Once again Blaine was in his old bedroom; he could see the cream colored walls and his tobacco colored bed, but he couldn't understand why he was there and how.

Where was the German man he had saved? What had happened?

Before his got his answers, his bedroom door opened and his mom ran in his direction. He once more heard his father's screams downstairs.

This wasn't a dream. This was a nightmare.

"Please son, go!" begged the dream Diana, holding her son's shoulder just like Diana had in reality years ago. Reliving that hurtful memory, Blaine begged his body to wake up: "Wake up, wake up, wake up! Please wake up!"

"Son, pay attention to me! Blaine! Hear me! You have to run!" The woman in his dreams screamed.

"I can't. Not again; please do not make me leave you behind again!" Blaine shouted, shaking his head. He couldn't, he would never leave her, not again.

"I am begging you, go! Run! Please! Do it for me, for Papa!" The Italian woman cried, kneeling desperately in front of her son like she would have in real life.

Blaine shook his head in disagreement, but his legs were already involuntarily moving in the direction of the window. His dad screamed and claimed innocence downstairs while the policemen were climbing the stairs; soon they would be kicking his door down.

"Mamma," he murmured with his voice cracking. He couldn't leave her. He just couldn't.

"Please son, run and be safe, for me, for papa, promise me, son," Diana whispered while tears fell across her face, blurring her makeup. "Promise me!"

And then Blaine woke up.

His eyes were damp and he was panting: Why did his subconscious do these things to him? Why did he have to dream about it? Wasn't it enough to suffer from those memories during the day? Why did he now also have to dream about it? Blaine only wished that he could forget. He felt like a coward for wanting that, but he just wanted to be able to smile again. Was that too much to ask?

After some minutes of thinking about his vivid nightmare, Blaine decided that is was time to get up. He had a terrible pain in his back due to the uncomfortable position he had been sleeping in the night before, but as he rubbed his eyes and adjusted his vision to the sunlight, he knew it was time to get up. At least he attempted to.

"I can't feel my leg," he said, almost falling onto his chair again without feeling his dormant leg. "Oh wait, ouch! Ouch! Oh, there you are," Blaine said seconds later as he jumped on one foot and felt the muscles of his leg beginning to twist with ache.

"Alright, let's slowly put you on the ground, okay?" The hazel eyed man talked with his own leg before standing on his two feet again. He still stretched himself and yawned for a few times before his brain started to work properly and he remembered.

He remembered the stranger occupying his bed and the reason why he had slept in an uncomfortable chair the night before.

The man looked to the pale figure on his bed and held his breath for a few seconds, panic encompassing him. The German man didn't seem to be breathing at all.

Blaine quickly sat on the edge of his bed and hesitantly placed his hand over the wounded man's chest, looking for a sign of life, a heartbeat, a breath, anything. He stayed in that position for several seconds, with his hand placed on the man's chest until he felt an inhalation.

He sighed with relief. The German was alive. He was breathing.

Blaine knew that he shouldn't feel so relieved by this, but since he had seen the man's eyes, something had awoken in Blaine, a part of him that he neither knew nor had any control over.

This part felt that the idea of never seeing those blue eyes open again was unbelievably painful.

"You scared me, German! Well, I guess I will have to look for some warmer blankets for you. You seem cold," the hazel eyed man whispered, feeling the other man's low temperature under his palm.

Blaine went to look for something that could warm the man on his bed. On his way, he passed by the German's torn clothes and something caught his attention. He stopped. There was something reflecting the sunlight there and it seemed to be something metallic; it could be a bullet, or even a rosary or a pendant.

Getting closer to the shining metal, Blaine saw that it was a small box-like pendant that had fallen close to the left pocket of the German's uniform shirt.

Blaine carefully took the small heart shaped object between his fingers, analyzing it. This reliquary seemed to be something too feminine for a man to carry, especially a German soldier; they were known to be serious and cold hearted people. Why would one of them carry something like that?

Opening it up, he saw a picture of two men, which made everything even more confusing. Why would someone have a picture of two men in one of those things? Reliquaries are made to carry pictures of couples or parents and no one could have two male parents. Besides, neither one of the men in those pictures even looked like the German, excluding the whole possibility of affiliation between him and any one of them. This whole situation left Blaine with a thousand questions running through his mind.

Another thing that puzzled Blaine were the unusual features of these men. Both of them had really dark and curly hair; one of them seemed to have his hair even curlier than the other. They also had a darker skin tone than the German, and their features weren't exactly "Germanic", which raised even more questions about their identity and the reason why that pilot was carrying their pictures.

Closing the slightly dirty, yet still delicate reliquary, Blaine noticed something he hadn't noticed before. In the back of the reliquary was a small inscription. The hazel eyed man didn't really manage to understand what was written there, but he identified some letters. Putting them together, Blaine formed what he thought could be a name.

"Rach?" he read aloud, unfamiliar with the word that he had formed. "Rach?""Raachh...Rach! Rachy?" Blaine exclaimed, testing out loud all the pronunciations he thought could be the right ones for that word. He tried a few more times, horribly imitating a German accent in one of his attempts before giving up and getting the blanket that he had promised to the strange man in his bedroom.

"Well, you seem better, German," Blaine said, placing the blanket over him and checking his temperature. "I think that this morning was just a scare, wasn't it?" he concluded with a small smile.

"You know what? I am kind of tired of calling you 'German', so I guess I will be calling you 'Rach' for now on. It is what is written on your weirdly girly reliquary, so that must be your name," Blaine decided, sitting on the bed and holding the heart shaped locket near the sunlight while trying again to decode what was written on it.

All day, he spent hours looking at that little thing, seeing every detail that he could and memorizing every piece of it.

What Blaine didn't see were two halves of an oval-shaped disc covered with ashes and dirt that had also fallen into the middle of the German's torn clothes. They were too dirty toreflect the sunlight like the reliquary, so they didn't catch Blaine's attention, making the hazel eyed man miss the dog tags notched with numbers and the initials 'K.H.'.

Dog tags that belonged to the pilot Kurt Hummel, a man born in Berlin in the year of 1920.

xxxxXXXXxxxx

In the year of 1920, the world wasn't kind receiving Kurt Hummel to life.

It was winter when he was born, and it was a winter so severe that the cold could freeze people in their sleep if they didn't use enough blankets. And it was in this stupidly cold winter that Kurt's mother, Helen Hummel, died giving birth to him and his father Burt Hummel, veteran of the first war, lost his capacity to smile.

Kurt didn't know why he never saw his dad smile.

Burt couldn't even look into his son's eyes. Those unbelievably pure blue eyes and his smile reminded Burt so much of his wife, and how twisted and horrible the world was.

For Burt, the world began to change from a good and hopeful place to the dark place in which they lived on the day he went to the war. Yes, Burt had come back alive from the war, "in one piece" like people used to say, but something inside him was different, and he didn't feel whole anymore. All those years buried in the trenches had changed Burt. He had become bitter and scared and the only thing that still made sense to him was Helen.

The beautiful and blue eyed woman was Burt's motive to wake up in the morning and face the memories of the war that haunted him. Helen always worked so hard to show him how wonderful the world could be, and was always kind and sincere.

For a while, she convinced him, and Burt began to live again. They got married and Burt was full of hope. Helen was pregnant. He and his wife had given life to someone, to a human being. "How bad could the world be when someone can give life to another person?" he thought in those times, believing in a better life, but then Burt changed his mind again. The world once more revealed itself to Burt Hummel as a bad place in a cold winter's night, taking his wife away from him.

Helen left behind this little piece of light, this little piece of her, and it seemed so unfair. Burt was sure that his son would probably be destroyed and damaged by the world too, just like he was, like Helen was, because for Burt nothing good could last in this world where Helen didn't exist anymore.

And Burt wasn't the only one feeling that way, so devastated and lost. All over Germany, there were people also suffering from the consequences of the first war.

None of them had chosen to fight that war, but everyone paid the price of it. Before the war, they had jobs and families, Germany was growing, and they had an amazing future ahead of them. But then the war came, and the government, too blinded with their imperialist ambitions, started a conflict that only brought damage and suffering for the German people.

After the war, most of the Germans had lost someone they loved, a husband, a father, a brother or a son, and a financial crisis left most of them in misery. They were feeling humiliated, angry and unsupported.

And in the middle of all this misery, without a mom and being raised by a father that didn't smile, Kurt Hummel learned what life was.

Life wasn't about happiness or fun; that was for the lucky people. Life was about loss. Burt taught Kurt that, and Kurt didn't know another way of living.

He never had many toys, only one or two, leaving him so fascinated by his new neighbors and toy makers. When Kurt went to their house, he saw that there was another way to see life. From that moment on, going to his neighbors' house and spending time with Rachel Berry, his neighbors' five-year-old niece, was the only thing that made him happy.

Rachel Berry was a cheerful Jewish girl; she had beautiful brown hair and pretty brown eyes. The young girl spent her time smiling and singing, dreaming about being a huge star and making movies. Since he had met her, nothing, not even cake and candies, made Kurt happier than playing at her house in the afternoons after school.

They played, sang and ran around the entire place holding the funny stars that Rachel's uncles had hung on their walls. Rachel always said that those were called the Star of David. Kurt laughed, because they didn't belong to any David he knew. They belonged to Rachel's uncles and he didn't understand why she insisted on saying that they belonged to this David. They would always be Rachel's stars if you asked him.

The two kids didn't understand why some people said that they didn't belong to the same world. For Kurt, Rachel was the best part of his world. How could she not belong to his world? Her house was full of funny things and there he could smile and play with grownups. Rachel's uncles, that she for some reason secretly called daddies, were fun; they laughed and played and they weren't like Burt, who was always quiet.

And at the end of the day, when Kurt was forced to go back to his home, the young boy couldn't avoid this annoying feeling that grew in his chest. He envied Rachel. She had everything, funny parents and a big house. He didn't have anything, and lived in a small house with a sad dad who never played or sang. Kurt couldn't avoid these feelings, but he always forced those dark thoughts to disappear from his mind. And they did.

At least until Kurt began to be poisoned by the world like his dad had always said he would be.

As Kurt grew up, things began to get darker. Burt got sick and the economic situation wasn't getting any better. Kurt had to start working to buy his dad's medicine. He took every kind of job he could. He worked for endless hours in the few fabric mills that still existed in Germany, followed by even more hours of cleaning the streets and chimneys. In those times, he would have done anything for money just to keep his dad alive.

But even though he did everything he could, things kept getting worse and worse. It began to be too painful for Kurt to see Rachel again. It just hurt too much to hear her talk about going to an art school when he didn't even have the time to sing anymore. She was turning into a beautiful and gracious woman, while he was turning into the weird and dirty boy that cleaned chimneys.

Another thing that hurt his feelings, even if he never admitted it, was seeing her happiness dating Finn Hudson.

Finn was this handsome and tall guy, and he caused all sorts of weird feelings in Kurt; envy for being so strong and manly while Kurt still was small and girly, embarrassment for all the unmentionable and sinful thoughts that filled Kurt's mind when Finn was around, and shame for being poor. Everything about Finn Hudson just felt so wrong and dirty, and Kurt couldn't deal with what he felt being close to Finn and hearing Rachel talk about him.

So he grew apart from Rachel, but even in his bitterness, he knew she wasn't lonely without him. She had all these new friends, like Puck, a strong, Jewish guy with a weird haircut who liked to bully Kurt every time he saw the blue eyed boy walking on the street. There was Sugar Motta and Harmony too, two girls that looked just like Rachel in some aspects and were ambitious like her, but none of them was as talented as Rachel.

As the time passed and Rachel was surrounded by new friends, Kurt became more and more lonely. And like Burt had predicted, it didn't take too much living for Kurt to lose his shine. The blue eyed man just broke; he gave up on happiness and let himself be surrounded by sadness as his dad was.

And unfortunately, Burt died with that image of his son as pneumonia took his life regardless of his son's efforts to keep him alive.

After his father's death, Kurt left the hospital and walked adrift for hours. He walked and walked while tears fell from his eyes; now he had lost everything that life had been worth living for; his mom, his dad who didn't smile, and he would probably lose his house and be sent to the orphanage. What had he done to deserve that? Why couldn't he be like Rachel, special, loved?

Still walking, Kurt saw a commotion.

There were a lot of people together and the look in their eyes was the look of seeing a hero, a savior. In front of that crowd, a man wearing a dark green uniform was speaking; behind him was a giant swastika.

Kurt stopped and listened.

While the man talked, time seemed to freeze. Everything that man said was exactly what those people were feeling, what Kurt was feeling. All the darkness locked in the blue eyed man's chest as in the chest of everyone there was suddenly given a voice by that man. He talked about the German humiliation in the war, about the shattered men that had come back home and the misery that they lived in now. Hearing that speech and the promises of change that man made was everything Kurt needed, everything that everyone there needed.

When the man ended his speech, the gathering of people couldn't do anything besides applaud. None of them realized that they were all being manipulated and fooled. They had so much resentment and suffering inside of them and so little perspective about the future that the promises made by that man seemed to be the best chance they had to end all that misery.

Kurt was sent to the orphanage. He wasn't totally unhappy there. Germany was changing and he was a part of that change, or at least that was what the people who took care of him said.

The teachers and the nurses always told him how he was special being part of the new German nation, and for the first time in his life, Kurt Hummel believed it.

People began to talk that he represented a superior kind, and for the first time in his life, Kurt didn't feel bad about himself.

He wasn't the miserable and weird boy anymore; he was an important part of something so much bigger.

It wasn't too long before Kurt began to dream about joining the army, as his father had once done, but this time to avenge Burt, to make the enemies pay for the shattered man they had left behind with Kurt. At least that was what Kurt was told. He was told that the enemies were responsible for his lonely childhood, and if they hadn't destroyed his dad, Kurt would have had a dad who would have smiled for him.

The party of men speaking in the street that cold night became more powerful when Hitler ascended to power, and the changes grew even more.

The misinformation about Jewish people and foreigners grew as well, and became more twisted and perverse each time it was passed on. Lies were spoken one time, two times, three times, a hundred times.

It was just as Joseph Goebbels, a Nazi party member, had said: A lie told thousands of times becomes a truth.

When the Jews were forced to go to ghettos, Kurt secretly became worried. "What will happen to Rachel?" he thought, but then he saw a couple of short movies produced by the government in the movie theater that calmed his worries. The ghettos showed in those movies seemed like nice places. "She is just with her kind, everything is okay," Kurt thought, ignoring the bad feeling burning in his chest.

When he was old enough, Kurt finally joined the army as he had dreamed of doing. He began special training, because he didn't want to be a simple soldier; he wanted to be a pilot, flying in the sky and following orders, like he had seen in the government movies.

And as Kurt trained, he became great, the best in his regiment, as a matter of fact.

Germany was growing too; the economy was getting better with the development of the military industry. People were working again, but they were being fooled by the misinformation that supported their patriotism and made them think that everything was okay, because the people were happy when the nation and the government was happy.

And the nation was very happy with Kurt. He was close to becoming a pilot due to his efforts and the support of his superiors. Nothing could ruin this new life, and the happiness that he had created.

At least that was what he thought.

A few days before his first mission, Kurt's superior asked for his help. He was going to visit a brother that belonged to the SS, the armed wing of the Nazi party, and he needed someone to talk to on the road and prevent him from falling asleep while he was driving. Kurt didn't want to go at first, but the man was his superior and he was so close to actually going on a mission. He didn't want to risk everything by saying no.

His superior said to Kurt that they were going to a concentration camp.

Kurt had heard about those places. The government had put the Jews there to prevent betrayal. He had also seen the movies about those places, so he wasn't afraid to go.

Because just like the movies that Kurt had seen about the ghettos, the short movies about the concentration camps made them look nice, almost like vacation camps.

So Kurt went with his captain. They travelled a long way before they got there.

When they arrived, Kurt at first didn't believe it, because what he was seeing didn't look anything like it looked in the movies.

This wasn't a vacation camp. This was anything but that.

The camp was separated from the road by a couple of sharp barbed-wire fences, looking particularly sinister, like the ones put up outside any military or semi-military establishment that Kurt had seen.

Naturally, Kurt began to look for the things that he had seen in the movies, but didn't find any. The place was large, like a whole town of barracks painted in disgusting green. There were many people arriving there - soldiers and civilians, too many people.

How would all of them fit into that place?

Kurt couldn't believe what he saw next behind the huge barracks of concrete and the endless lines of people coming in.

Amidst all that mud, there were skeletal figures. Kurt couldn't even identify if they were men or women - they were so skinny, pale and lifeless.

Kurt brought his hand to his mouth and closed his eyes.

He was dreaming. That was the only explanation for what he was seeing, none of it could be real. They had told him how these places were like and this wasn't how they were supposed to be. Any minute, he would open his eyes and wake up, he had to, because this couldn't be the place they had told him about.

Where were the well-built leisure areas that he had seen in the movies? And the refectories? The playground? Where was everything?

This place didn't have anything besides concrete and suffering.

Kurt felt like someone had punched him in the stomach, for when he opened his eyes, everything was still there, all the horror, the suffering, and the concrete. All that he had believed in, all that they had made him believe, were lies.

How could they lie to him like that?

The cost of development of his society was too high; those skeletal figures with striped clothes were people, humans. How could anyone have the power to do that to them? How could Kurt serve a system that did that?

Kurt made an excuse and ran away from his superior. He wanted to leave this place and go back in time to the point where he had just felt safe and happy. He wanted to go back to his neighbors' house and play with the funny stars on the wall.

He supported his weight on a wall and fell on his knees. Kurt then proceeded to vomit everything that he had in his stomach. He was a mess. Luckily, he was in a place where only a single SS member saw him.

"Are you okay, son?" the man asked, placing a hand on Kurt's shoulder.

Kurt jerked as if the hand of the soldier burned his skin through his uniform. The man's kindness was disgusting: How could he be kind to Kurt while being a monster to these people?

Kurt curled away from the man and bumped into something. He fell, thinking he had bumped into a tree or a bush, but then he felt cold skin under his hands. It wasn't a small tree or a bush: The blue eyed man had fallen over a person, a fragile and skinny body of a man.

"K-Kurt?" a broken voice murmured. The voice belonged to the man under him; his hair was shaved and his appearance was reduced to that of skin and bones while his pale skin was covered with purple bruises.

"P-puck?" He gasped, desperately recognizing the man below him. He couldn't believe his eyes; that man couldn't be Puck, not the strong and healthy Puck that he knew. The man under him had lifeless eyes and seemed like he could die any moment.

The SS member took the man away from him, cursing Puck while Kurt stayed still, paralyzed on the ground with his eyes wide open and his breathing coming out in pants, too shocked to move.

"R-Rachel," he kept murmuring to himself. What had happened to her? His Rachel couldn't be like the lifeless ghost that Puck had become. Kurt was shaking his head with the thought of his best friend. She couldn't be in that state. Rachel still had to be the funny girl of his memories, the girl that would never cut her hair short, even if it was only a little bit shorter.

Kurt looked around him and in every feminine figure he could see, he saw Rachel. He could in fact have seen her, but he wouldn't know, because suddenly everyone there was Rachel, lifeless Rachel, skeletal Rachel.

Kurt felt guilty, disgusting, like he would vomit again if he still had something in his stomach. He tried to get up, but fell down again in the same place where Puck had fallen before.

And under his hand Kurt felt something metallic, heart shaped.

When he looked at the metal under his palms, he recognized it in a second. It was Rachel's reliquary; he could see the inscriptions of love that her daddies had made for her.

Puck had Rachel's reliquary.

This could mean only one thing: Rachel was dead.

Rachel would never give someone that reliquary, not even under torture, and if Puck was carrying it, it meant that she wasn't there anymore to protect her most important treasure.

An unbelievable pain took over Kurt's body with that realization. The guilt ran through his veins like a toxin, killing every other thought little by little, every happy memory that Kurt still had. He felt like he had sold his soul in the night of his dad's death and now the devil was making him pay the price, because this world had to be hell.

When Kurt saw his captain again several minutes later, he was still sitting on the ground in front of the reliquary with his palms covering his face. The old German thought that he was feeling sick and told him to go back to the car.

Kurt picked up the little heart shaped accessory and numbly began to walk towards the car. The metallic ornament in his hand seemed to burn Kurt's skin. As he walked, Kurt held it even more tightly. The reliquary made him feel more and more of that guilt burning his senses. He put it in his left pocket, feeling the burn right above his heart.

Kurt didn't help his captain on the way back to the base. He didn't speak a word, barely nodding when the older man asked him something, and he stayed that way for the days that followed.

Everyone in the boot camp thought that Kurt was just anxious about his first mission when he suddenly stopped eating properly and began to act strangely, always staring at this strange metallic accessory before going to sleep.

His posture also changed; it was like he had begun to carry a huge weight on his shoulders. The reliquary in his left pocket felt heavier and heavier as time passed and his guilt grew. Kurt didn't do anything in his free time besides feeling the heaviness of his childhood memories in his chest.

When the day of his first mission arrived and he climbed on his plane, Kurt just wanted to fly away from that place, from the lies and the guilt.

When his regiment was flying into the English airspace, Kurt suddenly changed his course. His comrades were shocked, but they had a mission and couldn't lose time going after a pilot that probably had become scared and was going back to the base where he would be punished.

No one thought that Kurt wouldn't go back to the base.

Kurt flew and flew until his fuel began to run out and a red light began to shine on his panel. Kurt didn't see the red light, though. His head was full of the horror that he had seen and his chest was too heavy with the burden of his guilt. He just hoped that some enemy plane noticed his lonely German plane and shot him down, ending all the suffering that had been his life since the day he was born.

When Kurt saw an open field under him, he knew that he could land if he wanted to, but the thought of seeing Rachel dead in a ditch in that concentration camp made him realize that even if he could land properly, he probably wouldn't. He would die, just like her, just like he deserved.

He held tightly to the tissue in his left pocket, which was wrapped around Rachel's reliquary, and let go of the control.

And for those final seconds, just in that fraction of time before the plane crashed on the ground, there wasn't Rachel's death on Kurt's mind anymore, just memories of the Rachel who always laughed, holding her Star of David above her head, playing and singing and dreaming of fairy tales.

He felt no pain, no guilt or suffering, only good memories. For the first time since he found the reliquary, there wasn't any burning or heaviness in Kurt's chest. It was just him and death, coming to bring him home to his friend.

Or maybe not.