Title: Creeping On A Stranger
Author: an_alternate_world
Rating: T
Characters/Pairing: Blaine Anderson, Sebastian Smythe
Word Count: 3,539
Summary: Seblaine Week 2014: Day 1 (Alternative Meeting). Sebastian has always had a habit of getting in the way and making a nuisance of himself. Since his little sister had gotten sick when he was eleven, he has spent years trying to gain back the attention of his parents.
Warnings/Spoilers: Implied violence.
Disclaimer: I am in no way associated with Glee, FOX, Ryan Murphy or anything else related to the FOX universe.

Blaine sinks and swims, floats and flounders, drifts and drops.

Through the haze, he starts to believe that morphine is an incredible drug.

Sebastian has always had a habit of getting in the way and making a nuisance of himself. Since his little sister had gotten sick when he was eleven, he had spent years trying to gain back the attention of his parents.

At first, he increased his time studying to ace his exams. His parents cast tired, proud smiles in his direction as they assessed his straight As report card.

When that barely worked, he rebelled against the studious studying type and started experimenting in petty crime like writing offensive graffiti on the playground equipment and setting fire to useless pieces of paper in the park. His parents cast tired, concerned gazes when he trudged home long after it had fallen dark outside.

Increasingly frustrated, he found a group of cool older boys. They were everything he wished he was – confident, collected, capable. They were the ones that first introduced him to alcohol. He was barely thirteen, but it helped to numb some of the pain he felt over his sister's illness and the parental abandonment he endured until he realised even that wasn't gaining his parents' attention.

By fifteen, he'd smoked a few joints, been drunk more times than he could count, and hooked up with a couple of naive young boys who were keen to experiment like he was. He was increasingly convinced he was gay, but he had no one to come out to, no one to discuss his uncertainty with, since his parents were so often absent, his sister was too sick and too young to understand, and any friends he had would probably beat him up. It was mostly causing him to smoke more, drink more, trying to pretend he wasn't caught up in this whirlwind of negativity and distaste which was all squarely directed from him towards himself.

When he stumbled home at some ridiculously early hour one morning after he'd fallen asleep in the park with a bit too much alcohol coursing through his veins, he found his father waiting for him on the steps. He paused, leaning against the doorway so that his father didn't notice how he started shaking.

Maybe this is it. Maybe Lillian has finally found some peace.

Instead his father explained that his kid sister was in the PICU, had been moved up the transplant list, wasn't doing too well. The words began to blur together until the numbness Sebastian found at the bottom of a bottle managed to infect his stone-cold sober body. She wasn't gone, but, perhaps, she was going. His father cast a displeased look in his direction, requesting he shower and change before visiting Lillian in the hospital.

Sebastian wanted to protest. He didn't want to see his sister on a ventilator again, her body connected to machines that worked to keep her tiny body alive. Sometimes the only way he got rid of those images was drinking until he couldn't see anymore.

His father wouldn't have listened anyway, so he silently moved upstairs towards the bathroom, figuring that this time would be another downhill slide for Lillian and he'd be forced to watch it.

How could he have expected everything he knew to change?

His mother was usually a doctor in the PICU ward of the Westerville hospital for reasons Sebastian consistently failed to understand. She had a sick kid at home and ignored her other one, and yet she enjoyed spending her days surrounded by other sick kids? Perhaps being a masochist ran in the family and he got it from her.

Regardless, the conflict of interest with her daughter being in close proximity, had led his mom to be transferred to the adult ICU ward. He could tell from the sour expression on her face as she explained the issue to his father that she was entirely nonplussed about the change but Sebastian thinks it's probably a good thing. Being too close to Lillian would wear his mother out faster than the stress she's already endured trying to keep his sister alive for the past four years.

He enters the room and tries not to stare at how small and pale she looks against the white sheets and blankets which surround her. While Lillian is every bit as frail as an eleven year old should look when they've been slowly dying for years, she hasn't grown much since she got sick so she's still barely the height of an eight year old. He looks at her now, with her jaw taped open for the tube to push down her throat, and he can barely remember Lillian being alive and happy, blissfully free of the disease that had wrapped around her tiny heart and begun to squeeze it tight. If Sebastian had been able to sacrifice his own life for his sister, he would have. (Maybe it would have the added bonus of getting his parents to remember they have another child again.)

After an hour of watching her sleep – which Sebastian thinks is pretty boring and extremely creepy – William Smythe mutters something about trying to find some decent coffee and departs the room.

Mostly, Sebastian just thinks his father can't stand watching Lillian anymore.

He waits five minutes before letting himself out. It's not like Lillian will know he was there and isn't now. He glances at the patient whiteboard out of a habit that comes from following his mother around on shifts and can't help but see a room number with an unrecognisable name scrawled in the column. What really draws his attention is '14yo' and 'multiple fractures'.

Sebastian has always has a habit of getting in the way and making a nuisance of himself.

He's not sure anyone's ever considered that he's just incredibly curious, probably borderline nosy.

Sebastian chose this particular room to visit because the person was the closest in age to him. It was really as simple and complicated as that. After all, it was the PICU so he knew he wasn't going to get any stellar conversation from the patients. He glances around himself furtively before he presses open the door, because he's pretty sure there'd be some odd looks to see him going into the room of someone other than his sister. Perhaps he could feign that he was friends? They were pretty close in age after all…

The fourteen year old on the board with the multiple fractures and indecipherable name turns out to be a boy, which Sebastian tries not to think is a great bonus. Observing a girl is much weirder, as he can attest to after spending so much time with Lillian. He closes the door with the quietest of clicks and moves closer into the room.

It's hard to miss how the boy's head is swathed in bandages as well as the left side of his face. He can see a bubble shape over one eye which makes him think there must be some sort of patch under all the layers of gauze and bandages. It's also impossible to miss how his left arm and leg are heavily casted and held in traction pulleys. They make Sebastian wince because he's never thought they could be particularly comfortable, and yet he supposes this boy is too out of it to even understand or feel it.

The boy is like Lillian with a ventilator tube down his throat so Sebastian doubts he's been in the hospital very long otherwise they would have tried to wean him off it. An IV pitter-patters with soft drips and blips while an ECG monitor jumps each time his heart beats. He watches the boy's chest for a moment, at the way it's forced to rise and fall through an artificial pumping. It doesn't rise very much and he wonders if there's broken ribs as well.

He pulls up a chair and watches the boy with morbid fascination. It's far more interesting that Lillian, who he's had memorised for years. Even when he gets too old and develops dementia, he'll be able to recall what Lillian looked like in the hospital – the memories might even haunt him after he dies. Instead, he starts mentally cataloguing what he can see of the boy. He can't tell much about his appearance beneath all the dressings on his face, but he can see a few loose locks of hair which are dark and possibly curly. He can see the edge of full, pinked lips around the tape and tubing. He looks faintly tan but it's hard to be completely sure with the minimal light in the room and the amount of skin which is covered up.

Feeling frustrated with the lack of visual clues, he reaches for the boy's medical chart and starts to peruse the details. If nothing else, four years of going back and forth to hospitals has taught him more than he ever wanted to know about these things and years of asking his mother curious questions about her short-hand notations makes many of these too easy to read.

He reads about how the boy had been brought in a week ago, with the intention of taking him of the ventilator sometime in the next week or two. The numerous IV bags include some powerful painkillers and sedatives because he's got a shattered leg, arm, collarbone and four broken ribs. Apparently his nose was broken and he also has a fractured eye socket. There was a punctured lung, and, his eyes widen, bleeding on his brain.

"Jesus..." he whispers, glancing up at the boy. At least the bandages around his skull make sense now.

He returns to the papers, examining that he'd been admitted through the emergency department after an anonymous 911 call had alerted authorities to an unconscious male outside a middle school. It had taken three days before they'd tracked down a next of kin and the boy's injuries had been referred to the police for further investigation. He re-reads the sentence about next of kin, shaking his head that anyone could fail to notice where their child was for three days. Given the extent of these injuries, the boy could have died. Perhaps this boy's parents cared as little as Sebastian's?

"Someone really did a number on you, hey?" he murmurs, wondering what the boy's story was. He tried to imagine it but even in some of his wildest scenarios, he couldn't really come up with anything that explained how someone got this badly beaten up. After all, for all Sebastian could tell from the injury list and admission records, he'd probably been left for dead. Sebastian knew from his time with the older boys at the playground that a beat down didn't happen without some serious shit leading up to it.

He replaces the chart and memorises the name. Blaine. He likes it. It's unusual, but it rolls off his tongue nicely and it's…it's an attractive name, somehow.

"Rest well, Blaine. Let those bones heal," he breathes, brushing his fingertips against Blaine's uninjured forearm, before creeping back out of the room and returning to Lillian's.

His father doesn't return for nearly another hour. When he does, his eyes are rimmed red and the tip of his nose is puffy.

Sebastian doesn't ask. He's stopped wanting the bad news.

Sebastian frequently visits the hospital under the guise of talking to Lillian while she lapses in and out of consciousness, but he quickly establishes that she's out of it more often than not. After they remove the ventilator and try to keep her more aware of what's going on, it becomes clear that she struggles to remember where she is and whether or not he's been there before. So he uses that to his advantage to peek in on Blaine.

It's ten days after he first 'meets' Blaine that the ventilator tube is gone and an oxygen mask covers his face. Sebastian takes that as a step in the right direction even though he has to check a couple of times to make sure that Blaine's chest is actually rising and falling on its own.

A week after that, he notices that the IV is holding one bag now instead of the three it had held during his first visit. Blaine's still sleeping, or unconscious, but he smiles to himself and hopes that he's getting better.

Another week passes and the bandages around Blaine's face are gone. It surprises him and he steps forward to look closer. With the entire left side of his face on display, Sebastian can now see just how ridiculously long his lashes are, the slight slope to his nose where it was broken. It's impossible to miss some lingering bruising but it's now recognisable as a face.

It's also one which is rather attractive although he reminds himself it's entirely inappropriate to be thinking that way.

He sits by Blaine's bed for little more than half an hour each time he visits, because he doesn't want to get caught by a nurse or have Blaine wake up. He finds himself wondering what colour eyes Blaine would have on more than one occasion. He doubts they're blue given his complexion, but perhaps they're green or brown.

There are plenty of times he's not at the hospital. Occasionally he attends school but rarely for a full day. He gets too many pitying looks from teachers and the handful of friends he has. Within a few hours of being around all of that, he wants to tear chunks out of his hair. He hates that people know things about his personal life and puts it down to his parents calling to let the school know why he's absent so much and then gossipy teachers being overheard. It makes him glad he hasn't come out, because he's pretty sure that would have turned into a wildfire.

Some afternoons, he ignores that he should be at the hospital and turns up at the park to see his old dropkick mates. A joint and several mouthfuls of vodka later, he feels like the king of the world as he stands at the top of the slide with his arms outstretched. Some of the boys hoot and holler at him, ranging from telling him not to hurt himself to encouraging him to see if he can fly. He doesn't have a kingdom to rule but there are a few moments of tranquillity in his head when he's too high to really process what's going on around him.

After a week of being bored in the few classes he'd attended, Sebastian has little interest in trying to find a questioning, lonely-hearted guy on Friday night. He sneaks into the PICU, not for Lillian, but instead to see Blaine. As much as he tells himself that it's wrong to keep visiting someone he doesn't know, he still thinks about how it took three days to find a next of kin. He's never seen anyone visiting Blaine and maybe he thinks no one deserves to be that beat up and isolated in a hospital room. He uses that as an excuse to the mysterious draw the boy has over him, something that keeps pulling him in and pulling him back, time after time. He doubts he'll ever truly understand why, but he finds himself visiting anyway.

He sits by Blaine's bedside with a book he was meant to have read for Literature, losing himself in a world of knights carving up dragons which all seems too easy to be real. Admittedly, Sebastian has to remember he's never fought a dragon before, but he doubts it's really so easy to just kill them. Midway through a chapter, there's a rustling of sheets and a pained grunt in front of him.

He book snaps closed as he glances towards Blaine. There's a very obvious look of discomfort crinkling part of Blaine's face. The ECG skips a couple of beats and then the IV beeps a couple of times. Sebastian watches as it drips faster, liquid sliding through the coiled tubes into Blaine's veins. He suspects it's some sort of painkiller and that the machines register when Blaine's hurting, although he thinks they've eased off the morphine which is probably why Blaine is shifting around easier in pain.

He can't do anything to make it go away though and Blaine seems to still for a few minutes so he returns to his book, immersing himself again in a fantasy world he thinks would be better suited for Lillian's interests than his own teenage ones.

"N-No..."

The voice rasps out so unexpectedly that he nearly drops his book. Blaine's right, uncast hand is trembling against the thin mattress of the hospital bed in front of Sebastian, his right leg squirming under the sheets. It doesn't take a genius to realise Blaine's having a nightmare. He can easily recall the many nightmares he's comforted Lillian after she's wobbled into his room with huge, teary eyes and promised to keep her safe. Uncertain of what sort of boundaries he's probably crossing, he stands to move forward and captures Blaine's shaking hand in his own.

The result is almost immediate. The pinched look of distress around Blaine's mouth and eyes fades. The shuddering breaths stop sounding quite so harsh. His leg stills under the sheets. The ECG shows fewer irregularities in his heartbeat. It's a fascinating change and Sebastian isn't sure whether he should let go or keep holding on.

Creepy though it is, holding on wins.

He tugs his chair closer and gently runs his thumb over the back of Blaine's hand, mindful of the tubes and wires that still seem to snake out of every available section of skin.

Time ticks by, his book lies abandoned on the floor, and Sebastian is on the verge of dozing off. He really should have left a while ago but he feels calmer than he has in a while and it's a hard feeling to want to leave. The hand he's been absently stroking shifts against him and it immediately jolts him awake.

"Who're you?"

The slurred words draw his attention upwards to confused gold eyes and it nearly takes his breath away. He'd wondered what colour Blaine's eyes might be, but nothing could ever have compared to seeing those eyes open. He's entranced and deep down, he thinks that's going to be a huge problem.

He also has a problem since he'd never expected to be caught in this situation of watching a stranger.

"I... Uh..." He stumbles over his words and lets Blaine's hand go because holding onto it seems awkward now. "My sister is here too and I..." Oh hell, he may as well be honest. "I saw your age on the chart and looked in on you because I'm only a bit older than you."

Blaine's eyebrows scrunch together and Sebastian wonders if it hurts. Judging from the quiet whimper, he guesses that it does. "That's...creepy."

"Sorry." Sebastian offers an embarrassed smile and a shrug of his shoulders because yeah, he thinks it probably is way more creepy to have spent time with a perfect stranger than his own sister. "I'm Sebastian."

"Blaine," the boy in the hospital bed says, before a vaguely amused smile crosses his lips, "but I suspect you already knew that."

Sebastian nods unashamedly and crosses his ankles beneath the chair. "Is it weird to say it's nice to finally talk to you?"

"Definitely," Blaine mumbles, his eyes fluttering closed and Sebastian thinks maybe Blaine only has brief windows of consciousness like Lillian as his body continues to heal. "You can come back though, if you want."

"Yeah?" Something unexpectedly warm flutters in his chest. He'd expected yelling to tell him to get out and not return. Being told he can come back is… It exceeds any expectations he'd ever entertained late at night.

"Your face is nice to wake up to," Blaine whispers, his words slurring together again, as he sags into the mattress and Sebastian knows he's fallen asleep again.

He stifles the laugh that threatens to bubble free with a quiet cough and runs a hand over his apparently nice face. It's only when he draws his hand away that he thinks more carefully about the words. Blaine had been left for dead outside a middle school, and thinks he has a nice face. In Hellhole, Ohio, Sebastian wonders if maybe Blaine's gay and the reason his case was referred to the police was because they suspected a hate crime.

Considering what he knows and hears about gay people that has kept him holding onto the secret of his sexuality, he wouldn't be surprised. It saddens him though, because when he looks at Blaine's peacefully innocent, vulnerable face, he knows the boy would never have harmed anyone.

He brushes his fingertips over Blaine's forearm and knows that he really should get going.

"Sleep well, Killer," he murmurs, smiling at Blaine's content little sigh in his sleep.

He can't help hoping that Blaine won't be as confused as Lillian so often is if the boy wakes up to Sebastian again.

~TBC~