Archive of Our Own ^beta

memory is a fickle thing. it demands to be trusted, presents itself in white lace and pearls, sits pretty at the forefront of your mind. until, of course, it turns ugly, and there isn’t much worth remembering anymore.

kurt knows this. knows it well. and yet, he looks into the eyes of his brother, his vision dim and inviting. he remembers. stefan wears no pearls, save for the trim of corded lace on the hem of his socks, but dangles an apple over his head. (kurt remembers that it is a salish apple, and he remembers the colour of the ribbon in stefan’s hair. he does not remember the heaviness of the forest. he does not remember the tree’s branches being so bare.)

“what if you balanced it on your nose, like a seal?” his brother says, rolling the apple in between his fingers, “or juggled them. you’re good at juggling, aren’t you?”

“i’m not an animal,” kurt nudges his shoulder with his foot from where he’s perched in between the branches, “why don’t you juggle?”

“because you’re better at it than me,” stefan rolls his eyes, “which isn’t even fair. i’m older. i’m supposed to be the best at these things, you know, at least for another year or two.”

“you’re a better juggler than jimaine.”

“mom’s a better juggler than jimaine. jimaine isn’t a juggler.”

kurt hooks his ankles around the trunk and swings down, lunging for the apple as he falls. stefan yanks it out of his grasp and stumbles backwards. he grins, all teeth. kurt doesn’t. this is not how it’s supposed to happen. he’s supposed to grab the apple; he climbs up to the top of the tree, and gets stuck. he remembers.

he blinks at his brother, upside-down, and calculates his next move. stefan holds it out to him, as all older brothers do, dangling the offer of low-hanging fruit. and so he reaches for it. his tail gives out from where it’s wrapped around the branch, and he falls. he never falls. this is not how it’s supposed to happen.

“not quick enough, eh?”

his brother tosses the apple from hand to hand, looming over him and his ten-year-old limbs, knees covered in dust on the forest floor. stefan smiles; kurt can see his dimples. still, an uneasiness pricks at the back of his neck when he’s offered his free hand. he trusts his brother. he has always trusted his brother. he does not trust this memory.

“you have to start being more careful,” he chides, pulling him to his feet, “accidents happen all the time, but kurt . . .”

his frown brings one of kurt’s own to his face. he still feels it, the disconcerting tinge to it all; he doesn’t know what happens next, even though he should, even though this has already happened. “i’m always careful,” he tries, as if he’s failed some test he didn’t know he was put up for, and stefan shakes his head.

he isn’t meeting his eyes. he’s staring at his abdomen with disappointment. kurt notices, with vague horror, that the front of his shirt is damp. he reaches down to touch it and his hand comes away bloody, the red a muddy crimson against the blue.

“still not quick enough,”  stefan repeats, but when kurt looks up he is gone, and every tree in the forest stretching for miles is bare, ashen against the grey skies.

this is not how it’s supposed to happen.

he remembers this heaviness, the kind that pins your wrists to the ground. as he emerges from his comatose daze, kurt is met with the plain hindrance of consciousness and anesthetic, and the alarming realization that his limbs do not obey him. he knows this place, though he does not know his own place within it, and the inability to locate himself sends a dizzying rush of panic through his body.

he strains his ears. he must. he tries. he doesn’t know what moves. everything comes to him through a viscous sludge, like his ears are full of cotton; low, slow tones, that don’t reverberate off of anything, that don’t give him any indication to the nearest wall or whose voice it belongs to.

it doesn’t matter where he is. because he is in a cage. it all feels the same, anyway.

if he could put the two together, perhaps he’d notice the heart rate monitor spiking, or the heavy breathing of his breath catching in his throat, but everything blurs with the white of the infirmary lights and the metal of the cot railing pressed coldly against his hand and the linoleum floors barely make a sound when he hits them, or maybe it’s his body that’s silent.

“kurt?”

his head weighs a thousand pounds. he pushes against his heavy eyelids, more of a strain than he would like, to make out kate’s hazy silhouette in the doorway. she crosses the room, kneeling to get to him, and that’s when he realizes that he hasn’t gotten any closer to the doorway than he attempted at all.

“did you fall? come on, let me help you,” she hooks her arm around his waist, tries to pull him back into bed; he’s pushing against her, pushing against his own limbs, bone marrow cemented, infirmary air holding him down, “can you stand? i’ll call for help.”

he wants to tell her no. the words form in his mouth, just barely– he doesn’t need back into the bed, he needs to get out, he needs to sober up, he needs–

kurt hears some kind of heaving, whimpering noise, like a wounded animal. he wonders what could be happening in the room next to his until kate turns her panicked eyes on him, and it registers that it came from him.

she looks to the heart rate monitor, which is beeping with a rising ferocity, “it’s . . . oh, kurt. you’re scared. i know. it’s just painkillers. it’s just–”

he has to strain so hard to focus on her words that the second other voices begin to overlap, he tunes her out completely. black spots blurring into shoes and back again dot the linoleum out of the corner of his eye, more arms on him than two. someone pushes something and the liquid in his IV moves; in an instant, the world begins to fall away. he hears that anguished noise again and slumps forward against the floor.

nothing hurts, but he wishes it would. anything besides this numbness. helplessness. anything to make it real. the dead don’t bleed. (or so he’s told.) and with the familiarity of it all, he misses his mother.

he’s hauled up into the cot; in his mind’s eye, he reaches out to kate, someone, anyone, begs them not to send him back, holds onto the lucid world with both hands. nothing happens. his limp arms drag him down, down, down, into the cage.

“listen, i really don’t think you should–”

“move over, kate.”

someone advances on him too quick— he can’t feel them coming, can’t hear their heartbeat. and then it’s darkness, and someone else’s hands. it’s always darkness. always someone else’s hands. never his own.

kurt slips away.

“i told you to be careful.”

kurt looks below him, nothing but the barren ground to cushion his fall. he doesn’t think about the absence of a safety net. if anything, it comforts him. he grins down at stefan, and the tightrope doesn’t wobble, not even with his sabre outstretched.

“i’m always careful.”

“yeah, well, you better be, because mom will kill me if you poke your eye out or something.”

he rolls his eyes, and stefan runs an anxious hand down his face, feigning nonchalance. as if to prove a point, kurt lunges forward, parrying an invisible blow. he catches himself with his foot, secure around the rope.

“see? careful.”

“that wasn’t funny.”

“it kind of was.”

his sabre makes a satisfying noise as it arcs across the air, and he chases his imaginary opponent forwards and backwards along the tightrope, his tail loosely curled around it to tighten and support his weight when he leans backward. he knows when he’s done something particularly impressive when he hears stefan suck in a breath through his teeth; in which case, he winks down at him, and his brother flips him off.

“you don’t need to show off. i just said be careful. ”

“i’m not showing off! this is part of my routine! i’m practicing.”

normally, jimaine would stand in front of one of the spotlights, carefully holding her paper puppets in front of the flame. the shadows would dance along the fabric of the big top, and kurt would dance with them, deflecting every attack, dodging every swipe. for their big finale, he would sheath his sabre, salute the shadow men, and fall backwards off the tightrope, giving the audience a moment of shock before catching himself with his tail and basking in applause.

he pictures jimaine’s puppets, the rising crescendo of hans’ fiddle, playing him into the cue to end the act. he ducks, grin widening in anticipation; on his next thrust, he misses. a searing pain pierces him through, and he stumbles backward, staring down at his abdomen, his shirt rapidly turning scarlet. his sabre drops from his hand. he doesn’t hear it hit the ground.

“you’re still not quick enough,” he hears stefan’s voice, clear as day, but he can’t place him in the swirling world around him, “i told you. accidents happen all the time.”

kurt tries to take a step back. the tightrope disappears from underneath him, and he falls. he never falls. this is not how it’s supposed to happen; this time, not even the barren floor is there to catch him. he plunges into darkness.

waking up is like a splash of cold water, and nowhere that kurt needs it to be. instead, he’s left with his eyes wide open, his pupils refusing to dilate against the infirmary lights, and assumes for a moment that his limbs are handcuffed to the cot until he realizes that it just requires a great deal of effort to move them.

“woah, there. hey, hey. slow down. hey,” he thinks it rather unfitting that the first person he sees once the room comes into focus is scott, looming over him, far too close, “you’re okay. easy, there.”

his throat screams for water when kurt moves his tongue, weighing leaden and burdensome in his mouth, but some kind of desperation makes him push to say the first thing that comes to mind.

“i’m not a horse, scott.”

scott’s eyebrows knit together at whatever gravelly excuse for a sentence it actually turns out to be, but someone must have heard him, because he gets a response of a gruff laugh and the scraping of chair legs.

“there’s the elf i know.”

his voice alone makes every bone in kurt’s body pull towards him. suddenly, he is completely and totally aware of just how big this room feels, just how sparse his comfort has been. his sense of smell returns. the scent of his flannel makes him ache; he longs to curl up somewhere warm and familiar.

“give us a minute, slim,” logan’s silhouette crosses into kurt’s view as scott leaves, and his fingers are numb as he tries to reach out to him. he doesn’t even know if he raises his arms. logan kisses his forehead, lingers close as if he can tell, “hey, darlin’.”

“logan,” it sounds like help. like every emotion loitering under the surface, everything kurt will be embarrassed of showing later, “logan, i can’t feel my–”

a fit of coughs wrack his body, and he can’t feel it so much as hear it. logan reaches for a glass of water, ready on the side table, and presses it to his lips. “here. drink this.”

kurt forces it down, drinks like a dying man. doesn’t stop to focus on what that means. his head pounds, even as the world stays still for the first time in a while. maybe it’s the hydration that makes the tears flow, maybe it’s logan passing his hand across his hair, over and over, like coaxing a baby bird to rest. kurt clutches his dog tags, dangling over the railing, because there’s nothing else.

“my tail. i can’t feel my tail.”

he’s rendered blind, somehow, without it. it’s one of the first things he noticed. or maybe he’s feeling its absence after his plunge off the tightrope . . . he squeezes his eyes shut for a moment, shakes his head. keeps his eyes shut, because it’s nicer there, when he doesn’t have to focus on why the darkness persists. logan lets out a breath from beside him.

“i know. kate made cecilia switch your painkiller. supposed to just numb ya’ instead of making you all dizzy. it’ll come back,” 

soft, faint sobbing fills the otherwise silent room. kurt grasps that it isn’t coming from logan.

“hey, honey, it’ll come back, i promise.”

“i just want to wake up,” he whispers, like a prayer, if god can hear him through this comatose, “i miss you, and i want to wake up.”

a wrinkle appears in logan’s brow. he lets his hand come to settle against kurt’s cheek, and kurt feels his own tears pressing against his face now. “you’re awake, kurt. i’m right here.”

“it doesn’t matter. you’re not real,” he offers some kind of apologetic smile, as if breaking the news to him, “don’t feel bad about it, schatz. it’s not your fault. i’m just waiting to wake up.”

logan doesn’t know what to do, even in whatever dream this is. something about the familiarity of that comforts him. he holds kurt’s gaze for a moment, before standing– his dog tags slip out of his loose grasp– and making his way to the coffee pot. kurt closes his eyes, waits to be resuscitated in the same uncaring room, plagued by the same leaden bone marrow, only without logan.

“drink this. it’ll help.”

kurt cracks an eye open at the smell of coffee. “is your bedside manner just to force drinks on me?”

logan rolls his eyes and fiddles with the buttons on kurt’s cot to sit him up slightly. “not forcing. i’m offering, ‘cause you’re gonna ask me for it in a minute.”

“you know me so well,” he hums. logan brings it close to his lips before kurt even attempts to lift his arm. his eyes soften, “two sugars and–”

“-- and way too much creamer, yeah. i remember. it’s decaf, though.”

kurt smiles, sipping slowly, and approves. “danke,” there’s so much affection in logan’s voice as he speaks to him, for a man who isn’t smiling. kurt’s own smile fades as he meets his eyes, seeing his irises coloured with worry, “please don’t look at me like that.”

logan shakes his head. “just trying to think of somethin’ i can say to convince you.”

“convince me of what?”

“that this is real.”

kurt stares at him, still, and there is no darkness, there is no blood. the room stays perfectly still. he doesn’t remember this, some past event to revisit and twist to fit the cruel whims of the present; all he remembers is how logan makes his coffee, the scent of it on the side table. logan lets out a breath, and leans in close, presses his lips to kurt’s head as if he’s trying to put his pieces back together. the spot in between his neck and the crook of his jaw smells like home, right where kurt fits.

“i want to believe you,” he admits, quietly.

“i know,” logan says, “i know you do.”