AN: Trigger warning. Seriously. Self-harm, cutting. SERIOUSLY. Anna, this is for you. I hope it makes your birthday...brighter?

It's the videos that hit him the hardest.

Kurt sends him the link after prom. He doesn't actually talk to Dave, not more than a nod of greeting and sometimes an awkward smile in the halls, but he emails Dave this link.

I got your email address from Finn, hope that's okay? Anyway, I want you to watch these. You've probably heard about this project, but I'm willing to bet you've never actually paid any attention.

Just watch. I think it will help.

The link is to a YouTube channel for the Trevor Project. Dave watches.

It doesn't help.

He gets why it was supposed to – the videos are all about how life for gay kids gets better after school, and how intolerance now doesn't mean putting up with intolerance forever. It's all about how things will change.

Those videos weren't meant for Dave Karofsky.

The words that drill deepest into his mind over and over, the words that apply to him, are the bad ones. Intolerance and bullies and scared and they're the monsters, not you. Over and over, tape after tape. These rock stars and actors and famous queer guys Dave's never heard of look into the camera, at Dave, and call people who would hurt gay teenagers animals, and cowards, and inhuman.

Weak, intolerant. Hateful, pathetic. Scared little children. Monsters, animals, bullies.

Bullies.

Dave doesn't wonder why Kurt doesn't talk to him, or even look at him. He doesn't have to ask why all the glee kids still hate him even after the Bully Whips and everything. The answer is in those videos.

Santana wrote him the speech that he gave to Figgins, and to the glee kids once Figgins was on board. She made sure he learned it. It was all bullshit, of course. She never made him watch any videos, she never talked to him about kids who jumped off bridges.

He does all that himself, later.

He watches YouTube clips of news stories about little scrawny big-eyed kids who hang themselves in their closets. Who OD on their mom's depression medication, who vanish with nothing but a note left behind and get fished out of rivers a week later.

He watches parents sob and activists glare. He watches school friends cry while speaking at memorials, and hallways full of students dressed in black to honor a dead friend. He watches clips of those dead kids while they were still alive, smiling and happy and kids until someone fucked them up so much they couldn't even fucking live anymore.

He watches teachers and cops and lawyers stare with hard eyes into the camera and talk about prosecution, about the animals who are to blame, the monsters who caused it all.

Dave has never been a gay teenager. He's always been one, whatever, but he's never lived that life. He's never let it be his identity, he's never dealt with what they deal with.

But he has been a bully. A monster. A scared, pathetic animal. So those are the only parts he connects with. Those are the only characters in the news stories that he relates to. The only words that apply to him.

His grades don't get any better for the rest of the year. He sits upstairs in his room and watches these videos instead of doing homework. He sits in class and hears words echo in his mind on repeat – bully, coward, monster – instead of hearing the teachers.

He passes Kurt Hummel in the hallway and sees statistics and memorials and suicide letters.

He looks at himself in the mirror and sees an animal looking back at him.

When Santana blows off Bully Whips duty after losing prom queen to the kid she was spending all her time protecting, Dave doesn't argue. Their 'relationship' was never anything more than a thin farce, and when they give up acting it out no one asks any questions. No one is even surprised.

For a while Dave keeps an eye on Kurt from a distance, but the glee nerds are usually hanging around him, and no one really bothers him much at all. And Dave gets distracted bit by bit, stops being able to focus on anything but the accusations that echo through his head. Stops being able to look at Kurt without seeing crime scene tape and grainy footage from memorial services.

Hudson asks him about it, in the locker room after practice maybe two weeks before school gets out.

"Hey, Karofsky. So I noticed you're not hanging around Kurt anymore."

Dave just frowns at him.

Hudson's too fucking goofy to pull off serious, but he looks pretty grim right then. "I'm just making sure everything's cool with you two."

So things don't go back to how they were, Dave hears.

He shrugs. "We're cool," he answers simply, shoving his books in his duffel bag so he can get out of there fast.

Finn grins and relaxes. "Good. Cool. Just, he's my brother now, you know? And ever since you told these jerks to back off things have been pretty good for him."

Dave looks over at him, and his gut does a burning, twisting thing, and he hikes his bag over his shoulder. "Whatever, dude," he mutters, and ignores whatever cheerful words Finn calls after him in response.

Dave drives home thinking about those words. For a little while he let himself think that the acid in his gut comes from the implied lie, from letting Finn believe that Dave ordered anyone away from anyone.

Because he didn't. He pulled Z and Strando and the guys off some dweebs once in a while in the hallways, but that was it. And none of them were ever bothering Hummel. So maybe he just feels guilty about letting Hudson give him credit for something he didn't do.

But that's not it.

When Dave figures out what it really is that makes him burn inside, it hits him even harder than all those Youtube videos.

That's the first night he actually hurts himself. It's not on accident, it's not deliberate. It's this weird moment that happens and seems completely inexplicable, and if someone were to ask him about it he wouldn't be able to explain.

It happens as he's getting ready for bed. Staring at himself in the mirror blankly as he brushes his teeth, he suddenly realizes why Finn's words bothered him so much.

Because Finn is right. Once Dave stopped messing with Kurt, no one else did.

The moment after he realizes that, he thinks about the day he stood in the hallway with Kurt, that embarrassing moment when he said he was sorry and couldn't keep his fucking eyes from watering or his head from bowing.

Before that Kurt all but said the same thing Finn did: since he came back to school, no one's said boo to him.

Same thing Kurt's dad said in Figgins' office. That things at McKinley were better because Dave wasn't going after people anymore.

It's the only excuse Dave could begin to give for the things he did, the things that have been weighing him down so hard. The only rationale he could come up with that made his own actions bearable to him: that he was scared. That he knows how hard gay kids get beat down around McKinley, so he was scared and lashing out so no one came after him.

But Finn and Kurt and Kurt's dad have all pointed out now that...that no, gay kids don't get beat up at McKinley. Dave Karofsky beats up gay kids at McKinley.

He didn't turn himself into a monster to fit in with all the other monsters. Because he's the only one there was. He's the only person around that a guy like him would have to be scared of. He's the only fucking monster-coward-bully-animal around, so he has nothing to be scared of.

He has no excuse anymore. He never had any excuses.

When Dave realizes that, his hands act out on their own. He opens the drawer under the sink and grabs the cardboard package of replacement razor blades and forces one out of its slot and pinches it between his fingers and drags it ina line across his arm and he doesn't have a single thought in his mind the entire time that takes.

It's like waking up from a dream the moment afterwards.

He blinks at himself in the mirror, he feels the burn in his arm and frowns down at the line of red welling up and trickling down to his elbow.

He's almost confused. What the hell just happened?

He grabs a rag and shoves it against his arm and stares out at the mirror, baffled.

He doesn't see an animal staring back at him. He sees fear in his eyes, doubt, pain. And for the first time in weeks it makes him look like a human being, and not a monster.

Dave laughs to himself the next morning, when he sees the thin puckered line of pink up his arm. Nothing, not bad at all. Hardly a real cut, it just surprised him.

He's not some emo fucking band geek cutting himself to feel alive or whatever the fuck they do it for. He's not some asshole. He just had a weird moment, just let his thoughts and those videos get the better of him. It's freaky, but it's done.

That next night, though, when he lays in bed and stares up at the darkness and can't get to sleep through all the voices and accusations and names circling through his head, he realizes that after his 'accident' in the bathroom the night before, his mind was actually silent.

All those words stopped. For a little while, at least.

It's just Dave and his dad, and his dad works hard and doesn't spend much time at home. He's always left Dave to do his own thing – he never had a choice, he had to work, and Dave used to be a responsible enough kid to be trusted on his own. By the time he started acting out, he was too old to be babysat or whatever.

Sometimes when Dave's head fills up with all those faces and words and anger, his dad's face hurts more than any of the others. That disappointment in his eyes, the helpless look like he doesn't know why Dave's turned into this creature that he is, and he blames himself for it.

Dave wishes he could tell his dad that he's not some monster. But he can't.

He gets strangely obsessed with, like, spacing. Patterns. That first little thin cut was nothing, it heals up and vanishes without a trace, and Dave is glad because it was weird and jagged and sloppy.

After that, though, it becomes obsessive. The first time he pulls out that little replacement blade actually planning to do just what he did before, he holds that thing over his arm for a good couple of minutes before he figures out where he wants to do it. And then it becomes a matter of spacing the next one out perfectly, of keeping the little red lines and healing wounds lined up. Making them the same length, the same straight line.

It's not about pain. He doesn't like the pain, it gets harder and harder to actually put that blade against his skin just knowing that it's going to slice and burn into him.

It's about shutting up the people who have started living in his head. It's about putting grief and fear into his own eyes so that he can actually see himself as human for a little while.

But the silences get shorter and shorter, and the humanity dims way too soon the more he tries to cut it into him. And he realizes that the pain itself isn't enough. It isn't what he wants.

He didn't hurt people, really. He shoved some nerds into some lockers, he jammed up Kurt Hummel a few times pretty hard. But the pain isn't his legacy, is it? Physical pain isn't what made those kids hang themselves with their dad's neckties.

It was fear that did that.

And this, what he's doing with the razors and the neat little lines of red scars, that doesn't scare him. Not after the first time. He needs to be scared of it, or it's going to stop working altogether.

So he cuts deeper. He branches out from his neat little rows, he drags the razor in a longer line, he pushes it until it indents his skin into a valley before it starts cutting through.

The pain is sharper, and when he sees how much blood wells up and starts flowing, his gut twists and his adrenaline pumps, and it scares him. Too deep, maybe. Too deep this time, he won't ever stop bleeding, he's going to drop dead and be remembered as some emo punk living some after-school special in his bathroom.

And that's what he needs. That fear. He craves it, it makes everything in his mind go calm and quiet. It makes him a human again.

It's the only thing that works.

But he can only be scared of deeper cuts for so long.

It's summer by now, he's supposed to be playing Xbox with Z and helping at the football camp Bieste started for the JV and incoming freshmen. He should be hitting the mall and driving up and down the fucking parkway the teenagers all cruise on summer nights, macking on girls and pretending like Lima isn't a soul-crushingly boring place to be.

He should be doing a thousand things. What he does is sit in his bedroom, watching videos. Reading newspaper archives. Visiting the sites that support gay teenagers who need help, and always, always finding himself already there. Already the bad guy in a thousand testimonials.

His dad still works, adults don't get summertime, and at first Dave tries to pretend like he's normal. He goes downstairs and eats dinner with his dad, he sits through games on Sundays, they talk about senior year and whether Dave's good enough at football to get a scholarship somewhere good, or whether he'd do better focusing on math and science.

It feels unreal. It feels more and more like they're talking about the plot of a movie that Dave's never going to see.

Sometimes he's glad that his dad still considers him a real person. Sometimes he wants to scream at him instead, to grab his shirt and get in his face and yell until his dad sees the monster under his skin.

When he thinks about coming out, it's not being gay that feels like the big secret. It's being a monster. And just like being gay, maybe his dad would think it's a phase he's going through. But just like being gay, it's fucking not.

Dave uses his allowance to go to Walmart and buy rags, so he can throw away the ones he gets bloody instead of trying to sneak them into laundry loads. He buys bandages, antiseptic. He buys a bigger, thicker kit of replacement razor blades that look like they're designed for some serious barber shit. He cleans them obsessively, he folds and refolds the stack of extra rags sitting on the floor of his closet. He wears long sleeves and can feel his pulse in his inner arms whenever his dad looks at him.

He's alone.

But that's fitting. He doesn't deserve other people.

A knock on his door. He considers ignoring it – he can barely hear the thump from upstairs – but his dad gets packages delivered at home sometimes and he'll be pissed if there's a UPS slip on the door when he gets home. Dave doesn't need his dad asking more questions than usual about what his kid does all day as the summer ticks by.

Dave pounds downstairs and opens the door, and time seems to freeze when he sees Kurt Hummel standing on his porch.

Kurt looks uncertain, but when Dave blinks out at him he relaxes and smiles awkwardly. "Hi."

Dave looks past him, but he seems to be here alone. He squints out at the sunshine, and doesn't want to drag his eyes back to Kurt. "What're you doing here?"

"I...um."

When nothing else comes out Dave forces himself to look down at Kurt.

Kurt frowns at him, his head tilted in that little bitchy judgmental way that used to get to Dave so easily. "You look terrible."

Dave scowls, but it's half-hearted. He can't be mean. He can't let the monster out, or he'll have to punish himself worse tonight.

Kurt meets his eyes and there's something weird on his face. Something wide-eyed and sincere and worried. "Seriously. Are you losing weight or something?"

Dave shrugs. His appetite is for shit lately, but he's a big fatass anyway, right? The hell business is it of Kurt's?

He doesn't say that, though. Saying things takes a lot of energy.

"Finn says people are asking about you. To hear him talk, Azimio is waking around their little football day-camp thing like an abandoned puppy dog. I just...thought I'd...have you been sick?"

Dave shakes his head and sighs. "Just...I'm probably not gonna play next year."

"Why not?" Kurt regards him, unwavering.

Dave hesitates, but answers with a shred of honesty. "Because I don't like what it does to me."

"Football?"

"All of it." Azimio, the whole locker-room bullshit mentality. Being a letterman jacket, strutting the halls like he's somebody. All of it.

McKinley. School. Fucking life. Whatever.

Kurt moves up to the door, like Dave's going to invite him in or something ridiculous like that. "What's going on with you?" he asks.

"Nothing." Dave frowns. Next time, he tells himself, he'll ignore the door. "I've got to go, Kurt. Just...whatever, if anyone gives a shit just tell them I'm fine."

"You mean lie? I'm not so good at that."

Something about Kurt's steady, worried eyes makes Dave's arm throb. He swallows and shrugs and backs up to push the door closed. "I'm not your problem, Hummel," he says, low, as he tries to shut the door.

Kurt reaches out and braces his hand against it. "David...can I...are you...?" He stops and frowns, but his eyes focus again almost instantly. "I have your email address. Can I email you?"

Dave frowns but shrugs. He can ignore emails, he just really needs Kurt to be gone. "Whatever."

Kurt doesn't seem satisfied, but his hand drops and the door shuts hard, and Dave reaches out to lock it – the knob and the bolt – and all but runs up the stairs and back to his room.

Only when that door is shut behind him can he breathe.

Kurt is nice. Coming by and checking on him, asking to email. It's nice, and it grates on Dave worse than any of Kurt's bitchiness ever did.

All Dave can do is go to the bathroom and stare at the beast in the mirror and replay those stories and words and accusations in his head. Such a nice kid, so quiet, never bothered anyone, smile on his face. Never hurt a fly and those monsters bullied him until he couldn't take it anymore. Until he...what? Jumped in front of a car. Swallowed pills, hung himself, drowned himself, shot himself.

Their fault. Those monsters, those bullies, those cowards.

Drove him to kill himself. Drove him to write this note, to...to transfer schools. To run up north to some fancy prep school, to leave his family and friends. To be alone. To escape. To get away where the monster couldn't chase him.

Dave can hardly open his little plastic case of blades. His hand is shaking and the cut goes crooked the moment he starts dragging it across.

It's not enough – there's more wetness coming from his eyes than his arm. He has to trace another line, shaky and deep.

And then another.

The face in the mirror won't become human. It's not working. It's not enough anymore. Kurt isn't scared anymore, and Dave doesn't know how to make himself into what Kurt is now. He tried fear, he tried pain. He doesn't know what there is beyond that.

He doesn't know how to get to where Kurt is.

A fierce burn at his wrist makes him look down. Something like real, deep fear makes him go cold as he sees the red and ugly mess he's made of his arm. He's cut over old scars, he's bleeding all over the floor, the bathmat, down the sink.

His wrist. He cut too high up on his wrist and it's deep and red and tracking in steady drips down his arm and to the floor.

His head feels light, and his stomach flips around. He drops the razor he's still clutching, but he doesn't move beyond that. Will he die here finally? Was it too much? Finally?

He stands there and sways, waits for the lights to go dim and his knees to buckle.

But it doesn't come. The tracks up his arm darken and crust, the scars slowly thread down and stop. The drips of blood get darker and slower.

He waits to die, but his body just won't fucking let him.

He has to wash the bathmat – luckily it's brown, the stains won't show.

It takes him an hour to clean the bathroom – his head does feel light and he isn't moving fast.

He has to thread the bandage all up his arm. And it hurts, it fucking throbs with every heartbeat, and burns with every movement.

He throws away five rags just cleaning things up, and it still smells like iron in the bathroom but he sprays some air freshener and leaves the door open so the place can air out.

He pukes twice while he's cleaning. But nothing comes out, just dry heaves and spit.

Dave goes to his dad the day after that, in a polo shirt and sweater like it's cold in the house or something. He asks his dad if they can talk, and his dad doesn't ask him questions these days but from the way he instantly shut his work laptop and gestures Dave into his little office, Dave sees how worried he is.

"I can't go back there," Dave says, and it's hard to get the words out. He keeps thinking that McKinley is a punishment he deserves.

But his arm is killing him, and some of the cuts reopened overnight and bled on his sheets. And he's really, really scared of what he's turning into.

His dad sits back silently, waiting for more.

Dave talks.

He doesn't say everything, of course – there's no way in hell he'll ever show his arms to his dad. He disappoints his dad too often as it is, he can't watch those sad fucking eyes get even more grim, more disappointed and helpless and horrified.

He tells his dad more about the bullying than his dad knew before. Dave's a monster but he can still play human well enough that after he tells his dad about the death threat, his dad reaches out and pats his leg and tells him that everyone does things they regret.

Forgives him, in his own way.

Which is fucking ridiculous. But maybe parents have to forgive.

He tells his dad that he can't go back to that school, because the people who like him like that bully, and the ones who don't like him won't trust him either way. He's too scared of going back to what he was just to keep his friends and his status.

A week later his dad comes home late from work and tells Dave that he's registered to start at Carmel in September.

Dave thanks him quietly and goes upstairs and opens his email, and deletes every unread email in his inbox. Kurt and Z and Bieste. Kurt more than anyone.

He can't be that monster anymore. But he doesn't want to be someone who has to bleed to feel human. There's got to be some middle ground somewhere, and maybe he'll find it on his own if he can just be somewhere where nobody knows him.

Dave doesn't sign up for sports. His dad says that's probably smart, grades should come first and football scholarships are hard to come by with so many players in the midwest.

He doesn't talk a lot. He focuses in school and doesn't get to know anybody. He doesn't make friends, but he doesn't make enemies. He doesn't listen to gossip. If there's a loser glee club here, if there's a pretty, soft-eyed gay boy walking around getting shit from some pack of bullies, he doesn't know and he doesn't want to know.

He goes online and does some research and comes up with two names: one, GSA Columbus. Closest thing teenagers have to a gay support group, apparently.

Two, Scandals. The only gay bar around, and it's actually in West Lima.

He goes back and forth for a while about whether to go to the group or the bar, or both, or neither. He goes to the group's website and reads encouraging words about finding friends and support. He checks the bar on Yelp and reads about dingy lighting and how karaoke nights suck.

Dave is trying to be better than he was, but still. When he grabs his keys and lies to his dad about a study group at some classmate's house, it's West Lima he drives to.

The first step into the bar is terrifying. He has no clue what to expect, just a thousand different worse-case scenarios that all tumble around in his head.

Reality is pretty anticlimactic. He's there on a Wednesday. The bar isn't crowded, there's a lot of older guys sitting around. A pool table hidden in the corner, a dance floor that no one's using. There's music playing, but it's something country, not Lady Gaga or whatever.

It's just a bar. It's like a place he'd see in a movie, except there's no chicks in there.

He walks from the door to the bar like he's walking deeper into a tomb. But he sits down and asks for a beer and the guy checks his ID and even though it's the cheap plastic thing Z got him last year it still passes muster. Dave figures he's big enough to be a believable adult either way.

He sits there, quiet, and listens to the guys down the bar talk. They throw a few casual questions his way now and then, but he answers in shy mumbles until they stop trying.

It's not what he expected. Not at all.

He knows that first night that he'll be back. It's dingy and sad and he's as lonely there as he is shut inside his bedroom, but that makes it fit. That makes it feel right.

In the end Scandals helps more than he realizes.

Two months after his first step inside the bar, Dave knows people there by name. The bartenders get his beer pouring before he even sits. He feels good inside the bar, and when he leaves he feels like a human being for a while.

He knows a couple of kids in school – this chick in his Chem II class who could make that Zizes chick look like a Victoria's Secret model, she's the funniest person he has ever fucking met in his life. She does things with the crook of an eyebrow that make Dave laugh more than a monster deserves to laugh at anything.

A couple of nerds in English, too. Real nerds, like DnD and World of Warcraft and all that shit, but they're smart-asses and they're getting picked on by some douche blond jock like something out of an eighties movie, and Dave puts a stop to that real quick. And for some reason they start hanging out together.

Dave isn't about to sign up for WoW, but somehow listening to these dudes talk about raids and expansions and aggro and shit is fucking awesome.

His grades are good. He doesn't mind getting up in the morning. Best of all, he can vanish from his straight, monster skin whenever he wants and go to Scandals and be what he is. Gay.

It feels good. Looking back at where he was that summer, Dave can see that he was in a really bad place. The kind of place that people don't usually get out of all on their own. But he did, somehow. He crawled out, and he hasn't pulled out the razors in weeks, and his arms are pretty fucked up but a lot of the littler scars have healed.

He's healed. In the smaller ways.

He turns his head, he narrows his eyes at a strangely familiar sound, and suddenly a pair of round, soft blue eyes is looking his way.

"David?" Kurt sounds utterly shocked.

And it's nothing. It's a run-in with someone he used to go to school with, that's all. Dave talks a little about Carmel and makes Kurt smile by throwing around some gay slang he's picked up, and Kurt leaves him with a pleased smile and goes to dance with his boyfriend.

It's nothing. Nothing huge.

It doesn't have to be anything huge.

But Dave sits at the bar and watches beautiful Kurt and his beautiful boyfriend, and some other beautiful guy that they seem to be with – someone familiar but not from McKinley, one of the crowd that shows up at Scandals on the weekends, probably.

He watches them and he realizes suddenly that he's been wrong.

He's not a gay guy. Scandals isn't for him.

Kurt's a gay guy. Kurt is the scared and timid and pretty guy that's on every Youtube video, every website, every story about being a gay teenager. Kurt and Blaine and their friend.

Being gay isn't about going to a bar and sipping beers and talking to guys about being a fucking bear cub. Being gay means being harassed and bullied and wanting to die and wanting to transfer schools and living in fear and pain.

Dave hasn't gotten any better. He's been living a fucking lie. He hasn't found a life at Carmel and Scandals. He's taken over Kurt's life. He's tried to appropriate humanity that doesn't fucking belong to him.

Because they're out there dancing, and he's still a fucking monster.

It's weird how it happens, really.

The videos, the ones Kurt sent him to help him, are the things that first made him truly loathe himself.

Finn asking about him and Kurt and whether they were still cool is what made Dave realize exactly how much of a monster he really is.

Kurt showing up at his house made him cut himself so badly he probably should have just fucking died of it.

And a night out at Scandals makes him realize that he can't simply ignore his past and hope he can look human enough to fool a new crowd of students.

He's a little drunk when he gets home from the bar the night Kurt shows up. He's a little tipsy, but the razor is still and steady in his hand, and the first bite of metal slicing into his hand feels like an old friend. It feels honest. Real.

All those weird moments that set him on their course, that made him realize what he is and what he deserves...funniest thing is that he has Kurt Hummel to thank for all of them.

He watches the red trail down his arm, dark steady flow, and wonders if he still has Kurt's email address. He thinks he ought to let him know that he's as sorry as any monster can be. That he's glad that Kurt is one of the survivors and not one of the memorials, but that doesn't mean that Kurt's monster deserves to be unpunished.

He ought to thank Kurt. Because yeah, Kurt's human and Dave's animal, but they all have parts to play, right? Maybe in some absurd way Dave helped Kurt become who he is. Maybe the monsters that don't kill their victims can take some credit for making them stronger.

Or maybe it's just the blood-loss talking. He thinks strange things when he bleeds.

Until he stops thinking at all.

end