Chapter Text
F all 2014
Dave shifted in his chair and tapped the notecards in front of him. He didn’t need them anymore; he’d done this talk so many times, but he liked the security of them.
He watched students file into the lecture hall, wondering if he’d see anyone he knew. He tapped his foot on the floor, made small talk with the girl sitting next to him, someone he’d done a speaker’s bureau talk with the week before at one of the suburban high schools north of the city. He was caught off guard by a familiar smell, the faint trail of someone’s spicy-sweet cologne. The cologne that had meant too many things to Dave years ago, when he thought he'd known who he was and where he was going. The cologne that told him the boy he'd loved like a brother and lost through his ignorance was near.
The cologne that had plagued him, every goddamn day of two years in that hellhole of a school.
The cologne, something else, some kind of lotion or soap or hair product. The whole combination screamed Kurt Hummel.
Dave’s stomach flipped over. He shifted in his chair, peering around the press of bodies moving into the room, trying to see who had been wearing that cologne, that unlikely scent. All he could see was the slender back of a young man, oversized backpack hanging off one shoulder over a black pea coat, dark-wash jeans and thick-soled shoes. A peek of purple and grey, undulating woven texture around his neck.
Dave watched while he unwrapped himself and settled into a chair near the back of the room, pulling a slim laptop out of his backpack and settling a pair of thick-framed glasses on his face. Dave’s brain raced. It was impossible, after all this time, that he would be here. Kurt Hummel was meant for New York, for high fashion or the Broadway stage, not for a crowded Intro to Psych class in Boston.
It wasn’t Kurt. It couldn’t be Kurt.
But then the man closed the lid on his laptop and Dave’s heart stuttered a beat.
He caught Kurt’s eye, watched Kurt’s face go pale and his eyes go hard. Dave didn’t blame him, there had been no chance for explanation or redemption between them, just the two of them in a glaring spotlight, hurting and hating, Kurt lashing out and Dave shocked into deafening silence. The whole time of it, those two terrible years, he'd hated himself more than he ever hated Kurt. He hadn’t been able to explain, then, but he could now. Kurt shifted, hefted his backpack like he was going to run, but Dave shook his head. Wait, he mouthed. Please. Stay.
Kurt’s eyes flicked from Dave to the door, to the professor striding in and setting her own notes on the podium. He sagged in his seat, defeated. Stay, Dave mouthed again. Let me explain.
Kurt nodded once, and when he turned his face away toward the aisle, familiar everything-is-perfect Kurt Hummel mask in place, Dave could have sworn he saw tears creeping down Kurt’s cheeks.
When the lecture was done, students crowded the table. Most of them were angling to talk with Lena, the trans girl that was one of the speaker’s bureau’s most popular panelists. But then Kurt stepped carefully up to Dave, hands twisting the fringe on his scarf.
“That was a pretty good explanation, but really? You just disappeared, Dave. You left.” He flicked his eyes to the ceiling and sighed, soft and sad. “You left me. Left all of us, when we needed you. I can’t just forgive you for that.”
“You’re right. How about I buy you a coffee?”
Something dark crossed Kurt’s face, a mix of pain and sadness. “You owe me - you owe all of us - more than just coffee.” He closed his eyes and shook his head. His lips moved like he was talking to himself, and when he opened his eyes he pushed words out of his mouth. “Fine.”
There was a cold distance behind Kurt’s words and his demeanor as they exchanged numbers and set a date for the next afternoon at an off-campus coffee shop. Kurt smiled at him when they said their goodbyes, but it was a twisted smile and Dave saw the pain in it.
He wanted to stop Kurt, to beg forgiveness. To say the things he'd finally come to accept: I’m so sorry, I didn’t do enough; I should have stayed but I was scared too; I’m not like that anymore.
But he was pretty sure the only thing Kurt wanted to hear was the one thing that hurt Dave more than anything to admit: I was never like that in the first place.
Kurt should have just pretended that he hadn’t seen him at all. He was thankful, at least, that he’d spotted Dave from behind, his unchanged haircut and the way his shoulders sloped as familiar to Kurt as Finn’s were; he supposed, in the end, that he and Dave had been brothers of a sort, in their own way.
Except for all his imperfectness, Finn had never even thought of betraying Kurt as badly as Dave had. So he pushed through the crowd, through his own trembling sweaty fear, into the classroom and up the stairs to his seat. He held himself stiff and careful behind a shield almost forgotten after almost two years gone from those halls, divested himself of coat and scarf, and settled in for lecture.
The shock that crossed his face when Dave caught his eye wasn’t feigned. He had genuinely hoped that he’d blend into the other 200 bodies in the room, just another invisible boy in jeans and a henley. Kurt was EveryBoy now, nothing distinct or special in his manners or speech, nothing to set him apart or call attention or make him unique or different.
Being different courted a million kinds of disaster, and Kurt couldn’t afford to give up anything else.
He listened to Dave’s part of the presentation with his heart in his throat. He’d known, of course, the bare pieces of Dave’s story. He’d lived the worst chunk of it, after all, inside those walls that had felt like a prison. But the anger and the hurt and the abandonment welled up inside him, and his hands were shaking when he made his way to the table afterwards to talk to him.
It was supposed to be better, everyone had told him, once he made peace with things.
He’d worked at it so long, but he didn’t suspect he was ever going to find peace, not unless he gave in. So he made the date for stupid coffee, ran into the men's room, and was sick to his stomach.
He refused to go to dinner when Regina came over from next door to get him, so she brought him a handful of the saltine packets from the soup bar and some bread so he could make toast in his contraband toaster oven. "I was going to bring you ginger ale," she said, setting the crackers on the edge of his desk, "but I ran out of hands."
"It's fine," he said from his cocoon of blankets. "Thank you."
"You sure you're okay? You look like shit."
"I'll really be okay," he promised, even though he never believed it himself anymore.
Regina let herself out and Kurt stayed there, still, watching the shadows grow and then disappear on his walls.
He didn't sleep.
No, that wasn't quite right. He did sleep, restlessly, and woke up more times than he could count. Each time, he was disoriented, not understanding how a firm bed and warm blankets smelled like blood mixed with grass and dirt, how the normally yellow light from the hall outside had become flashes of blue and red, how the silence around him was shattered by Dave Karofsky's voice yelling over and over I told them to stop, why wouldn't they stop?