Prologue - 9:38

"Every plan is a tiny prayer to father time."

There's an old adage that starts circling around when bad things happen. "Life isn't fair" – it's a useless grouping of empty syllables, worn down as they are with overuse. It isn't life that's unfair – the existence of a pulse in a person doesn't single one out for bad luck. People are unfair – life just gives a person more to lose.

At 9:38 on a Tuesday morning, at the intersection of Alder and 2nd Street, a minivan barreled into the side of a car. The minivan ran a red light; the car was making a turn through the intersection. In the next instant, it caught the car by the middle and sent it spinning. Before the minute was over, the screeching had come to a stop. The driver of the minivan hadn't stopped, relatively unharmed; the empty baby carrier strapped onto the backseat hadn't slipped so much as an inch. The driver of the car was in worse condition, trapped and bleeding on the inside curve of the crude crescent bent into the side of the car.

The driver of the minivan was drunk. The boy in the white car was Kurt Hummel, a senior at McKinley High; he'd been on his way to pick up some groceries for his stepmother.

So it wasn't the debatable unfairness of life that handed Kurt Hummel head trauma along with a slew of other injuries. He didn't wake up one morning to find the back of his head bleeding. The impact of the minivan at the angle it struck gave Kurt head trauma. Every last bottle that the other driver downed had given Kurt head trauma, as well as the slow-moving vehicle turning in front of him, and the flat tire on Kurt's Navigator, Carole's grocery list, and the habit of giving students a break from school during winter. One might point to these elements and find some conspiracy of the universe, but the simple fact remains that luck (or fate, or fortune, as you would have it) is determined by nothing more than a series of coincidences that are nearly impossible to predict.

It was Finn who first got the call on Burt's cell phone that had been left at home. There was a woman's voice gently asking for his stepfather, and Finn tried to place it because he was almost certain he recognized the number, but he came up blank. When he told the woman that he couldn't get to Burt, she told him that there had been an accident and that Kurt was in the hospital.

Finn's brain kind of cut out, and all he could think about was how it was Christmas, almost, and things like that just didn't happen on Christmas. The glee club was trying to organize a get-together for the holiday and he'd just started to convince his little brother to wear a tacky sweater with him. He couldn't be in the hospital. Kurt would never miss an opportunity to be with his friends, so he couldn't be in the hospital right now. Kurt didn't let people hurt him. There must have been a mistake.

It took him a second to snap back to reality. "I'll tell him. I'll be there."

He had to call Rachel after that, since they were short a vehicle; her protests about previous plans dried up when Finn mentioned he needed to get to the hospital. They were almost there before the phone on Finn's lap began ringing again. Burt wanted to know where he was and if he'd heard. Carole was waiting for them by the ER entrance. For the love of God, please drive safely.

Rachel didn't ask until they were pulling into the hospital's parking lot. When Finn told her she was very pale and quiet and he worried that she might pass out before they left the car but instead she just took his hand and ran to the ER with him.

Carole didn't know any more than they'd been told, but she did explain that Kurt was already in surgery as they entered the elevator. The air felt compressed, like it was hard to breathe. This couldn't be happening. Not now, not to Kurt. Finn's mind kept flipping through strange, unrelated thoughts as though throwing random bits of information to the forefront would distract him from the horrible wrenching feeling that was happening somewhere between his heart and the bottom of his throat.

They spent hours in the uncomfortable waiting room while Carole went to find out what she could. It had windows and Finn felt very exposed. They were quiet except for the sound of some morning talk show playing on the ancient television mounted to the wall.

Finally, sometime that afternoon, probably, a doctor came to see them. He talked about a lot of complicated things to do with Kurt's brain and honestly, Finn didn't hear much around the sudden muffling of his hearing, as good as if he was holding hands over his ears. It was just as well – he didn't want to think about any of it yet.

Burt asked a question. "You can go in now, Mr. Hummel; he's still in Intensive Care, so just one visitor at a time."
Rachel and Finn sat back down as Burt and the doctor left. Rachel pulled her phone from her pocket with shaking hands. "I should… I should call Blaine. He'll be so upset if he hears it from somewhere else, and I'll have to call Mercedes and Brittany…"
Finn placed a gentle hand over hers, lowering it from where she'd almost already raised it to her ear without dialing anyone. "Not until you're ready, okay?"
She glanced between him and the phone. "Blaine at least," she insisted, taking a deep breath. There was no one else with them in the waiting room, so Rachel didn't bother stepping out.

"Blaine? Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't realize… May I speak to Blaine, please?" Blaine was out of town for the week with family; Finn wasn't sure what good it would do to tell him now, but it was true that he would be upset to hear about what happened to Kurt through gossip. "Hello? Blaine? Yes, this is Rachel. Oh, I'm… fine, how are you? …that's good, I'm glad things are going well for you…" The attempt at cheer in Rachel's voice was painfully forced, and Finn held her other hand without thinking about it. In seconds, her grip was impossibly tight like if she wasn't holding on to something she might fall. Her voice was tight, too, holding the emotion back. "Listen, I'm calling about Kurt. No, he's not mad at you, he just… Blaine, Kurt was in an accident this morning."

It was silent for a moment. Finn listened closely; he didn't think Blaine was saying anything. He caught the tail end of what might have been a whispered question.

Rachel choked on a sob. "No, he's… he was in surgery all morning and he's in a coma now, and… the doctor said if – when, when he wakes up… he hit the back of his head really badly. And, um, the doctor thinks that he has, uh, cerebellar damage, so… so he might not be able to talk or move very well. We'll have to wait and see, but… but it doesn't look good, Blaine."

The fuzz in Finn's ears was sharpening into a ringing, and suddenly the waiting room felt impossibly cramped. He wanted to make a run for the elevators, to reach the air outside so he could breathe, but he couldn't leave Rachel there alone.

"Yeah, I'll let you know if we hear something. Mr. Hummel is in there now, they're only letting one person in at a time, but… yeah, I'll call you back. I'm so sorry, Blaine. I'll call you back." She hung up the phone and stared at it.

"Do you want me to call the others?"

"He was crying, Finn." She took a shaky breath. "I ruined his Christmas. I can't…"

Finn gently pried her phone out of her hand and placed it on the table amid the outdated magazines. Without a word, he started dialing Puck's number on Burt's phone. Even as he spoke, the ringing stayed in his ears until Carole tapped his arm and said it was time for them to go home.

There's a feeling a person sometimes gets, when they get home from being away, that something in the house is missing. It's not that anything is actually gone, it's just that suddenly the space doesn't feel like it's supposed to. Maybe you notice that the painting in the living room is faded, or the tablecloth has a spot you don't remember; any other day it's just a part of your life, but on that day, you are a stranger looking in, catching the details of someone else's life, and that familiar warmth of being somewhere you know is absent. For just a second – a brief, tiny instant – time has moved without you and you are on the outside of that glow that is home.

The house, the newer one with two stories and bushes in the front, with separate bedrooms and the dishes still in the sink, the one with a rocking chair on the little porch and the rug with the stain from the first Thanksgiving dinner held by two halves of what was going to become a less-broken family, felt just like the waiting room. Carole suggested softly that Finn should get some sleep, but she didn't argue when he sat next to her on the couch. She had the house phone and her cell phone on her lap just in case.

They waited. Maybe for some news, but mostly for permission to forget for a while. The world outside the front door was everything it had always been, but it had left Finn and his family behind.

The waiting turned into a routine. Burt would visit in the afternoon, or Finn, or Carole. Mr. Schue would make a polite inquiry in class and Finn would answer briefly. He'd get home and stare at the scarf hanging on the coat rack, knowing that Kurt would have a fit if the material stretched and wondering if he should take it down and fold it. The Navigator stayed in the garage – no one wanted to drive it.

For a while, the New Directions rallied their strength. They couldn't sing in the ICU, so they sang in the lobby. Brittany looked for every good-luck charm she could find, and Blaine brought new flowers to the room every week. It was always "when Kurt wakes up." When Kurt wakes up, he's going to be so upset that he missed the glee assignment. When Kurt wakes up, we'll have to tell him about what Brittany said to Mr. Schue. When Kurt wakes up, it'll feel okay to sing again.

Finn was at school, in fifth period, when he was called to the office. His mom was waiting for him, and just a second after that initial flash of fear – they were wrong, it wasn't enough, he's not waking up – she hugged him and told him that Kurt was awake.

Awake and immobile. Still and quiet, because when he would try to speak, his mouth wouldn't cooperate, or his arms and legs. He was confused a lot in the beginning, but his memory was okay because Finn always knew that Kurt recognized him when he walked in the room. Finn couldn't say how; it was a sibling thing, probably. And when he'd hold Kurt's hand, his brother's grip was so tight that Finn knew Kurt understood what he'd lost. Whenever that happened, Finn would tell him some funny story from school or gossip until the younger boy's grip loosened a bit.

After a while Finn didn't talk so much about school. Their friends didn't seem to realize that the boy in the bed was still Kurt. They tried to visit – Rachel talked the entire time, every time, in an attempt to fill the silence, while Santana, for perhaps the first time, appeared to have nothing at all to say – but they looked so scared. They weren't ready to see Kurt like that. There were excuses and the visits stopped. Finn didn't get angry, but he didn't have much to say to any of them.

Blaine brought flowers when he visited and mostly just sat quietly, holding Kurt's hand and sometimes looking at him. He lasted longer than most, but one day Finn heard that he'd transferred back to Dalton. Finn caught Kurt staring at the last arrangement of flowers, red and yellow roses; it was the first time since the accident that he'd seen his little brother cry.

They tried to restart their lives around the massive hole that had been blown into it; Kurt went to physical therapy and speech therapy provided by the hospital, trying to recover from his physical and mental injuries. There was yelling and frustration, plenty of tears, medical bills and crunching numbers at the garage office and silent Friday night dinners. Kurt got a little mobility back, but the therapy just wasn't working. The doctors and therapists advised that he might be more comfortable at home.

The house was quieter after Kurt was there. Finn wasn't sure if it was just because they felt guilty talking to each other when he couldn't or if it was the lack of noise that Kurt usually brought with him - he didn't listen to music anymore, either on his headphones or the stereo in his room, he didn't watch those musicals that he used to obsess over, and he definitely didn't sing in the shower or while getting dressed anymore. There was some part of him that hadn't woken up yet, he thought. Maybe most of him, because he seemed so much smaller now, being practically carried upstairs to his room by Burt and being fed by Finn's mom when he couldn't seem to hold onto the fork. Finn hoped that Kurt wasn't really awake yet, because he knew his brother would hate that.

Kurt was awake, but he didn't bother with "why me" and he tried not to think about "what now." Most of his thoughts were strange and disjointed. He wondered if his mother felt like he did when she was in a car accident - the confusion and the sudden, unshakable knowledge that he was not going to survive. She'd died on impact - he wondered what that was like, too. He thought about how he couldn't move when he woke up and thought he was paralyzed; he thought about the mass of useless syllables that tumbled out of his mouth. He thought about the frozen smiles on his friend's faces as the realized the enormity of what happened, how they'd looked trapped and afraid. He thought about how trapped he felt, especially at first, like that one night he tried to stand and walk to the dresser for something and couldn't even get to the end of his bed.

There's a peace that a person sometimes feels after a loss. It doesn't heal anything and it doesn't change anything, but it keeps the screaming and tears in a neat little package deep at the bottom of your stomach. It's a weight that keeps you grounded to the bottom of the ocean and far from the currents, a place you can't control, where you might be hurt again. It's a hollowing, deadening sensation, and because Kurt couldn't think of what else to do, he let it happen. His life was out of his reach, so Kurt stayed in his room and faded.


A/N: So, this is the longer fic I've been planning based on "Talk to Me" from Strange Turn of Events; you don't need to have read that one to understand this one, so no worries. I don't know how long it will be or what the update schedule will be like (because I'm in school right now and school has a way of messing with plans), but I'm really excited to work on it and I hope I can do it justice. Thanks for reading!

Before I forget - the quote at the top is part of a lyric from "What Sarah Said" by Death Cab for Cutie.

(Disclaimer: Glee is owned by Ryan Murphy and FOX. This is meant for entertainment purposes only and not for profit.)