A/N: Sorry, again. Exams, and life, and more exams, and summatives, and just, ugh. Sorry.

Jeez, I haven't written Mercedes in forever! And I mean that in relation to things I have written; not just that I haven't written very much at all lately.

I found this quote somewhere ... probably over on LJ. No, wait ... I think it was in an NCIS fanfic on this site, actually. Maybe.

Wherever I found it, it stuck out to me. I was planning to write a Kurt drabble for it, but then I thought: where's the challenge in that? Relating a quote like that to Kurt is easy. And it's still not super hard with anyone else, but Mercedes in and of herself was a challenge. So I went for it.

I hope you enjoy it and that I haven't gone rusty so soon. (BTW, if you've requested something I haven't forgotten. I will get around to them. At some point. Promise.)


He who has never hoped can never despair. – George Bernard Shaw

-0-0-

Mercedes has never been one to give up hope.

But lately, with everything … keeping it hasn't been easy at all.

What with the increase in persecution from the sports' teams lately, and Kurt jumping ship (understandably, as she now can see) for Dalton Academy, things have just sucked. And she's finding that slushie facials were a whole lot easier to deal with when Kurt was around to help her get back to fabulous right afterwards. Tina's around sometimes, but it's not the same. She misses her best friend's quick wit and steady strain of speech when she'd wash the artificially flavored ice out of her hair. Just his company made it less of an ordeal. It was easier to focus on the doings of the fashion world and the latest school gossip than it was to think about what had just happened.

But he's not around anymore.

And she doesn't blame him for that. Much, anyways; and she tries her hardest not to at all. (Because it's not his fault that no one can see past his sexual orientation; that the Letterman jacket-wearing, knuckle dragging, club swinging Neanderthals at this school can't deal with the fact that hey, he isn't the same as everyone else.) But it's hard to keep that little bit of hurt that she can't seem to bed rid of from coloring her opinion every time she thinks about him at Dalton, so far away from her.

Getting back to the point, though …

Mercedes believes that even when things seem their darkest, there's always a way back to the light. It's just the way she is, the outlook she chooses to have on life.

She's just saying that when you're walking down a crowded hallway, with your head pointed down at the ground, and two different flavored slushies dripping down your hair and face to the ground and your (in her case, fabulous) clothes … it's not easy to see that light shining through. Sometimes it doesn't shine though.

And lately she's all but felt like there was no hope anywhere to be found.

But then, Mrs. Miller writes a quote by George Bernard Shaw on the board and tells the class to write a few paragraphs about what it means to them, and why.

She isn't quite sure what to do with the assignment; because yeah, she can relate it to her life, but she isn't about to start pouring her heart and soul onto a lined piece of paper for her third period teacher to read, mark, and not care about. (She's sick and tired of the faculty doing nothing. At least when they don't really know, it feels less like they're letting them all down with their excuses and turned eyes.) So she writes some bullshit and people coming together in tough times in their despair to find the ray of hope shining through, even though that's not what she feels when she reads the quote at all, and hands it in as she leaves.

But on the way to her locker, as she dodges a plastic cup, she knows what it means to her.

It means that is she – and the rest of them – are this miserable, there's got to be a chance that waiting somewhere around the corner there's a change in the air.

And hey … maybe it will get better.


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