Kurt picks up his bulging bag and adjusts the single strap over his shoulder, dipping beneath the load. His bag is stuffed full of books – text books, journals, song books, composition books, every book he has – until the seams stretch to their limits and a bit beyond, pulling at the fabric, threatening to rip. Kurt had emptied out his school locker – taken down his pictures, thrown out his pieces of flair, and wiped it clean - to save his dad the trouble later on.

He waves good-bye to his friends, turning down an offer to go to Breadstix andexcusing himself out of a trip to the mall. He needs to be alone or he might talk himself out of doing this. Next thing he'd know, he'd be at the Lima Mall, pretending to care about Rachel's search for a new reindeer sweater she didn't already own, or at the movies, trying to decide between seeing the new for spring rom-com or the new new for summer rom-com.

Kurt can't keep this up. He doesn't have the strength. Everyone seems to think he's bulletproof, but he's not. The slurs, the jokes, the names, the locker checks, the dumpster tosses – they've started to take their toll.

They're cracking through his armor.

Kurt had been coping this whole time, taking things day by day. He could deal for as long as he had to so long as he had his dreams to look forward to - moving to New York with his best friend, living out of a pricier-than-necessary shoebox apartment, attending NYADA, the premier musical theater school in the country.

Kurt had nailed his audition. Absolutely nailed it. Maybe his resume wasn't all that heavy on the extracurriculars, but his grades more than made up for that. He was so certain he was going to be accepted to NYADA that it was the only school he applied to.

But yesterday afternoon, after the last bell and right before Glee Club, the school counselor handed him a brown envelope. Seeing it, knowing where it came from, made his heart flutter wildly in his chest.

It was the letter he'd been waiting for - his notification from NYADA.

Correction – his rejection letter from NYADA.

So, he wouldn't be jetting off to New York right after graduation. He'd be staying home…in Lima…working at a coffee shop and attending community college.

It wouldn't be a bad life, it just wouldn't be his life.

He couldn't bear the thought of it – sitting around, wasting a year, waiting for another chance to audition, competing against high school kids who will have spent the year singing and performing while he'll have spent it slinging coffee. No. Kurt was sick of fighting for a dream that was too big for him. Apparently, it always had been, he had just been too naïve to see it.

He didn't tell anyone about the rejection. He didn't want to hear the condolences or the pep talks, especially after seeing on Facebook later that night that Rachel had gotten her NYADA letter.

She had been accepted.

He didn't ‘like' her status, and he didn't congratulate her. He might have been acting childish, but it stung too much.

Kurt spent the night alone in his room, lying in bed and staring at the ceiling, contemplating his options. After a while, only one solution came up consistently. He knew it would destroy his father. He knew his friends wouldn't understand, but he wouldn't bother leaving a note. He didn't want to explain himself. He didn't want anyone reading between the lines.

Kurt went through the whole next day like a zombie, ignoring the world around him, thinking through his plan, going over it step by step, visualizing everything from start to finish so there would be no surprises. Eight hours had never felt like such an eternity before, but a day of going through the motions has brought him here, waiting in the shadow of the school, watching his friends climb into their cars and drive out of the parking lot before he gets into his own vehicle. He hefts the bag into the front passenger seat and rounds to the driver's side. He concentrates on each move when he makes it – unlocking the door, opening the door, sitting down, shutting the door behind him, as if all this mundane crap will somehow be important later on.

He turns his key in the ignition, puts his Navigator into gear, and leaves the parking lot, turning down a street that leads away from high school, away from his home, his friends, his dad, everything he knows. He merges onto the freeway, pretty much by rote, on route to the Auglaize River. He's decided how this will end. He only needs the courage to do it, but if he can't, there are alternatives to courage.

That's where the heavy ass bag of books comes in.

The amount to which he's planned this out kind of disturbs him, but even if this is his first attempt, it's not the first time he's thought about it.

He wants it to be the last.

He puts on the radio and hums to the song that comes on, tricking himself into believing that this is any other uneventful night, and he's going for a drive to calm his nerves. He can't find peace in his decision, but it doesn't scare him as much as he thought it would. This ambivalence doesn't sit right with him. He wants to be one or the other, either completely at ease or utterly terrified, but he can't seem to commit himself to one solid frame of mind. He doesn't want to feel blasé about his own life. He wants to believe that he was good for something, that in some small measurement he made a difference.

Kurt parks his Navigator out of sight of the main street – somewhere where it won't be spotted till morning. He takes his cell phone out of his pocket and puts it in the glove compartment to remove the temptation of trying to call for help. He replaces it in his pocket with a pair of handcuffs that he brought, leaving the key behind. (Handcuffs that he lifted from his stepbrother's room. He tries not to wonder why he had them.) This way, with his book bag over his neck and shoulder and his wrists cuffed, there will be no way for him to get the bag off.

Kurt sighs with a shudder.

He's really going to do this and when he does, he'll have succeeded at one thing in his life. In a way, it feels like a relief. He tries to hold on to that feeling. Otherwise, he'll become overwhelmed by the dozens of ways that this feels like a trap, like a mistake.

He steps out of his vehicle, dragging the book bag out along with him. He locks the Navigator up, not wanting anything to happen to it before it gets back to his dad. He hoists the bag onto his shoulder, and with a deep breath in - tasting the last of the cool spring air - he starts down the road that heads to the river. Being late in the season, the sun only now begins to set. Plenty of golden sunlight keeps the sky aglow. Kurt watches it, soaking in as much of these final moments as he can – champagne gold rays kissing the horizon, dappled with a hint of red that signals warmer days ahead, the smell of the freshly cut grass he treads through, the cars whizzing by him on this stretch of the road, a large white feather laying across his path…

Kurt comes to an abrupt halt – as if this feather physically blocks him from moving any further. He stops and stares at it. He doesn't know why, but it stuns him - this pristine, white feather sitting amid the dark green grass. Kurt stoops down, teetering backward beneath the weight of his book bag to get a better look. The feather isn't just long; it's tremendous. He estimates that it's about the length of his arm. It looks like a swath of fresh snow covering this one bit of ground. Kurt reaches out a hand but he doesn't pick it up. He's almost afraid to touch it. He can't imagine what kind of bird would shed such a feather. Egrets would be the logical source, especially close to the water, but he hasn't seen any around lately. He decides to leave it be, but as he goes to stand, his fingers brush it by accident.

“Que sera, sera,

Whatever will be, will be.

The future's not ours to see!

Que sera, sera!”

Kurt uses his make-believe opera voice as they sing the big finish. He giggles when he runs out of breath and the note finally drops, though his mother is able to sustain it a little longer than he can. He looks over at her, sitting behind the steering wheel, stepping on the brake pedal, slowing down to maneuver carefully through the sheets of pouring rain.

“Let's do another one!” Kurt cheers, bouncing up and down in his seat, the leftover crust of his peanut butter and jelly sandwich clutched in a white cloth napkin in his hands. (He always insisted his mother pack his lunch with a cloth napkin. He felt that paper napkins were for the uncivilized.)

“Alright, alright,” his mother agrees, not taking her eyes off the road while she drives over to the far right lane of the highway. “I picked last time so you get to pick this time.”

“Uh…” Kurt considers his options from the repertoire of musical numbers they reserved for automobile singing, “how about something from Annie? Like ‘Tomorrow'?”

“Hmmm,” his mother considers, turning on her blinkers and glancing over her shoulder as she takes the exit ahead, “seems appropriate for a rainy day.”  She shrugs. “Why not?”

“Yay!” he exclaims, kicking his feet with excitement.

Kurt takes a deep breath when his mother does, timing his entrance to hers. He sees her open her mouth to sing…

This is the point where Kurt has to pay attention really hard. His mother has a tendency to try and fake him out. He has to catch her at the right moment or he'd be a half second too late. His mouth hangs open as he prepares to sing, his mother shooting him glances from the corner of her eye, her smile widening.

She does her best to fool him, but he jumps in swiftly and they make their entrance together.

“The…”

The wail of a car horn behind them comes too late. The sound that follows – an explosion of glass and the crunch of metal – nearly blows out Kurt's ear drums. He feels the car spin, and then lift. He hears his mother scream.

Or he thinks it's his mother.

Because the next thing he hears is his own voice yelling.

“Mommy! Mommy, no! Mommy!”

He's outside the car, on the side of the road, surrounded by strangers looking down at him, asking him questions in overlapping and confused voices.

“Are you okay?”

“Little boy, what's your name?”

“Are you hurt? Where are you hurt?”

But he isn't hurt. There isn't a scratch on him. He's lying in the grass on the side of the road with no memory of how he got there. He tries to look past the legs standing around him, tries to find his mother and their car, but the people gathered won't let him see. They keep blocking his way. A gap forms in the crowd when a police officer approaches, and in that split second before the man crouches down to see if Kurt is hurt, Kurt can see EMTs pass by with a person on a gurney – a person he can't see because they're covered in a black bag…”

The first of Kurt's tears hits the grass, and he drops the feather.

The police never found the drunk driver who skidded across three lanes of highway and plowed into their car. No one could explain how Kurt flew from the car and landed in the grass without a scratch since his mother died on impact.

Kurt glares at the feather – stares it down like it killed his mother, as if it somehow had a hand in her death. He stands up, brushing away more tears with the back of his hand, intent on stomping the thing into the dirt, grinding it under his heel until it breaks in half and the white barbs shred, but when he lifts his foot over it, he can't. He can't bring himself to destroy it. On the contrary, he leans back over to pick it up. He doesn't know why keeping it seems important, or how he could have such a thorough change of heart, but he does. He needs to have this feather with him, not that he has a single clue what he's going to do with it once he reaches the river, but he can't leave it behind.

His fingers stop inches away from it. He's not having second thoughts, but he‘s in no hurry to relive that memory again. He closes his eyes, holds his breath, and touches the feather, waiting for the singing, the rain, the car crash, the pain to return, but whatever triggered the memory is gone.

Beneath his fingertips is just a feather.

Kurt picks the feather up, carrying it carefully in his two hands, and continues on. Not far from where he found the first feather, he finds a second, sticking up from a bush in his path, bending with the breeze. He knows he should probably avoid this one – step around it and walk on – but his heart needs it. It's an odd compulsion he can't explain.

Kurt walks over to it. It stands upright from the branches like it had been growing there. Kurt reaches out an unsteady hand, fingers trembling at the prospect of what memory this feather might hold, if it held any at all, if these memories aren't some bizarre hallucination brought upon by the stress of what he's about to do. Kurt swallows hard and leans forward at the waist, his fingers touching the feather at the stem.

“You fucking fag!” is the only warning he gets before he's shoved into his locker, the loose door flying open with the blow and rebounding into his face, leaving a thin cut on his cheek. The sting to his shoulder, still sore from yesterday's locker check, smarts enough to sends stars shooting behind his eyes. Kurt raises a hand blindly to rub the joint, blinking madly to get his vision to return. He can feel the trickle of blood run down his cheek and he raises a hand to catch it before it stains his vintage McQueen shirt. Kurt looks around him, at the other students walking up and down the halls, throwing glances his way. Kurt isn't embarrassed, lying on his back in an awkwardly prone position on the floor with tears in his eyes. After the fifth locker check, he stopped feeling ashamed of being the victim. Mostly, he's pissed - pissed at the jocks who find the need to pick on him every day for no other reason than he's gay, pissed at the kids who walk by, even stepping over him, some of them who know him, not even asking if he's okay, pissed at the teachers who don't even look at him, don't even acknowledge that he's being bullied because then they would have to do something about it, and as far as they're concerned, the district doesn't pay them enough. Kurt struggles to sit up and pulls his knees up to his chin, holding back his sobs. He knows it has to get better, but he wants it to be better…right now.

Kurt yanks his hand away from the feather, and this time his fingers tingle. He opens and closes his hand to get the feeling to return. It's his shoulder, he realizes, burdened by the book bag causing his hand to go numb.

Or was it the locker check? It felt so real.

Kurt reaches a hand to his face to wipe the blood from his cheek, but when he looks at his fingers, they're clean. No blood…just wet from his tears.

Kurt looks up and away from the feather toward the darkening horizon. He's running out of time. Not that he has a specific time limit, but he was hoping before dark…

Kurt plucks the feather from the bush and continues along the road, turning down the embankment. Every five feet or so, he finds a feather, and he touches each one. It still doesn't make any sense to him, but he doesn't fight it. Before he reaches sight of the water, Kurt finds twenty feathers in all, each holding a horrible memory from his past: the taunts and jeers thrown in his face along with about a hundred Slushies, a closeted Neanderthal in his school kissing him and then threatening his life, being accused of cheating to win the student body presidential election, his father's heart attack - they were all there. Strangely, though, he finds himself rushing forward in search of each new one, not because he's some kind of masochist, but because he's looking for an answer. What great hulking beast molted and left these feathers behind, each with a link to his memories, and why? Why are they there? What lesson do they have for him? Or are they just there to prove he's right? That the decision he made to end it all is the absolute correct one, because of this pain lurking in his past?

Kurt races toward the bank, wobbling beneath the weight on his shoulder that has unwittingly become a part of him, his arms cradling a mass of feathers, his feet sinking into the moist ground. He scans the shoreline for another feather, but instead, he sees a dark figure jutting up from the ground, round and formless but also sharp and stiff. When he squints his eyes in the fading light and takes a few steps forward, he sees the figure on the ground is a person, sprawled out on the soft earth as if they had fallen, maybe hit by one of the cars speeding by and thrown here. Kurt slows his stride and then stops. He watches the body, and even from a distance he can tell that this person is breathing.

“Hello?” Kurt calls out. “Are you…are you okay?”

Other than a broken moan, Kurt receives no reply.

“Are you okay?” Kurt repeats but louder, taking a cautious step closer. “Are you conscious?”

The person rises up on hands and knees, lifting their body off the ground about an inch, but then slips and falls back to earth. Their head turns his way, eyes shut, raven curls falling across their forehead.

It's a boy – a boy about Kurt's age. Kurt examines his face – such a handsome, rugged face, young but with lines of worry creasing his brow and tightening his lips. He appears barely conscious, a cut hidden beneath his mass of unruly hair dripping a rivulet of blood down the bridge of his nose. It crosses Kurt's mind that this could be a trap – that this boy is acting, lying in wait, pretending to be hurt to lure unsuspecting Good Samaritans out of their cars so that he can mug them…or worse. The addition of the blood (which could very well be fake) is a nice touch. Kurt is all for realism when practicing the craft.

As foolhardy a decision as it may be, Kurt decides to investigate further. He had planned on dying tonight anyway. It wouldn't hurt to check and see that this boy isn't injured.

“I don't mean you any harm. I just want to help you,” Kurt says, his body shaking, his brain screaming at him to drop his bag and run, but he can't. If this boy is hurt then Kurt can't leave him. He doesn't have the heart.

Besides, helping this boy feels like paying something forward for all those people who ran to his aid while he lay on the side of the road.

“Are you hurt? Is there something I can do to help you?”

The closer Kurt inches toward the boy on the ground, the more gruesome the scene becomes. There appears to be a trail of blood leading up to him, and something – maybe rebar, possibly even bone – sticking out of his back. Kurt stops to lower his bag onto the ground, calculating how he could move the boy without hurting him further. He has to get this boy back to his Navigator and drive him to a hospital before he loses too much more blood. Or he could just…

Kurt pats his pocket for his cell phone and feels the outline of the metal cuffs instead.

“Fuck!” he spits out in aggravation. Damn him for leaving his stupid cell phone in the stupid glove compartment!

At the sound of that curse, the boy's eyes snap open. Kurt yelps, jumping back, startled out of his skin. He takes a step away, but the boy puts up a hand to stop him.

“No,” he says, his voice surprisingly clear for a boy with a possible concussion. “No, Kurt. Please. Don't go.”

Kurt gasps, his brows coming together, confusion shadowing his guarded expression, hugging the feathers in his arms close, their presence suddenly making him feel safer, more secure.

“How…how do you know my name?” Kurt stammers, planting his right foot behind him in the dirt, preparing to run if he needs to.

“I don't mean to startle you,” the boy replies sadly. “I'm not here to hurt you.” The boy tries to rise to his knees, but the things sticking from his back seem to throw him off his balance, and he ends up on the ground again. The boy's head drops on his shoulders in defeat as he takes in a shuddering breath. Strain shows on his face as the things on his back move, first attempting to spread out, but then curling in toward his body. With a cold wash of skeptical recognition, Kurt – not fully ready to believe his own eyes on this account - realizes what the things on the boy's back are.

They're wings – nearly bare, skeletal wings.

“What…what are you?” Kurt asks, wrinkling his nose with disgust at the broken appendages that make an off-putting crackling noise with every slight shift in position.

“I am…” The boy bites his tongue after those two words, closing his eyes tight with a look of pain as if he had been slapped in the face. “I was an angel.”

“I don't believe in angels,” Kurt says staunchly, standing up straight when he declares it.

“I don't blame you,” the boy says, laughing hollowly, looking down at his hands clutching the grass to keep him grounded. “If I were you, I wouldn't believe either.”

Kurt's eyes take in the condition of the wings on his back. If they're fake or real (which would be ridiculous beyond belief, Kurt knows that) he can't tell, but they seem to cause the boy unspeakable agony. Kurt sees it in the blank depths of the boy's watery, golden eyes – golden like the sunset dying all around them, shrouding them in darkness. Kurt sees where the boy's eyes focus, reminded of his strange captives by a light tickling beneath his chin, and pieces to this puzzle fit together.

“Are these…are these feathers yours?” Kurt asks, offering them out to him.

“They used to be,” he says with a sniffle, shaking his head at the offer and turning his face away.

“Did someone do this to you?” Kurt asks, stepping forward, his heart pulled by the boy's expression – full of sorrow – and by his captivating eyes, brimming with unshed tears.

“Not exactly,” he admits.

“Please,” Kurt begs, taking a knee, not even flinching when mud starts to seep through the denim of his jeans, “stop being vague and tell me who you are. Because you know my name, and I get the strange feeling that I should know you.”

The boy sighs; his whole body looking smaller with the release of that one breath.

“My name is Blaine,” the boy says, turning to face Kurt completely. “I used to be a guardian angel…your guardian angel, as a matter of fact…and those…” Blaine points a shaking finger at the feathers held tight in Kurt's arms, “are every time I failed you.”