A/N: My writing is still experimental, and this is very much an experiment. So tell me which parts are good, and which parts aren't so good, because I know there's both in this fic. Also, if you think of a better summary, don't hesitate to suggest it to me!
The boom of thunder sent him into hiding.
The shock of lightning coursed through his body.
Dreams, feelings, memories were becoming jumbled in his mind.
He fought, and he screamed, but the thunder concealed his screams and the storm clouds cloaked his eyes. He was hidden, buried within himself, and they told him, and he knew, he was never going to find his way out.
00
When they told him he was going home he didn't feel relieved. He didn't feel scared. He didn't feel anything. He couldn't even really remember why he was there in the first place. But going home seemed like something he should want to do, so he thanked them, and waited for someone to come get him.
When his mother appeared in the doorway to his room he paused. He swallowed. Something deep inside him, an emotion or a memory, was trying to fight its way to the surface. She helped him into new clothes, jeans and a button down, as opposed to the white overalls he was wearing before. He hadn't liked the overalls at first, he remembered, but then he had. He didn't know what had changed.
On the way home his mother told him how proud she was of him. He was cured, she said. He wasn't broken anymore. To that he smiled, but he got that bad taste in his mouth once again as he felt a forgotten memory stir within him. It felt strange. Everything was numb, like it had been when he was in that bed, in the special room, when they had brought the lightning and thunder and it had consumed him. Maybe it never left him, he mused. There was still a storm inside him, still fog before his eyes.
Even though he had gaps in his memory(all for the best, his mom and his doctors assured him), he still remembered where they lived, and that was not where his mother was taking him.
"Aren't we going home?" he asked as she turned onto another unfamiliar road.
"Of course we are, honey," she answered and smiled at him. "Just you and me and our new house. Your father and I decided you need a change of scenery so you can stay healthy."
He swallowed down the bad taste in his mouth and let her drive him into Little Rock, Arkansas. He was sure it would be fine. It would all be fine.
00
He was back in school, a new school, and repeating his senior year because apparently he had missed half of it when he was busy getting cured, as his mother fondly referred to that blurry period of his life. He remembered that he used to be good at maths and science. He wasn't good at them anymore. He couldn't remember anything he had learnt. The fog that was still there made him lose track of the world sometimes, and he couldn't focus anymore.
His mom made him join the football team, and what energy he had he spent there. He even made a few friends there, but he was sure that he didn't really like any of them.
One day in school a silhouette broke through the fog in his eyes. It was a boy in the lunch queue. He was wearing dark skinny jeans and a fancy jacket that hugged his waist. He had short, light brown hair that was styled expertly on top of his head. Dave could feel his heart beat faster as his head started to throb, and never before had he felt a memory from before be so close to surfacing. The boy turned around, but his face was unfamiliar. It wasn't right. It wasn't... It wasn't him.
His headache got so bad that day that he had to go home. His mother took one look at him, gave him sleeping pills and sent him to bed. He woke up two days later and the fog was back, blurring his sight more than ever.
00
That fall he had to go back to the hospital that cured him, for a check-up, his mother said. The doctors asked him lots of questions, about memories and emotions and triggers, and he found himself holding the memory of the boy he had seen close to his heart. He didn't want them to take it away from him. The storm in him, the tremors in his hands and the headaches he had were beginning to lessen, and the doctors said that this wasn't good because it meant that he was forgetting what he had learned there. He wasn't supposed to see, but they gave his mother a bottle of pills and told her that they were going to help Dave stay cured. He found himself wondering for the first time, though he didn't ask, what illness they had cured him of.
They didn't make him wear the overalls.
00
The guys on the football team made him go to a party with them. There he met a girl. Her name was Sami. She had long, curly, light brown hair and she was shorter than he was. She wasn't really pretty, but Dave supposed he liked her well enough. The best thing about her was her eyes. They were blue and grey and reminded him of something. Something good. So he kissed her and went to more parties with her, and soon she was calling him her boyfriend.
00
The day before Valentine's Day he introduced Sami to his mother. He remembered the last time she had been proud of him, it was when she had picked him up from the doctors, but he couldn't remember the last time she had looked at him so warmly, with so much love.
He couldn't figure out why it made him feel so uneasy.
00
His mother still gave him a pill every night before bed, and they helped him sleep. They also made the fog thicker, but his mom said that that was good, so he didn't question it.
Sami knew that he wasn't quite healthy, that his sickness still lingered in the form of confusion and disconnection, but she loved him anyway. She said once that she prayed every night that he would get better.
Sami said she loved him. She said that a lot. She wanted him to spend the night in a hotel with her. He didn't want that, but he didn't say no.
Sami broke up with him when he couldn't have sex with her. It was not that he didn't try. It was that he couldn't.
00
Graduation was coming up, and through some miracle he had passed the necessary classes and would get his High School diploma. He asked his mother what he should do after graduation, and she said he should get a job. With his illness, he couldn't go to college anyway.
He wondered sometimes, why his dad didn't come to his graduation. Why he never called, and why he never visited. But Dave never asked. His mom always got very angry when he asked questions like that.
00
Things within him started to change. The storm still raged inside of him, the headaches still persisted, the fog still clouded his eyes, but a curiosity that didn't exist before slowly started to form in his mind. It all began when his mother was out one night, the first date she had gone on in forever, and he guessed that meant his suspicions were correct. His dad was out of the picture for good.
He put the tv on in the living room, simply because he could, and because he wasn't supposed to. Accidentally he stumbled onto a movie channel, where they were showing a movie called Brokeback Mountain. He watched it with shock, seeing two men fall in love with each other, and when they kissed, he was pulled out of the fog for a minute, a different but similar scene playing out in his mind's eye. The scene was of him, and another boy in the McKinley locker room. He furrowed his brow, trying to concentrate, trying to grab hold of the elusive memory, and when he did, he almost fell off the couch.
Bully. Kurt Hummel. Blue eyes. Kiss.