"I can't"
Those were his last, pathetic words to Kurt before he bolted out of the decorated gymnasium at a breakneck pace. The whole situation had simply proved too much for him to handle.
Bursting through the front doors of McKinley, caught between tears and hyperventilation Dave thought back on the week that had changed everything.
He closed his eyes, recalling his conversation with Santana in the café last Friday. Somehow, she had found him out and was threatening him with the most terrifying blackmail in the world: outing him to the world. Panicked, he quickly downplayed the effect her words were having on him so as to not alert anyone else around to the conversation. Like a deer in headlights he was too overcome with shock and fear to fully listen to what the spunky Latina was saying to him until he heard something that had caught his ear. Santana, the man-hungry, busty former leader of the Cheerios was a lesbian.
"Maybe, I'm not the only one", he had thought, only to be interrupted by her proposal of mock-dating to hide each other's secret and execute revenge on Fabray and Puckerman for crossing her. But he didn't care about either of them or becoming prom royalty, what really had stuck was Santana's plot to get Kurt to return to McKinley as a means to do so. Kurt, the boy whose life he had made miserable these past years only as a way to fight his own feelings. Kurt, the shining symbol of pride and fearlessness who strutted through McKinley's halls without a care in the world. Kurt was never afraid to be himself and didn't give a damn about what others thought of him; at least it seemed that way until tonight.
Tonight Kurt endured the wrath of McKinley's homophobia, the very thing that Dave had feared most of all. Seeing his shining beacon of hope being derided and ridiculed by his classmates made his heart skip a beat; more than anything he wanted to go with Blaine into the hallway after Kurt and comfort him, but crippling fear and insecurity got the best of him. Behind his frozen expression, Dave was weeping for Kurt. He hated himself for not being strong enough to go and comfort the boy he so admired and at one point even loved. He admired Kurt for having the balls to come back and not only accept the crown, but own it. Kurt was everything that Dave wanted to be: confident, proud, beautiful, loved and kind. Dave could have come out at that very moment when he looked into Kurt's beautiful face with tears; he could have, but he ran away again, like he always had before.
These memories plagued him incessantly as he sat on the steps of McKinley drenched in tears. "My god, why am I such a fuck up?" he grunted as he slammed his fist into the concrete floor beneath him.
The pain in his throbbing knuckles felt like a sweet release from the emotional trauma wracking his mind, at least for a moment. But as the initial sting subsided his thoughts wandered back to earlier in the week.