AtOG fic (yup): Gloves & Masks
Masks and Gloves, an All the Other Ghosts fic, because fucking hell New York, Jesus, it's not like I can do anything *else*. I may have warped the timeline slightly to do this because obviously when I wrote AtOG and Grey I wasn't expecting a pandemic to hit within the next few years. And I know I have entirely vanished for months (Sorry, ill again -_- ) and I know I never revisit fandoms so this is super weird but with everything going on, this is the fic my mind went back to; given that I usually only revisit fandoms for charity, if you do want to make a donation to either Médecins Sans Frontières or a local homeless charity or anyone else who could probably really really use the help right now, do please feel more than free <3
I hope you're all keeping safe and well and ignoring everything that fucking Trump is coming out with in the face of this (Do not let people tell you that the economy is more important than peoples' lives. Governments' actions in the past few weeks have already proven that the shape our economy was in before this was not *necessary*, and it can be reshaped to keep people in their homes and their jobs.). Stay the fuck at home. Help each other out. And do the things that keep you steady; cuddle your pets, meditate, read, sing, make art and get some sunlight on your face, look after your loved ones. Take care of your body, now we have harsh proof of how fragile bodies are. And take care of your heart, since we're all struggling with this. But seriously seriously seriously, you guys, stay the fuck at home. Just stay the fuck at home, so you're not making one more job for the people who *have* to go out. The literal only thing you have to do at this point in time to save lives, to be an honest to god hero, is stay the fuck at home: this opportunity will *not* repeat itself, believe me . . .
Rating: R, bit of swearing
Disclaimer: I don't own anything, and frankly good luck finding a lawyer who gives enough of a shit to sue me over this right now.
Warnings and spoilers: Warningswise this is about the state of the world right now and might be stressful if you're already not managing that well; it's not written to *be* stressful but if you're trying to avoid most of the news, it might not be a good idea. Also AtOG was never a fic that pretended that anyone, even children, escapes the worst in the world, so there's that. Spoilers - well, for AtOG and Grey, it would not be a good idea to read this of that verse first?
Summary: It matters not just to survive this but to survive it right.
First he unpeels the unsightly blue disposable gloves from on top of what he's already thinking of as his 'real' gloves. Then he pumps some hand gel from his belt and works it into his real gloves. Then he can pull up the face mask, which is uncomfortable on his skin by this point, his ears feel bruised. And then the Ghost of New York is just sitting on top of Mr Conti's kitchen roof, breathing the cool spring air of the city, feeling it dew-fresh to his skin after the clamping of the mask. He knows that this is not a time to be resentful of what that damn mask is doing to his skin. He still doesn't think there's enough cleanser in the world, though.
He looks down to the alley floor, slides and drops neat as a cat to his feet there, looks through the lit kitchen window and taps once, just with a fingertip; Sal looks up from the table where he's on a laptop jigging a toddler on his knee, and smiles across at the window, and the Ghost looks fondly at the little head of dark curly hair drowsily watching cartoons from Sal's lap, and smiles back. He remembers his own drowsy little dark-headed toddler refusing sleep. Not because all the world was drawn with the stress of a pandemic then but because toddlers are toddlers, and the bedtime 'no' is at least something to rely on.
Thermos of coffee and a pastry in a paper bag on the doorstep. The Ghost almost automatically puts the bag into his mouth to free a hand for the climb and then thinks, No, and has to try not to squish it under his arm instead, semi-solid as he climbs back onto the roof and then can just sprawl there again, exhausted, not just physically. Coffee and pastry beside him for now he lays on his back and stares dazedly up through the dull night sky and he is not used, he doesn't think he can become in any way resigned again, to being alone on a night. It's been over a decade since he was regularly solo for his patrols, and he's had Phalanx for so much longer than he ever didn't have him, and - and he is trying, he really is, he swallows hard and he tries, he's grateful that his dad and Carole are isolated with the kids so they're all safe, he's grateful for every day he doesn't get sick and he gets one more night of trying to help, he's grateful for every single fragment of contact with Blaine so he knows -
He rolls his head to the side, cheek pressing the cold of the roof through his hood, and breathes, and breathes, until the burning of the want to cry has reduced enough to breathe again. Then he sits up and sniffs and remembers not to touch his face and eats his pastry instead, one eye on the time, because Blaine calls before and after each twelve-hour shift and he's only got a few minutes, if Blaine doesn't run over his shift again.
He doesn't, or not by much, Kurt thinks they're keeping an eye on each as best they can in the hospital, making each other take breaks. He's sitting cradling his coffee, staring at nothing and thinking about the kids, he hopes Mouse is asleep, he knows how anxious she gets, he hopes Julio's keeping calm, he stresses himself out trying to hold his own temper down and it's too much for an eight-year-old - when his cell buzzes and his heart gasps as if up from a coma. He tucks the phone up under his hood, held between cheek and shoulder, and says, "Hi, you."
"Hey," Blaine says, sounding tired but relieved. "Mr Conti's?"
"Sal said they drove some pastries to the hospital yesterday in the message."
"They did, it's why I'm maybe ten percent less jealous than I normally am. You okay?"
"I'm fine. Are you?"
"I'm fine. I'm fine. How's your night been?"
"Quiet." Even now the sound of the traffic is a lullaby rather than a nightclub, the way he's always known it. Few planes overhead, few distant voices. His city like a ghost town. "How's your night been?"
" . . . not quiet. Oh - damn. Keep - I just remembered not to rub my eye then."
"- god. Yes." He was just about to do the same thing himself, laughs - nerves, more than anything, slipping the phone back into his palm so his neck can straighten again. "Did you get the video of the kids Dad sent?"
"Yeah, jeez, nothing should be that cute. Literally nothing should be that cute. We are really lucky."
Kurt's throat hardens, and he is far too old to cry and far too close to it every day now. "Yeah," he says, roughly. "We are."
They were lucky to ever have Julio in the first place, Julio who took to the world with delight, who wanted to wear the dinosaur onesie for a full year straight and communicate only by roaring, Julio who sits to meditate with them looking so serious and so calm with one little foot flexing in his lotus, keeping his blades in check. He is such a good boy. And they are so lucky that Julio did have his blades under control, almost always, when they got the call about the little girl who'd been taken into care and then just disappeared, about the invisible walls in the building no-one could get through, they were so lucky that the Ghost, Kurt the father, was able to fade himself into view in that basement where he could hear but not see her breathing, tearful and afraid, and say so quietly, heart just hurting for her, "Hi. Are you just like me too?"
Sort of; like both of them, their little Mouse, fading into view in front of his eyes for the first time, a grubby exhausted four-year-old all cried out and frail with long-ingrained terror. Invisible as a ghost when she wants but never intangible, and none of them understand the shapes she can make in the air, solidity where there was air and just as invisible, shields they can't see, Kurt's tripped over them more than once when she's been playing. She could have been born of them, honestly, though she looks like neither of her fathers - officially they're still fostering her, while the adoption winds its way through the courts - even if Julio could be Blaine's if you squint. It was Julio who called her Mouse, 'Morgan' just never stuck, after he sulked that he didn't want a little sister and then took one look at her when they brought her in, undergrown and skinny and still never quite steady, nothing but fear back then and gripping Kurt's hand in a way that hurt, and his nose wrinkled, and he held his hand out to the silent girl and said, "Come on, mouse. You c'n play with my Legos."
Magnanimity indeed, from a six-year-old. She's not quite so shy anymore, their Mouse, though she's wary of strangers. Her favourite colour is blue because she wants to be just like Elsa, which in a way Kurt is grateful for. It's not like he thinks there's anything antifeminist about pink unless you have no option but pink, and just from a designer's viewpoint the variety of clothing Mouse has to choose from in stores is depressing, it's not really a choice if there's only one colour to choose . . .
You have to be grateful for what you have to be grateful for, when can you feel the luck fiercer than when luck can't be trusted and you face losing it all? Kurt is faint with fear for his dad even if officially he's been healthy for years, but when he thinks about Blaine in that hospital -
He swallows, and tries to make himself mean it when he says it. "We are lucky."
This far, anyway. Because Phalanx, who's spent years focusing on first aid, volunteered in the ER to free up a more experienced doctor for the ICU and the Ghost went weak, went momentarily blind when Blaine told him, saw and heard nothing, fell into some dark inner space of no. The streets are safer than the hospital right now. Anywhere is safer than the hospital. And his husband - no.
. . . but Blaine followed him from Ohio and wanted to do the right thing whatever it cost him and chose the costume to guard his back and he knew, he knew, he knows his husband, there was no point refusing, no point arguing, and in the face of this, his city, the world, he couldn't live with himself to be so selfish. He would give his own life for Blaine's. But they made their choices, the both of them, and he can't put Blaine's life above all those people he's helping now, what the fuck else is the mask for? But it feels different, it feels different, Blaine a world away sealed inside a hospital and they never see each other because they both don't know what contamination they might bring with them and he doesn't even see his dad or his kids and he wants to do what everyone else is doing, bunker down with his family and close the doors on the world, except it's not what everyone else is doing. Not everyone can, and not everyone should. They have to drive the ambulances and stock the shelves and make the medicines. And Phalanx, in a different sort of mask, has to work in that hospital, and the Ghost, alone, has to keep other people out of that hospital to give his husband just one less thing to do, to give all those doctors just some space to breathe.
He remembers the guy with headphones in staring at his phone screen the Ghost ran at and threw his arms around and ghosted as the truck rushed through them both on the street, and his breath comes slow. He knows he can't stop. The emergency services are too stretched already, he has to do what he can, even if that guy wouldn't have survived to take up an ICU bed they can't even spare an ambulance for his corpse right now. So he has to come out, feeling as alone as a single limb, and do what he can with his mind fully on-task even if a good half of his heart is elsewhere. None of them get a choice in this. No-one has a choice to not be living through this, and the heart of it hasn't changed: no-one should be left on their own when the worst things happen.
He's never really thought of himself as brave. He's really trying to be, now, more than he ever knew he could be. It matters not just to survive this but to survive it right. To not be selfish, not be stupid, to be someone his family can be proud of; he cares as if for the first time to be someone that he can be proud of himself. Maybe it's seeing Blaine walk into that hospital like that. Maybe it's just the scale of it, no-one wants to remember this time as the time they decided to be a dick . . .
"You sound all echoey," he says, and remembers again not to rub his eye. "Where are you?"
"Staircase. A nurse was sleeping in the break room, I didn't want to be the tool who woke her up. Did you know you've gone - ho ho - viral again?"
"What? When? I haven't done anything!"
"If I say the phrase 'hashtag don't be so blisteringly irresponsible' would that mean anything to you?"
"Oh," the Ghost says, and rolls his eyes to the plum-coloured sky. "Him. Well he shouldn't have been there to film me cuffing anyone anyway, what the hell some people think 'lockdown' means -"
Blaine laughs, low and a little rough, he sounds so tired that Kurt's heart clenches. "It was - I mean it's hilarious, on one level, it was very - you."
"Mm," he says, irritated at the thought of the very existence of Twitter for the twelve-thousandth time in his life. He's not on Twitter. Of course Blaine is.
"But it - I forget how up close to people we are all the time on the streets, I - watching you have to pin a guy down to get cuffs on him -"
"Oh, Blaine . . ."
"It - freaked me out. Just this - like my spine went tight. Sorry. G-"
Kurt is silent for a diplomatic second and then says, "You were about to call me 'Gurt' again, weren't you?"
"I get - stuck between them sometimes. Um. It - I hate that you're out there. I hate it. We have no idea what you're exposing yourself to."
He's angry and holding it down, that Blaine can't seem to get this. "A smaller viral load than you are, Blaine."
"I'm wearing more protective gear than you -"
"Not enough."
"- and I know what people can get like, even before this - no-one's - spit at you, coughed at you -?"
"You want me to start wearing the goggles, don't you?"
"I really don't care that they ruin the aesthetic, I really seriously don't."
"I don't either, I hope you don't think I'm that shallow. I just lose enough of my peripheral vision with the hood."
"I just -"
"Blaine, I'm safer than you are, you know I'm safer than you are. I wish to god you were out here on the streets with me, you'd be safer here. I'm not touching anyone more than I have to and patrolling is quiet right now, it's like a graveya-" He stops. Until recently he'd never noticed how many allusions to death normal conversation entails. "It's quiet, it really is. Literally the first thing I did tonight was take orders for milk and bread from people shouting out of their windows in one building. I made some dumbass bar that thought they could hide still being open close down. I rescued a bodega cat from a tree."
Blaine laughs, the first true honest laugh, that bark of pleasure that jolts Kurt's heart for not hearing it enough right now. "Oh man. I wish someone had filmed that."
"Her name was Pigeon," Kurt says, sipping some coffee thoughtfully. "I got the paramedics through a locked door to an elderly patient. I also punched a Nazi but I disinfected my gloves thoroughly after that, not just because of the virus, obviously."
"I should've known the Nazis are too dumb to stay indoors."
The Ghost has a rule for himself right now that he doesn't do anything that might add to the numbers of people going into the hospital, and he would have even applied that to the fucking morons spray-painting swastikas onto an Asian supermarket except one of the assholes - it's not just that they tried to fight, it's that one lashed out aiming to snatch off the mask. And it shocked Kurt, the understanding of it, lurching his own head back and looking into the man's vicious, manic eyes, and all his fury fisted in his chest, and he punched him in the face instead. He really doesn't do that much but Phalanx taught him how, and if you're ever going to punch someone it might as well be a Nazi. He's not going to tell Blaine that the guy tried to grab the mask. Blaine has more than enough to worry about, and Kurt is certain he's not telling him half of what's going on in the ER anyway. He can guess enough, and it just makes him want to weep.
"You're not safer than me," Blaine says quietly. "I still have full lung capacity."
The Ghost sighs, heavily. "I get shot the once," he says.
"Kurt."
"I'm fine. You know I'm fine. The scarring is extremely minimal, I'm fine." He presses his cheek to his own shoulder, tired, thinks of Blaine's shoulder beside him in bed, the warmth of the flesh, his him-smell safe in the sheets. "You don't get to pretend that I shouldn't be worrying about you in a building full of the virus if you're worrying about me out here in the fresh air because I got shot a decade ago."
"So we both worry."
"The best part of people," Kurt murmurs, distantly, "that we care enough to worry." He listens to Blaine breathing. He knows he'll be tired and he won't keep him awake much longer, but he wants to do something, something, he is supposed to be a hero and he has never fallen out of love with that man, if he can't make him safe then at least he should be able to make him smile. "There really is so much caring," he offers, head a little lower in the hood. "The way some people have . . . when we come out of the other side of this we'll all know something new about what love can look like. And bravery. Everyone's afraid but everyone's coping, and thinking about other people."
". . . you know I never really thought about, about dignity before. Not what it really means. But in here it's all - it's pretty crazy, but when I get a moment to think I get - I get really scared, Kurt. About you out there. Yeah, about me in here. About everyone in this. And I don't mind being scared so much but I just keep thinking that what matters is how I behave. To not take it out on other people who are scared too. So at the end of the shift I can look back on it mostly the right way. I don't know if that's what that word's really supposed to mean but it feels like it does right now."
"I know what you mean," the Ghost says, hooking a knee closer to rest his chin on it. "It's alright to feel what you do, but if you're the one in the cape you have to act in a way that keeps other people calm." He breathes, slowly. "We're kind of all in capes now whether we like it or not."
"I'm pretty happy to classify people who think that their being inconvenienced is worse than other people dying as supervillains right now, yeah. And these guys - the doctors and nurses in here really are heroes. Really." His voice has gone raw, and Kurt's throat knows how he feels. "I have to be on my best behaviour when I've got them to live up to."
The Ghost swallows, head still resting on his own knee. "I feel so useless. I'm really not doing much of anything to help."
"We need you. Don't think we don't. A paramedic tweeted that you saved him from a mugging."
". . . I know. I know I can't do anything else. And this really isn't about my ego, I just wish I could help - the way you are, right now."
"I don't want you in here with scarring on your lung."
"Oh so you do admit the viral load in there-"
"Oh - god can we not, please, fuck-!"
It takes Kurt a second. "Did you just touch your face?"
"I forgot, shit, shit. Lemme go rinse my eye real quick. Don't freak out, I already washed my hands after my shift, please don't freak out."
He doesn't even want the coffee, all he feels anymore is queasy. "Go wash now. I love you."
"I love you too, be safe, Kh-"
A swallowed not-laugh. "'Khost' -"
"Shut uppp," his husband says, and hangs up to do what he can.
He holds his phone to his forehead for a moment, eyes tight closed, hating everything. But Blaine is right, though it's not the word Kurt would have associated with this before speaking to him; dignity. To get through this the way you'd hope you would, now that you find you have to. So he messages him, Sleep well, I love you, be safe xx and messages his dad, Let me know if you want me to pick anything up for you on the way home, love you xx (he locked his and Blaine's bedroom door from the inside over a week ago, ghosts in and out through the outside wall, never enters the rest of the house; if he's still going in and out there's no reason for anyone else to so much as open the front door and he can leave groceries on the porch for them) and slots the phone away, stands up, stre-tches. He's in what he is diplomatically calling his mid-thirties. He's aware that every extra year is playing the odds now, athletes are retired by Kurt's age, but the Ghost still has things he needs to do and his body still feels supple enough, strong enough. He knows it won't be his own body's ageing that worries him into hanging up the suit, it'll be Blaine's, and the only thing he needs Blaine's body to be strong enough for for the next few weeks is fighting off this virus . . .
He puts the remainder of the coffee down the drain, leaves the thermos outside the door (through the window Sal is slowly dancing around the room with a sleepy dark head resting on his shoulder, yawning) and pulls a new pair of disposable gloves on, refits the mask over his raw face. And then he climbs, higher up the building until he's on a taller roof, looking across his eerily quiet city, all those lit windows and hardly a soul on the streets. And his heart just - he's always sworn he would give anything for this city, and his throat fills hard on the knowledge that so so many of the people he's looking out over right now would do just the same, they're already doing it. Blaine's right about heroes in all this, but it's not just everyone risking themselves to help others on the streets and in the hospitals. Every single person who's putting others first, putting their wants behind others' needs, everyone making themselves get through this with kindness and courage and dignity, what else could 'hero' mean?
The Ghost of New York could never be called naïve and he knows, he knows like exhaustion, that not everyone is going to come out the other side of this, that they're already losing bodies, that's why Blaine is in that hospital. But for those that remain there is love, the core of courage, there can be no courage without love to make it worth it, and sometimes love feels like worry, love in the form of worry is agony, and sometimes it feels like grief and that's even worse - but you'd never wish the love away to not have to feel the worry and grief. He stands looking out across his city thinking of Finn back on the streets where cops are needed the most, iBorg's moved into ventilator production, Mike's in another hospital dealing with just as much as Blaine, Congresswoman Mercedes Jones is up in Washington fighting the government to do this right, all that worry and grief and courage, all that love, his eyes sting, all that love in the world just straining to do something to help -
"Hey!" someone calls from across the street, and he looks over to the woman leaning out of her window, waving with both arms. "Hey spooky! Thank you!"
Not for anything in particular, he doesn't recognise her face, but the world is full of heroes right now and he's the only one in front of her to be thanked. He waves back, calls, "Thank you for staying indoors!" and vanishes, to take the running leap onto the next rooftop.
Live. Stay safe, be brave, be kind. It's all that 'hero' means.
I hope you're all keeping safe and well and ignoring everything that fucking Trump is coming out with in the face of this (Do not let people tell you that the economy is more important than peoples' lives. Governments' actions in the past few weeks have already proven that the shape our economy was in before this was not *necessary*, and it can be reshaped to keep people in their homes and their jobs.). Stay the fuck at home. Help each other out. And do the things that keep you steady; cuddle your pets, meditate, read, sing, make art and get some sunlight on your face, look after your loved ones. Take care of your body, now we have harsh proof of how fragile bodies are. And take care of your heart, since we're all struggling with this. But seriously seriously seriously, you guys, stay the fuck at home. Just stay the fuck at home, so you're not making one more job for the people who *have* to go out. The literal only thing you have to do at this point in time to save lives, to be an honest to god hero, is stay the fuck at home: this opportunity will *not* repeat itself, believe me . . .
Rating: R, bit of swearing
Disclaimer: I don't own anything, and frankly good luck finding a lawyer who gives enough of a shit to sue me over this right now.
Warnings and spoilers: Warningswise this is about the state of the world right now and might be stressful if you're already not managing that well; it's not written to *be* stressful but if you're trying to avoid most of the news, it might not be a good idea. Also AtOG was never a fic that pretended that anyone, even children, escapes the worst in the world, so there's that. Spoilers - well, for AtOG and Grey, it would not be a good idea to read this of that verse first?
Summary: It matters not just to survive this but to survive it right.
First he unpeels the unsightly blue disposable gloves from on top of what he's already thinking of as his 'real' gloves. Then he pumps some hand gel from his belt and works it into his real gloves. Then he can pull up the face mask, which is uncomfortable on his skin by this point, his ears feel bruised. And then the Ghost of New York is just sitting on top of Mr Conti's kitchen roof, breathing the cool spring air of the city, feeling it dew-fresh to his skin after the clamping of the mask. He knows that this is not a time to be resentful of what that damn mask is doing to his skin. He still doesn't think there's enough cleanser in the world, though.
He looks down to the alley floor, slides and drops neat as a cat to his feet there, looks through the lit kitchen window and taps once, just with a fingertip; Sal looks up from the table where he's on a laptop jigging a toddler on his knee, and smiles across at the window, and the Ghost looks fondly at the little head of dark curly hair drowsily watching cartoons from Sal's lap, and smiles back. He remembers his own drowsy little dark-headed toddler refusing sleep. Not because all the world was drawn with the stress of a pandemic then but because toddlers are toddlers, and the bedtime 'no' is at least something to rely on.
Thermos of coffee and a pastry in a paper bag on the doorstep. The Ghost almost automatically puts the bag into his mouth to free a hand for the climb and then thinks, No, and has to try not to squish it under his arm instead, semi-solid as he climbs back onto the roof and then can just sprawl there again, exhausted, not just physically. Coffee and pastry beside him for now he lays on his back and stares dazedly up through the dull night sky and he is not used, he doesn't think he can become in any way resigned again, to being alone on a night. It's been over a decade since he was regularly solo for his patrols, and he's had Phalanx for so much longer than he ever didn't have him, and - and he is trying, he really is, he swallows hard and he tries, he's grateful that his dad and Carole are isolated with the kids so they're all safe, he's grateful for every day he doesn't get sick and he gets one more night of trying to help, he's grateful for every single fragment of contact with Blaine so he knows -
He rolls his head to the side, cheek pressing the cold of the roof through his hood, and breathes, and breathes, until the burning of the want to cry has reduced enough to breathe again. Then he sits up and sniffs and remembers not to touch his face and eats his pastry instead, one eye on the time, because Blaine calls before and after each twelve-hour shift and he's only got a few minutes, if Blaine doesn't run over his shift again.
He doesn't, or not by much, Kurt thinks they're keeping an eye on each as best they can in the hospital, making each other take breaks. He's sitting cradling his coffee, staring at nothing and thinking about the kids, he hopes Mouse is asleep, he knows how anxious she gets, he hopes Julio's keeping calm, he stresses himself out trying to hold his own temper down and it's too much for an eight-year-old - when his cell buzzes and his heart gasps as if up from a coma. He tucks the phone up under his hood, held between cheek and shoulder, and says, "Hi, you."
"Hey," Blaine says, sounding tired but relieved. "Mr Conti's?"
"Sal said they drove some pastries to the hospital yesterday in the message."
"They did, it's why I'm maybe ten percent less jealous than I normally am. You okay?"
"I'm fine. Are you?"
"I'm fine. I'm fine. How's your night been?"
"Quiet." Even now the sound of the traffic is a lullaby rather than a nightclub, the way he's always known it. Few planes overhead, few distant voices. His city like a ghost town. "How's your night been?"
" . . . not quiet. Oh - damn. Keep - I just remembered not to rub my eye then."
"- god. Yes." He was just about to do the same thing himself, laughs - nerves, more than anything, slipping the phone back into his palm so his neck can straighten again. "Did you get the video of the kids Dad sent?"
"Yeah, jeez, nothing should be that cute. Literally nothing should be that cute. We are really lucky."
Kurt's throat hardens, and he is far too old to cry and far too close to it every day now. "Yeah," he says, roughly. "We are."
They were lucky to ever have Julio in the first place, Julio who took to the world with delight, who wanted to wear the dinosaur onesie for a full year straight and communicate only by roaring, Julio who sits to meditate with them looking so serious and so calm with one little foot flexing in his lotus, keeping his blades in check. He is such a good boy. And they are so lucky that Julio did have his blades under control, almost always, when they got the call about the little girl who'd been taken into care and then just disappeared, about the invisible walls in the building no-one could get through, they were so lucky that the Ghost, Kurt the father, was able to fade himself into view in that basement where he could hear but not see her breathing, tearful and afraid, and say so quietly, heart just hurting for her, "Hi. Are you just like me too?"
Sort of; like both of them, their little Mouse, fading into view in front of his eyes for the first time, a grubby exhausted four-year-old all cried out and frail with long-ingrained terror. Invisible as a ghost when she wants but never intangible, and none of them understand the shapes she can make in the air, solidity where there was air and just as invisible, shields they can't see, Kurt's tripped over them more than once when she's been playing. She could have been born of them, honestly, though she looks like neither of her fathers - officially they're still fostering her, while the adoption winds its way through the courts - even if Julio could be Blaine's if you squint. It was Julio who called her Mouse, 'Morgan' just never stuck, after he sulked that he didn't want a little sister and then took one look at her when they brought her in, undergrown and skinny and still never quite steady, nothing but fear back then and gripping Kurt's hand in a way that hurt, and his nose wrinkled, and he held his hand out to the silent girl and said, "Come on, mouse. You c'n play with my Legos."
Magnanimity indeed, from a six-year-old. She's not quite so shy anymore, their Mouse, though she's wary of strangers. Her favourite colour is blue because she wants to be just like Elsa, which in a way Kurt is grateful for. It's not like he thinks there's anything antifeminist about pink unless you have no option but pink, and just from a designer's viewpoint the variety of clothing Mouse has to choose from in stores is depressing, it's not really a choice if there's only one colour to choose . . .
You have to be grateful for what you have to be grateful for, when can you feel the luck fiercer than when luck can't be trusted and you face losing it all? Kurt is faint with fear for his dad even if officially he's been healthy for years, but when he thinks about Blaine in that hospital -
He swallows, and tries to make himself mean it when he says it. "We are lucky."
This far, anyway. Because Phalanx, who's spent years focusing on first aid, volunteered in the ER to free up a more experienced doctor for the ICU and the Ghost went weak, went momentarily blind when Blaine told him, saw and heard nothing, fell into some dark inner space of no. The streets are safer than the hospital right now. Anywhere is safer than the hospital. And his husband - no.
. . . but Blaine followed him from Ohio and wanted to do the right thing whatever it cost him and chose the costume to guard his back and he knew, he knew, he knows his husband, there was no point refusing, no point arguing, and in the face of this, his city, the world, he couldn't live with himself to be so selfish. He would give his own life for Blaine's. But they made their choices, the both of them, and he can't put Blaine's life above all those people he's helping now, what the fuck else is the mask for? But it feels different, it feels different, Blaine a world away sealed inside a hospital and they never see each other because they both don't know what contamination they might bring with them and he doesn't even see his dad or his kids and he wants to do what everyone else is doing, bunker down with his family and close the doors on the world, except it's not what everyone else is doing. Not everyone can, and not everyone should. They have to drive the ambulances and stock the shelves and make the medicines. And Phalanx, in a different sort of mask, has to work in that hospital, and the Ghost, alone, has to keep other people out of that hospital to give his husband just one less thing to do, to give all those doctors just some space to breathe.
He remembers the guy with headphones in staring at his phone screen the Ghost ran at and threw his arms around and ghosted as the truck rushed through them both on the street, and his breath comes slow. He knows he can't stop. The emergency services are too stretched already, he has to do what he can, even if that guy wouldn't have survived to take up an ICU bed they can't even spare an ambulance for his corpse right now. So he has to come out, feeling as alone as a single limb, and do what he can with his mind fully on-task even if a good half of his heart is elsewhere. None of them get a choice in this. No-one has a choice to not be living through this, and the heart of it hasn't changed: no-one should be left on their own when the worst things happen.
He's never really thought of himself as brave. He's really trying to be, now, more than he ever knew he could be. It matters not just to survive this but to survive it right. To not be selfish, not be stupid, to be someone his family can be proud of; he cares as if for the first time to be someone that he can be proud of himself. Maybe it's seeing Blaine walk into that hospital like that. Maybe it's just the scale of it, no-one wants to remember this time as the time they decided to be a dick . . .
"You sound all echoey," he says, and remembers again not to rub his eye. "Where are you?"
"Staircase. A nurse was sleeping in the break room, I didn't want to be the tool who woke her up. Did you know you've gone - ho ho - viral again?"
"What? When? I haven't done anything!"
"If I say the phrase 'hashtag don't be so blisteringly irresponsible' would that mean anything to you?"
"Oh," the Ghost says, and rolls his eyes to the plum-coloured sky. "Him. Well he shouldn't have been there to film me cuffing anyone anyway, what the hell some people think 'lockdown' means -"
Blaine laughs, low and a little rough, he sounds so tired that Kurt's heart clenches. "It was - I mean it's hilarious, on one level, it was very - you."
"Mm," he says, irritated at the thought of the very existence of Twitter for the twelve-thousandth time in his life. He's not on Twitter. Of course Blaine is.
"But it - I forget how up close to people we are all the time on the streets, I - watching you have to pin a guy down to get cuffs on him -"
"Oh, Blaine . . ."
"It - freaked me out. Just this - like my spine went tight. Sorry. G-"
Kurt is silent for a diplomatic second and then says, "You were about to call me 'Gurt' again, weren't you?"
"I get - stuck between them sometimes. Um. It - I hate that you're out there. I hate it. We have no idea what you're exposing yourself to."
He's angry and holding it down, that Blaine can't seem to get this. "A smaller viral load than you are, Blaine."
"I'm wearing more protective gear than you -"
"Not enough."
"- and I know what people can get like, even before this - no-one's - spit at you, coughed at you -?"
"You want me to start wearing the goggles, don't you?"
"I really don't care that they ruin the aesthetic, I really seriously don't."
"I don't either, I hope you don't think I'm that shallow. I just lose enough of my peripheral vision with the hood."
"I just -"
"Blaine, I'm safer than you are, you know I'm safer than you are. I wish to god you were out here on the streets with me, you'd be safer here. I'm not touching anyone more than I have to and patrolling is quiet right now, it's like a graveya-" He stops. Until recently he'd never noticed how many allusions to death normal conversation entails. "It's quiet, it really is. Literally the first thing I did tonight was take orders for milk and bread from people shouting out of their windows in one building. I made some dumbass bar that thought they could hide still being open close down. I rescued a bodega cat from a tree."
Blaine laughs, the first true honest laugh, that bark of pleasure that jolts Kurt's heart for not hearing it enough right now. "Oh man. I wish someone had filmed that."
"Her name was Pigeon," Kurt says, sipping some coffee thoughtfully. "I got the paramedics through a locked door to an elderly patient. I also punched a Nazi but I disinfected my gloves thoroughly after that, not just because of the virus, obviously."
"I should've known the Nazis are too dumb to stay indoors."
The Ghost has a rule for himself right now that he doesn't do anything that might add to the numbers of people going into the hospital, and he would have even applied that to the fucking morons spray-painting swastikas onto an Asian supermarket except one of the assholes - it's not just that they tried to fight, it's that one lashed out aiming to snatch off the mask. And it shocked Kurt, the understanding of it, lurching his own head back and looking into the man's vicious, manic eyes, and all his fury fisted in his chest, and he punched him in the face instead. He really doesn't do that much but Phalanx taught him how, and if you're ever going to punch someone it might as well be a Nazi. He's not going to tell Blaine that the guy tried to grab the mask. Blaine has more than enough to worry about, and Kurt is certain he's not telling him half of what's going on in the ER anyway. He can guess enough, and it just makes him want to weep.
"You're not safer than me," Blaine says quietly. "I still have full lung capacity."
The Ghost sighs, heavily. "I get shot the once," he says.
"Kurt."
"I'm fine. You know I'm fine. The scarring is extremely minimal, I'm fine." He presses his cheek to his own shoulder, tired, thinks of Blaine's shoulder beside him in bed, the warmth of the flesh, his him-smell safe in the sheets. "You don't get to pretend that I shouldn't be worrying about you in a building full of the virus if you're worrying about me out here in the fresh air because I got shot a decade ago."
"So we both worry."
"The best part of people," Kurt murmurs, distantly, "that we care enough to worry." He listens to Blaine breathing. He knows he'll be tired and he won't keep him awake much longer, but he wants to do something, something, he is supposed to be a hero and he has never fallen out of love with that man, if he can't make him safe then at least he should be able to make him smile. "There really is so much caring," he offers, head a little lower in the hood. "The way some people have . . . when we come out of the other side of this we'll all know something new about what love can look like. And bravery. Everyone's afraid but everyone's coping, and thinking about other people."
". . . you know I never really thought about, about dignity before. Not what it really means. But in here it's all - it's pretty crazy, but when I get a moment to think I get - I get really scared, Kurt. About you out there. Yeah, about me in here. About everyone in this. And I don't mind being scared so much but I just keep thinking that what matters is how I behave. To not take it out on other people who are scared too. So at the end of the shift I can look back on it mostly the right way. I don't know if that's what that word's really supposed to mean but it feels like it does right now."
"I know what you mean," the Ghost says, hooking a knee closer to rest his chin on it. "It's alright to feel what you do, but if you're the one in the cape you have to act in a way that keeps other people calm." He breathes, slowly. "We're kind of all in capes now whether we like it or not."
"I'm pretty happy to classify people who think that their being inconvenienced is worse than other people dying as supervillains right now, yeah. And these guys - the doctors and nurses in here really are heroes. Really." His voice has gone raw, and Kurt's throat knows how he feels. "I have to be on my best behaviour when I've got them to live up to."
The Ghost swallows, head still resting on his own knee. "I feel so useless. I'm really not doing much of anything to help."
"We need you. Don't think we don't. A paramedic tweeted that you saved him from a mugging."
". . . I know. I know I can't do anything else. And this really isn't about my ego, I just wish I could help - the way you are, right now."
"I don't want you in here with scarring on your lung."
"Oh so you do admit the viral load in there-"
"Oh - god can we not, please, fuck-!"
It takes Kurt a second. "Did you just touch your face?"
"I forgot, shit, shit. Lemme go rinse my eye real quick. Don't freak out, I already washed my hands after my shift, please don't freak out."
He doesn't even want the coffee, all he feels anymore is queasy. "Go wash now. I love you."
"I love you too, be safe, Kh-"
A swallowed not-laugh. "'Khost' -"
"Shut uppp," his husband says, and hangs up to do what he can.
He holds his phone to his forehead for a moment, eyes tight closed, hating everything. But Blaine is right, though it's not the word Kurt would have associated with this before speaking to him; dignity. To get through this the way you'd hope you would, now that you find you have to. So he messages him, Sleep well, I love you, be safe xx and messages his dad, Let me know if you want me to pick anything up for you on the way home, love you xx (he locked his and Blaine's bedroom door from the inside over a week ago, ghosts in and out through the outside wall, never enters the rest of the house; if he's still going in and out there's no reason for anyone else to so much as open the front door and he can leave groceries on the porch for them) and slots the phone away, stands up, stre-tches. He's in what he is diplomatically calling his mid-thirties. He's aware that every extra year is playing the odds now, athletes are retired by Kurt's age, but the Ghost still has things he needs to do and his body still feels supple enough, strong enough. He knows it won't be his own body's ageing that worries him into hanging up the suit, it'll be Blaine's, and the only thing he needs Blaine's body to be strong enough for for the next few weeks is fighting off this virus . . .
He puts the remainder of the coffee down the drain, leaves the thermos outside the door (through the window Sal is slowly dancing around the room with a sleepy dark head resting on his shoulder, yawning) and pulls a new pair of disposable gloves on, refits the mask over his raw face. And then he climbs, higher up the building until he's on a taller roof, looking across his eerily quiet city, all those lit windows and hardly a soul on the streets. And his heart just - he's always sworn he would give anything for this city, and his throat fills hard on the knowledge that so so many of the people he's looking out over right now would do just the same, they're already doing it. Blaine's right about heroes in all this, but it's not just everyone risking themselves to help others on the streets and in the hospitals. Every single person who's putting others first, putting their wants behind others' needs, everyone making themselves get through this with kindness and courage and dignity, what else could 'hero' mean?
The Ghost of New York could never be called naïve and he knows, he knows like exhaustion, that not everyone is going to come out the other side of this, that they're already losing bodies, that's why Blaine is in that hospital. But for those that remain there is love, the core of courage, there can be no courage without love to make it worth it, and sometimes love feels like worry, love in the form of worry is agony, and sometimes it feels like grief and that's even worse - but you'd never wish the love away to not have to feel the worry and grief. He stands looking out across his city thinking of Finn back on the streets where cops are needed the most, iBorg's moved into ventilator production, Mike's in another hospital dealing with just as much as Blaine, Congresswoman Mercedes Jones is up in Washington fighting the government to do this right, all that worry and grief and courage, all that love, his eyes sting, all that love in the world just straining to do something to help -
"Hey!" someone calls from across the street, and he looks over to the woman leaning out of her window, waving with both arms. "Hey spooky! Thank you!"
Not for anything in particular, he doesn't recognise her face, but the world is full of heroes right now and he's the only one in front of her to be thanked. He waves back, calls, "Thank you for staying indoors!" and vanishes, to take the running leap onto the next rooftop.
Live. Stay safe, be brave, be kind. It's all that 'hero' means.