Whistle For The Choir (2/?)
Name: Whistle For The Choir
Author: iamsamflynn
Spoilers: A Very Glee Christmas.
Pairing: Rachel/Quinn.
Length: 2000+
Rating: up to R.
Summary: They meet Hiram Berry for the first time at the hospital, and Puck explains that this all started with a badly scheduled date.
A/N: Skedaddle wit'ch'yo big words. Team Glee goes badass. That's all you need to know.
Glee tastes like tension and pool water.
Contrary to speculation, Rachel does not let a concussion and ten stitches stop her from attending school two days later. She tells him about the taste after five minutes of Finn alternating between looks of anger and regret - and possibly desperation. Puck just frowns a little because it seems like a strange thing to say. Except, everyone is pointedly ignoring Finn for the most of the meet - if not shooting him down entirely - and Rachel is painstakingly dedicated to ignoring the boy's gaze, so the tension part is pretty much explained. Puck doesn't know that tension is actually a taste, but it certainly seems palpable.
Finn gets up hurriedly when Mister Schuester asks for volunteers and rushes to the front of the room to perform, his eyes locked intensely on Rachel the entire time, and for a moment it looks like Rachel isn't breathing. Then she coughs heavily, almost like she's choking, and Puck pats her on the back, moving his arm around her for the comfort.
He understands a little after that - being around Finn is tense for everyone in Glee, but Rachel's the one who almost drowned because of him, and looking at him makes her remember it. The taste of chlorine in her mouth, on her tongue, stuck latent in her throat, flooding her lungs.
Puck kind of wants to vomit for a moment.
Finn starts the song, and the feeling doesn't go away.
Puck interrupts him before the verse starts.
"Oh hell no you don't," he says loudly, standing up from his chair and stomping down from the risers to glare at Finn while the music cuts off and Mister Schuester tries to jump in front of him. But Puck will not be denied, because it's only Monday morning and it's just too early to be dealing with this shit.
"Sit down Puck! This is just rude, Finn has the right to-"
"Shut the fuck up and stop making me angry, that's what he has the right to do," Puck interrupts angrily, eyes stuck on the teen in the middle of the room rather than the older man in front of him. Finn's still sporting bruises from his 'lesson' on Saturday - will be for a while if the colour of that shiner on his right eye is any indication, Puck notes with a great deal of satisfaction - and Rachel's sitting in her chair in the risers with all of the Glee girls surrounding her and the gash at the back of her head stitched back together (but no one can see that).
"I'm allowed to sing to her! I deserve to tell my side of the story!"
"No, you deserve to get my foot up your ass - except, no, you'd probably like it there," Puck shoots back, and luckily enough Schuester realises the danger quick enough to turn and force Finn back before any blows can fall. "You told your side of the story when you tried to bully Rachel back into dating you, and when you pushed her to cracking her head on the poolside! You almost killed her, you dumb shit! No one hurts my home girl! You don't deserve forgiveness for that, okay! And you aren't butchering a song by 'The Script' in a shitty attempt to earn it!"
They stand and glare at each other for a few minutes, until Puck feels a soft hand on his shoulder and Finn feels a flat gaze finally meeting his.
"Stop. Just stop," is the only direction that Finn gets from the girl, but Rachel delivers it with such stiff, unrelenting authority and decision that he bows his head and sobs to himself, finally realising how hopeless he is for trying. Rachel turns to Puck instead, gives him a gentle smile and nudges him back in the direction of his chair. She turns to follow him up, and Mister Schuester reaches out after her to turn her back, probably wanting some kind of explanation. His hand brushes over her wrist.
What everyone witnesses next is both shocking and totally expected.
Rachel yanks her hand away, stumbles back in fear until she lands in her chair, which skids back to hit the wall. She starts hyperventilating as soon as she hits the seat, one hand clapping around her wrist, then brushing over her shoulders as she shrinks into herself. She's pulled her feet up onto the chair and her knees to her chest before anyone can move over to her, and when her hands slide to cover the back of her head and she whimpers, Santana gets out of her chair and orders all the boys out of the room.
Puck stays for a moment, tries to reach out a hand for the girl, only to have her flinch away from him. He frowns sadly to himself, but he's not going to take this personally, so he just nods. She'd woken up with him in the room next to her the day before, shucked up in the hospital bed for an overnight after they'd stitched her up. Her dad had to go back to work, and Puck had stayed the night anyway - despite all appearances at school, they were old friends, always had been. She'd flinched away when he'd reached out for her then, too, but he'd stayed and talked to her all day, and by the end of it she was fine with him touching her - taking her hand, putting his arm around her, anything that wasn't too heavy or sudden or forceful. She'd been fine with Kurt when he'd visited, but he wasn't exactly the most masculine character anyway, and Blaine's presence was too gentle to set her off. The girls had been fine this morning.
But he understood, he swore he did - she'd been attacked two days ago, and she had bruises, dark and huge, on her shoulders from Finn's hands. She didn't want the boys near her - too big, too intimidating, pushing her into that fear again.
"I'm sorry, Noah," she chokes out after a moment, but he just gives her a small smile. She knows it hurts him to have that refusal, especially since he sat with her for hours yesterday to get back the comfort. She wishes she could be fine for him, but he assures her it's not the case.
"It's okay, babe," he says gently. "I'm here when you need me, okay? I'll go tell Mister Schue about it. And tell Finn to stop trying to slaughter all that is good music." She nods and he starts to move out of the room after the rest of the guys while the girls all shuffle in around her, listening to him sing to himself. "I'll leave the door on the latch if you ever come back, if you ever come back - there'll be a light in the hall and a key under the mat if you ever come back, there'll be a smile on my face and the kettle on, and it'll be just like you were never gone-"
The music cuts to a muffled hum when the door closes behind him, and everyone wonders why Finn would ever have the audacity to sing that song. Rachel's still freaking out, though, so Quinn drags her chair right next to her, gearing to talk her down. It's weird, since they rarely talk and mostly they're just civil - the club stopped hating each other after Christmas, when Quinn and Sam broke up and Finn and Rachel got back together - but for some unknown reason Quinn's presence is just that comforting. It works, and Rachel walks out of the room ten minutes later with hardly a slouch to her normally impeccable posture, taking Puck's arm so he can walk her to her next class like the thought of his touch didn't almost make her throw up only moments beforehand.
Finn shuffles off down the hall when Puck's glare gets too much, and Mike's asking Tina why the boy is even able to go to school but Puck doesn't answer them. Neither does Rachel. There had been an argument in the early hours of Sunday morning between the team of Puck and Hiram, and Rachel about that very topic - both of whom thought some sort of charge should be pressed, something, anything. She, however, was adamant that the case rest there - that they forget all about it, like it never happened, even if she couldn't look her dads in the eye for the rest of the day or share space with them without wincing. She wasn't forgetting this, and they didn't know why they should.
There had been a lengthy discussion about Drew Gillan, and who he was exactly, because all Puck had figured out was that Finn Hudson was apparently secretly gay and mid-affair. Kurt had been there for that conversation as well, actually - and from the text Puck received from the boy close to midnight last night, Puck quickly figured everything from Finn's sexuality to Rachel's hospital visit and back again had been relayed to the parents. Finn might have been in school, but he wouldn't be going anywhere else until college.
Still, Rachel might pretend to be infallible, and try to prove that he hasn't broken her and she doesn't care, but the breakdown in the choir room is probably the first of many and she still flinches when Finn looks her way or one of the jocks pass her in the halls. She falsifies forgiveness, but Puck knows better. And he's not the only one.
So when Azimio Adams slams her locker shut on his way past her at lunch, leaving the girl with wide eyes and tense shoulders, he finds himself limping into the cafeteria only five minutes later - one hand gripping his stomach and the other covering one eye. No one knows what happened, or how he hurt himself in the five minutes and the three corridors between Rachel's locker and the cafeteria. There's some speculation, but no one really notices when Santana Lopez bumps fists with Puck, passing his table, or how the burly football player jumps away when Brittany Pierce wanders idly by him. They only notice the bruising coming up on his face - and not at all how it matches the mottled look of the two girls' knuckles.
Stacey Kent from the Cheerios pushes Rachel a little too harshly between classes, sending her reeling into Artie's lap. The boy frowns at the departing Cheerio, but wheels Rachel off the class with a smile and some light conversation to calm her down because she looks like a frightened rabbit and she can't quite bring herself to move. Stacey is ten minutes late to World Literature, and when she does forward into the classroom her entire uniform is stained blue, her hair is stuck to her forehead, and her lip is split. Everyone is too concerned about what Coach Sylvester will do to the girl about the uniform to notice Quinn Fabray's smirk in the back row, or the way she victoriously claps hands with Mike Chang beside her.
Dave Karofsky still has the gall to throw a slushy at the girl between Spanish and Math, even though only half the hallway laughs. The other half are wary of retribution, and no one relaxes, even after Mercedes and Tina lead a slushy-soaked Rachel Berry to the nearest bathroom (did she stop breathing when the liquid hit her skin? Was she hyperventilating by the time she got out of the hall? Yeah, but no one mentions that). No one sees Dave Karofsky for the rest of the day - just Rachel Berry cleaned up nicely, half of the glee club flanking her like they're on a timetable, and Noah Puckerman's arm around her shoulder. When Karofsky crawls out of the dumpster at the end of the day with a black eye and lipstick and all over his face, not one single person in McKinley high is surprised. Everyone is quickly realising that messing with Rachel Berry, no matter how trivial an incident, is cause for some serious backlash.
The grin on Tina Cohen-Chang's lips and the way Puck cracks his knuckle when they walk past with Rachel between them? Well, no one asks why.
/-\
And I wish you could give me the cold shoulder
And I wish you could still give me a hard time
And I wish I could still wish it was over
But even if wishing is a waste of time
Even if I never cross your mind
I'll leave the door on the latch
If you ever come back, if you ever come back
Author: iamsamflynn
Spoilers: A Very Glee Christmas.
Pairing: Rachel/Quinn.
Length: 2000+
Rating: up to R.
Summary: They meet Hiram Berry for the first time at the hospital, and Puck explains that this all started with a badly scheduled date.
A/N: Skedaddle wit'ch'yo big words. Team Glee goes badass. That's all you need to know.
Glee tastes like tension and pool water.
Contrary to speculation, Rachel does not let a concussion and ten stitches stop her from attending school two days later. She tells him about the taste after five minutes of Finn alternating between looks of anger and regret - and possibly desperation. Puck just frowns a little because it seems like a strange thing to say. Except, everyone is pointedly ignoring Finn for the most of the meet - if not shooting him down entirely - and Rachel is painstakingly dedicated to ignoring the boy's gaze, so the tension part is pretty much explained. Puck doesn't know that tension is actually a taste, but it certainly seems palpable.
Finn gets up hurriedly when Mister Schuester asks for volunteers and rushes to the front of the room to perform, his eyes locked intensely on Rachel the entire time, and for a moment it looks like Rachel isn't breathing. Then she coughs heavily, almost like she's choking, and Puck pats her on the back, moving his arm around her for the comfort.
He understands a little after that - being around Finn is tense for everyone in Glee, but Rachel's the one who almost drowned because of him, and looking at him makes her remember it. The taste of chlorine in her mouth, on her tongue, stuck latent in her throat, flooding her lungs.
Puck kind of wants to vomit for a moment.
Finn starts the song, and the feeling doesn't go away.
Puck interrupts him before the verse starts.
"Oh hell no you don't," he says loudly, standing up from his chair and stomping down from the risers to glare at Finn while the music cuts off and Mister Schuester tries to jump in front of him. But Puck will not be denied, because it's only Monday morning and it's just too early to be dealing with this shit.
"Sit down Puck! This is just rude, Finn has the right to-"
"Shut the fuck up and stop making me angry, that's what he has the right to do," Puck interrupts angrily, eyes stuck on the teen in the middle of the room rather than the older man in front of him. Finn's still sporting bruises from his 'lesson' on Saturday - will be for a while if the colour of that shiner on his right eye is any indication, Puck notes with a great deal of satisfaction - and Rachel's sitting in her chair in the risers with all of the Glee girls surrounding her and the gash at the back of her head stitched back together (but no one can see that).
"I'm allowed to sing to her! I deserve to tell my side of the story!"
"No, you deserve to get my foot up your ass - except, no, you'd probably like it there," Puck shoots back, and luckily enough Schuester realises the danger quick enough to turn and force Finn back before any blows can fall. "You told your side of the story when you tried to bully Rachel back into dating you, and when you pushed her to cracking her head on the poolside! You almost killed her, you dumb shit! No one hurts my home girl! You don't deserve forgiveness for that, okay! And you aren't butchering a song by 'The Script' in a shitty attempt to earn it!"
They stand and glare at each other for a few minutes, until Puck feels a soft hand on his shoulder and Finn feels a flat gaze finally meeting his.
"Stop. Just stop," is the only direction that Finn gets from the girl, but Rachel delivers it with such stiff, unrelenting authority and decision that he bows his head and sobs to himself, finally realising how hopeless he is for trying. Rachel turns to Puck instead, gives him a gentle smile and nudges him back in the direction of his chair. She turns to follow him up, and Mister Schuester reaches out after her to turn her back, probably wanting some kind of explanation. His hand brushes over her wrist.
What everyone witnesses next is both shocking and totally expected.
Rachel yanks her hand away, stumbles back in fear until she lands in her chair, which skids back to hit the wall. She starts hyperventilating as soon as she hits the seat, one hand clapping around her wrist, then brushing over her shoulders as she shrinks into herself. She's pulled her feet up onto the chair and her knees to her chest before anyone can move over to her, and when her hands slide to cover the back of her head and she whimpers, Santana gets out of her chair and orders all the boys out of the room.
Puck stays for a moment, tries to reach out a hand for the girl, only to have her flinch away from him. He frowns sadly to himself, but he's not going to take this personally, so he just nods. She'd woken up with him in the room next to her the day before, shucked up in the hospital bed for an overnight after they'd stitched her up. Her dad had to go back to work, and Puck had stayed the night anyway - despite all appearances at school, they were old friends, always had been. She'd flinched away when he'd reached out for her then, too, but he'd stayed and talked to her all day, and by the end of it she was fine with him touching her - taking her hand, putting his arm around her, anything that wasn't too heavy or sudden or forceful. She'd been fine with Kurt when he'd visited, but he wasn't exactly the most masculine character anyway, and Blaine's presence was too gentle to set her off. The girls had been fine this morning.
But he understood, he swore he did - she'd been attacked two days ago, and she had bruises, dark and huge, on her shoulders from Finn's hands. She didn't want the boys near her - too big, too intimidating, pushing her into that fear again.
"I'm sorry, Noah," she chokes out after a moment, but he just gives her a small smile. She knows it hurts him to have that refusal, especially since he sat with her for hours yesterday to get back the comfort. She wishes she could be fine for him, but he assures her it's not the case.
"It's okay, babe," he says gently. "I'm here when you need me, okay? I'll go tell Mister Schue about it. And tell Finn to stop trying to slaughter all that is good music." She nods and he starts to move out of the room after the rest of the guys while the girls all shuffle in around her, listening to him sing to himself. "I'll leave the door on the latch if you ever come back, if you ever come back - there'll be a light in the hall and a key under the mat if you ever come back, there'll be a smile on my face and the kettle on, and it'll be just like you were never gone-"
The music cuts to a muffled hum when the door closes behind him, and everyone wonders why Finn would ever have the audacity to sing that song. Rachel's still freaking out, though, so Quinn drags her chair right next to her, gearing to talk her down. It's weird, since they rarely talk and mostly they're just civil - the club stopped hating each other after Christmas, when Quinn and Sam broke up and Finn and Rachel got back together - but for some unknown reason Quinn's presence is just that comforting. It works, and Rachel walks out of the room ten minutes later with hardly a slouch to her normally impeccable posture, taking Puck's arm so he can walk her to her next class like the thought of his touch didn't almost make her throw up only moments beforehand.
Finn shuffles off down the hall when Puck's glare gets too much, and Mike's asking Tina why the boy is even able to go to school but Puck doesn't answer them. Neither does Rachel. There had been an argument in the early hours of Sunday morning between the team of Puck and Hiram, and Rachel about that very topic - both of whom thought some sort of charge should be pressed, something, anything. She, however, was adamant that the case rest there - that they forget all about it, like it never happened, even if she couldn't look her dads in the eye for the rest of the day or share space with them without wincing. She wasn't forgetting this, and they didn't know why they should.
There had been a lengthy discussion about Drew Gillan, and who he was exactly, because all Puck had figured out was that Finn Hudson was apparently secretly gay and mid-affair. Kurt had been there for that conversation as well, actually - and from the text Puck received from the boy close to midnight last night, Puck quickly figured everything from Finn's sexuality to Rachel's hospital visit and back again had been relayed to the parents. Finn might have been in school, but he wouldn't be going anywhere else until college.
Still, Rachel might pretend to be infallible, and try to prove that he hasn't broken her and she doesn't care, but the breakdown in the choir room is probably the first of many and she still flinches when Finn looks her way or one of the jocks pass her in the halls. She falsifies forgiveness, but Puck knows better. And he's not the only one.
So when Azimio Adams slams her locker shut on his way past her at lunch, leaving the girl with wide eyes and tense shoulders, he finds himself limping into the cafeteria only five minutes later - one hand gripping his stomach and the other covering one eye. No one knows what happened, or how he hurt himself in the five minutes and the three corridors between Rachel's locker and the cafeteria. There's some speculation, but no one really notices when Santana Lopez bumps fists with Puck, passing his table, or how the burly football player jumps away when Brittany Pierce wanders idly by him. They only notice the bruising coming up on his face - and not at all how it matches the mottled look of the two girls' knuckles.
Stacey Kent from the Cheerios pushes Rachel a little too harshly between classes, sending her reeling into Artie's lap. The boy frowns at the departing Cheerio, but wheels Rachel off the class with a smile and some light conversation to calm her down because she looks like a frightened rabbit and she can't quite bring herself to move. Stacey is ten minutes late to World Literature, and when she does forward into the classroom her entire uniform is stained blue, her hair is stuck to her forehead, and her lip is split. Everyone is too concerned about what Coach Sylvester will do to the girl about the uniform to notice Quinn Fabray's smirk in the back row, or the way she victoriously claps hands with Mike Chang beside her.
Dave Karofsky still has the gall to throw a slushy at the girl between Spanish and Math, even though only half the hallway laughs. The other half are wary of retribution, and no one relaxes, even after Mercedes and Tina lead a slushy-soaked Rachel Berry to the nearest bathroom (did she stop breathing when the liquid hit her skin? Was she hyperventilating by the time she got out of the hall? Yeah, but no one mentions that). No one sees Dave Karofsky for the rest of the day - just Rachel Berry cleaned up nicely, half of the glee club flanking her like they're on a timetable, and Noah Puckerman's arm around her shoulder. When Karofsky crawls out of the dumpster at the end of the day with a black eye and lipstick and all over his face, not one single person in McKinley high is surprised. Everyone is quickly realising that messing with Rachel Berry, no matter how trivial an incident, is cause for some serious backlash.
The grin on Tina Cohen-Chang's lips and the way Puck cracks his knuckle when they walk past with Rachel between them? Well, no one asks why.
/-\
And I wish you could give me the cold shoulder
And I wish you could still give me a hard time
And I wish I could still wish it was over
But even if wishing is a waste of time
Even if I never cross your mind
I'll leave the door on the latch
If you ever come back, if you ever come back