Kurt isn't really sure how he got home. He doesn't remember driving back, but he doesn't remember walking either.
Truthfully, he barely remembers anything beyond sitting outside his father's hospital room nursing a cup of coffee that had gone cold ages ago, and suddenly hearing the sound of machines wailing urgently. He remembers nurses and doctors rushing into the room, trying to do anything and everything they could. He remembers shooting out of his chair and charging for the room, only to be intercepted by a tech who had grabbed him around the chest and hauled him away. He doesn't remember the tech's name, though Kurt had become quite familiar with all of the hospital staff who worked in the general vicinity of his father. He doesn't remember where the tech took him except that he couldn't see or hear what was happening. He doesn't remember what the man had been saying when he was trying to calm Kurt down.
Kurt remembers the doctor appearing around the corner minutes later with apologies that destroyed his entire world.
"I'm sorry, Kurt. I'm so sorry."
He remembers the doctor saying that he was going to call Kurt's teacher unless there was someone else he should inform. He remembers failing to respond and simply collapsing to the floor, unable to support his own weight. He remembers hearing the doctor speak to Will over the phone, though he doesn't recall what he was saying. He also doesn't remember the exact moment when a thought flickered through his head that he couldn't stop but he remembers that he didn't want to stop it.
Kurt doesn't remember escaping from the tech and the doctor, though he supposes they must have tried to stop him from bolting. He doesn't remember feeling anything except a spreading numbness that drove him away from all their sympathies. He doesn't remember thinking anything in particular except that he needed to be home.
And home he now is, though it isn't a home anymore. It's simply a house that used to belong to a family. A family now dead and soon to be buried. All of them.
Kurt walks inside and up the stairs without really seeing any of it. He knows where he's going and what he's doing, but even from downstairs, the only thing he sees is the revolver in his dad's gun locker. He sees it so clearly in his mind that he's holding it and loading a bullet into the chamber before he even realizes he's opened the safe.
Kurt never wanted to be another statistic about gay teen suicide. But he supposes there are worse things than dying.
Things like living.
The framed photographs on his father's dresser catch his eye and he's not sure how long he stares at them for. There's a wedding picture of his parents, a picture of Kurt and his mother on the last birthday he'd shared with her, a picture of him and his father standing in front of the auto shop, and a picture of him and Mercedes. The first one they'd ever taken as friends, back in middle school.
For the first time in what feels like decades, a flicker of something courses through him. It may be guilt, or grief, or sorrow, he's not sure. It feels muffled and distant, as though someone else very far away was feeling it instead of him.
He remembers that the last thing his father had said to him was, "I'm disappointed in you, Kurt."
Kurt's been fighting with his friends lately and he doesn't want words said in anger to be the last they hear from him.
He doesn't have the energy to call all of them, and he knows that it would take too much time if he did. Though it feels impersonal and callous, he simply sends a mass text.
'I'm sorry,' it says. 'I love you.'
He drops the phone on the bed as soon as the message is sent and he puts the barrel of the gun to his temple.
Across town, a dozen people simultaneously hear their phones ring or vibrate and get a horrible feeling in the pit of their stomachs, even before they realize what it says or who it's from.
Outside, a car with the muffler dragging across the ground screeches to a halt in front of Kurt's house. Kurt doesn't hear it.
Only Will, panicked and desperate and racing across the lawn tooslowtooslowtooslow, is close enough to hear the gunshot.
Somehow, the noise of it echoes in all of their minds anyway.