Rated M to be safe.

I wrote this a few weeks ago when I was visiting relatives in the boonies of Iowa. Said relatives live in a blissfully quiet town that is, despite its residents' best efforts, falling down around them. It's the sort of town where you drive around and quickly realize that behind at least a third of the doors you pass lives at least one alcoholic or drug addict. It is small town America after all, what else are people supposed to do with themselves besides self-medicate their boredom with drugs and/or sex? Anyone who describes it differently is lying either to you, themselves or both.

Anyway, being in Iowa warped my thinking about our beloved boys a bit and this is the result.

I don't own Glee.

Blaine glared blearily at the row of prescriptions his mom had lined up along his nightstand. She had hesitated before leaving them, as though she thought at first it might be better to leave them in the bathroom or the kitchen or some other common area of the house, but in the end she left them on his nightstand. He unfairly hated her for it.

There were pills to prevent infection that tasted like mold, a cream to reduce swelling that burned like salt in a bloody wound, a sedative he still took when boxing wasn't enough to deal with his panic attacks, and in the largest bottle there were pain pills.

Blaine obediently grimaced his way through the prescriptions by his bed, making the expected if unintentional faces of disgust or pain when he choked the pills down or rubbed the cream onto his face, but he left the pain pills alone.

Well, almost alone.

After Kurt visited him a few days out of the hospital and commented on how full that one prescription bottle still looked, Blaine took the recommended number of pills out throughout the course of each day and flushed them down the toilet.

His mom watched him closely, more closely than she ever did. She silently checked up on him when he was studying half-heartedly for his SATs, when he tried watching the movies Finn brought over, when she thought he was asleep, but never when Kurt was over. Kurt, paragon of all things good and desired in Blaine's life, was apparently enough of a safeguard by himself that Blaine didn't need her watchful gaze then.

Blaine bore it all with as good a grace as he could manage and tried to ignore the itchy, burning feeling consuming his right eye, tried to ignore the constant headache caused by so much effort put in to focusing on things with only his non-dominant eye. He slept a lot.

In sleep he could forget the jeering faces of his old friends, could forget Sebastian's string of demanding texts erased one by one from his phone's memory card. He could forget his mom's worried glances, his dad's distance, Kurt's drawn and pale face in the hospital room.

He couldn't forget the pain.

It was always there, lingering behind his eyes, taunting his heart, his memories. Halfway through his first week out of school Blaine stopped being able to differentiate the physical pain from the emotional.

Blaine dropped three more pain pills down the toilet and flushed before slowly making his way back to bed and closing his good eye against the nausea-inducing light seeping through the blinds on his window.

His head hurt more today than it had since the accident. Blaine breathed in and out deeply and tried to force himself to stop thinking.

It didn't work.

His mom came in and checked on him, trying to be unobtrusive about estimating the level of the pain pills left in the bottle but Blaine didn't even look at her. He huffed out a sigh when she was gone and squinted at his calendar.

One more day until the surgery.

Another week until Valentine's Day.

Almost a month until his and Kurt's anniversary.

Would they make it to their anniversary if Blaine confessed? Would Kurt still want to be with him if he knew what Blaine was, what Blaine used to be? He'd been good so far about forgiving Blaine his faults, but Blaine feared the day Kurt discovered one fault too many and left him.

This could be that fault. Or it could be one more time Kurt forgave him.

Blaine rolled over and glared at the innocent-looking bottle of pain pills on his nightstand again.

Kurt probably wouldn't understand. He was a good person though, better than Blaine, so he might try. He might make all the right sounds and turn out to be exactly the kind of supportive partner Blaine had always wanted, but he might also lash out at Blaine and turn away from him in disgust.

Blaine wouldn't risk it.

Even if Kurt stayed there was too much of a chance that he would try to support him the way his mom tried to support him. Blaine wanted to throw up at the notion. He didn't need a babysitter.

No, Blaine would continue to grit his teeth through the pain and ignore the pills' addicting powers.

Every pill flushed down the toilet was a victory. Every minute he held the pills in his hand without swallowing them or crushing them into powder was another battle won.

Blaine bore the pain as best he could and slept a lot; he refused to give in to the pill's bittersweet haze.

Thoughts?

It recently occurred to me that this could tie-in quite nicely with my story Just a Temporary Setback as the reason Blaine needed therapy at the We Care Crisis Center. If you'd like to read that one you can find it in my profile.