Chapter Text
It had been 7 years since he'd last seen him, since he'd pushed him into a locker, since he'd threatened to kill him —the emptiest threat he'd made. If he were to die, Dave wasn't sure he'd want to live himself. Seven long, life changing years. He'd come out to Azimio a few months after Kurt left McKinley.
"You're... You're one of them?" Azimio had asked. His voice was littered with shock and confusion.
"Yeah, I guess I'm 'one of them', whatever that means."
"Get away from me, fucking faggot!"
Those words cut Dave like a knife.
"Dude, come on. Don't be like-"
"FUCK YOU!" he'd shouted as he pushed Dave into the locker. Karmic retribution, he'd supposed, for all the times he'd done the same to the much smaller Kurt.
He sat there on the ground in front of his locker. He could feel the wet warmth of blood in his hair, the taste of copper in his mouth like sucking on a coin. He was familiar with the feel of it on his knuckles, he was used to the feel of it after football and hockey practice, after long, hard games, but he'd never felt it like this, at the hand of another.
It was more than just physical pain. Every part of him hurt. Rejected by his best friend. It was the very thing he was afraid of most.
More than ever he'd regretted his treatment of Kurt Hummel. He could feel it, physically feel it, as it formed a lump in his throat. His stomach twisted. Why did he have to push away the one person who he thought would still care about him at the end of the day, if he only knew the real him? Jealousy. Fear. He'd crushed on Kurt since he started McKinley. It was Kurt's freshman year, Dave's sophomore, and the first time he saw him, his eyes weren't quite sure where to look first. He was wearing a houndstooth scarf tied around his neck, a Sgt. Pepper jacket, and tight black jeans. He'd known he was different for a long time. He figured out he was gay in middle school. He'd had crushes before, but something about this boy was different.
Seven long years later. Seven long damn years, and here he was, back in fucking Lima where this whole mess started. He never wanted to come back here. Never. When he got away, he swore he'd never look back. Fuck his friends, fuck his family, fuck everything. He was never coming back here. Never. But here he was, and under circumstances that he wished were different.
Funerals. He was used to them. He had no grandparents left. His friend Bryan died in his sophomore year, the same year he met Kurt. But none of those were nearly as bad, as heartbreaking to him, as Mason's. He was 7 years old when his brother, whom he'd idolized since he could remember, had died. He remembered everything, from the phone ringing in the middle of the night and waking him up, to the all too vivid memory of seeing his father cry for the first time.
He was 7 years old, and even then, he knew he was never enough. His brother's death confirmed that. Mason was 16, a licensed driver for all of 4 months, when his parents got the call. He'd swerved to miss a deer. That fucking deer changed everything, or rather it just amplified what already was times 10. That fucking deer...
Mason ran track, played football, basketball, and even hockey (his father's personal favorite), yet he never appeared to be stretched too thin. Dave was never as into sports as his father or brother. His interest in the games were more casual, but he went along with it in an attempt to just be enough. But he wasn't. Never. As hard as he tried, joining pee-wee his first year of school, to watching every damn game on television right between his father and brother, he was never able to escape Mason's shadow. He didn't so much mind. He loved his brother, and his brother loved him. He'd only wished his father would look at him the same way he looked at Mason, that he'd see the same spark in his eye when he talked about him. The spark was never there, and it ate at him, especially since the day he figured out he was gay. His father wasn't a hate-filled bigot by any means, but he'd certainly heard the word faggot tossed around during a hockey game or two. Would this man ever really accept him? Dave struggled with this for years. His grades would fluctuate, he would lash out... He was sure his family would never accept him, never love him for who he truly was. After coming out to Azimio he had even less reason to believe in his world's improvement. He was resigned to the fact that he would just have to go at it alone, that he would just have to stop his own feelings from consuming him. He didn't want to be gay, he didn't want to have these feelings, and he'd do anything to stop them. The only problem with that was, the more he tried to push the feelings down, the more regret he'd feel. The more regret he'd feel, the more his feelings would bubble up inside him, and the angrier he'd get. There was no stopping it. There was only hiding it.
Here he was, 7 years later, on the cusp of quarter-life, and things had changed for him. But in Lima, it always brought the feelings of old back to him. Now, however, instead of striving to push himself down, to hide and run, he would harness all of his energy into staving off his own emotional regression. He would do his damnedest to be a better man. Hell, that's what brought him back here in the first place.
He pulled into the parking lot and turned of his car, halting Dylan's "Tangled Up in Blue". He got out of his car and walked up the sidewalk. Every step he took left a footprint behind, the soles of his old boots forming a trail to the door to the Stanton Memorial Funeral Home. He stepped inside, stomping the wet snow from his boots onto the small rug in front of the door, brushing it from the shoulders of his pea coat. He looked down the hall, where multiple viewing rooms were being used by different sets of mourners. As he walked down the long corridor, with doors every few feet, he saw pictures and wondered what stories were going on in the rooms they marked. The old Korean man in room #2, was he a man with a large, loving family, or a man with no family at all? Judging from the lack of noise, Dave worried that he may have been the latter, and it filled him with sadness. Dave grieved for the man that, he speculated at least, died lonely. Not only did he grieve for him, but he feared for himself. Would that be him?
As he walked further, he saw more faces. A woman who looked to be in her fourties. Was she a mother? Was she a wife? Were her parents still alive? An older African-American woman with incredibly kind eyes, but weathered skin that made him wonder if treacherous things had befallen her in her lifetime. The kindness in her eyes gave him huge respect for her, for maintaining that kindness, even through the sadness he theorized her to have experienced. Finally, he reached the last picture in the hall, the room he was headed to. He saw the picture, a man familiar to him, despite only briefly meeting him once while pressed against a wall. He read the top of the visitors book as he signed his name: "In Remembrance of Burt L. Hummel."