. Trust is the wedding ring on Blaine's hand. (So young, my lord, and true.)
Blaine's warm hand on his cold-numbed head. Don't let go, he thinks, a little desperate though he can feel the heavy fever rising like black water to drag him under again. Don't let me go. I'll get lost. I won't find my way back to you. What if I wake up as someone else?
O, that way madness lies
Don't let go.
("I'm right here," Blaine whispers, and strokes his hair back. "I'm always here.")
I am almost mad myself
Don't let go.
*
By the second day Blaine is pretty much outright panicking and knows it. He can't get Kurt to drink. He can't get him to lift his head from the pillow more than a couple of times, and Kurt's dull gaze like he's failing to work out who Blaine is hits him hard in a way he can't understand, his knees are unsteadied by it.
Blaine has never denied that Kurt is the strong one in their relationship. Oh, when they were young, when they first met, when Blaine was pretending very hard to be strong and Kurt never lied about how weak he felt, that was different, that was a dance, a game, that was all acting (Blaine has never been so good an actor as Kurt). In all honesty he does know that Kurt is the foundation of Blaine's life, that Blaine's confidence is located not in his own constitution but in Kurt's. And right now Kurt can't prop Blaine up, Kurt can't lift himself from his own illness, right now Kurt is a questionable quality. How much of you is here, love . . . ?
"Kurt," he sings to him softly, prying his shoulder from the mattress, turning him to his back, kissing a little path across his mouth. "Kurt . . ."
A quick mouthful of water and his mouth over Kurt's again; some flows down his cheek but Blaine feels him swallow and spasm with hurt underneath him. He dries his cheek, swaps his pillow, puts his hands over his own eyes, tries so hard not to despair but oh god he's scared and he needs Kurt and Kurt needs him. God, the world should pity the person who needs Blaine.
He thinks back, to the three days when Kurt was clearly incubating this while caring for Blaine. He thinks back further, to how oddly skittish Kurt's been, and he thinks, Crap, that play. That damn play. Every time they do a damned tragedy -
Kurt had been irritable for a week about walking sand into the apartment, the sand he'd been rehearsing on because they're expecting to pretty much flood the stage with 'blood' by the end of the play and John doesn't particularly want his King Lear dissolving into gory farce as they slip and slither all over on it. So they'd been rehearsing on sand, and Kurt had looked pinched and disgusted whenever he came home, and Kurt is Kurt. And Blaine knows Kurt.
It's not that Kurt is a wuss when it comes to horror movies, which he hates utterly and refuses to watch. Okay once Blaine had been able to tease him for it but he knows Kurt, now. It's not fear that makes Kurt avoid them. It's revulsion. Why would he ever find horrible, horrible things happening to people entertaining? Kurt's sensitivity to other people's feelings, that unbearably easy empathy of his, makes even fictional horror dangerous to him. So Blaine long ago stopped asking him to watch The Ring with him and warned him in advance throughout Game of Thrones when he'd need to look away. And now Kurt's in King Lear . . .
"I'm one of the few characters who gets to stay clean, everyone'll be -" He'd waved a hand at his own body, distaste twisting his mouth. "- splattered with it by the end of the play. But I get to stay clean right up until Phil carries me on and puts me down in it all. I'm trying to talk John into giving me something clean to 'die' on. I don't - oh god, it'll get in my hair."
"It's not real blood, Kurt."
Something in Kurt's eyes, some flit of sickness in there, and Blaine had realised that for Kurt, while he's onstage, it is.
And now Kurt, worn down and wrung out, is trapped some place Blaine can't get in and help him and the pathetic trickle of water Blaine's been able to feed to him in the last two days is nothing like enough, and Blaine left to himself is no longer beginning to panic, he is just panicking. He's supposed to be a doctor, he's supposed to look after Kurt, he's supposed to know what to do -
He calls Amita.
"And good afternoon, Dr Anderson, feeling better now?"
"What? Yes. No. Yes. Amita, Kurt's really sick, I'm getting-"
"For god's sake Anderson, I do not have time for this, every time he doesn't reply to a text within two minutes you think he's been-"
"Amita I'm not-"
"-hit by a bus or something I have all your patients and Mark is as much use as a dog on its hind legs-"
"Hey," Mark says, more disappointed than disagreeing, in the background.
"'Mita I'm not freaking out I'm - okay I am freaking out but I'm not - doing it for no reason, he is really sick, I can't get him to drink anything, I don't know what to do."
There's an irritated pause and Amita says, "Is it too harsh to suggest you try being a doctor?"
Blaine rubs his nose, glances through the open bedroom doorway where Kurt isn't moving in the bed. He says quietly, "Kind of yeah, I've had a rough week."
She sighs down the line, mutters on the edge of her breath in a mixture of Urdu and English (he remembers her increasingly irritated at a patient asking where she comes from, no, where her family is from, Amita finally barking at him, "Detroit.").
"Fine." she says. "What's his temperature?"
For about three minutes they run through symptoms, and it actually does calm Blaine down, sets the part of his brain that is actually designed to think instead of just react into gear again. He rubs his temples with thumb and fingers of one hand and says, "I can't help him like this, he is going to get nothing but worse if I don't get some fluids in him and I can't get him to drink enough, I just can't. I don't know how I'd get him to the ER, I can't get him down all those stairs, if I call an ambulance he will seriously actually kill me when he's able to-"
"Talk quickly, Anderson, some of us are at work."
"I need a favour."
"Hmm."
"'Mita. For Kurt. You love Kurt."
"Well clearly I'm not doing it for you," she says, and he knows Amita, he can see the way she would roll her eyes to the ceiling in exasperated thought. "What do you need?"
Blaine has been so, so lucky in his life with his friends.
*
Kill thy physician, and the fee bestow
Upon thy foul disease.
The room presses in, it's too small, too full of words. There's no space left to breathe in it, all full of numb cold words pressed in against him, suffocating with all their weight. I am cold myself. His body remembers the steps on stage, walking through the words, his body remembers sand underfoot (scrape ground-glass harsh), his face remembers pain and hope, plaited in like strands of sharp metal. These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend/no good to us.
His body remembers, and the words drown his mind. O me, my heart, my rising heart! but, down! The world is a chaos of too many words, and every breath chokes razors down his throat, and his body remembers bad things. My breath and blood! Too many words and too many of them too much (Vengeance! plague! death! confusion!), bedlam in his brain, a man with no eyes (Out, vile jelly!) and nausea clamps his guts, too much, a catastrophic tumble of words bringing him down with it, pelting off his skin leaving cold bruises, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill!
There's not enough room between the words to catch a single slitting desperate breath.
Hot hands on his head, thumbs brushing his cheeks. "Kurt, Kurt, hey, beautiful, you with me right now?"
Voices knot together in his mind, how can so many people fit in a room so full of words? His eyes burn and won't properly open, the person holding his face is a dark fuzz but he knows it's Blaine; of course it's Blaine; he knows Blaine even through the sandstorm of words words words scouring his skin. Blaine kisses him (Restoration hang/Thy medicine on my lips).
The words shatter from his hands, and he holds to the knowledge of Blaine instead.
"Here?" a strong, steady female voice says.
"Yeah, thanks Amita - Mark, have you got the -?"
He doesn't understand, can't understand, can hardly find his own mind through the ringing echo of all the words. His entire body feels battered by words (I am mightily abused.). Blaine lifts his hand by the wrist and kisses his throbbing temple and says to him, "Trust me, I'm a doctor."
He's mad that trusts.
Kurt doesn't care. He trusts.
There is cold -
And gradually, the dark becomes warm.
*
He wakes, slow and tired and thirsty, drained and dull in the dim, and blinks his eyes to open. He's lying on his back in the bed, and Blaine is a shape on the covers next to him, a heavy crashed out shape with an arm hooked warm over Kurt's stomach. Kurt breathes, slowly, and it hurts only a little, and swallowing hurts more but god he's thirsty.
He turns his head, looks across, keeps looking for some time too drowsily confused to do much else, until the muscles in the arm over him tighten and loosen, and Blaine makes a little noise next to the pillow. Kurt swallows again, and draws his strength up, and grates out, "Blaine . . . ?"
Blaine snuggles closer and grunts happily, "Mm?" and then snorts himself up, awake. "Kurt? Are you okay?"
"I'm on a drip," Kurt says, a little bit freaked out, his voice coming out sandpapered.
"Yeah, we, um, you were really dehydrated. How're you feeling?"
". . . are we supposed to have a drip?"
"We borrowed it from the hospital." Blaine bends over him, touches his forehead and then climbs over his body and out of the bed. He takes Kurt's hand as Kurt lifts it, staring at the band aid around his wrist. "I'll unhook you, one second."
"Are you supposed to 'borrow' things from the hospital? Ouch."
There's already antiseptic and cotton balls on the night table, and Blaine works with such quick efficient motions that Kurt's reduced to just staring, mesmerised by his sure clever hands. "They won't miss it, we'll take it right back. I just wanted to get some fluids into you, you were being really unco-operative about drinking. There you go, good as new."
He hands Kurt his own hand back, wrist neatly cleaned and taped. "I," Kurt says, and stares at it. "Who's 'we'?"
"Mark and Amita brought it. I couldn't get you to the hospital on the scooter, so I brought the hospital to you."
"Mark and- ? You let them in here? They were here?"
"They helped. I needed help, Kurt, you were -"
"You let them in here?" Kurt says, distraught, because he knows what he must look like right now, putting his hand to his head (elf all my hair in knots, oh god, he must look like death left to rot). "How could you -"
"I was worried." Blaine pushes the drip stand to one side, wraps up the trailing wire, begins putting things neatly away. Kurt catches the fall of his voice, and swallows, and it hurts. He closes his eyes and breathes, for one second, easier than he has in some time. He opens his eyes again. Of course he knows that hunch of Blaine's shoulders.
"Thank you for looking after me."
Blaine shrugs, carefully disposing of the needle. "I owed you, remember?"
"You were pretty unco-operative too, for the record. For two hours before you lost your voice you kept calling me mom, you haven't made that up to me yet."
"Did I? I'm sorry." He leans down, kisses Kurt on the forehead which is sweet of him because Kurt knows what a disgusting wreck he is right now. "How're you feeling?"
Kurt swallows, again, and it tastes foul, like he's been gargling garbage. Sharp-edged garbage. "Thirsty. Hungry. And I really need to pee."
"Great. I mean, not great, but so much better than - Kurt do you have any . . ." Kurt shuffles himself up on his elbows to sit, winces at the dry ache of his head and watches Blaine's face, while he sits on the edge of the bed and worries his hands a little. "I really worried."
"I'm fine," Kurt says. "It was only flu."
Blaine stares at him for a long moment, head a little ducked and upraised eyes so young, and Kurt - doesn't really remember much, doesn't know how long his condition has been obviously 'worrying', but he does know, he knows and he would normally never let it hurt him, how much Blaine can worry.
He twitches a smile, says again, quietly, "Thank you for looking after me."
Blaine's hands squeeze a little, and he nods, slow and very serious. He swallows. "Do you need some help getting up?"
Kurt sighs, and it ends in a moan, and he slumps back into the pillows. "Yes. I feel like death. Carry me to the bathroom?"
Blaine takes his hands, hauls him from the bed, actually does offer his arms but Kurt does not need Blaine tripping and dropping him when all his body feels like a bruise, he shuffles like an old man instead with Blaine's hands on his back while his wobbly knees threaten a Bambi impression at any given second. "I'll call your dad and tell him you're up," Blaine says. "And I can make you some breakfast, and then we can go back to bed because I don't know about you but after this week I am wiped."
Kurt catches the bathroom door handle and staggers in. "How - what day is it?"
"Saturday. You stopped talking to me on Thursday night, I don't know if you lost your voice like I did or if you're just really grumpy when you're sick."
"Probably best not to push me to find out if I'm grumpy when I'm sick when I'm sick, Blaine. Saturday? Really?"
"Saturday morning cartoons in bed," Blaine says, grinning hopefully, and Kurt hangs off the shower cubicle and gives a tired grin back.
"I actually could enjoy something brain-rottingly cheerful right now, since you mention it, yes. Now you can leave me alone to use the bathroom, Blaine, because I've clearly had little enough dignity the last few days as it is."
"I'll call your dad. Don't-"
Kurt raises an eyebrow, waits while Blaine stares at him.
"Don't stress yourself out," Blaine says, slowly. "Okay? About learning the play or anything. You really shouldn't be back at rehearsals until you're well again, you just - really, really need to relax and let your body heal itself." As if mustering defence for an oncoming attack, "Doctor's orders?"
Kurt just rubs his hair, and shrugs. "I'm not worried about learning my lines." When he blinks he sees the sharp black lines of words. "I'm fairly certain I know them already."
"Okay, cool. You wash up, I'll make you some toast!"
Left alone in the bathroom Kurt checks his face in the mirror - god he looks awful, weary blue eyes in sunken yellow sockets, hair as mad as if styled by a hurricane - and he feels tired, and hungry, and generally quite badly abused by life, like his body really needs to be somewhere warm and gentle and safe for a while. Like inside the circumference of one of Blaine's hugs, actually.
I'll go to bed at noon. He stretches his arms back, long and hard, and the muscles in his back and chest say oh it is good to be alive.
Disclaimer: It would actually belong to the creators of Glee and William Shakespeare, two parties not often referred to in the same sentence.
Rating: PG-13? Gentler than Lear definitely, but then they make horror movies gentler than Lear.
Summary: In which Kurt's fever waking-dreams are really not so nice as Blaine's (Seriously, have you *read* King Lear?), but when Blaine Anderson plays doctor, he plays to win.
My sickness grows upon me.
Words, words, words.
He doesn't understand how his skin feels so strangely numb and not cold at all, warm to his touch, but all the world presses icy against him all the same. Heat is the burning hot water bottle Blaine brings him. The blankets he presses over Kurt's heavy body are dead and lifeless, comfortless weights. This cold night will turn us all to fools and madmen.
Words, words, words. Blaine speaks to him but Kurt's throat is an open wound, breath hurts, there will be no reply. There has always been a reply. Words belong to Kurt (No words, no words: hush.). He has always understood how important words are, fumbled for them as a teenager, fought them out over assignments in class, read the right books and thought oh, of course. He is rich in words. He was a precocious child, swallowed a thesaurus as soon as he learned to read; the normal words are so dull.
There are no words now ("Kurt, hey, you going to eat something for me?"). Silenced by the festering sore that is his own throat he thinks how much it matters, the things the words can't touch, the things the words cup but can never replace. His purpose in life now is to tread the places between words and words-can't, what the words can't quite mean is something he has to show with the hesitation in his face and the trip of his tongue, what the words can't quite mean is an expression in his eyes and a tension in his body. The body speaks. The pause before a breath speaks. Acting is making even the silences speak. Words, words, words.
The body's delicate: the tempest in my mind
Doth from my senses take all feeling else
Save what beats there.
("Kurt, Kurt," and warm fingers on his deadened temple. "Kurt, angel, I need you to drink something for me, can you do that? Please?")
Every breath is pain.
*
we are not ourselves
When nature, being oppress'd, commands the mind
To suffer with the body
*
Kurt doesn't get sick.
Like, actual fact, he just doesn't. He acts like he doesn't have the time for it and Blaine does believe that Kurt is BAMF enough that sickness takes one look at him and knows that today is not the day for that fight. Kurt Hummel simply does not get sick. Kurt is busy. Being ill is for other people.
Apparently today is the day for that fight, the day for sickness to take its revenge. Right now Kurt is running about three days behind Blaine, right now Kurt is in the place Blaine was three days ago when Blaine thinks he was probably giving quite long fever-rambles judging by how much he tore his own throat to shreds, not that he can remember anything he said. Kurt isn't talking. Kurt lays like a body in the bed, unco-operative and silent. Blaine can't make him drink and it's inconceivable that he could get him to actually eat anything. And he feels, he feels . . .
So much of Blaine's life before he met Kurt was spent skating on the hollow-stomached edge of inadequacy. So much of his life was just keeping smiling in the hope that people wouldn't mind that he wasn't actually good enough. So much of his life was being polite at compliments, not even trying to understand where they were coming from.
And then there was Kurt. Kurt who is the most brutally honest human being Blaine's ever met, Kurt who (I love you. I'm proud to be with you. You take my breath away.) loves Blaine and fuck, he's Kurt. Kurt chose Blaine.
Blaine now considers doubt somewhere on a par with infidelity: he would never do that to Kurt. He would never not respect himself, because Kurt loves him, and Blaine will protect everything Kurt loves. Kurt is always right. Always. And Kurt, in all his wisdom, chose Blaine.
And now Blaine sits on the bed next to him where Kurt lies in a shapeless hump under too many covers and Blaine can't even get him to drink.
It's easy enough to take his temperature, because Kurt gives no response at all to Blaine lifting his arm and putting a thermometer into his armpit, so Blaine knows that while they are not in good territory, this thing at least isn't boiling Kurt to death from the inside. But he can't get him to drink. Kurt won't lift his head at any entreaty for a sip from a cup. Blaine cracks up ice cubes and tries to press them through his lips but he screws his eyes up and tries to wriggle away, coughs and the pain is so obvious on his face and Blaine can't bear it. He can't bear any of this.
He's supposed to be Kurt's husband.
He's supposed to be a fucking doctor.
He does understand why Kurt had an easier time caring for Blaine than Blaine is finding caring for Kurt. When Kurt pleads with Blaine to do something, Blaine does it. He'd do it for anyone, frankly. Someone wants him to do something and Blaine trips over himself to do it (This will make you happy? Oh god yes right just let me-) but Kurt is not so easily influenced, never has been. Blaine desperately needs people to like him, feels their dislike like a smack to the skull. Kurt knows that his disdain will always outweigh other people's and so he doesn't tend to give much of a fuck. But -
It's appalling, doing it. He finds it physically distressing, the things he knows he'd do for any patient. Clinically lifting his head to make him drink when Kurt wriggles and whimpers and doesn't understand and it hurts him, Blaine can't. He can't. He just can't.
But pleading endlessly and desperately, trying to talk him into it by incessant patient negotiation, all he's doing is exhausting him. Kurt clearly doesn't understand why Blaine won't just let him alone to sleep and Blaine knows what dehydration does to a healthy body, let alone an already compromised one. 'It's only flu' is meaningless, it's never only flu, the fact that it can be survived doesn't mean that it isn't dangerous, Blaine walks those hospital wards every day and now Kurt -
What exactly the hell is the point of Blaine if he can't even look after Kurt?
He manages to get Kurt to accept a couple of spoonfuls - 'spoonful' is relative, they are really not 'full' spoons - of that non-dairy frozen yoghurt he likes so much before the pain of swallowing puts him off and he turns his face back into the pillow to avoid Blaine again. Blaine sits on the covers next to him, back propped off the headboard, fingers and thumb running through Kurt's hair. "You're going to be alright," he says, sings, soft under his breath. "You're going to be fine."
He doesn't think that Kurt can even hear him. What the hell are the point of words now?
*
Love, and be silent.
Weighted down with fever Kurt puts his hands on the textures of the words, feels them fill his mouth with their smooth shapes without having to pass his sliced-open throat. He's aware of Blaine in the room, Blaine around him, Blaine as constant to Kurt as the sun in the daytime, Blaine a simple fact of life. But.
Blaine loves Kurt. He knows that. Fact: Blaine loves Kurt. Who is Kurt? Kurt is (words, words, words) the things he does and the things he says, this inner Kurt he's stuck with all the time Blaine has no actual access to. If Kurt isn't doing and saying things then is Kurt even Kurt, the Kurt Blaine loves (since, I am sure, my love's/More richer than my tongue)? Without words, who is he?
Nothing, my lord.
He feels really too crappy right now to have an existential crisis.
Who are you? He interrogates himself, pokes at himself so small on the inside, so small and containing so much. He's all full of words and feeling, when he punctures himself he springs a leak and out they come, a helpless rush of it all, Unhappy that I am, words/feeling/words. He feels things too much. He thought he was defective when he was a teenager, the things he couldn't contain, he should be able to contain it, be as glossy and contained as a porcelain vase. He understands the excess feeling now, because all the excess is there for Blaine. Half my love with him, half my care and duty. Anything left over he spends on stage, but Blaine comes first. The things Kurt does actually do for himself are curious things, done mostly in the service of wiping himself out. On stage they're someone else's feelings. Kurt Hummel ceases to exist once he steps onto those known/unknown boards. Who does Blaine love while Kurt's on stage and gone? Kurt does the deeds of other people, feels the feeling of other people, says their words, someone else's heart beats in his chest and sometimes he doesn't know why he's not afraid of it.
yet he hath ever
but slenderly known himself.
When it's someone else's tongue in his mouth and someone else's heart in his chest, what happens to Blaine's love? If Kurt isn't living his own life, doing his own deeds, who is Blaine even looking at under the spotlights . . . ?
Now he doesn't do anything, now he lays at the bottom of his pit of fever and can't make sense of Blaine when he speaks, has no way to reply. He is not someone else and not himself. Someone else could conceivably be worth Blaine's love. No-one at all?
(But now her price is fall'n.)
Blaine will love him anyway, he thinks. Blaine is too good to abandon Kurt even when Kurt is (Is man no more than this?) little worth it. He's mad that trusts in the tameness of a wolf, a/horse's health, a boy's love, or a whore's oath. Trust is not madness. Trust is the wedding ring on Blaine's hand. (So young, my lord, and true.)
Blaine's warm hand on his cold-numbed head. Don't let go, he thinks, a little desperate though he can feel the heavy fever rising like black water to drag him under again. Don't let me go. I'll get lost. I won't find my way back to you. What if I wake up as someone else?
O, that way madness lies
Don't let go.
("I'm right here," Blaine whispers, and strokes his hair back. "I'm always here.")
I am almost mad myself
Don't let go.
*
By the second day Blaine is pretty much outright panicking and knows it. He can't get Kurt to drink. He can't get him to lift his head from the pillow more than a couple of times, and Kurt's dull gaze like he's failing to work out who Blaine is hits him hard in a way he can't understand, his knees are unsteadied by it.
Blaine has never denied that Kurt is the strong one in their relationship. Oh, when they were young, when they first met, when Blaine was pretending very hard to be strong and Kurt never lied about how weak he felt, that was different, that was a dance, a game, that was all acting (Blaine has never been so good an actor as Kurt). In all honesty he does know that Kurt is the foundation of Blaine's life, that Blaine's confidence is located not in his own constitution but in Kurt's. And right now Kurt can't prop Blaine up, Kurt can't lift himself from his own illness, right now Kurt is a questionable quality. How much of you is here, love . . . ?
"Kurt," he sings to him softly, prying his shoulder from the mattress, turning him to his back, kissing a little path across his mouth. "Kurt . . ."
A quick mouthful of water and his mouth over Kurt's again; some flows down his cheek but Blaine feels him swallow and spasm with hurt underneath him. He dries his cheek, swaps his pillow, puts his hands over his own eyes, tries so hard not to despair but oh god he's scared and he needs Kurt and Kurt needs him. God, the world should pity the person who needs Blaine.
He thinks back, to the three days when Kurt was clearly incubating this while caring for Blaine. He thinks back further, to how oddly skittish Kurt's been, and he thinks, Crap, that play. That damn play. Every time they do a damned tragedy -
Kurt had been irritable for a week about walking sand into the apartment, the sand he'd been rehearsing on because they're expecting to pretty much flood the stage with 'blood' by the end of the play and John doesn't particularly want his King Lear dissolving into gory farce as they slip and slither all over on it. So they'd been rehearsing on sand, and Kurt had looked pinched and disgusted whenever he came home, and Kurt is Kurt. And Blaine knows Kurt.
It's not that Kurt is a wuss when it comes to horror movies, which he hates utterly and refuses to watch. Okay once Blaine had been able to tease him for it but he knows Kurt, now. It's not fear that makes Kurt avoid them. It's revulsion. Why would he ever find horrible, horrible things happening to people entertaining? Kurt's sensitivity to other people's feelings, that unbearably easy empathy of his, makes even fictional horror dangerous to him. So Blaine long ago stopped asking him to watch The Ring with him and warned him in advance throughout Game of Thrones when he'd need to look away. And now Kurt's in King Lear . . .
"I'm one of the few characters who gets to stay clean, everyone'll be -" He'd waved a hand at his own body, distaste twisting his mouth. "- splattered with it by the end of the play. But I get to stay clean right up until Phil carries me on and puts me down in it all. I'm trying to talk John into giving me something clean to 'die' on. I don't - oh god, it'll get in my hair."
"It's not real blood, Kurt."
Something in Kurt's eyes, some flit of sickness in there, and Blaine had realised that for Kurt, while he's onstage, it is.
And now Kurt, worn down and wrung out, is trapped some place Blaine can't get in and help him and the pathetic trickle of water Blaine's been able to feed to him in the last two days is nothing like enough, and Blaine left to himself is no longer beginning to panic, he is just panicking. He's supposed to be a doctor, he's supposed to look after Kurt, he's supposed to know what to do -
He calls Amita.
"And good afternoon, Dr Anderson, feeling better now?"
"What? Yes. No. Yes. Amita, Kurt's really sick, I'm getting-"
"For god's sake Anderson, I do not have time for this, every time he doesn't reply to a text within two minutes you think he's been-"
"Amita I'm not-"
"-hit by a bus or something I have all your patients and Mark is as much use as a dog on its hind legs-"
"Hey," Mark says, more disappointed than disagreeing, in the background.
"'Mita I'm not freaking out I'm - okay I am freaking out but I'm not - doing it for no reason, he is really sick, I can't get him to drink anything, I don't know what to do."
There's an irritated pause and Amita says, "Is it too harsh to suggest you try being a doctor?"
Blaine rubs his nose, glances through the open bedroom doorway where Kurt isn't moving in the bed. He says quietly, "Kind of yeah, I've had a rough week."
She sighs down the line, mutters on the edge of her breath in a mixture of Urdu and English (he remembers her increasingly irritated at a patient asking where she comes from, no, where her family is from, Amita finally barking at him, "Detroit.").
"Fine." she says. "What's his temperature?"
For about three minutes they run through symptoms, and it actually does calm Blaine down, sets the part of his brain that is actually designed to think instead of just react into gear again. He rubs his temples with thumb and fingers of one hand and says, "I can't help him like this, he is going to get nothing but worse if I don't get some fluids in him and I can't get him to drink enough, I just can't. I don't know how I'd get him to the ER, I can't get him down all those stairs, if I call an ambulance he will seriously actually kill me when he's able to-"
"Talk quickly, Anderson, some of us are at work."
"I need a favour."
"Hmm."
"'Mita. For Kurt. You love Kurt."
"Well clearly I'm not doing it for you," she says, and he knows Amita, he can see the way she would roll her eyes to the ceiling in exasperated thought. "What do you need?"
Blaine has been so, so lucky in his life with his friends.
*
Kill thy physician, and the fee bestow
Upon thy foul disease.
The room presses in, it's too small, too full of words. There's no space left to breathe in it, all full of numb cold words pressed in against him, suffocating with all their weight. I am cold myself. His body remembers the steps on stage, walking through the words, his body remembers sand underfoot (scrape ground-glass harsh), his face remembers pain and hope, plaited in like strands of sharp metal. These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend/no good to us.
His body remembers, and the words drown his mind. O me, my heart, my rising heart! but, down! The world is a chaos of too many words, and every breath chokes razors down his throat, and his body remembers bad things. My breath and blood! Too many words and too many of them too much (Vengeance! plague! death! confusion!), bedlam in his brain, a man with no eyes (Out, vile jelly!) and nausea clamps his guts, too much, a catastrophic tumble of words bringing him down with it, pelting off his skin leaving cold bruises, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill!
There's not enough room between the words to catch a single slitting desperate breath.
Hot hands on his head, thumbs brushing his cheeks. "Kurt, Kurt, hey, beautiful, you with me right now?"
Voices knot together in his mind, how can so many people fit in a room so full of words? His eyes burn and won't properly open, the person holding his face is a dark fuzz but he knows it's Blaine; of course it's Blaine; he knows Blaine even through the sandstorm of words words words scouring his skin. Blaine kisses him (Restoration hang/Thy medicine on my lips).
The words shatter from his hands, and he holds to the knowledge of Blaine instead.
"Here?" a strong, steady female voice says.
"Yeah, thanks Amita - Mark, have you got the -?"
He doesn't understand, can't understand, can hardly find his own mind through the ringing echo of all the words. His entire body feels battered by words (I am mightily abused.). Blaine lifts his hand by the wrist and kisses his throbbing temple and says to him, "Trust me, I'm a doctor."
He's mad that trusts.
Kurt doesn't care. He trusts.
There is cold -
And gradually, the dark becomes warm.
*
He wakes, slow and tired and thirsty, drained and dull in the dim, and blinks his eyes to open. He's lying on his back in the bed, and Blaine is a shape on the covers next to him, a heavy crashed out shape with an arm hooked warm over Kurt's stomach. Kurt breathes, slowly, and it hurts only a little, and swallowing hurts more but god he's thirsty.
He turns his head, looks across, keeps looking for some time too drowsily confused to do much else, until the muscles in the arm over him tighten and loosen, and Blaine makes a little noise next to the pillow. Kurt swallows again, and draws his strength up, and grates out, "Blaine . . . ?"
Blaine snuggles closer and grunts happily, "Mm?" and then snorts himself up, awake. "Kurt? Are you okay?"
"I'm on a drip," Kurt says, a little bit freaked out, his voice coming out sandpapered.
"Yeah, we, um, you were really dehydrated. How're you feeling?"
". . . are we supposed to have a drip?"
"We borrowed it from the hospital." Blaine bends over him, touches his forehead and then climbs over his body and out of the bed. He takes Kurt's hand as Kurt lifts it, staring at the band aid around his wrist. "I'll unhook you, one second."
"Are you supposed to 'borrow' things from the hospital? Ouch."
There's already antiseptic and cotton balls on the night table, and Blaine works with such quick efficient motions that Kurt's reduced to just staring, mesmerised by his sure clever hands. "They won't miss it, we'll take it right back. I just wanted to get some fluids into you, you were being really unco-operative about drinking. There you go, good as new."
He hands Kurt his own hand back, wrist neatly cleaned and taped. "I," Kurt says, and stares at it. "Who's 'we'?"
"Mark and Amita brought it. I couldn't get you to the hospital on the scooter, so I brought the hospital to you."
"Mark and- ? You let them in here? They were here?"
"They helped. I needed help, Kurt, you were -"
"You let them in here?" Kurt says, distraught, because he knows what he must look like right now, putting his hand to his head (elf all my hair in knots, oh god, he must look like death left to rot). "How could you -"
"I was worried." Blaine pushes the drip stand to one side, wraps up the trailing wire, begins putting things neatly away. Kurt catches the fall of his voice, and swallows, and it hurts. He closes his eyes and breathes, for one second, easier than he has in some time. He opens his eyes again. Of course he knows that hunch of Blaine's shoulders.
"Thank you for looking after me."
Blaine shrugs, carefully disposing of the needle. "I owed you, remember?"
"You were pretty unco-operative too, for the record. For two hours before you lost your voice you kept calling me mom, you haven't made that up to me yet."
"Did I? I'm sorry." He leans down, kisses Kurt on the forehead which is sweet of him because Kurt knows what a disgusting wreck he is right now. "How're you feeling?"
Kurt swallows, again, and it tastes foul, like he's been gargling garbage. Sharp-edged garbage. "Thirsty. Hungry. And I really need to pee."
"Great. I mean, not great, but so much better than - Kurt do you have any . . ." Kurt shuffles himself up on his elbows to sit, winces at the dry ache of his head and watches Blaine's face, while he sits on the edge of the bed and worries his hands a little. "I really worried."
"I'm fine," Kurt says. "It was only flu."
Blaine stares at him for a long moment, head a little ducked and upraised eyes so young, and Kurt - doesn't really remember much, doesn't know how long his condition has been obviously 'worrying', but he does know, he knows and he would normally never let it hurt him, how much Blaine can worry.
He twitches a smile, says again, quietly, "Thank you for looking after me."
Blaine's hands squeeze a little, and he nods, slow and very serious. He swallows. "Do you need some help getting up?"
Kurt sighs, and it ends in a moan, and he slumps back into the pillows. "Yes. I feel like death. Carry me to the bathroom?"
Blaine takes his hands, hauls him from the bed, actually does offer his arms but Kurt does not need Blaine tripping and dropping him when all his body feels like a bruise, he shuffles like an old man instead with Blaine's hands on his back while his wobbly knees threaten a Bambi impression at any given second. "I'll call your dad and tell him you're up," Blaine says. "And I can make you some breakfast, and then we can go back to bed because I don't know about you but after this week I am wiped."
Kurt catches the bathroom door handle and staggers in. "How - what day is it?"
"Saturday. You stopped talking to me on Thursday night, I don't know if you lost your voice like I did or if you're just really grumpy when you're sick."
"Probably best not to push me to find out if I'm grumpy when I'm sick when I'm sick, Blaine. Saturday? Really?"
"Saturday morning cartoons in bed," Blaine says, grinning hopefully, and Kurt hangs off the shower cubicle and gives a tired grin back.
"I actually could enjoy something brain-rottingly cheerful right now, since you mention it, yes. Now you can leave me alone to use the bathroom, Blaine, because I've clearly had little enough dignity the last few days as it is."
"I'll call your dad. Don't-"
Kurt raises an eyebrow, waits while Blaine stares at him.
"Don't stress yourself out," Blaine says, slowly. "Okay? About learning the play or anything. You really shouldn't be back at rehearsals until you're well again, you just - really, really need to relax and let your body heal itself." As if mustering defence for an oncoming attack, "Doctor's orders?"
Kurt just rubs his hair, and shrugs. "I'm not worried about learning my lines." When he blinks he sees the sharp black lines of words. "I'm fairly certain I know them already."
"Okay, cool. You wash up, I'll make you some toast!"
Left alone in the bathroom Kurt checks his face in the mirror - god he looks awful, weary blue eyes in sunken yellow sockets, hair as mad as if styled by a hurricane - and he feels tired, and hungry, and generally quite badly abused by life, like his body really needs to be somewhere warm and gentle and safe for a while. Like inside the circumference of one of Blaine's hugs, actually.
I'll go to bed at noon. He stretches his arms back, long and hard, and the muscles in his back and chest say oh it is good to be alive.