In Ivy And In Twine, Chapter 3
Blaine Anderson/Kurt Hummel
M
A fill for this prompt on GAM. A semi-AU. Kurt and Finn hate the idea of soulmates, mostly because neither of them know the name of theirs. But all their friends are a little obsessed, and decide to try to find Kurt's soulmate for him. What they find instead is Cooper Anderson, who says if Kurt doesn't visit a mysteriously ill Blaine in the hospital soon, they both could be in danger.
Also here: http://archiveofourown.org/works/540842
And also here: http://www.fanfiction.net/s/8623353/1/In-Ivy-And-In-Twine
32,698 words
Chapter 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15
Luckily, Finn took initiative and asked enough nurses and random hospital employees to find the right part of the building to go to. Kurt and Rachel wordlessly followed him. They went past an empty gift shop playing sad jazz, the pediatric ward, and through the cafeteria where one solitary doctor ate a late Thanksgiving dinner alone. They went up to the top floor and back down to the first. In the end they found the right place, and Cooper waiting for them, somewhere in the middle.
Kurt knew he recognized Cooper from something, somewhere, but he couldn’t think of what. He felt like maybe it was a movie. Or maybe he just looked like someone he once saw in a movie. They all introduced themselves politely, awkwardly, and then Cooper, Rachel and Finn fell silent and stared at Kurt expectantly.
“Am I... supposed to just go in?” Kurt asked, gesturing to the closed door to his left without actually looking at it. It stood there, glaringly, in his peripheral vision. It might as well have had a neon sign above it with a blinking arrow that said, “He’s in here.”
“Sure,” Cooper nodded his encouragement. “Go ahead. No one’s coming to check on him again until the morning, unless there’s some kind of emergency.”
“Is some kind of emergency likely to happen?” Kurt asked, approaching hysterics at the thought.
“No, no, of course not,” Cooper said. “I just meant to say, if there is an emergency an alarm will go off and doctors will come running and... you’ll have advance warning to sort of... run away and hide, because you’re not supposed to be here. But don’t worry! No one knows anything about it but us, and nothing’s going to happen. No one will find out.”
Kurt was not very relieved by this. He nodded a little stiffly but otherwise didn’t move.
“Go ahead,” Finn said eventually, patting him on the shoulder for support. “As quick as you can.”
Kurt frowned at him. “Why?”
“Just... to get the weird first meeting part over with. And,” he added, more quietly, “because it’s already past one o’clock.”
Rachel looked up at Finn, worried. “Can your dad actually ground me until spring break?”
Kurt tuned them out. He worked up the courage to look at the door handle of the room that awaited him, but still didn’t move.
“He’s not even awake,” he heard Cooper saying somewhere in the distance of real life. “He only wakes up for a few hours every day, usually in the afternoons.”
“Can’t you shake him, or jump on his bed, or scream in his ear and wake him up?” Rachel asked.
“No,” Cooper said. “Nothing works. We’ve tried.” He looked at Kurt again. “But he’ll know you’re there. He’ll hear you. Just say hello to him.”
Kurt inhaled suddenly and wondered when the last time he’d done that was. “Fine,” he said. Without thinking about it for another second, he left the bright hallway and attempted to quietly barge into the dark room that Blaine was sleeping in. He thought he heard Rachel wish him good luck before he shut the door again behind him.
He had to wait a moment for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. He heard the noises of medical equipment before he could see it. Nothing cliche like a beeping heart monitor, just the hum of a lot of electricity. And he could see the little red and green lights on them, sometimes blinking, which probably meant something.
Eventually the outline of a window with drawn curtains, a TV, and a bed came into focus. There was a lump of an indistinguishable body on the bed, mostly covered by a blanket. And there was a big comfortable chair next to the bed, implying this patient had visitors who were going to have to sit there for a long time.
Kurt sat in it. He forced himself to look at Blaine, who was lying on his back, sleeping apparently peacefully, with long eyelashes curled against his cheeks. Kurt didn’t know what to think, or what to say, or what to do, or how he felt. If pressed, he might say he felt like his heart was swelling up disproportionately large and was about to come out of his throat.
He decided to take Blaine’s hand in his own. It seemed like the thing you were supposed to do with sleeping people in hospitals. Not really something you did with a stranger, but Kurt felt like he had the right to claim Blaine’s hand if he wanted to. Maybe he had more right to it than anyone else in the whole world. They had a connection. They were connected. Even if someone else, or something else, had decided it for them. It was true.
Blaine didn’t move when Kurt took his hand, but Kurt didn’t expect him to. And Kurt didn’t say anything for a long time. After a while he could tune out the hum of the machines hooked up to Blaine and could hear him breathing instead. A slow, steady, sleep breathing.
Kurt licked his lips before speaking, finally, quietly. “I just realized,” he whispered, “that your brother is in the Free Credit Rating Today commercials. I love those commercials.”
He glanced sidelong at Blaine, who made no change or response whatsoever. But what had he expected him to do, laugh?
Kurt frowned at himself. “Sorry. That wasn’t a good first thing to say. I don’t know what to say. I can’t decide if it’s worse or better that you can’t say anything at all.” He paused, and decided to start over. “I’m Kurt. Hummel. I don’t know how familiar you are with my name, but believe me, I only heard yours for the first time tonight. And I’m already here. I’m here,” he said again. He didn’t know why he said it again, but when he did, Blaine moved. He rolled to his side to face Kurt, and pulled Kurt’s hand closer to his chest. He held Kurt’s hand tight. Instead of passively letting his hand be held, like he’d done a minute ago, he gripped Kurt’s now like he was never going to let go. But he was still asleep.
Kurt couldn’t ignore that his heart had skipped a beat when it happened. He had to sit forward in his chair now, in an uncomfortable, awkward position so that he didn’t pull his hand free from Blaine, but he didn’t mind. “I didn’t believe in this stuff before, you know,” he said. “Or I don’t know if I believed in it or not, but I didn’t really care. Most of the people I know in happy relationships are with people who aren’t the right ones. What’s the fun in being told who to love? Where’s the spontaneity? Isn’t that what makes life good?”
Of course, Blaine didn’t answer. He just held Kurt’s hand like his life depended on it.
“My friends think if I don’t help you get better, and you die, that I’ll die, too. Because I have a cold. Or the flu. Maybe that’s why I came, at first. I guess I’d rather not die, you know, if I had any say in it. But your totally handsome brother thinks I’ll save you just by saying hello. But I can’t, Blaine. I can’t save you. You can’t want to live just to meet me. You need to want to live for yourself. If you can’t get better, because you have some awful mystery disease that won’t let you, then that’s fine. But if there’s anything in the world that’s going to convince you to get better, it shouldn’t be me. I’m really boring, for one thing. I mean, the most exciting thing about me is my closet, and you’d probably get bored of talking about that after a few hours. But mostly, I just don’t... want the responsibility. What if you fall into a coma, or die, when you find out I’m not good enough, or smart enough, or cute enough, or not the person you thought I’d be at all? And I can’t promise if you wake up right now, and look at me, and talk to me, that it will work. I can’t promise we’ll fall in love. It might not be an automatic thing. I can’t just marry you tomorrow. I don’t know you. But...”
He paused. This wasn’t exactly the best speech to give a possibly dying person. If Cooper heard him he would probably throw him out of the hospital. He was doing the opposite of what he was supposed to be doing. But something about the situation made him want to be honest more than anything else. “But,” he began again, “I would like to. I would like to know you, and at least be your friend.”
He looked at the door. He knew Finn would be pacing the halls in impatient fury. Or maybe he’d already called Burt and explained everything, thinking Burt would forgive them if he knew the truth. That seemed like a horrible thing that Finn would probably do. But Kurt didn’t worry as much as he otherwise would have. He’d fallen into a weird peace, lulled into it by Blaine’s breathing.
“I hope you believe me,” Kurt said in conclusion, “when I say that I have to go now, but I wish I didn’t. I wish I could stay with you.”
He might have imagined it, but it almost seemed like Blaine squeezed his hand a little harder, and tried to pull him a little bit closer, like he was trying to pull him into the bed or into his own body, but didn’t have the ability to accomplish it beyond a fraction of a millimeter.
Kurt intended to let go, to pull away and leave the room. But when he actually went to do it he found that he couldn’t. Not that he literally couldn’t, but he morally couldn’t. He knew that Blaine didn’t want him to go, and what if something awful happened and he never saw him again after that night? It was like Blaine had plainly said, “I need you here, Kurt,” and so Kurt couldn’t make himself move or let go.
So he sat there, sometimes looking at Blaine’s eyelashes and sometimes looking at their fingers intertwined, until someone softly knocked on the door and opened it a crack to peer in. It was Finn. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but we really have to go.”
“And our parents usually come early in the morning,” came Cooper’s voice from somewhere. “So, he’s right. You should probably go before they get here.”
Kurt stood, but Blaine still held his hand tight. “I’m sorry,” Kurt whispered to him, almost wanting to burst into tears over how unfair it was and how mean he felt for pulling away from him finally. “I’ll come back again.”
“You can come back any time,” Cooper said. “Any time our parents aren’t here. Any night, really. They always leave around 5 or 6.”
Kurt nodded at him, and rushed out of the room as quickly as he could, because he couldn’t last in there a second longer. He wanted to run straight into the elevator, and then to the car, and then into his bed for the rest of his life, to think everything over and attempt to figure it out. Without saying anything, Finn and Rachel followed him.
From behind Cooper thanked him for coming. Kurt turned to look at him, just for a moment. “I didn’t help anything,” he said.
“I’m sure you did,” Cooper smiled.
Finn and Rachel attempted to ask questions on the way back home, but Kurt couldn’t answer them. He wasn’t sure what had actually happened himself. He stayed mostly quiet in the backseat, watching two half moon imprints from Blaine’s fingernails fade out of his palm, only visible every time they went under a streetlight.
M
A fill for this prompt on GAM. A semi-AU. Kurt and Finn hate the idea of soulmates, mostly because neither of them know the name of theirs. But all their friends are a little obsessed, and decide to try to find Kurt's soulmate for him. What they find instead is Cooper Anderson, who says if Kurt doesn't visit a mysteriously ill Blaine in the hospital soon, they both could be in danger.
Also here: http://archiveofourown.org/works/540842
And also here: http://www.fanfiction.net/s/8623353/1/In-Ivy-And-In-Twine
32,698 words
Chapter 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15
Luckily, Finn took initiative and asked enough nurses and random hospital employees to find the right part of the building to go to. Kurt and Rachel wordlessly followed him. They went past an empty gift shop playing sad jazz, the pediatric ward, and through the cafeteria where one solitary doctor ate a late Thanksgiving dinner alone. They went up to the top floor and back down to the first. In the end they found the right place, and Cooper waiting for them, somewhere in the middle.
Kurt knew he recognized Cooper from something, somewhere, but he couldn’t think of what. He felt like maybe it was a movie. Or maybe he just looked like someone he once saw in a movie. They all introduced themselves politely, awkwardly, and then Cooper, Rachel and Finn fell silent and stared at Kurt expectantly.
“Am I... supposed to just go in?” Kurt asked, gesturing to the closed door to his left without actually looking at it. It stood there, glaringly, in his peripheral vision. It might as well have had a neon sign above it with a blinking arrow that said, “He’s in here.”
“Sure,” Cooper nodded his encouragement. “Go ahead. No one’s coming to check on him again until the morning, unless there’s some kind of emergency.”
“Is some kind of emergency likely to happen?” Kurt asked, approaching hysterics at the thought.
“No, no, of course not,” Cooper said. “I just meant to say, if there is an emergency an alarm will go off and doctors will come running and... you’ll have advance warning to sort of... run away and hide, because you’re not supposed to be here. But don’t worry! No one knows anything about it but us, and nothing’s going to happen. No one will find out.”
Kurt was not very relieved by this. He nodded a little stiffly but otherwise didn’t move.
“Go ahead,” Finn said eventually, patting him on the shoulder for support. “As quick as you can.”
Kurt frowned at him. “Why?”
“Just... to get the weird first meeting part over with. And,” he added, more quietly, “because it’s already past one o’clock.”
Rachel looked up at Finn, worried. “Can your dad actually ground me until spring break?”
Kurt tuned them out. He worked up the courage to look at the door handle of the room that awaited him, but still didn’t move.
“He’s not even awake,” he heard Cooper saying somewhere in the distance of real life. “He only wakes up for a few hours every day, usually in the afternoons.”
“Can’t you shake him, or jump on his bed, or scream in his ear and wake him up?” Rachel asked.
“No,” Cooper said. “Nothing works. We’ve tried.” He looked at Kurt again. “But he’ll know you’re there. He’ll hear you. Just say hello to him.”
Kurt inhaled suddenly and wondered when the last time he’d done that was. “Fine,” he said. Without thinking about it for another second, he left the bright hallway and attempted to quietly barge into the dark room that Blaine was sleeping in. He thought he heard Rachel wish him good luck before he shut the door again behind him.
He had to wait a moment for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. He heard the noises of medical equipment before he could see it. Nothing cliche like a beeping heart monitor, just the hum of a lot of electricity. And he could see the little red and green lights on them, sometimes blinking, which probably meant something.
Eventually the outline of a window with drawn curtains, a TV, and a bed came into focus. There was a lump of an indistinguishable body on the bed, mostly covered by a blanket. And there was a big comfortable chair next to the bed, implying this patient had visitors who were going to have to sit there for a long time.
Kurt sat in it. He forced himself to look at Blaine, who was lying on his back, sleeping apparently peacefully, with long eyelashes curled against his cheeks. Kurt didn’t know what to think, or what to say, or what to do, or how he felt. If pressed, he might say he felt like his heart was swelling up disproportionately large and was about to come out of his throat.
He decided to take Blaine’s hand in his own. It seemed like the thing you were supposed to do with sleeping people in hospitals. Not really something you did with a stranger, but Kurt felt like he had the right to claim Blaine’s hand if he wanted to. Maybe he had more right to it than anyone else in the whole world. They had a connection. They were connected. Even if someone else, or something else, had decided it for them. It was true.
Blaine didn’t move when Kurt took his hand, but Kurt didn’t expect him to. And Kurt didn’t say anything for a long time. After a while he could tune out the hum of the machines hooked up to Blaine and could hear him breathing instead. A slow, steady, sleep breathing.
Kurt licked his lips before speaking, finally, quietly. “I just realized,” he whispered, “that your brother is in the Free Credit Rating Today commercials. I love those commercials.”
He glanced sidelong at Blaine, who made no change or response whatsoever. But what had he expected him to do, laugh?
Kurt frowned at himself. “Sorry. That wasn’t a good first thing to say. I don’t know what to say. I can’t decide if it’s worse or better that you can’t say anything at all.” He paused, and decided to start over. “I’m Kurt. Hummel. I don’t know how familiar you are with my name, but believe me, I only heard yours for the first time tonight. And I’m already here. I’m here,” he said again. He didn’t know why he said it again, but when he did, Blaine moved. He rolled to his side to face Kurt, and pulled Kurt’s hand closer to his chest. He held Kurt’s hand tight. Instead of passively letting his hand be held, like he’d done a minute ago, he gripped Kurt’s now like he was never going to let go. But he was still asleep.
Kurt couldn’t ignore that his heart had skipped a beat when it happened. He had to sit forward in his chair now, in an uncomfortable, awkward position so that he didn’t pull his hand free from Blaine, but he didn’t mind. “I didn’t believe in this stuff before, you know,” he said. “Or I don’t know if I believed in it or not, but I didn’t really care. Most of the people I know in happy relationships are with people who aren’t the right ones. What’s the fun in being told who to love? Where’s the spontaneity? Isn’t that what makes life good?”
Of course, Blaine didn’t answer. He just held Kurt’s hand like his life depended on it.
“My friends think if I don’t help you get better, and you die, that I’ll die, too. Because I have a cold. Or the flu. Maybe that’s why I came, at first. I guess I’d rather not die, you know, if I had any say in it. But your totally handsome brother thinks I’ll save you just by saying hello. But I can’t, Blaine. I can’t save you. You can’t want to live just to meet me. You need to want to live for yourself. If you can’t get better, because you have some awful mystery disease that won’t let you, then that’s fine. But if there’s anything in the world that’s going to convince you to get better, it shouldn’t be me. I’m really boring, for one thing. I mean, the most exciting thing about me is my closet, and you’d probably get bored of talking about that after a few hours. But mostly, I just don’t... want the responsibility. What if you fall into a coma, or die, when you find out I’m not good enough, or smart enough, or cute enough, or not the person you thought I’d be at all? And I can’t promise if you wake up right now, and look at me, and talk to me, that it will work. I can’t promise we’ll fall in love. It might not be an automatic thing. I can’t just marry you tomorrow. I don’t know you. But...”
He paused. This wasn’t exactly the best speech to give a possibly dying person. If Cooper heard him he would probably throw him out of the hospital. He was doing the opposite of what he was supposed to be doing. But something about the situation made him want to be honest more than anything else. “But,” he began again, “I would like to. I would like to know you, and at least be your friend.”
He looked at the door. He knew Finn would be pacing the halls in impatient fury. Or maybe he’d already called Burt and explained everything, thinking Burt would forgive them if he knew the truth. That seemed like a horrible thing that Finn would probably do. But Kurt didn’t worry as much as he otherwise would have. He’d fallen into a weird peace, lulled into it by Blaine’s breathing.
“I hope you believe me,” Kurt said in conclusion, “when I say that I have to go now, but I wish I didn’t. I wish I could stay with you.”
He might have imagined it, but it almost seemed like Blaine squeezed his hand a little harder, and tried to pull him a little bit closer, like he was trying to pull him into the bed or into his own body, but didn’t have the ability to accomplish it beyond a fraction of a millimeter.
Kurt intended to let go, to pull away and leave the room. But when he actually went to do it he found that he couldn’t. Not that he literally couldn’t, but he morally couldn’t. He knew that Blaine didn’t want him to go, and what if something awful happened and he never saw him again after that night? It was like Blaine had plainly said, “I need you here, Kurt,” and so Kurt couldn’t make himself move or let go.
So he sat there, sometimes looking at Blaine’s eyelashes and sometimes looking at their fingers intertwined, until someone softly knocked on the door and opened it a crack to peer in. It was Finn. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but we really have to go.”
“And our parents usually come early in the morning,” came Cooper’s voice from somewhere. “So, he’s right. You should probably go before they get here.”
Kurt stood, but Blaine still held his hand tight. “I’m sorry,” Kurt whispered to him, almost wanting to burst into tears over how unfair it was and how mean he felt for pulling away from him finally. “I’ll come back again.”
“You can come back any time,” Cooper said. “Any time our parents aren’t here. Any night, really. They always leave around 5 or 6.”
Kurt nodded at him, and rushed out of the room as quickly as he could, because he couldn’t last in there a second longer. He wanted to run straight into the elevator, and then to the car, and then into his bed for the rest of his life, to think everything over and attempt to figure it out. Without saying anything, Finn and Rachel followed him.
From behind Cooper thanked him for coming. Kurt turned to look at him, just for a moment. “I didn’t help anything,” he said.
“I’m sure you did,” Cooper smiled.
Finn and Rachel attempted to ask questions on the way back home, but Kurt couldn’t answer them. He wasn’t sure what had actually happened himself. He stayed mostly quiet in the backseat, watching two half moon imprints from Blaine’s fingernails fade out of his palm, only visible every time they went under a streetlight.