Fictable no. 39
Finn smiles at him one day over a pile of towels that they’re folding (pretty badly), and it’s a real smile. Not a forced smile like he’s been used to getting the last couple of months, not an angry smile like he gets whenever they’re at basketball practice and coach has them on opposite teams, facing off. It’s not a conspiratorial smile like the one he got over the top of Jesse’s car as they slashed the tyres. And it’s not a sad smile like the one he got just before everyone left him and Quinn at the hospital to go back to Regionals.
It’s a seriously real smile, like the ones he used to get before Finn joined Glee and started pretending his mom had a prostate and Puck screwed his girlfriend and Quinn lied to everyone and the world started spinning wildly out of control. A real smile, like he used to get when they were friends. It knocks him down. He smiles back, he can’t help it.
Every day after that he gets a smile. Just one. Different times of the day, different places, different situations, but every day, he gets a smile from Finn. He’s not keeping track or anything, but he watches out for them, just in case Finn’s smiling at him more and he hasn’t noticed or something. He’s not. Puck gets exactly one smile a day. He always smiles back.
He starts watching Finn. Not in a gay way, just, he wants to know if something’s going on. If something’s happening to make Finn hate him less, or if he’s just coming round to that way of thinking naturally. He doesn’t really know why he cares, he just thinks it’s important somehow, the distinction. So he starts watching Finn, just around, not like, actually following him or anything, but if he sees him in the hallway he’ll just stand around and watch a bit, or sometimes he follows him a bit of the way to class, or hangs around late after Glee to see what’s up.
Here’s what he finds out.
Finn spends a lot of time with Rachel. Too much time, if you ask Puck. And he likes Rachel, kinda, she’s quite sweet really and she’s sorta funny even though she doesn’t mean to be and overall he doesn’t really hate her guts, but he could definitely not spend the amount of time that Finn does around Rachel, he wouldn’t even have to light himself on fire, he thinks it would just happen. Spontaneous combustion, or whatever.
But Finn’s all about Rachel, says he loves her and all that shit, so he probably quite enjoys spending all that time together. They spend a lot of time together.
Whenever he sees them in the hall, usually Tuesday mornings after second, Wednesday afternoons just after study hall and on Fridays right before lunch, Rachel always smiles at him. Usually he nods or winks or something like that, but he’s started to notice that whenever he sees them together and Rachel smiles at him, that’ll be the smile he gets from Finn that day, so these days he kind of smiles back at both of them simultaneously.
He wonders briefly if Rachel’s the reason Finn started smiling at him again. And he gets kind of pissed. He tells her one day before Glee, when she’s at her locker getting her stuff, that she needs to back off, he can fight his own battles thanks anyway, and if him and Finn are gonna work shit out, it’s not gonna be because of her nosy ass.
She laughs at him, which, what the fuck? And tells him that she has both no idea what he’s talking about, and no influence over whom it is that Finn chooses to smile at. Then she bounces off down the hall to the choir room and he stands at her locker for a few minutes, rethinking his theory. He doesn’t come up with anything satisfactory.
So he starts watching again, and that’s when he notices.
Finn’s been smiling at Quinn as well.
She’s back on Cheerios, though she’s not captain anymore, Santana’s clinging on to that with the tips of her fingernails and she doesn’t look like she’s gonna last long. She’s not quite back to being to four star bitch that she once was though, pregnancy, and all that came along with it, has softened her. She’s kinder now, to everyone, and she doesn’t live her life based on what Sue Sylvester wants from her. He sees her in the lunchroom with Mercedes one day and they’re scarfing down cupcakes and drinking regular coke and giggling, he gives her props for that.
Anyway, he’s on his way to class one day and he’s walking down the middle of the hallway when he sees them, Finn on one side, Quinn on the other (how did they never get annoyed that their names rhymed? That shit was irritating) and he sees Finn turn round a smile at her, and her face like, lights up, and she looks surprised, even though she had been looking at him before and Puck thinks she was kind of expecting it. Still, he knows that feeling, every day Finn smiles at him and it still shocks the hell out of him every time, he can barely manage to smile back. Quinn looks like she’s in the same boat. They walk away from each other and Finn’s coming towards him, and he’s not sure if the smile he gets is his smile for the day or just leftovers from Quinn’s, but he smiles back anyway, just in case.
At some point, one smile a day turns into a couple. And even though Puck’s been watching intently every day for the last two months, and remembers pretty much every smile, he’s not entirely sure when it happened. But he notices on a Saturday; Sectionals is coming up and Jane Adams have reportedly brought their game this year instead of stealing ND’s game so they’ve been having extra practices on Saturdays and yeah, it really blows, he knew it would.
But they’re all kind of joking around and somehow Finn’s been roped into having a dance-off with Mike Chang, which is pretty much the funniest thing he’s ever seen in his life. Everyone’s smiling and laughing and clapping out a beat. Quinn’s practically hanging off of Matt she’s laughing so hard it’s difficult for her to stand up, Mercedes is trying to sing something but it keeps dissolving into big loud cackles halfway through a word, which just makes everything funnier. Mr Schue’s doing his best to look impartial but he’s got a couple of knuckles shoved in his mouth and Puck’s pretty sure that if he didn’t he’d be on the floor, and Rachel and Kurt are trying to cheer for Finn, but they keep breaking down as well. It’s actually kind of awesome.
And then it gets more awesome. Finn falls down. He’s trying to copy this move that Mike was doing with a spin and like a half split and Puck has no idea why he even attempted it because they were both there last year when Mike was trying to learn it and it took him six months to get right but it’s actually fucking hilarious to watch Finn try, because he screws up the turn, trips over his own feet but tries to do the splits anyway and just ends up on his ass, limbs all over the place and at ridiculous angles.
It’s instinct, really, the way he steps forward into the circle and shoves his hand out for Finn to grab. He doesn’t even think about it, never considers for a second not doing it. And then Finn reaches up and grabs it and he realizes that the last time the guy touched him it was a fist in his face, and now he’s holding onto his hand as he pulls himself up and once he’s up he throws Puck this ridiculously goofy smile and pats him on the back as he breaks the circle to find a chair.
That’s when Puck realizes that Finn already smiled at him today, this morning when they both happened to be walking into school at the same time, and now he’s smiled at him again, and that has Puck trying to remember how many smiles he got yesterday and the day before. He can’t. But he got two today. He’s grinning like an idiot, and it’s not just because that shit before was funny.
He’s in history class one day, he’s early for whatever reason, only by a couple of minutes, no big. Anyway, he’s at his desk, messing around with this list he’s drawing up the hottest teachers in the school based on the criteria he and Finn developed in freshman year, when he feels a body drop into the seat beside him and looks up to see the man himself sitting beside him. Dude’s got this pensive look on his face and he’s staring straight ahead.
“So, I’ve been thinking,” he says slowly, tilting his head to one side.
“Yeah? Bet that’s been painful huh?” Puck blurts out and instantly regrets. Seriously, what is his problem? Every time he catches a break his mouth just goes and drops it for him. Goddamn. He opens his eyes and looks over at Finn, expecting to see that old mix of anger and hurt looking back at him. Instead he finds a toothy grin, and amused eyes.
“You’re an ass.” Finn tells him. Still smiling, looking him right in the eyes. And he shrugs, coz, yeah, he really is, but he’d be more of an ass if he said so. Finn seems to get it because he laughs a little and throws his head back. Puck smiles and laughs a bit himself, and then suddenly they’re looking at each other and laughing together instead of just side by side and he thinks something is really just changing.
“So anyway,” Finn says when they’ve both stopped laughing, “I was thinking,” he pauses for a second to give Puck another chance to trip over his mouth, when Puck stays quiet and just keeps looking at him, he continues with a smile, “if we’re serious about having skirt length on a sliding scale comparative to severity of hairstyle, we should really come up with some kind of numerical system based on the percentage of hair that’s loose so that it’s easier to mark off against hemline inches. What do you think?”
And that’s the moment that Puck knows they’re gonna be ok. Finn’s just sat down next to him and picked up a conversation that they’d left unfinished three months ago, no ceremony, no fuss, no apologies. They’re cool now. And Puck would ask what the hell was going on, except somewhere in the back of his mind there’s this teeny tiny little Rachel looking at him with her big, matter-of-fact eyes after he’d said goodbye to Beth and given her to Shelby, and saying, ‘ours is not to reason why, Noah’ and patting him on the hand. At the time he’d rolled his eyes and called her a geek, but now he figures that that was probably sound advice, so he just nods along with Finn’s idea and they start revamping their system, right there in class.
A couple of weeks later, at Mercedes’ birthday party, he’s sitting by himself knocking back some ginger ale (it’s a parent supervised party, no beer, no nothing, not even punch or whatever) and just looking out across this group of freaks that he’s come to call friends. Seriously, they’re such losers sometimes that it hurts. But he kinda likes them anyways, at least they’re never boring. Well, apart from Rachel sometimes when she gets on a roll, or Kurt when he tries to dispense fashion advice, or sometimes Quinn when she gets on one of her righteousness trips like she tends to these days when she’s feeling down and starts telling him all about he could be a better man or some shit. As a group though, never a dull moment. He sort of enjoys it.
Finn sits down next to him and they bump cans of ginger ale like beer and sit there in silence for a couple of minutes, just looking out at the room. When Puck looks over at Finn he realizes that he wasn’t actually looking at the room, so much as he was looking at her. Quinn. They catch each others’ eyes just at the moment Puck happens to notice, and a smile passes each of their lips. Quinn’s shy and unsure, Finn’s sad and affectionate.
It hits him then, what he really did. It wasn’t about screwing Finn’s girl or getting her pregnant or lying about it. He split them up. These two people who actually really kind of loved each other. He took them away from each other and made it so that they probably couldn’t find their way back. He feels really, actually, really bad in that moment. Like maybe he should really apologise.
“Hey, look man-“ he starts, and then stops short because, how the hell is he supposed to apologise for this? “I- I mean you know that I- I’m really-“
Finn cuts him off with a wave of the hand.
“Don’t.” He says, and takes a swig from his can. “You suck at it anyway.”
They meet each others’ eyes and Puck really wishes that he were just able to like, say something. But Finn’s right. He sucks at it. And he thinks Finn probably knows, what he wants to say, and damn is he thankful for that.
And that’s the conclusion that he comes to in the end, that he’s just really damn grateful for this guy. Because after everything that’s happened, the things he did and the things he said and what all of that has done to them, dude still understands him better than anyone else in this whole goddamn town, and even after all of that, Finn’s still able to get over it and smile at the guy who pretty much ruined everything for him.
That’s why Finn’s his boy. And always will be.