Title: Till Death Due Us Part
Rating: PG-13
Characters: ensemble
Summary: Even though they had long moved on and lost touch with one another, Ms. Pillsbury worked for three days straight to contact each and every last one of them.
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction; I don't own the characters, just the story.
Warnings: future fic, character deaths
A/N: I don't like to do author's notes for a variety of personal reasons, but I felt that this piece required one. I would like to get it out in the open that I have no idea what is wrong with me. When I read fan fiction, there are two things that are an automatic turn-off: death fics and future fics. Now that you know this, you can see why I fear for my mental health; the story you are about to read is actually both of these things. The concept for the story came to me last night out of nowhere, and I spent an hour crying myself to sleep as it wrote itself in my head.
Emma Pillsbury was the one to get them together. Even though they had long moved on and lost touch with one another, Ms. Pillsbury worked for three days straight to contact each and every last one of them.
It took a week before they all could request time off, put plans on hold or find babysitters, but Emma was more than willing to delay the funeral until they could all get together. Will Schuester would have wanted it that way.
One by one they descended on the recently constructed Radison on the outskirts out town. It had been years since they'd seen one another, though they had promised on that warm, breezy graduation night 11 years ago that they would keep in touch. As each of the former students entered the immaculate but plain lobby, the others would stand; they would eye each other for a few seconds before breaking down and rushing into a group hug.
Everyone seemed to talk at once, but it was an organized chaos. Brittany sat on Artie's lap as they talked to Mike. Kurt kept an arm around Santana's waist as she laughed out loud at Puck's jokes. Finn, Mercedes and Quinn whispered quietly as Rachel and Tina looked on and smiled.
When their voices were hoarse and the group was mostly caught up on the happenings of the last decade, the ensemble fell quiet. The somber mood followed them as they retired to their rooms, as they tried to get some sleep before the service early the next morning.
The rain had started around 3 AM and hadn't let up by the time they all had arrived at the cemetery at noon. Though the day was dreary and overcast, the former singers and dancers made the quiet trek up a gently sloping hill and to the spot of their beloved music teacher's final resting place. Emma had arrived early, as had some one hundred other members of the community. There were teachers, both current and former, local business owners, family and friends from out of town and several members of Mr. Schuester's motorcycle club. He'd only owned the bike six months, and had been riding less than four when tragedy struck.
The service was long and emotional, with plenty of loved ones wanting to pay homage to a man who, especially in later years, had become one of the most selfless people most knew. He had remained at William McKinley High School for seven years after the school choir's first win at Nationals in 2012, and he had brought the first-place trophy home on five more occasions in that time. He and Emma had also married, but since she could not have children, they had decided to adopt. One baby turned into two, then three, then a 16-year-old boy. The man and his wife found a new calling when their son, Michael, graduated high school, and they decided to become full-time foster parents.
When the memorial was over, the group bid their farewells so that they could visit family and friends, but promised to meet up at the hotel for drinks before the first of them had to fly home in the morning. Kurt and Finn spent time with Burt and Carol, Puck visited his sister at the local elementary school, Quinn went across town to visit her mother's grave, Mercedes met up with an old boyfriend and the others had a long lunch together.
That night, the alcohol flowed freely as they took turns having a drink in William Schuester's honor. Though there had been times when each student's relationship with the teacher had been tremulous, by the time each had graduated, they'd found that Mr. Schuester had become a trusted friend, mentor and confidant.
It was late when someone - Brittany - made the announcement that they should all buy plots so that they could be buried together.
"Britt - that doesn't make sense," Santana had slurred between hiccups. "We're not all going to die at the same time."
Brittany's eyes rolled heavenwards for a moment while she thought about it. "Yeah, well, I know that," she tried to clarify, "but whenever we do, whether it's tomorrow or a hundred years from now, we can all be together, like we should be. Because, we're family, right? We always said we were."
Everyone's heads bobbed sloppily and then a computer was turned on; credit cards, debit cards and bank account numbers were handed over, and it wasn't until the sun was peaking through half-closed blinds that the early risers realized what they had done in their drunken stupor.
The room was dark and quiet and tense, but little by little, each of them came to see that maybe the arrangement wasn't so bad. They had shared a lot in high school and in the couple of years afterwards, and they had indeed once sworn to one another that they were more than just friends - they were family. By the time showers were taken and luggages repacked, everyone was comfortable with the decisions of the night before and excited, if that could be appropriate, with the fact that one day, they would spend eternity by each other's sides.
Though they had promised to do a better job telephoning, e-mailing and online chatting, the group drifted away from one another slowly but surely. It was two years later when they found themselves once again walking through double doors and into a hotel lobby.
Artie had finally felt comfortable living on his own, and he had only been enjoying his first chance at complete independence for six weeks when he was struck down by sepsis caused by an unseen - and unfelt - pressure sore.
Tina took the news of his death the hardest since they had made plans to move in together. Six months after Mr. Schuester's funeral, Tina's birth mother passed away and in her will, left Tina a large, six-bedroom home. Since Tina worked as a freelance writer, she could afford to uproot and make the trek from Cleveland to Pittsburgh. With the burden of a four-figure rent payment off her shoulders, Tina thought she could relax a little, and had invited Artie to cohabitate with her. She argued that they had always gotten along great, even after an awkward break-up sophomore year, and she thought it no trouble that she might have to occasionally help him bathe or get to the store.
The two had conversed and made plans for a year before the talks dwindled away to nothing. Tina blamed herself a bit - if Artie hadn't been living alone, if she had worked harder to get him in her home, he would still be alive - but she did take some comfort in the fact that she had been the last one to send an email and was technically waiting on a response from him. He had been the one, however inadvertently, to cut off communication.
When she was clearing out her email account three months later, she stumbled across a message in her drafts folder; it was dated around the time she had last sent Artie a message, but she deleted it without looking at it because she was certain that it had to be only a copy of the last email she had ever sent him.
Santana was crying before she'd even made it through the newly installed revolving doors.
"This is fucked!" she screamed when she entered the small room off the side of the main lobby. Kurt, Rachel, Mike and Puck stared at her with wide eyes as she continued to rant. "We're fucked! Didn't we say that we weren't going to let this happen? Didn't we say we were going to keep in touch? Where the hell have you people been?"
Rachel turned away and covered her face, while Mike and Puck ducked their heads. Only Kurt maintained eye contact with the furious Latina, and when she quieted long enough for him to get a word in edgewise, he asked, "Where have you been?"
Santana stopped pacing and turned a deadly glare on the pale-skinned man. "Excuse me?" she hissed.
"A phone works both ways, Santana," he explained. "Where have you been?"
The room fell completely silent, and Puck morosely wondered if there would be two funerals this trip when Santana suddenly ran across the room, just to fall to her knees in front of Kurt and into his arms.
She sobbed for long minutes while he held her, tears forming in his own eyes, but never spilling.
"I never got to say goodbye," she wailed into his shirt, fisting the material only to let it go and then do it again.
There was no body to bury at Brittany's funeral; she'd taken a cruise ship trip with a casual boyfriend ten days prior to celebrate a raise at work. The two drank more than they should have, and she felt that their inside cabin was too hot and stuffy for a restful night's sleep. She was only going to get some fresh air she told Ralph, and she would be back in a minute.
An hour later, cruise ship security held a belligerent, drunk man in their custody while he railed about having seen someone go overboard. They stopped the ship and commenced a search and rescue operation, but when the man was asked if he personally knew the fallen passenger or could even describe what she looked like, he could only admit that he liked peppermint and didn't know why they couldn't sell candy canes all year long.
The search mission was called off after 90 minutes as there were no other witnesses and no reports of a missing cabin mate. It wasn't until the cruise ship docked three days later and a head count conducted of departing passengers that the crew of the Flourish realized that Brittany S. Pierce was gone.
Her empty casket was buried next to Artie's, and the members of New Directions stood in the rain long after the service to take in the fact that they were now two down.
Kurt and Santana were the last to leave, and she clutched his hand fiercely. "I never got to say goodbye," she whispered, repeating the words she'd cried for an hour the night before.
"I know," Kurt whispered back, a single tear finally rolling down his cheek. "Rarely do we ever really get the chance to."
After Brittany, the friends renewed their vows to do a better job staying in each other's lives. And they did a good job of it for a while, but pregnancy, job loss and a new war on foreign soil tore them apart.
It had seemed to many of them that the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Egypt had just ended, when the first reports of casualties from the conflict in Iran started to trickle in. Mike had an enlisted son so he had news channels on at all times to keep apprised of the situation. It was because of this that he was the first to hear of Noah Puckerman's death.
The rain fell steadily the afternoon of Puck's funeral, just as it had the previous four times the kids had found themselves at Woodlawn. The Army had wanted to bury Puck at Arlington - he was a national hero, after all - but relented when informed of the group's standing promise to one another. While some of them thought that maybe Puck would have preferred to rest alongside his fallen countrymen, it was Finn who reminded them of the look on Puck's face when they had gathered for Artie's service years ago. Though a self-proclaimed badass, Puck never could hide a swell of emotion, and it took very little convincing before they all believed he was laying down his arms exactly where he would have wanted to.
He's not sure why it took Puck's passing to realize that the commitments they'd made to each other - the assurances of phone calls and birthday cards - needed to be taken more seriously, but Kurt takes it upon himself eight months after the funeral to buy a planner, list the names, phone numbers and email addresses of his friends - his family - and set aside two months each, six months apart, to contact them. He realizes this means he will only talk to them a couple of times a year, but he figures it's better than the once-anytime-someone-dies that they've grown accustomed to.
It's because of this new "schedule" that he is informed of the passing of Mercedes Jones, possibly years before he might have otherwise; it was the fifth time he'd taken a pen to her name and crossed it out since the planner idea had come to him. He'd had the telephone balanced on one shoulder while he worked on a quick email when the line was answered by a woman who sounded like she was in her early twenties.
It turned out to be Mercedes' daughter, Sasha - named after Mercedes' idol - and she was equal parts heartbroken and still in mourning; she apologized profusely for not having phoned after her mother's death three months prior.
"Things have been… difficult," she quietly reasoned.
Kurt listened intently while the young woman unloaded about Mercedes' health issues - about how the doctor's had warned her if she didn't take better care of herself, the diabetes would take care of her. When the angry child ran out of steam, Kurt filled her in on the funeral plans they'd made as delicately as he could, and inquired about how the situation had been handled.
"She'd mentioned it once or twice," Sasha solemnly explained. "I was little the first time she talked about it, and I wasn't sure if she was serious or not. She's here, if you want her." When Kurt didn't say anything, clearly confused, the girl clarified: "I mean, she was cremated."
Mercedes' ashes are placed in the plot between Artie and Puck; the diva had said, drunkenly, that night 15 years ago when the plots had been purchased, that she wanted to be buried between two hunks when she died. Like her daughter, Kurt and the others weren't sure if that had been a joke, but they figured it wouldn't hurt to fulfill the request.
Rachel tried for a year to come up with a better plan than Kurt's calling schedule, but when push came to shove, she had to admit she loved his idea and decided she would do the same thing. Unlike Kurt, though, she would endeavor to call her former classmates once every three months rather than once every six. When she had explained it to Kurt over the phone (when he called her), she pictured him rolling his eyes at her one-upmanship, even though it had been years since he'd last called her out on it.
It was with a spring in her step that Rachel walked out of the corner bookshop and crossed the street to get back to her apartment. If she had spent less (or more) time comparing the pros and cons of the three notebooks on the shelf, she would have not been in the street when a drunk driver took a sharp turn and lost control of his car.
When Quinn's plane landed, it was raining; she laughed without mirth because really, it had rained for everyone else's funeral, so why not Rachel's, too?
She and others, however, were both surprised and then not-so-surprised when the rain broke mid-day, and sunlight streamed down from between dark clouds like a beacon. This was Rachel Berry - and no one would ever rain on her parade.
Santana was the next to go. And for such a stupid, stupid reason, Mike had angrily cried.
Crack cocaine.
Yes, it had been the one and only time she'd ever tried it - tucked away in a dank, ugly restroom after a night partying with a bunch of women too old to be club-hopping - but sometimes it only took one time, as Mike was well-aware of. Mike had lost his own son - a boy who had served in the military, a boy who had been discharged with honor and amazing benefits, a boy who had thought he was untouchable - to the cold, unforgiving pull of that poison, and as a result, Mike had spent countless hours this last year lecturing youth at the local community center.
Tina tried valiantly to calm her old boyfriend, but he would have none of it. Dead or not, Santana was bearing the wrath of his anger, and he wasn't sure if this was something he could forgive her for.
Mike didn't come to Santana's service, and when Finn pulled out his car keys and announced that he was going back to the hotel to get him, Tina put a hand out and told him to leave it. The two shared a heated look, but in the end, Finn put his keys back in his pocket and stood solemnly as they lowered the dark-haired beauty's casket into the ground.
The sun was setting, and the sky was colored in purple and amber hues when a lone figure crossed towards the freshly turned soil before Santana's headstone. Mike let his legs fold under him, and didn't even try to push Tina away when she wrapped an arm around his shaking shoulders.
Quinn passed away four days after she turned 50. The doctors had shaken their heads in sympathy when the cancer diagnosis had come in seven months ago; they told her she wouldn't live to see her next birthday, but she swore to them she would.
She had gone home that night and cried for hours. The next morning, she woke up and changed everything about her life: she cut red meat and dairy from her diet, she started a new, intense exercise routine and she went to church for the first time in two decades and prayed to God.
For all her efforts, the disease still took her, and just as quickly as it would have if she hadn't changed a thing. She told no one of her illness, not necessarily because she didn't want to, but because there was no time.
So, it came as a big surprise when the remaining comrades found themselves splitting two rooms at a hotel that they were tired of seeing… and months earlier than they were expecting to. This was the year they were going to get together and celebrate something good for once - a big party honoring a half century on this planet. This was the year that they were supposed add happy memories to all the terrible ones that these chipped walls and worn-out carpet had seen.
Instead, they walked - slower than the years before - to the familiar grave site. They stood in the rain - just like the years before - and said goodbye to yet another of their friends. It was Tina who took Kurt's hand first, and then Kurt took Mike's, and Mike grabbed Finn's. The four of them held onto each other as if they never wanted to let go. It occurred to them then that there were more of them dead now than there were alive, and suddenly, being 50 felt less like the beginning of a new chapter in their lives and more like an end.
The concept of mortality being closer than ever hit Mike and Tina hard; so hard, as a matter of fact, that they clung to one another like lifelines. Within weeks they had both left their respective partners, Tina had sold her home and the two of them had started a new life in a new city.
Things seemed to be going well for them for a while, but it wasn't too long before the cracks started to appear in their hastily constructed new lives. Even though it had been a year and a half, Mike missed his wife; she had been with him for years - 23 to be exact - and she had been the one with him when their child was born, the one with him when they'd gone to the morgue to identify his body. Mike's entire life had revolved that boy, and he was playing house with a woman who had never even met him.
Forty-six days before the one-year anniversary of the day Mike and Tina had hastily exchanged vows in a cramped, crowded office at city hall, Tina called Finn to tell him that Mike had committed suicide.
Her voice barely wavered for the initial minutes of the phone call, and Finn hated himself for wondering if this was some type of cruel joke. But within seconds of the first hitch in her breath, she was crying and inconsolable. She cried for God over and over again while Finn shushed her and tried to tell her it was going to be okay. Finn struggled to see the tiny keys on his cell phone, and he hoped that the text message he sent Kurt was at least somewhat coherent.
It was an hour before Finn hung up with Tina. She was so tired, she said, and she needed to lie down. He told her to do that, and that he and Kurt would be calling her in the morning. They said their goodbyes, and Finn immediately returned Kurt's six missed calls.
"I don't understand what Mike is dreading," Kurt had said, and Finn cursed whoever thought making phones smaller was a good idea.
When Kurt tried to get a hold of Tina the next morning, her phone went to voicemail after several rings. It did the same thing the next four times he called, and the three times Finn tried. Kurt was going to try one more time before calling up the airport and securing the next flight out when an older man answered the phone. The man spoke in broken English, but Kurt understood that he was the masseuse, and he'd found Tina unresponsive on the bed when he'd come for his weekly appointment.
The coroner declared that she'd passed of natural causes, but Finn and Kurt knew it was actually a broken heart that had done her in, even if it was argued that such a thing did not exist. It was also not lost on them that both she and Mike had technically died of the same thing, just in different ways.
Mike's ex-wife fought for his body; she claimed that he had left her when he was not in sound mind, and that there was no way that she was going to let him lay next to the home wrecker who had killed him. Kurt and Finn put up a token protest - regardless of the twisted love affair between the three, Mike and Tina had decided years ago, long before this mess, where they had wanted to be buried.
An advocacy group took up the matter in Mike's defense, and the bodies of he and his wife were cremated and held until the situation could be resolved. It took over a year, but the courts ruled against the former Mrs. Chang, and the Hummel-Hudson brothers were free to bury their friends.
Kurt and Finn were the only ones at the graveyard for the service-that-wasn't. The urns had been interred with no fanfare, and the siblings felt bad that the last of their friends had left this world with no one but the two of them to say goodbye.
"It's going to be worse next time," Finn remarked, and Kurt choked down tears because the same thought had been running through his mind, though he didn't want to think about it. His father had been gone 12 years now, and Finn's mother, Carol, 11 and a half.
"You'll be standing here by yourself," Finn continued, and Kurt turned his head sharply to stare dumbfounded at his brother.
"What makes you say that? What makes you think… what makes you think it won't be you left burying me?"
Finn smiled, a hint of happiness in a world full of sadness. "Because you're Kurt Hummel," he answered. "You're going to live forever."
Kurt shook his head, not even caring now that the tears were streaming down his face. As the boys stood sentry before the headstones of the ones they'd spent a lifetime loving and mourning, Kurt couldn't shake the feeling that if it had started to feel like the beginning of the end three years ago, then the end of end was just around the corner.
"I'm retiring in a year," Finn casually mentioned that night as they came to a stop at a red light. It was raining, just as it had been for the last two days, and the windshield wipers squeaked as they worked to clear the raindrops from the windshield. Kurt turned to look at his brother, a delicate eyebrow raised in silent request for Finn to go on. "I was thinking of moving back down here."
"To Lima?" Kurt asked.
"Yeah," Finn said with a short nod of his head. "Why not?"
Kurt shrugged; he couldn't really give a reason not to.
"And I was thinking," Finn continued, lifting his foot off the brake as the light turned green. "Maybe you might want to, too."
Kurt had started thinking the same thing seconds before Finn had said it. He could do it, and truth be told, he missed his brother. His brother was all he had left in this life, and the thought of living out his last years, days and minutes with him sounded very appealing.
"I think I would like that," Kurt said.
He would never know if Finn ever heard it, though, as it was at that moment a truck going much too fast for the road conditions slammed into the side of their vehicle.
Russell Cramden of WLIO would be the first over the course of the next few days to call the brothers heroes. It hadn't been their intention, but the loss of their lives resulted in the saving of the woman who had been kidnapped by the man driving the SUV that killed them.
They also saved the lives of the woman's three kids; the children had been tied up and left to suffocate in a garage quickly filling with carbon monoxide. The siblings, aged 15, 16 and 18 all went to school at William McKinley, and in some strange twist of fate, all three were involved in the school's choir program. The link of past and present would be made hundreds of times, and a shrine erected thanking the men for their sacrifice.
The official report stated that Kurt Hummel and Finn Hudson died immediately on impact; Finn of a broken neck, Kurt of blunt force trauma, and that they would have felt no pain, would not even had been aware of what had happened.
The unofficial story, however, says that the first man to get to the car and try to administer aid, the driver of the blue hatchback that was behind them, found the boys - dead - but shoulder to shoulder, heads resting against one another and hands tightly clasped.