It Goes Down Easy, (2/5)
Continuing to bring my shit over to LJ from ff.net
Title: It Goes Down Easy
Rating: T
Summary: Forwards & backwards, then up & down. And the non-stop spinning. That's what it feels like. That's how they are together.
Disclaimer: I do not own Glee, but if I DID, well, I only have five words for you: Brittney. Finn. Spin-off. Freelance detectives. Get on it, Ryan Murphy.
A/N - I had the best/WORST time writing this chapter. Best, because of all the Puck/Quinn interaction. I don’t care, I’m obsessed with the idea of those two being BFF super-parents. And worst, well, there HAS to be a plot, right? Right?!
Un gros merci to my awesome beta Babs! Much love, CRAZY LADY! And to Becca, who gave me a crash course in football so that this chapter could happen.
Chapter title stolen shamelessly from The Strokes.
Chapter One: Shabop Shalom
What Ever Happened?
I want to be forgotten,
and I don't want to be reminded.
You say "please don't make this harder."
No, I won't yet.
I want to be beside her.
She wanna be admired.
You say "please don't make this harder."
No, I won't yet...
-------
It’s easy to tell when most people are stoned out of their minds. With Finn, the rules are a little different. The kid already looks half-baked, and that’s on a good day. So it takes years of Puck and Finn smoking badly rolled joints behind the 7-11 down the block from school to learn all of the tell-tale signs.
Sitting in the Hudsons’ garage, Puck sees the way Finn’s gripping the edge of the worktable and he knows that his best friend is good and blitzed. Because when Finn is high, his arms are literally weapons of mass destruction. They’ve gone through enough vases, windows and Playstations by now that Finn automatically holds on to whatever is most stable when they smoke so he doesn’t end up knocking down half of Western Ohio.
Rachel is sitting on a bench, mostly silent but still giving these indignant squeaks every once in a while because “I understand the need to divulge in such transgressions, boys, but I don’t want you two to become a statistic.” When Puck strikes up a conversation on possible ways to make Nationals go their way, without relying solely on their talent, Rachel goes red in the face. “We’re not going to cheat.”
“Why the fuck not?”
She gets her I am about to unleash some wisdom on you, Noah Puckerman look, which always comes right before she says something completely stupid. “Because! That’s unethical!”
Puck lets out a bark of laughter before taking one last toke. Rachel huffs and amps up for her final blow and he’s already smirking at whatever it is she’ll say. What he doesn’t expect is for Finn to say it with her, at the exact same time; like it’s one of their duets that they nail the second they perform them.
“Winning by cheating isn’t winning.”
He opens his mouth to tell them how lucky they are to have him around but he sees the way they’re both grinning dorkily at each other and he wonders if maybe they may not need him as much as he likes to think so.
So what he says instead is “Alright Hudson, it’s been real. But I know how the little lady gets when she doesn’t get her daily dose of The Puckerman Special so we’re gonna bounce.” He picks Rachel up and hoists her over his shoulder despite her protests and heads for the door.
Rachel calls him a pig, Finn knocks over a toolbox and Puck wonders if the weed is finally making him paranoid.
-------
The next day, Quinn’s waiting for him by his truck when he gets to the parking lot after the final bell. She comes over for dinner at his place every Wednesday, ever since his mother found out about the baby. He’s not really sure what these dinners accomplish, other than making him want to drink battery acid, but his mother insists on keeping tabs on the baby. And he’s nothing if not terrified of her so really, it’s out of his hands.
He chucks his backpack into the bed of the truck and turns to face Quinn, taking in her pissed off expression and the way her arms are crossed.
(Ever since her stomach started really showing, she’s had to cross her arms a little bit higher than usual, which makes her look less intimidating and more like a genie. But don’t tell her that. Trust him.)
“I’ve been waiting for half an hour,” she snipes. He sighs. Tonight is going to be fun.
“Well school finished ten minutes ago so...” He opens her door for her and gives her a boost into the cab of the truck. If her mood is anything to go by, it’s not the time for the hilarious grunts that he normally whips out when he has to lift her. He walks over to his side and gets in, and starts to drive only when he sees she’s put on her seatbelt out of the corner of his eye. “I’ll have you know, I won’t stand for my daughter being a truant.”
“Gee, I wonder where you picked that word up,” she grumbles. He grins because he can tell she’s starting to calm down. “I skipped last period. I told Mr. Schue I wasn’t feeling well and he told me to take it easy.”
“What’s up with you two?” The day after he and Quinn had sat down and decided they wouldn’t be giving this baby up, she had been adamant that the first person she got to tell was Mr. Schuester. Puck had no idea why and she offered no information but two days after she left Puck’s house to go see their teacher, word spread that Mr. S had ditched the psycho wife. And now he and Quinn have gotten close, like they share some secret. Schuester dotes on her like a daughter, and Quinn eats it up, probably because her own father hasn’t spoken to her directly in months.
Puck hopes they aren’t fucking or anything. This kid is gonna grow up messed up enough as it is.
“Where’s Finn, anyway?” he asks when she ignores his earlier question.
“Detention.” She had been fiddling with the knobs on the radio, but now she’s abandoned them to stare at him in annoyance. “Someone told him that Coach Tanaka was considering a sex change and wanted everyone to start referring to him as Ma’am.” Puck grins. That one had been almost too easy.
Even though she isn’t biting his head anymore, he can tell something is still on her mind. “What’s wrong now?”
She takes a deep breath. “My hormones are all out of whack, Rachel Berry keeps singing to my stomach because she is convinced the baby can hear her, despite what everyone keeps telling me I am getting fat, and your mother hates me.”
All true.
As Quinn rambles on about her horrid life, Puck thinks back to the first night he brought Quinn home to his mother.
It was awful. And it only got worse when Quinn finally left and his mother asked him point-blank when they would be getting married. Puck had bought himself some time (and sympathy) from his mother by telling her that he had asked her to marry him, she had just said no. But then Quinn eventually got wind of that bullshit and told his mother straight-up that Puck never proposed because he is in love with Rachel Berry (he had jumped in with a very mature and very justified AM NOT! but no one was actually listening to him) and she went on to explain that furthermore, Quinn was dating her son’s best friend and had no intention of marrying Puck. Ever. This, believe it or not, did nothing to change his mother’s opinion of Quinn.
Quinn likes to bring up Rachel a lot when she comes over, probably because that puts the heat off of her and gets his mother started on The Incident and it’s bad enough her son is now going to be a father but she has to learn in front of everybody that he is some sort of sexual deviant and did he even think about what seeing that did to poor little Debbie and now he finally finds a nice Jewish girl but heaven forbid he brings her home to his mother like a good son. He glares at Quinn whenever she throws him under the bus like that, but she just smiles and listens to his mother’s Rachel Rant eagerly.
He and Quinn spend this particular dinner swearing up and down to raise the kid Jewish.
And then when Puck drives Quinn home, he spends the ride reassuring her that it was all just for his mother’s sake and the baby can get her Catholic on, no problem.
-------
Every Titan gets 3 tickets per game to give to friends and family. In the past, Puck’s have gone more often than not to a wide assortment of girls that thanked him in a wide assortment of ways. Sometimes, when Mrs. Hudson could make a game he’d toss a ticket Debbie’s way, but other than that, he mostly saw them as Get-Some-Ass-Free cards.
So yeah, they’ve been piling up in his locker for a while now. He’s considered inviting Rachel to a game but from the way her eyes glaze over when he just talks about football, he knows she’d only show up to, like, be supportive. Besides, she’s never asked.
But he gets an idea one day at her house, while she and Eli force him to watch The Sound of Music (and seriously, what’s with all the Nazi movies?) and he escapes by claiming he needs to use the can. He heads to the kitchen to raid their freakishly huge fridge when he spots a small wisp of smoke from the patio. Years of living with a pyromaniac means putting fires out is kind of second nature to him, but when he heads out with a pitcher of water all he finds is Brian, smoking a cigar with a cooler of Miller Lite and a small TV set up in front of him showing the Browns game.
They kind of just stare at each other for a while and then Brian nudges an empty patio chair in Puck’s direction and turns back to the game. They watch the whole game in silence (except for when Puck tries his luck and reaches for a bottle and Brian doesn’t even stop watching the screen to say “Don’t even think about it.”) and when he kisses Rachel goodnight and Eli shakes his hand goodbye, Brian just pats him on the back and says “Packers on Sunday. We don’t stand a chance.”
It’s a pretty pathetic idea, and he knows this, but he doesn’t really get why he just can’t let it go.
At school the next day, he stops by Rachel’s locker to give her back the notes she’s lent him to study for his history test (which he totally used to cheat, by the way, but he knows better than to tell her this) and he hesitates for a while before getting the crumpled envelope from his back pocket.
“Uh, these are for your father. Brian.” Rachel looks really confused, but he goes on because he can’t take it back now. “Well Eli can come too, obviously. And you.” She opens the flap and when she sees the tickets, he knows she’s going to give him a happy smile. But he’s blindsided by the mini-tackle into the lockers.
When it’s finally game night and he walks out onto the field, it doesn’t take him long to find them in the crowd, probably because Rachel is screaming his name like a lunatic.
“Noah! Puck!” Rachel and Eli are dressed head to toe in red. Eli’s holding a sign that says WE LOVE #20 that he hopes to God Rachel made because the alternative is just too fucking weird to contemplate. They’re both bouncing up and down screaming “Go Noah Puckerman! Score a touchdown! Win the game!” and Brian has that embarrassed but weirdly amused and kind of loving this look on his face that Puck is starting to worry is becoming a staple expression of his own. Right next to them is Quinn who, in a desperate last-ditch effort to get his mother to stop actively hating her, asked Finn for two tickets instead of one and is watching the game with Debbie. Both are scarfing down chilli dogs like it’s going out of style and Puck doesn’t care if one is his little sister and the other is the mother of his child, Finn is driving those two home because he knows this binge-fest is not going to end well and he just got his truck cleaned last week.
While most games consist of them getting reamed for three hours straight, they’ve somehow managed to find a team that sucks as hard as they do. Neither side has scored a single point yet, and it’s only a matter of time before someone tries to burn the stadium to the ground in a riot. The fact that they are evenly matched in craptitude has somehow sparked the most (only) interesting game at McKinley since Kurt’s debut. The crowd is on its feet, the Cheerios’ routines are actually game-related and Puck even catches a smile on Coach Tanaka’s face when he sends them out for the final play of the game. It seems kind of shitty to end it with a field-goal attempt but they might as well play to their strengths and a win’s a win. Of course, their team is so fucking ass-backwards that they manage to screw up the simplest play. Finn fumbles the snap, and Kurt panics when he sees the defensive line about to annihilate him so he pivots around a player from the other team and runs off just as Finn finally gets control of the ball and launches a Hail Mary into the melee.
Somehow the ball lands in Kurt’s hands.
They may as well have tossed a naked girl into his arms because Kurt just stands there, a panicked What the fuck am I supposed to do with thing? expression on his face and showing no sign of moving toward the end zone that is literally two feet behind him.
Puck starts to sprint toward him, stiff arming two other players in the process, and there is no time to explain laterals, no time to grab the ball out of Kurt’s hands and no time to even just tell him to run. The game is on the line and they’ve come so close to winning so few times and he feels excited on the field in a way that he hasn’t in months so he hopes the guys on the team will cut him some slack when he just picks Kurt up with one arm and carries him into the end zone.
The crowd basically goes retarded.
His eyes quickly go to his fan section. Brian is shaking Mr. Hummel’s hand and Eli’s still waving the sign like a maniac. Debbie is dragging Quinn down near the field by the hand, going up to strangers and saying “Hi! Would you like to meet my niece?” and pointing a giant foam finger at Quinn’s stomach. He sweeps his eyes across the stands for Rachel. And then something attacks him from the right side.
“Noah!” she shrieks. “You scored a touchdown!”
“Thanks for the update, Berry,” he chuckles, holding her up with his arm for a moment before letting her slide down.
“I must be honest with you, I thought football was stupid. And it is.” He lifts one of his eyebrows at her because where the fuck is she going with this? “But it’s more than that. Well, no it isn’t, it’s still basically just stupid but I can’t lie and say I wasn’t very aroused when I watched you on the field.” And she’s not exactly using her indoor voice, by the way.
“Christ, who taught you how to flirt?” he wonders out loud.
“Oh, no one. I’m self-taught,” she explains seriously, as though obviously he was complimenting her awkward as fuck come-on. He rolls his eyes but decides not to waste his breath explaining the joke to her. Instead, he takes his helmet from under his arm and jams it onto her head and smirks as she struggles to overpower him and get it off.
“It smells like your closet in here!”
“Leave it on, it’s a good look for you” he declares, but he lets go because he knows his helmet smells like ass and any longer in there, she might pass out. When she rips the helmet off and looks up at him, yeah she’s calling him an idiot, but her face is flushed and her eyes are bright and she looks happy.
And he gets that feeling again. The feeling that something is about to click in his brain and he is going to love it and hate it in equal measure but he can only put it off for so long...
...and then some guys from the team dump the entire cooler over his head (even though Kurt is officially in the books as the winner of the game, but oh my god the bitch-fest the little guy unleashed on them the last time they doused him) and even though it’s ball-numbingly cold, Puck is pretty damn grateful because you can’t really think when you have a brain-freeze of this magnitude.
-------
It’s a couple of weeks later when Santana sends out a mass text to everyone that she’s going to have a party at her place. A party that he has to miss to watch Debbie and that Rachel misses to celebrate her dads’ anniversary.
The events from that night Puck pieces together from the eye witness accounts and eventual tearful confessions.
First, Quinn has one of her infamous hormonal meltdowns. They aren’t frequent but they are dangerous. Finn is the one who catches the brunt of them. Puck knows he should feel bad for the guy (Puck himself had to handle one of Quinn’s episodes and was ready and willing to jump into oncoming traffic by the end of it) but Finn seems to get a weird kick from being the only person who can calm the chick down with any modicum of success. On this night however, Quinn loses it at Santana’s party, so Puck gets about a dozen texts from everyone there and they all tell him about how this time, it’s bad.
Second, Finn storms off mid-tirade and once again the people from the party help confirm time of departure, and admit that no one could blame him for leaving. Everyone assumes he goes home.
Third, Puck gets off the phone with Rachel. Her fathers have dropped her off at home on their way out of town for the weekend, and he plans on going over tomorrow and staying at her place until they get back. So he says goodnight, and he tells her to think about all the freaky things she wants him to do to her, and he hangs up.
This is all he knows when he goes to bed that night. Everything else he learns when Rachel rings his doorbell the next morning, crying.
He opens the door to find her standing there, her hair all over the place and tear tracks running down her face to a damp spot on her t-shirt. Obviously, this should be his first clue that something is wrong but what really freaks him out is that a) his mother’s car is still in the driveway and Rachel had to have seen it and b) she’s in sweatpants, looking the opposite of put-together.
“I did something, something horrible and I’m so sorry.” She’s speaking as though he should know what the hell she’s talking about but he is completely at a loss. This is Rachel Berry. The amount of stupid shit that can send her into hysterics is vast and unknowable.
He throws an arm around her in comfort. “Berry, get it together. I’ll totally help you bury the body.” He says it to make her laugh, but she just gets a stricken look in her face. “Oh god, you killed someone, didn’t you?”
“Noah...” she whispers, exasperated but still crying. He’s starting to feel uncomfortable, because she is obviously expecting him to put this together himself but for the life of him he can’t.
She looks down for a good while before in a deep, gasping sob she says “Finn came over last night.”
He drops his arm in mock-outrage. “YOU KILLED FINN?” He can do this all day, really.
But then he stops laughing when he looks up at her. It’s the pitying look on her face that starts the alarm in his head ringing and he gets a feeling of dread in his stomach that takes his breath away.
Something horrible. I’m sorry. Finn came over last night. Horrible. Sorry. Finn. Finn. Finn.
Fuck.
And looking back, he definitely should have figured this out earlier but, come on, this is Rachel. It’s a weak excuse, he knows, but for now it’s the only thing stopping him from feeling like a complete idiot.
Rachel is still sobbing. It’s not the pretty, glistening-eye crying she does when they watch a sad movie or the pathetic sniffling from when someone hurts her feelings. Her eyes are red and her nose is leaking and she looks awful. Good, he thinks unkindly.
She seems to think his silence is an invitation to explain herself. Her words are all running together and she is rambling, her hands wringing the hem of her sweater violently. “He got into a fight with Quinn and he was upset and it didn’t mean anything but we -”
“Don’t,” he says coldly. He forces his mind wander, to escape this moment and what it means, but all it does is recall another time, years ago, when he was standing in this doorway and someone else was trying to tell him his I’m sorrys. “Just don’t.” He slams the door in her face and, just like the last time, he sits with his back against the door until he hears a car drive away.
-------
He stares at the phone in his hands for at least half an hour. On the one hand, stress is the last thing Quinn needs. On the other, she has a right to know. And if he doesn’t talk to someone about this, he knows he will do something stupid and dangerous and permanent. He doesn’t even realize that he’s pressed the speed-dial to her cell number on his phone until he hears the click of the line being picked up.
“Hello?” she whispers at the other end.
“Quinn...” He struggles with how to start this conversation
Quinn, something horrible has happened.
Quinn, they’ve finally gotten back at us.
Quinn, it hurts and I don’t know what to do.
Thankfully she saves him from saying something awful. “I know,” she says, even though he hasn’t said anything so far. “I know, Puck.” Her voice is still a whisper and it’s making this worse for him, somehow. The Quinn Fabray he knows would be out for blood right now, not home, alone, in shock. Like he is.
“Finn’s here,” she explains quietly. So she’s not alone. “He’s sleeping now, cried himself out.” There is something tender in her voice as she says this, and Puck has to wonder if Quinn really gets what has happened.
“And you’re letting him?”
She goes on as though she hasn’t heard him. “He was there waiting on my front porch this morning when my mom went to get the paper. He told me everything. He told me that he and Rachel -”
“Stop!” It’s a knee-jerk reaction and he feels bad having yelled at her, but Quinn is blessedly silent so he doesn’t care too much. “Stop,” he continues quietly. “I don’t know the details.” The And I don’t want to goes unsaid.
She sighs on the line. “He’s... he needs me now. You know how he is,” she says, and for a moment Puck thinks I obviously don’t. “This is going to tear him apart. I... I can keep him together. I think.” He doesn’t need to see her to know she is chewing her bottom lip something fierce right now.
“You’re going to stay with him, aren’t you?” It’s a question, but it comes out more as a statement.
“I kind of deserve this, don’t you think?”
“No, you don’t. Neither of us does.” Don’t we, though? But he chases the thought away. “I can’t believe you’re going to let him get away with this...”
“I love him.” She says that like it’s so damn simple. And yes, a part of him hates her for it because it is that simple, for her.
“That’s the weakest fucking thing I’ve ever heard, Fabray.”
“Is it?” she asks, and Puck hears Finn mumbling something in the background on her end so he snaps his phone closed and goes back to bed.
-------
When he gets to school on Monday, his plan is to just... not do a damn thing. He briefly contemplates buying a slushy but he feels so fucking over that shit, and in his messed up brain even slushying her betrays a level of affection that he doesn’t think he owes her right now.
The whole school already knows by second period, even though no one comes up to talk to him about it directly. He briefly spies a blog post about it on Santana’s Blackberry when he sits behind her in class. “McKinley Needs To Stop Recycling Storylines: Hudson vs. Puckerman, II” and when he kicks the back of her chair, he’s surprised that she has the decency to look sorry and put her phone away.
During their lunchtime Glee practice, even Mr. Schuester has to realize that something is going on because the second they stop singing, everyone in the room is so silent that you can hear a pin drop. Puck doesn’t look at Rachel once (except when he forgets not to look at her and those times he’s glad to see she looks miserable). Quinn doesn’t leave Finn’s side for a second that day, although if it’s to counteract the rumour (is it a rumour if it’s true, though?) or to prevent Puck from getting anywhere near him, Puck has no clue.
It’s while walking out of fourth period English that he realizes he can do this. He can totally ignore the both of them for the next year and a half, because he has other things to worry about. Important things, like his child and figuring out a way to get her and Quinn to follow him out of this fucking town where nothing good ever happens. It won’t be hard to write them out completely. Rachel hasn’t been around long enough in his life to actually matter and after years of everyone telling him to be more like Finn, knowing that Puck’s rubbed off on him instead seems like a good enough consolation prize to throw a decade of friendship away. Besides, he’s gotten at least twenty texts that are all a variation of “I Let me make you feel better” today alone.
He can totally do this.
And then he gets to his locker and voices float out from the nearby girls’ bathroom. “Did you hear? Rachel Berry fucked Finn Hudson!”
Which would be bad enough if Rachel and Tina hadn’t been walking into the bathroom at that exact moment. Rachel starts sniffling and Tina put her arm around her shoulders and Puck drops a book of his to the ground because someone needs to remember that this is happening to him, too. At the loud bang from the book, the two girls look up and Rachel stops crying but turns around and runs down the hallway, Tina hot on her heels.
He’s glad he doesn’t have to make any official statement or anything. It’s going to end the way it began, naturally and without a fuss. She’s basically the smartest person he knows so he gives her the benefit of the doubt when he assumes she knows they’re over. Except a part of him feels like it’s not real until he says it out loud, but that’s the part of him that thought him and Rachel actually had a shot at this so it doesn’t really warrant listening to.
When he spots Kurt in the parking lot after school, Kurt just gives him a sad smile and says “I guess I’ll be seeing you tomorrow,” and when Puck furrows his brow Kurt gives a little shrug and says softly “Tomorrow’s Tuesday.”
And that’s when it starts feeling real.
-------
The absolute worst part is that Puck knows he’s going to take her back. People fuck up. He’s living proof. He’s not going to let her forget this any time soon, but as angry as he is, he knows that shit happens and they just need to man-up and figure their way through this. Besides, she’s the one who screwed up, so why should he suffer? Exactly. The second she calls to apologize, he’ll make her squirm a little (a lot) in guilt and then take her back.
Except it’s been two weeks. And he hasn’t heard a word from her.
Well, fuck.