MAY, 1993, SEATTLE, WA

          THE PHONE CALL came in the middle of the night. It seemed, looking back on it, like an appropriate time to receive that kind of a call. Nothing good ever happened in the middle of the night when the moon was high amongst the stars against a satin navy sky and the streets were quiet.

The Narcan was sitting in Lindy's nightstand drawer. She was acutely aware of it in a way that made her squirm, wondering if there would come a day when she would actually have to pierce through skin with it. 

The call woke her up from a rather nice dream. In it, she'd been swimming in the Atlantic, waving at Kurt who passed by on a boat. Kurt's dream-self had just been suggesting that she climb out of the water and join him on his boat when the shrill ring of her telephone rattled Lindy awake.

Knowing it must have been urgent, she shoved the covers off her body and ran into the kitchen, snatching the phone off of its hook and raising it to her ear. She was fighting grogginess as she spoke, rubbing her eyes with her fists. 

"Hello?"

"Lindy? It's Krist."

"Krist, my god. What happened?" Lindy's eyes flickered to the clock hanging at a slight tilt on the wall, its hands indicating that it was several minutes past midnight.

"It's Kurt, Lindy. He overdosed tonight."

Her chest spasmed and Lindy clutched at her heart, raking her nails over her skin through the t-shirt she wore. She supported her body against the wall but could still feel herself slipping away.

"W-what? Is he . . . is he . . ."

There was no way that he could be dead. There was no single fucking way that Kurt had gone and died on her, throwing away everything when they had just been reunited. She wouldn't have accepted it even if Krist had said the words to her right then, announcing Kurt's passing. Even if he was dead, Lindy would have found a way to get to him just so that she could beat the hell out of him for leaving. 

"He's alive. He didn't want anyone to know it happened, but Courtney called me hysterical because she thinks I need to talk to him soon. His mom and sister drove over from Aberdeen and were at the hospital with him."

Lindy balled her fist up, pressing it to her temple and kneading her knuckles into her head. "Fuck. Fuck. Was it bad?"

"They said he wouldn't stop talking about Hamlet."

She mashed her lips together, resisting the urge to spew out every curse that she'd accumulated in her vernacular. She wanted so badly to get in her car and drive to him, to shake him and scream at him and beg him to stay on earth rather than remove himself from the only place where he could be beside her. 

"Krist, I'm so scared for him," Lindy said, her voice no more than a whisper in the faint darkness of her kitchen. She felt alone, standing there with no one to return to in her bed.

"I am too, Lindy. He's scaring the hell out of all of us. I can't even begin to think of what will make him stop all this."

"I thought that maybe being with me would have been enough," Lindy muttered. She had finally confessed out loud the demon that had plagued her since she'd gotten back together with Kurt. In a ridiculous sort of way, she was jealous of the role that heroin played in his life. Kurt needed it more than he needed her. 

"It's gone way past that point. Don't blame yourself for that," Krist told her, sounding sad. He had known for weeks about Lindy and Kurt's hidden affair. His best friend had not been able to keep it from and as instinctual as he was, he'd always known those two would find a way back to each other. But that's where his guessing of what Kurt would do next stopped. 

"I'm trying."

"I'll let you go back to sleep now," Krist sighed.

As if that's going to happen.

"I just wanted to let you know what happened tonight. He may not tell you. He knows it will hurt you and I know he knows how much you disapprove."

"Should I let him know that I found out about it?"

Krist hesitated. "If you don't want him to run, then no."

_________

After an unusually long stretch of time in which Kurt did not visit Lindy, he finally found time to stop by her apartment, arriving in the early evening on a weekday. When she answered the door, she clenched her teeth together. Kurt's appearance was getting progressively more grim every time that she saw him.

"Hi," he said softly, entering into the apartment and taking Lindy's face in his hands. They were covered in his usual pair of fingerless gloves, a funny accessory for him to be wearing considering the season. She felt their prickly wool against her cheek but was more distracted by his mouth on hers.

"You look sick," Lindy said, unable to not point out Kurt's thinning face and wan complexion. She wasn't going to tell him that she knew about his overdose, but she did intend to do everything in her power to let him know that she was fully aware of what was going on.

"Things have been shitty at home," he said, excusing her observation and shrugging his arms out of his jacket. He draped it over the arm of the couch and held out his hands, a signal for her to join him in sitting. She did so with resistance -- she was still so mad. She felt betrayed by him, but she didn't want to feel that way. She wanted to understand why. 

"If they were shitty, you could have come here."

"I couldn't get away. Courtney's been hanging around and my mom's been visiting the house like crazy." 

"Huh. Why's your mom visiting?" Lindy asked, probing him with interest, curious to see if he'd crack under pressure. She knew well enough why Wendy had been frequenting the Cobain household. 

"To see Frances," Kurt lied smoothly. "She never gets to spend any time with her."

Lindy allowed this lie to pass. All she wanted to do anyways was lean her head against his shoulder while they watched television. It wasn't fun to try to wheedle the truth out of him when she would have rather enjoyed his company. Kurt complained that he wanted her to read to him, but she told him that they had run out of books. He made a note to bring more the next time he came over.

Eventually he shifted next to her, causing her to raise her head up.

"I'm going to the bathroom. Be back in a minute." He swiftly kissed her head and stood, disappearing into her room. She heard the bathroom door shut.

Lindy didn't know what it was that compelled her eyes to fall upon Kurt's jacket, but they did. They were drawn to it by impulse and for some reason, she could sense the danger, dark and haughty and poisonous, emitting from its invisible pull. 

Cautiously, Lindy reached for it, glancing towards her room. She could see the light of the bathroom was on; she had limited time to do what she was about to do.

She took Kurt's jacket into her lap, carefully turning it over so she could find the oversized pockets on either side. When she stuck her hands in both, she found nothing but empty space and the feel of denim against her fingertips.

But she was smarter than that.

She opened the jacket up, locating the secret pockets on the inside that had been sewn in either by Kurt or a previous owner. She plunged her hands into the first pocket, leery of what her hands might have touched.

Sure enough, she felt the smooth plastic of a bag, lumpy with deadly content. Next to it, she could already tell as she closed her hand around it, was a syringe.

That idiot. He was walking around with a syringe in his pocket like it was chewing gum.

She removed these things hastily and threw the jacket back into place. She folded them into her hands, carefully placing the capped needle tip outwards from her palm as she tucked the evidence behind her back. When she heard the door open and Kurt approaching the living room, she rose to her feet. Her heart was beating hard.

Kurt stopped in his tracks. He looked at Lindy with a wary gaze, like a wild animal trapped in the presence of a hunter. Kurt had been caught so many times in the past that by that point, he was deftly aware of whenever he was about to be captured again by those against him.

"You okay?" he asked uncertainly.

Lindy wasted no time showing Kurt just exactly how she was feeling. She pulled her hands out from behind her, displaying the bag and needle as she unfurled her fingers. Kurt's eyes rounded, but before he could get a word in, she threw the syringe to the ground without a second thought and smashed it beneath the sole of her sneaker. The sound of crunching glass against the carpet was the only noise in the apartment. 

"You promised," Lindy said accusingly. She crushed the bag of black tar heroin in her hand, crumbling it in her fist, devouring it into nothingness in the same sense that she wanted it to disappear from Kurt's life forever.

"Lindy, stop --," Kurt begged, lurching forward with his hand outstretched.

Lindy pushed him away, absorbed in her own hurt. She didn't want to feel him close to her. She didn't want to feel his skin, his breath, his kiss, when he was perfectly okay to continue his dance with death. As long as he kept it up, he threatened their chances of ever feeling those things together again.

"Don't," she warned. "Don't try to come up with any excuse. You made a promise to me and you broke it."

"I'm sorry Lindy, you don't fucking understand, I --"

"There's nothing to understand!" Lindy cried. Disgusted, she threw the bag at Kurt's chest, watching as it hit him and fell to the ground. "If you wanted to live, if you wanted to be happy with me, if you truly loved your daughter, you wouldn't do this shit!"

"How can I be totally happy with you in our situation, Lindy? If I left Courtney for you tomorrow, she'd take Frances away from me in a heartbeat!"

"I don't want to hear it! Shut up!" Lindy shouted. Just as she had done as a child when Trae had taunted her with his jokes, she rammed her hands to her ears and blocked out Kurt's desperate attempts to reason with her. If she wasn't careful, she'd fall victim to them.

"Lindy, if I lose you again, I'll die."

"You're going to die anyways!" Lindy screamed, her hands still clamped tightly over her ears and her eyes screwed shut. She turned away from him, considering walking out of her own home as an escape, but he grabbed her and spun her in his arms.

"I'm fucking begging you right now, just forgive me. God, just forgive me," Kurt pleaded. He was crying now, the blood vessels in his eyes bright red as he implored Lindy to forget what she had seen. She wrestled herself away from him, knowing that if she watched him cry for a second longer, she'd start to cry too. 

"I trusted you," she said bitterly.

Kurt let her go and in one rapid movement, bent down to the ground and picked up the bag of heroin. He held it up so that she could see, his tears still pouring down his face as he hiccuped with pain, before he walked over to her trash can and deposited the bag into it.

"Please, please, please, please," Kurt sobbed coming back over and clutching at her hands.

Something about the way that he was begging, so helplessly and with such abandon, made Lindy fully understand how hopelessly lost Kurt was. While Krist had already informed her that Kurt had been impossibly surly every time that he'd been confronted by his loved ones to end his battle with heroin, this was not the response she had envisioned. He had wasted no time in breaking down in her front of her, bearing all of his agony for her to see. There was nothing that scared him more in the world than the prospect of losing her or Frances. Nothing.

She couldn't abandon him. As much as she wanted to selfishly punish him for his addiction, she couldn't do it. Her love for Kurt was deeper than that, so buried in their years of being bound together that if she left him now, she may as well have ripped her soul apart. There was no leaving him when he needed her.

She let him fall into her arms again and once more, as she had done before, she held him as he wept.