"SHOULD I EVEN ask what happened?" Lindy said as she and Kurt walked into her apartment.

They were both drenched from the rain, their hair matted against their faces and their clothes sticking to their bodies. If she had not just witnessed such unfathomable insanity back at Lake Washington, Lindy would have suggested to Kurt that they take a hot shower together.

Kurt pulled his sopping t-shirt off and tossed it on the ground, exposing his bare chest. Lindy looked away so he wouldn't see her reaction to how deathly skinny he had become.

"You already know. It's the same old shit. It only got worse when I realized I hadn't called you and I got upset in front of her."

"Okay . . . so how does this help anything?" Lindy asked patiently. She genuinely wanted to know what resolution Kurt saw in leaving his house with her, right in front of a watching Courtney.

"Because I needed to be with you anyway. Your dad's funeral was today."

"We've got to be more fucking careful than this, Kurt."

"I'm tired of being careful. Fuck it. If she knows, she knows. She's doing the same damn thing."

Kurt stomped forward and pulled Lindy against him, kissing her lips with breathtaking intensity. He pressed his forehead against hers, closing his eyes.

"I'm going to quit, Lindy, I promise you. But I need you to be there while it happens. It's going to be so fucking hard but I need you."

Lindy, alarmed by Kurt's blunt announcement, grabbed both of his arms and tried to look into his eyes by lilting her head downwards.

"What are you saying? You're quitting?"

"I'm giving it up," Kurt enunciated. It was an unyielding mechanism that allowed Kurt to skirt around the actual word, 'heroin.' It was so much like him to avoid even a simple word.

"You want to be here for that?" Lindy reiterated nervously. Heroin withdrawal was no joke. She was entirely aware of what would happen to Kurt once his body registered that it wasn't getting its daily dose of heroin through his bloodstream. It was a sight unsuitable for the faint-hearted.

"Yes because you're the only person who can get me through it."

Kurt gritted his teeth, squeezing his eyelids even more tightly shut. Lindy inspected his face and felt a cold slap of realization.

"Fuck," she whispered. "You're already withdrawing."

"I'm fine!" Kurt snapped. "Courtney fucking found my last stash and flushed it this morning. So now's the perfect time to start. I've just got to stay here. Don't send me back."

"I would never send you back," Lindy said. She wrapped her arm around Kurt's waist and led him to her bedroom, helping him down onto the mattress. He was breathing hard, holding his stomach. She hadn't even noticed that the rain had dried on his face, and it wasn't water coating his forehead; it was sweat.

"Do you need anything?" Lindy questioned, pulling the sheets up Kurt's chest as she saw a shiver ripple down his body.

"No. Can you lay with me?"

Lindy honored his request and got into her bed beside him, attaching herself close to his quavering figure. For good measure, she laid an arm across his chest to provide as much warmth as she could.

It was like she had gotten on a rollercoaster and it was finally at its highest peak, getting ready to drop her hundreds of feet downwards. Lindy could feel the climax of misery building up in her room. She could see it on Kurt's pale face.

Every bad sign of Kurt's addiction pointed to that very moment as he laid next to her in darkness. He had only been off heroin for a day and perhaps slightly longer, yet he was beginning to experience the most harrowing kind of withdrawal. This meant that even just over twenty-four hours of no heroin had left Kurt in shambles.

Throughout the rest of the night and early morning, he did not sleep. Lindy could hear his panting and restrained whimpering as he tossed and turned and tried to lay in a position where his nausea would fade.

By the time gray daylight spread over the sky and the rain subdued to a drizzle, Kurt had started to vomit.

Lindy refused to leave his side. She was on the floor with him in the bathroom, the same bathroom floor where he had pretty much died only months earlier. Death had sought him out again in the very same spot, and it was close to claiming him.

"Let me call Jack," Lindy pleaded, pushing Kurt's clump of sweaty blonde hair off his face. "He can help, Kurt. I can only do so much."

"Don't. There's nothing anyone can do," Kurt croaked. He hunched back over the toilet, a fresh stream of vomit rushing through his open mouth.

By noontime, Kurt wasn't confident enough to drag himself up off the floor. He had nearly defecated on himself several times, but had demanded Lindy not stress over him. All he claimed to need from her was her presence and nothing else.

Lindy was helpless. She felt the world crushing her shoulders and shoving her into the ground, burying her into a deep pit of suffocation. She had learned about withdrawal when she studied pharmacy and other drugs in college. It was a condition that usually only lasted a week, with the most brutal symptoms cropping up between days three and five without use.

For Kurt, this timeline had been considerably accelerated. It had not taken that standard length of time for Kurt to succumb. It had only a little over a day. 

In other words, his heroin dosages were so great that his withdrawal went into instantaneous effect if not plugged with more of the drug. He had become nothing without it. 

By noon, Lindy was crying. Besides her anguish over Kurt's pain, she was wondering why no one had called. It struck her as entirely odd that Courtney, who claimed to be championing for Kurt's sobriety, had not found a way to discover his whereabouts.

With effort she could have only learned from nursing, Lindy dragged Kurt into her bed and laid him in a ring of pillows. She piled on as many blankets that she could find, cursing when they didn't stop his shivering.

It was the worst thing that she had ever seen.

If hell existed, then Lindy's own hell would certainly be an eternity of watching the love of her life writhe in pain while she stood aside, totally incapable of putting an end to his misery.

Lindy was unwavering as she watched over Kurt. She was curled next to him, crying as he moaned. His muscle aches had only gotten worse as the day passed. There wasn't a limb on Kurt's body that wasn't being ravaged by spasms. He hallucinated, forgetting at times that she was there as she stroked his body and murmured to him through her choked cries. 

"Let me die," he sobbed. "Why can't you just let me die?"

Lindy could barely see. Her vision was so clouded by tears that she struggled to look down at Kurt's gaunt face. She wept as he begged her to end his life, to let him slip away. She grabbed his hand and held it in hers.

"I'm so sorry Kurt. I love you. I'm so sorry," she chanted, shaking her head and wondering where in the hell God was at a moment like this. There had to be some kind of biblical miracle that could have saved Kurt from the purgatory that he was suffering in.

HELP ME, Lindy screamed internally. HELP HIM.

The day came and went. She didn't leave him unless it was to go to the restroom or to make food that Kurt ended up shoving away, unable to eat it. 

As Lindy experienced her worst nightmares unfolding in real life, she couldn't help but to think of the baby. She knew that a fetus had the capability to feel its mother's emotions, especially those that induced anxiety. It was a sharp warning that she needed to keep it together, to somehow wrangle her emotions in so that she did not stress the baby.

Various times occurred in which Lindy almost told Kurt the truth. It danced on the tip of her tongue, prying at her lips and putting up a strong fight. The only continuous thing that stopped Lindy was Kurt's never-ending cries for death.

He begged and begged for an unseen force to take him, to extinguish his despair once and for all. Every time Lindy came close to confessing, she would hear these solicitations and her determination dissolved into her tears.

She didn't think Kurt could handle it. He wasn't ready to be father again, all because he thought he was unfit to be one in the first place. He would be destroyed if he knew what had happened.

The afternoon blended into the evening, but sunset was masqueraded by another onslaught of rain clouds. Lindy and Kurt had not moved. She was still laying against him, her eyes trained on his face as he remained trapped in his own torment. There was no background noise except for rainfall.

The only bright side was that the muscle aches and nausea had subsided and were now coming in intervals rather than all at once. Kurt had grown quiet, appreciating this painless period.

"Tell me something about you that I don't know," he said abruptly. His voice was weak and raspy, but he sounded the most lucid that he'd been all day.

"You know everything already," Lindy vowed timidly.

"I bet I don't. Come on. Think of something."

Lindy racked her brain, trying to come across an old quirk or bad habit that Kurt may have not known about her. The thing was, he really did know all there was to know in the encyclopedia of all things Lindy-related. She struggled to pick out a piece of information that Kurt had not already heard once or twice.

Finally, she settled on a secret that she'd never shared with anyone before. It wasn't because it was anything pertinent — just embarrassing.

"Um," Lindy began, her cheek against Kurt's shoulder as she mused. "Do you know the band Crowded House? And that song of theirs, 'Don't Dream It's Over'?"

Kurt gave a little nod, listening intently with his tired eyes on Lindy.

"Well, I was seventeen when it came out and I absolutely loved it. I listened to the record all the time just to hear that song. I used to tell myself that it would be played at my wedding some day, and the groom and I would dance to it."

She laughed quietly for the first time in hours, distantly reminded of an easier time in her life. Kurt looked highly amused.

"Bullshit. That song's the most square shit I've ever heard."

"It's true!" Lindy said, laughing harder. She felt calm, seeing Kurt almost back to normal, even if it was only temporary.

"Put it on."

"What?"

Lindy's laughing ceased and she drew back, unsure if she had understood Kurt's inquiry.

"Put the song on," Kurt said again, shooting a suggestive glance towards Lindy's turntable in the living room.

"Kurt, why —,"

"Please do it."

He didn't have to ask a third time. Lindy got up and went into the living room, crouching down to thumb through her collected stack of records. She found the album at the bottom and tucked it under her arm before grabbing the record player and lugging it into the bedroom.

Kurt's gaze followed her as she set it down on the dresser carefully. From his spot in the bed, he looked like a sickly patient in a hospital with messy hair and purple-ringed eyes. Lindy glanced at him as she slid the record out of its casing, setting it up on the turntable. It took a bit of adjusting before she found the song.

It broke through the silence of the room, the first real noise besides that of their voices and the weather. Lindy was transported back to her senior year of high school, the fall before she had met Kurt and turned eighteen. She had played the song over and over, even when Trae had teased incessantly her for loving it so much.

Turning up the sound dial, Lindy drifted back over to the bedside. Kurt had closed his eyes and allowed his head to fall back into the pillow. He looked strangely peaceful as Neil Finn sang away in the background.

"Not so bad is it?" she tantalized. Kurt didn't look at her, choosing instead to enjoy whatever he was envisioning in his mind.

"It's still pretty bad. I'm only giving it a chance just this once."

"Why's that?"

"Because I'm trying really hard right now to picture us dancing to this at our wedding for our first dance. You look really beautiful in your dress. I'm in jeans. Everyone's drunk and high but conveniently, you and I aren't. Turns out I'm a bad dancer."

Lindy listened to Kurt's vivid description. Her eyes already felt raw from all the crying that she had done, but they were filling with more salty tears before she could try to hold them back.

"I just want to remember how this looks," Kurt said quietly. His fingers moved across his blankets, finding Lindy's knee and caressing her leg with a tender softness. It was a gesture made to ensure that she was still really there. He took another rattling breath, steadying himself as he continued to dream. 

"I need to remember it because I know I won't ever live to see it happen."