Kurt didn't see the semi that hit him.

It seems idiotic that something that big could go unnoticed, but it's not Kurt's fault. He did a full-and-complete at the four-way intersection. Then, when it was clear, he eased on through. The semi's driver, on a road he shouldn't legally have been driving and going way faster than he should have been in a quasi-residential area, hit his brakes too late and ran the stop.

It's ironic that one of the reasons why Kurt's dad agreed to buy him the Navigator, despite the exorbitant sticker price, was it's overall safety rating – 5-stars according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and Consumer Reports. It also happens to have one of the highest side impact safety ratings among SUV's in its price range. Had Kurt been hit by a sedan, a 4X4, or another SUV, he would have come out of this with flying colors, probably even walked away. But the 10,000 pound semi, skidding to a stop at 45 miles per hour, practically bent Kurt's Navigator in half. Kurt's not walking away from this one. He can't feel his legs, and his arms - it's like they never existed. His ears ring so loudly it blurs his vision. His head pounds like there's a pickaxe chipping away at his skull, blurring it more. And there's a sharp pain square in the center of his chest. He can't move his head or his neck to look, but he doesn't have to to know why that is. The airbag cracked his ribs, which he knew might happen. He'd heard stories. But the SUV's secondary impact with a telephone pole went a step farther and crushed his chest. A liquid heat started coating his skin, soaking his shirt straight through to his wool coat. For a second, he was afraid it was gasoline. When he figured out that gasoline wasn't what he was tasting, he realized it was something much, much worse.

It's ten o'clock at night. Kurt was on his way to his dad's house to celebrate his dad's second completely clean PSA – another year over with no trace of prostate cancer in sight. He had driven to Lima from New York the minute Carole told him the news – nine full hours. Kurt was just about to find a place to pull over, to call his dad and tell him that he was ten minutes away. He had originally wanted to surprise his dad, but he was running late (traffic in the Holland Tunnel keeping him locked under the Hudson River on the Jersey side for over an hour), and he didn't want his dad calling it a night before he got there. He decided to cross the intersection first and then find a place to park.

Kurt had been so worried that he wouldn't make it in time - that he'd have to enter the house after the lights were out, sneak up to his old room, and sleep off his excitement for the night. And now here he is, pinned behind his steering wheel, fighting to breathe, his cell phone lost somewhere on the seat beside him.

There seems to be about a dozen people outside his SUV, cupping their hands to the window, peeking in to look at him. Whether they're doing anything to help or just taking a look, Kurt doesn't know. He can barely see anything but colored lights through the dark fog growing, but he thinks he saw a camera flash. Morbid sons-of-bitches. Well, let them take all the pictures they want, as long as they're calling 9-1-1, too. He never held much faith in the collective intelligence of the people of Lima, Ohio, but he hopes somebody is trying to do something.

As the seconds tick, tick, tick by, a minute essence of calm in his head tells him that it won't matter. Nothing they do is going to make a difference. And as numb as his body has started to become, in his head, he's furious.

There's so much he hasn't done. He hasn't graduated from NYADA. He hasn't been to Paris. He hasn't starred on Broadway, hasn't written and directed his own musical, hasn't ridden a float in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. He hasn't designed his own fashion line, hasn't walked the runway during Fashion Week. Fuck, he hasn't been featured in an issue of Vogue, and he works there.

He hasn't fallen in love, won't get to start a family. Hasn't had a kiss in the rain.

Hell, he hasn't even buckled down and gotten a cat.

But all of that is meaningless. Life is what happens while you're busy making plans – isn't that the way the saying goes? As his mind scurries to make new plans, to see his life after this tragedy, to work toward how he's going to recover from this, he knows he's lying to himself. He knows there's nothing for him beyond this accident. He's not leaving his Navigator alive. And he's not just being overdramatic. He's been in accidents before. He's been in pain. He's been beaten till his skull cracked, till he blacked out. But each time, there was a certain amount of knowing that things were going to be okay. Even if they seemed scary, even if they turned out to be completely life-altering, it was going to be alright because things get better.

Right now, he's terrified, and there's no sense in him whatsoever that things are going to be okay. More than anything, he wishes he had something to hold on to, something that he believed in to give him comfort.

His mom was religious. While she was dying of cancer, she held strong to her faith in God and heaven. She had even taught him a prayer or two. He remembers some of the rosary, and two or three of the more popular Commandments – no killing, no stealing, no coveting. He can't see how those are going to help him. What did he believe in in life? He didn't believe in God or heaven. He kind of made it a point not to believe in those things. He was so angry at the universe for the unfair things in his life - for his mother dying, for the constant bullying he suffered, for his father being sick and almost dying so many times. The only thing he really believed in was his father…and himself. In his own ability to change the world.

It's a cold comfort for him now.

On some level, he really wishes he could have drunk the Kool-Aid, read the Bible and gone to church. It would have kept him locked in the closet for another decade, but maybe he'd be more at peace with this. Maybe he'd be ready to go, believing something was waiting for him on the other side – some kindly old man outside a set of pearly gates, who would look at him with a fatherly smile and say, “Don't worry what everyone else says. You can come in, too.”

But it would have only been a worthwhile trade-off if he knew that he was going to die this early, and even then, maybe not.

And his father. What about his father? Is he really going to leave his father now, after everything he's been through, having himself been near death and back? He's already lost a wife and a stepson. Is he going to lose Kurt, too? Kurt had made a promise that his father wouldn't. He swore that if his dad woke from his coma, he'd be with him every step of the way, helping him through his recovery, standing by his side to face whatever else came at him. It was the one promise he was going to fight tooth and nail to keep.

He tries to picture his father the last time he saw him, but all he can see is the look on his face when he gets the call about this.

Kurt knows he's crying, knows that tears are falling down his face. He can't feel them, but he knows they're there, carving paths in the dust from the broken air bag and streaking his skin.

He's going to die looking like shit. He could almost laugh, but he doesn't know how to anymore.

Knock knock knock

“Sir? Are you okay, sir? My name is Pete Jackson of the Lima Fire Department. We're going to have you out of there in just a…”

As sirens sound outside his window, as bright lights make their way through the haze and a voice calls out to him to relax, to stay calm, another voice – a softer voice, a more soothing, comforting voice – weaves into what's left of his consciousness, trying to be heard. It's a familiar voice, in that way that memories of lullabies, smells of home, and a long lost loved one's touch are familiar. It's printed somewhere inside him, and unlike the voice outside, demanding that he stay awake, he wants to listen to this one.

This voice calls him by name.

“Kurt…it's okay, Kurt. You're going to be okay.”

“We have an emergency medical crew here, and they're going to break you out in a jiffy. So just…”

“Relax, Kurt. Everything is going to be…”

“…alright? Just listen…”

“…to the sound of my voice, Kurt. It's time to let go.”

“We're going to be do the best we…”

“They can't do anything else for you, Kurt. But it's okay. It's all okay. Let go.”

As the back and forth chorus of voices continue, the quieter voice starts winning. Kurt doesn't want to go, but he can't keep fighting anymore. He doesn't have the strength, not this time. But all Kurt can think is he needs to get to his phone. He needs to reach his phone right away, because he feels it. He feels it going – life and time and future all slipping away, and he can't stop it. He needs to reach his phone and push the call button. He needs to talk to his dad one last time and let him know that right here, right now, the last person he was thinking about was him. How much he loves him. How he doesn't want to leave him. How he's going to miss him.

How he's so so sorr---

***

Kurt is cold. So cold. He's never been this cold before, which is strange because one winter, when he was six, he fell through the ice while pretending to be Dorothy Hamill and into the Auglaize River. He was so frozen after his father pulled him out that he thought he would never be warm again. He had blacked out the second his body hit the water. Being six, he thought he had gone into hibernation, and when he woke up, he was convinced it was spring. His mother handed him a hot chocolate and his father put a fifth blanket over his body, and a day or two later, the world became right again.

But Kurt shouldn't feel this cold.

He shouldn't feel anything.

He's dead.

That thought makes him shiver, something else he shouldn't be able to do, either, but there he is, shivering.

And now's the point when he goes hysterical.

“Hey, hey.” It's the voice. “It's okay.” That familiar voice. It's returned. “It's alright.” And it's coming from someone standing in front of him. “You're going to be fine.” Someone who puts a hand on his elbow and is helping him stand. “Just open your eyes, Kurt. You're going to be alright.” Kurt's almost incredulous to the thought of opening his eyes, but they blink on their own, opening up at the request of that voice, and there he is, standing in front of him, in what appears to be a landscape covered in snow – a man with dark, curly hair, tan skin, and warm, caramel eyes. A man smiling like Kurt's arrival here, in the distinct middle of nowhere, is the best thing that's ever happened to him. “That wasn't so bad, now, was it?”

Kurt stands, straightens his legs (thank whoever, he can feel his legs again), and tightens his grip around the man's hand (his hands – they're back, too.)

“No,” Kurt says – a lame answer to a ridiculous question, “I…I guess not. Who are you?”

“My name's Blaine,” the man says, brushing the loose flakes from Kurt's coat. “Blaine Anderson.”

Kurt looks at him, tilting his head to one side, more confused by the appearance of this man in front of him than he is by ending up here, wherever he is.

“Do I…know you?” Kurt asks. “You seem awfully familiar.” Kurt corrects himself. “Your voice seems awfully familiar.”

A projection of images and a string of the same voice echoes in his head, memories of different dark times in his past – his life flashing before his eyes. During the trying times in his life, he's heard it – when his mother passed away, when his father had his heart attack, when the jocks at school tossed him into the dumpster behind the parking lot.

It was the voice that promised him things would turn out okay.

It was the voice that reminded him that he was strong, that he could get through, that he would overcome.

It was the voice that once turned his hand away from a bottle of sleeping pills and toward his mother's sewing machine.

The man smiles the kind of bashful smile with full lips, rosy cheeks, and downcast eyes that usually accompanies flirting. “Sort of,” he says. “I was assigned to you a long time ago. I'm kind of like your guardian angel.”

Kurt scoffs and shakes his head. “But I don't believe in angels.”

“Well, just because you don't believe in angels doesn't mean we don't believe in you.”

Kurt frowns at that comment. It's witty and it's dismissive, and it's not what he needs. But Blaine smiles again. He squeezes Kurt's arm and his body immediately becomes warmer, so Kurt thinks that for the time being he can forgive him.

“Isn't this…I died,” Kurt says, still not grasping the concept. “Isn't that the end?” Kurt looks around him, at the miles and miles of white sky, white snow, and nothing else. There seems to be no here here, but he's somewhere, and that's confusing. “Why am I still…around?”

It has to be the end. Isn't that what he's always thought? When he's gone, he's gone. Unless this is some kind of outlandish hallucination, and the fire department actually managed to get him out of his SUV and revive him.

No. They couldn't have. He died. Kurt knows that for sure. Or close to sure.

He glances down at his feet, at the indentations he's made – visual evidence that he is, indeed, here. He looks up from his prints in the snow – prints that shouldn't be there and snow that shouldn't exist – to Blaine, patiently waiting for him, smiling so bright his eyes dance.

“Death isn't necessarily an end,” Blaine says. “It's another part of life. In fact, some people think of this as a beginning.”

“A beginning?” Kurt asks. It's almost too impossible, too absurd an idea to comprehend. Death is the black void, the great unknown. When the heart stops, the body no longer breathes, and the brain dies, there's nothing left. How can the shutdown of a human body mean anything but over?

“Yes,” Blaine says. “An opportunity to do the things you didn't get the chance to do on Earth. Do you have any of those?”

Kurt does – one in particular springing to mind when Blaine shifts his eyes down again, his cheeks turning slightly pinker.

“I do,” Kurt says, surprising himself for admitting it. “I definitely do.”

Blaine nods with a look of satisfaction on his face.

“Well,” Blaine says, reaching out a hand to Kurt, “maybe you can tell me about some of them.”

Kurt looks at Blaine's hand lingering in the air, waiting for him to take it. If Kurt doesn't take it, what happens? Does he disappear? He's pretty much done that. And why not go with the man with the divine voice and the welcome-home smile? What else does Kurt really have to lose?

He reaches out a hand to Blaine and takes his. Blaine's palm is soft, and his fingers thread through Kurt's, curl in, and hold on tight. Kurt looks at their hands, joined together, and he smiles. Holding Blaine's hand feels like calm and solace and relief, and in an odd way, perfect - like his hand has been searching for this one hand to hold his entire life.

“Now come on,” Blaine says, catching Kurt's eyes and holding his gaze. Kurt sees a new life flash before his eyes. A life he has yet to experience. A future, with his mom and dad, and Finn, reunited, and this man's a part of it. “There are some people who have been waiting a while to see you again.”