I Am Waiting For Something To Go Wrong
Title: I Am Waiting For Something To Go Wrong
Pairing: Noah Puckerman/Mercedes Jones
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Nothing owned, no profit gained.
Spoilers: Through S2.
Summary: Snapshots from a love that never was.
A/N: Title from Death Cab For Cutie’s “Expo ’86.”
1
They don’t get along.
It’s not his fault, he thinks with irritation, and why should he care? Every adult within the nearest mile seems to think he’s the bad guy here, even counting his own mother, but the fact of the matter is, he hasn’t done anything wrong. Not really.
Is it his fault Mercedes Jones is a big, dumb, loud girl?
Or that she, for whatever reason, can’t seem to stand his face? (This isn’t his imagination; she has told him on multiple occasions, flat-out, “I can’t stand your face, white boy.” He doesn’t understand why, since he’s pretty sure there is nothing objectively wrong with the way his face looks, but Mercedes sure thinks so.)
Man, he thinks furiously, even Santana Lopez isn’t this mean to him-and Santana is mean to absolutely everybody.
He just doesn’t get it. Yeah, he picks on some people or whatever, but he has to. He’s not the biggest kid around, or the smartest; if he doesn’t do something to get their attention, people will forget about him completely. Bad enough to have a dad who goes off for weeks at a time without calling or caring. He doesn’t need his fifth grade class to lose track of him, too.
And anyway, it’s not like it’s Mercedes he’s picking on. The chick’s way too scary for anything like that. He’ll take on Santana and her aluminum baseball bat before he even thinks of making fun of Mercedes and her funky-cool sneakers or whatever, although he’s never told her that to her face. He just figures it should be apparent from…his general lack of bullying her. Or something.
She shouldn’t hate him if he’s never done anything to her, that’s all he’s saying.
All Noah Puckerman knows is, Mercedes Jones seems for some reason to think he is the scum of the earth, and though he normally wouldn’t bother giving a singular crap, something about that bugs him.
***
“You got such a problem with it, then fix it,” Finn tells him wisely, seconds before ramming Puck’s cart off the Mario Kart track. He howls with glee, pumping a fist dangerously near Puck’s head, then winces when he gets a punch in the thigh for his troubles.
“S’not that easy,” Puck mumbles, returning his attention to the game. “She’s weird.”
“You’re weird,” Finn fires back, grimacing a little as he rubs his thigh. “She’s just a girl. Do girly things for her.”
“Like I know what girls like!” Puck exclaims, whooping and jerking the controller violently to the left. “Dolls or something? I don’t have anything like that.”
“You could steal Anna’s,” Finn suggests. Puck shakes his head.
“Mom would notice. And anyway, she’s four. What the hell would Mercedes want with a four-year-old’s toys?”
Finn’s whole upper body jerks toward the door, one hand coming down too hard over Puck’s mouth. “Dude! Swearing! My mom just bought a new bar of soap!”
“La di da,” Puck snarks back, but he has the grace to feel a little bad about it. Carole Hudson’s an awesome lady who makes awesome cookies and never makes him feel weird about tagging along on mother-son movie outings. He’s not big on letting adults tell him what to do, but if Carole doesn’t want them swearing in the house, he figures it’s not so bad agreeing to her terms.
He is a little pissed about how hard Finn felt the need to smash him in the mouth, though. He’s pretty sure his lip is bleeding, and the last thing he needs is to talk his way out of another ‘you’ve been fighting again’ accusation.
“Sorry,” Finn mumbles, shoving a tissue into his hands. “Anyway. I dunno what Mercedes would want with any toys. Do girls even play with dolls and stuff anymore?”
He doesn’t know. He does, however, have an idea of who might.
***
“Dolls?” Kurt Hummel drawls skeptically, one eyebrow arched. Puck stares at it for a minute, jealous (he can raise his eyebrow too, but only if he jams one eye closed first-not half as cool as he’s aiming for), then shrugs.
“Dude. It’s just a question.”
“About Mercedes,” Kurt responds icily, tapping his fingers against the desk Puck has him pinned behind. “While we’re both supposed to be outside? At recess? Don’t thugs like you live for the playground?”
He’s pretty sure being called a thug would be a punching offense normally, but Kurt will be so much less useful if he’s crying like a big sissy. He decides to let it slide this time.
“Whatever. Just tell me what I should do, okay?”
Kurt’s eyes narrow. “And if I do, you’ll let me go?”
“Yeah, whatever,” Puck snaps again, doing an uncomfortable little jig in place. He sort of has to pee, and he definitely wants to get to the soccer field before Lopez takes over the better side. Either way, this needs to speed along a little.
“Fine,” Kurt huffs, like he’s doing Puck the biggest favor in the world (the fact that he sort of is has no relevance at all). “Mercedes likes music. Okay?”
“Music.” He can do that. His dad’s an asshole, but he’s also a rock star, and Puck has always suspected the trait to be genetic. “Cool, yeah. Music.”
“Yes,” Kurt says dryly, “exceptionally cool. Also, flowers are always a good idea for women. My mom always-“
He falls abruptly silent, his pale face creasing with barely-restrained agony. Puck shifts uncomfortably from foot to food, rubbing his head.
“Right. Thanks, Hummel. I ‘ppreciate it, or…”
“Or whatever,” Kurt fills in, tone a little too strangled to be mocking. Puck shrugs, stuffing his hands into his pants pockets and shifting towards the door. At the last second, he remembers to turn back, pointing an aggressive finger at the boy behind the desk.
“And you’re not gonna tell anybody about this, right?”
Weariness drags across Kurt’s face like a wet dishrag. “Wouldn’t dream of it,” he mumbles. Puck nods and is out the door before his brain can dwell much on why a kid like Kurt should be so sad.
***
His dad would kill him if he knew. It has been rammed into Puck’s head since he was tall enough to see over the coffee table: these are not playthings. They are not to be breathed on, let alone picked up and snuck out the back door on the way to school.
And yet here he stands, proud and tall atop the pirate ship in the middle of the McKinley Elementary playground, acoustic Gibson slung heavy around his shoulders. He has never felt cooler.
The whole playground is staring up at him, slack-jawed. Finn keeps shaking his head in amazement; beside him, Quinn Fabray’s sparkling eyes ruin her otherwise bored expression. Kurt’s got his arms crossed over his scrawny chest, looking equal parts amused and disdainful.
And there, in the middle of it all, is Mercedes Jones. Looking more or less like she can’t decide whether to smile or throw a rock.
Puck grins.
His hands are too small to fit over the frets the way his dad does it, but he makes a valiant attempt anyway. Tongue stuck between his teeth, he presses weak fingertips hard against the strings, wincing a little at the unfamiliar bite. Dad always makes this look so easy, but right now, Puck’s kind of rethinking this whole plan.
Down below, Finn is pumping one fist up and down in the air, bouncing on the balls of his feet. “Go for it, dude!” he calls, cupping his free hand around his mouth. “Do ‘Freebird’!”
Oh, Puck thinks uneasily, he might not have thought this through all the way. He can sing just fine, he’s sure-rock star isn’t a career choice, his dad always boasts, it’s in the blood-but just holding this thing up is taking an amazing amount of energy. If he drops it, he’s screwed.
If he doesn’t play, he’s really screwed.
It's bad enough he couldn't find a flower.
Mercedes has one eyebrow quirked, her eyes flicking from his face over to Kurt’s. The smaller boy shakes his head subtly, and Puck makes a mental note to hold him down in the sandbox later.
“Come on!” Finn shouts. Puck considers adding him to the sandbox list as well. “How about ‘Back In Black’?”
He’s going to kill him. Really.
His throat has gone horribly dry, his cheeks flushing with heat. He half-wishes the wooden boards beneath his feet would just melt away and let the earth swallow him whole, but that would be such a sissy way to go out. He’s Noah Puckerman, for the sake of all that is Jewish and awesome. He’s a badass.
He strums a few times, experimenting. It’s clumsy and sad, barely qualifying as chords at all, but when he starts to sing, no one laughs. They wouldn’t dare. They know how hard he can punch.
Besides, everyone loves Lenny Kravitz.
He really gets into it, punctuating every burst of the chorus with a swing of his hips and a tuneless strike of the strings. Strutting back and forth across the playscape, he bobs his head to the tune in his head-complete with drums and backing vocals-and rocks out to the best of his ability. Down below, kids cheer and giggle. Santana Lopez is smirking. She’ll never say it, but he’s pretty sure that’s pride in her eyes.
He turns and gives his butt a hearty shake, spurred on when a handful of girls shriek and Finn whoops with laughter. This is great. This is amazing. If this is how his dad feels at gigs, no wonder he stays away so long.
He’s so caught up in the adrenaline rush that he fails to really think about his next move. It’s the rock star energy (or so he will argue later, knees drawn up to his chest in the principal’s office). The music courses through him, taking control of his arms and legs like he’s nothing more than a really awesome puppet strung up on his own guitar strings. He feels alive for the first time in his life, and the best thing he can think to cap it off is to really go where the music takes him.
And right at this minute, the music wants him to fly.
Humming his way towards the song’s finale, he slings the guitar across his back and spreads his arms. One step, two steps, three-he’s nearly there now. Several feet below him, he hears someone (Rachel Berry, if he had to guess), gasp.
“He’s going to jump!”
Hell yeah, I am, he thinks, seconds before his legs pinwheel in the air, head thrown back with the final bars of “American Woman.” His eyes scan the ground, catching Mercedes just in time to fling her a roguish wink.
And then he lands-directly on top of her.
It is not, all things considered, the best performance of his life. And it does not get him the girl. If anything, as she groans and flails her fists against his ribcage, doing her best to shove him off, Mercedes seems to hate him now more than ever.
But even as she cries, “Get your ugly face off me, boy!”, Puck grins.
Had to start somewhere.
2
She doesn’t get him.
He’s leaning against her locker, looking for all the world like a puppy recently booted out of its cardboard box, jacket hiked up to his ears. His t-shirt is torn and grungy, his mohawk a little greasy. She’s pretty sure he’s been wearing those same jeans all week.
She keeps finding him like this. Every morning, long before the rest of the world shows up, at a time where she’s only here because she’s getting a little extra help in Geometry. Sleepy-eyed, misery playing at the corners of his usually-sneering mouth, he looks like a rumpled mess.
It took days for them to speak.
She doesn’t like Noah Puckerman-has never liked Noah Puckerman, not since she saw him drag away a headlocked Kurt in the second grade and refuse to let him out of the coat closet until the afternoon snacks were already cleaned up. Noah Puckerman has a long-standing record of being a bully, an asshole, and a grade-A idiot.
Plus, there was that time he concluded an impromptu concert by falling five feet onto her head.
The thing about this kid, however, is that no matter how hard she tries (and she has always tried), she can’t seem to get rid of him. Oh, he’ll wander off for a little while, attention captured by the nearest cliché in a mini-skirt, but in the end, he tends to find her again.
At her locker.
At 7:08 in the morning.
It started a week ago-probably on the very same day he last pulled those raggedy-ass jeans out of the wash-and it took her three days to muster up the strength to look him in the eye. Not that he said a word. In a manner very unlike the boy the whole town calls Puck, he only scooted aside, one ankle still crossed over the other, and leaned against the next locker over. Waiting for her to pull the necessary books off the shelf, apparently, because as soon as she bumped the door shut, he unfolded his arms and held them out expectantly.
The first time she laid a textbook across his crooked elbows, she fully expected him to turn and heave it down the nearest staircase.
He didn’t. He never seems to do anything the way she expects. Even before the bonding experience of a lifetime that is Glee Club, she couldn’t figure him out. One minute, he’d be grinning suggestively at her from over Santana Lopez’s shoulder; the next, he’d dump a raspberry Slushee over her head and high five Karofsky. It’s like he lives to drive her insane.
Most of the time, she wishes he would just leave her alone. It’s obnoxious and confusing-not to mention more than a little heart-wrenching-to be jerked around for years on end by one of the biggest (and douchiest) studs in school. She knows she’s not his type, knows that she never will be, and she hates the way her heart twitches expectantly whenever he smiles. She doesn’t have blonde hair, or a perfect complexion, and she’ll never weigh less than 120. It’s not that she doesn’t have her own thing going on (Beyonce herself would kill for this booty, as she reminds herself daily), it’s just that “her own thing” isn’t his thing.
She accepts that. She has no choice, especially now that her friend is carrying his baby. It’s just a little hard to keep it all in mind when he’s standing here an hour before the first bell, hands in his pockets as he waits for her to reach him.
“Don’t you ever sleep?” she demands today. His head rolls up, expression brightening half a watt. He doesn’t seem to expect conversation.
“Quinn talks in her sleep,” he admits, shrugging. “Hard to get decent shut-eye through that.”
It hurts her chest to imagine them together, curled under the same quilt. Stupid to let that weigh her down. Quinn Fabray, aside from being unbelievably pretty, is her friend. She’s a good person, a bright and funny young woman who sometimes makes some sincerely dumb decisions. Mercedes likes her a lot, and the last thing you should do to someone you like a lot is hate them for having what you can’t.
“What’s she say?” she makes herself ask as she turns the lock idly. He scratches his head, fingernails itching back and forth through the longish fuzz. She wonders what it would feel like under her palms, whether it would scratch like stubble or feel soft like an old velvet couch cushion.
“I can’t hear the words,” he admits. “She’s got my bed, I-“ Something like panic flares in his eyes. “Oh! I'm not up there, I stay downstairs. Couch. Mom doesn’t dig on the sleepover idea, even though I told her, y’know, I don’t do pregnant chicks. No telling what freaky shit those hormones might make her do in the middle.”
Mercedes cringes, shaking her head to push the images away. “Right.”
“Seriously!” he presses, straightening up. “I’ve…I mean, you said it, right? I’ve done enough. Messed up her life and…”
He trails off, tired eyes snagging on a light fixture. Mercedes sighs.
“I’m sorry about that.”
“You were right,” he mumbles. “Everybody knows I fucked her up. Fucked up Finn, too. I fuck up everything.”
Enough. The last thing she needs two hours before a test on the War of 1812 is a self-pitying stalker-jock. She cuffs him on the shoulder just hard enough to drag his gaze back to her face.
“How come you’re always here so early?” she asks, prying her locker open and unloading the first book into his arms when they obediently spread. “And she’s not?”
“She is,” he corrects, shifting the Bio text more comfortably. “Early Cheerios practice. She likes to sit and watch.”
It’s the dumbest thing Quinn could be doing right now, but Mercedes isn’t surprised. For all her stony scowls and raised eyebrows, that girl cares a hell of a lot more than she likes to let on. Especially about her extracurriculars.
“I used to wait in my truck,” he goes on almost absently. “Trying to catch a little shut-eye or whatever. Not like I care about showin’ up on time. But lately, I dunno. Just doesn’t work.”
“So you creep on me instead,” Mercedes drawls, tossing her purse atop the stack and slamming the locker with a satisfying clang. He has the grace to look mildly sheepish.
“Yeah. I guess.” She notices he doesn’t apologize. Unsurprising. Noah Puckerman isn’t the apologizing type.
They angle towards the choir room, Puck shuffling just enough to keep the purse from dropping to the ground as he walks. He looks like he’s running on all of two hours of sleep. It’s miserable.
Feeling sympathy for a kid who cheated on his best friend, got a girl pregnant, and, until a few months ago, routinely started his mornings by chucking her best friend into a dumpster seems ridiculous. Still…
“You don’t have to carry those,” she blurts, embarrassed when he meets her eyes. “I’m not one of your cheerleader bimbos. I can do it.”
He shrugs. “Got it. And I know you’re not a bimbo. S’why I like you.”
Ignore that, she advises herself firmly. It never happened. “Whatever you say, white boy.”
“Jew boy,” he corrects with a shadow of his usual grin. For half a second, the image of a clumsy airborne guitarist burns in her mind.
“And technically,” he adds, seeing her tiny smile, “you are a cheerleader.”
She elbows him a little too hard, sending her own books cascading out of his arms. He swears, dropping to his knees and fumbling to scoop them up.
It’s a strange Noah Puckerman, this boy who shows up daily at her locker. She doubts their classmates would recognize him. He goes so out of his way to forget names and remember schedules, all the better to pummel and plunder from, acting every inch the moronic bad boy-and yet, here he is. Kneeling at her feet, mohawk pointed at the ground as he shovels change back into her purse, eyebrows knitted tight over exhausted eyes. The boy who sleeps on the couch so his pregnant not-girlfriend can be comfortable, who drives to school hours early for someone else’s sake, who carries the books of the very girl who let his secret run rampant through Glee.
Noah Puckerman is an asshole, there is no denying that. He is brutish and sometimes cruel, regularly dumb and thoughtless. She doesn’t like him much.
Except on mornings like this. Watching him scramble to his feet, blushing to the tips of his ears and cursing under his breath, she thinks maybe this Puck isn’t so bad.
He does need more sleep, she notes as he stumbles through the choir room door and sinks down in the nearest chair, head lolling back. A lot more. He’s juggling class (well, once in a while, anyway), basketball, Glee, Quinn. Having all the energy of the walking dead can’t make that any easier.
Maybe one of these days-not now, not yet, but soon-she should have a little chat with Quinn. Puck thinks he can do it all: be a jock, a ‘Glee stud’ (she really can’t take them seriously when they call themselves that), a brother, son, father. He can’t. Not alone. Not on the bare minimum of sleep and absolutely no one to turn to.
Her brother’s at college now; his room is gathering dust, sitting lonely and ignored in the back corner of the house. Maybe someday soon, Puck can sleep in his own bed again.
It’s a plan that merits some working out yet. For now, she watches his head thump against the wall, long eyelashes fluttering against his cheeks, and thinks that Noah Puckerman could definitely use a break. And, like him or not, she doesn’t mind sticking around.
Even obnoxious Jew boys need a little company now and then.
3
Reunions are bullshit.
Five-year reunions are even more bullshit than the rest, Puck thinks; just enough time for everyone else to show off their fancy college degrees, but not enough for anyone to have a decent career built up, or a family, or even to have changed much from the pictures on Facebook.
He actually has all three, if you want to be particular about it: his pool-cleaning business is legit now (no more nipple rings, and he hasn’t banged a cougar in a year and a half), and he’s got a daughter he sees once a month.
And he deleted his Facebook with a delicious vengeance the year Finn Hudson joined the Army and scampered off the continent to make his father proud. They communicate via scratchy letters in ever-boyish handwriting now. It’s ridiculous how into it Puck gets.
All things said, there’s no real reason for him to go to his reunion at all. He lives dangerously near Lima, visiting fairly often to see Anna and his mother. He plays on an indoor football team with Mike Chang and exchanges occasional awkward emails with Quinn (a recent Columbia grad), Santana (living with Brittany just outside of Vegas, of all places), and Artie (who, last he heard, is working on his very own video game and sharing an apartment with two other geeks just like him). He hasn’t heard from Rachel directly in years, but last Hanukkah brought to his door a tiny menorah with a gold star fused to its base. It made him smile.
Put simply, he’s happy. Or, if not happy, then fairly content. There are things he misses, of course; sometimes it’s hard to sleep with all the thoughts in his head, dipping and tangoing with the phantom scent of Rachel’s lip-gloss, or the echo of Quinn’s giggle as she cradled Beth for the first time, or the glitter in Finn’s eyes whenever he blew a character off the screen. Sometimes, he thinks whoever said high school made up the best years of his life was probably right.
Still, here he is. Probably going to be the first and last arrival to represent the McKinley Glee Club, class of 2012. He feels like an idiot in his old football jacket, but hey, it still fits and this is Ohio. Nostalgia is practically law.
And anything is better than a tie.
The gym feels smaller than he remembers, the smell of history digging its rabid little claws into his senses. Immediately, he hates it. The mass of falsely smiling people, the red-and-white decorations plastered to the walls, the balloons he’s been kicking his way past since walking through the door. He even hates the stick-on nametag with “Noah” scrawled on it. It’s like they didn’t know him at all.
Not surprising. He’s pretty sure the only people who really knew him didn’t RSVP. It makes him wonder what he’s doing here.
“Puck?”
It’s a nickname he’ll keep until the day he dies, and for that, he feels powerful. A name is the root of an identity, and he crafted his all by himself. He is the pinnacle of a self-made man.
Leave it to Mercedes Jones to remember.
He hasn’t heard from her since that last hectic teenage summer, caught up in the constant bustle of swimming pool days and beer pong nights. She went off somewhere-to U of M, or some little place in Boston, maybe; could be any place-and just never came back. Or maybe she did, and he was too busy to notice. He gets that way sometimes now.
Looking at her, he can’t stop the spread of an ear-to-ear smile. She’s beautiful in that same old way, radiating confidence and endless diva ‘tude. He remembers staring at the back of her head in grade school, puzzled as to why she was always scowling his way. Remembers, too, the ups and downs of high school: Slushees and ballads, secrets spilled and that brilliantly awkward week of dating.
God, Santana hated that.
“You look old,” she tells him now, eyes bright, and he knows it’s a joke. He works in the sun until snow comes and forces him indoors; the price is a well-muscled, tanned body topped by a lean, comfortable face, his ‘hawk long since given up on. He looks good.
He wonders if she notices.
“Didn’t expect to see you,” he admits, scratching his head. “Figured you’d be off forcing Mary J. into final retirement by now or something.”
“Kurt blackmailed me into coming,” she informs him with an eyeroll he remembers all too well. “He couldn’t make it, but he just had to know what everyone was wearing.”
He feels her eyes burning his skin, drinking in the clean jeans and terrifically sad jacket. “It’s warm,” he mutters defensively. “And it looks good on me.”
“Always has,” she drawls, grinning when he flexes and winks. “Oh God, you haven’t changed a bit.”
“Have too,” he retorts, but he’s laughing. Of course he’s changed; he hasn’t gotten a girl pregnant in years, he wants to say. Hasn’t locked any skinny losers into a porta-potty, or peppered his best friend with paintball pellets. Hasn’t channeled Billy Joel or zombies. He’s practically a whole new man since she last saw him, and thank every god in the sky for that.
It’s funny that he hasn’t thought about this in years, this strange hungry pull in his gut at seeing her. Mercedes Jones, the girl he never could explain or make sense of. The girl who never did take his shit. It’s amazing how appealing that’s always been.
It comes rushing back as they grin at each other, all the things he always refused to embrace bursting in to nail him between the eyes. He sees himself presenting her with a corsage before Prom (a fabrication; it was Rachel he took, pretending not to notice how she spent half the dance making sad eyes at Finn across the room). He visualizes sweeping her into his arms at graduation (in reality, Tina was the one he impulsively swung around, laughing as she playfully beat at his shoulders with tiny gloved fists). He pictures coming home from work, throwing his keys on the counter, curling up with her on their couch. Watching TV while her fingers massage the memory of a mohawk, while she teases him about everything and nothing.
Somehow, that one cuts the deepest-not because it never was and never could be, but because he’s not sure it will become a reality with anyone.
He’s been in love a hundred times, and in lust a thousand more than that. Nothing has ever been like Mercedes. She doesn’t make sense; doesn’t want him, didn’t even like him for most of their time together, and yet here she stands. The one person left over from the past he sometimes feels he’s still drowning in.
He opens his mouth-to say something that will ruin the easy moment, no doubt-and she throws up her hands. Catching him, as always, in the act.
“Don’t even say it, Puckerman.”
He doesn’t ask what. It would be an insult to them both. Instead, he grins again and tilts his head towards the door.
“Wanna get out of here?”
“Oh God,” she groans, hand dramatically splayed over her eyes. “You went and said it.”
He throws his head back and laughs like a seventeen-year-old boy, linking his elbow through hers. “Admit it, Mercedes Jones. You love me.”
“Never,” she replies, her smile brilliant. “I can’t stand your face, white boy.”
“Jew boy,” he corrects witheringly, nudging her side. “And you can too. You love me, and you’ve missed me, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
She shakes her head, bumping him with her hip, and he feels unreasonably near the top of the world. It’s not the same as cradling Rachel close during a slow song, or feeling the heat of Santana’s mouth against his skin, or watching Quinn deliver his child. Mercedes has never been like any of them, but she’s sure as hell something.
The girl he took up guitar for.
The girl he tried to fly to impress.
The girl he told his darkest secret to.
The girl whose company kept him sane at his wildest.
The girl he dated for a week to keep a reputation he cringes to look back on.
The girl who, through it all, has never let him steer the way he’s used to.
He feels the comfortable weight of her arm on his own and thinks everyone should be so lucky to have a Mercedes Jones walk back into their life. Even for one night of beaten-up football jackets and midnight Denny’s conversation.
It just feels right.
Pairing: Noah Puckerman/Mercedes Jones
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Nothing owned, no profit gained.
Spoilers: Through S2.
Summary: Snapshots from a love that never was.
A/N: Title from Death Cab For Cutie’s “Expo ’86.”
1
They don’t get along.
It’s not his fault, he thinks with irritation, and why should he care? Every adult within the nearest mile seems to think he’s the bad guy here, even counting his own mother, but the fact of the matter is, he hasn’t done anything wrong. Not really.
Is it his fault Mercedes Jones is a big, dumb, loud girl?
Or that she, for whatever reason, can’t seem to stand his face? (This isn’t his imagination; she has told him on multiple occasions, flat-out, “I can’t stand your face, white boy.” He doesn’t understand why, since he’s pretty sure there is nothing objectively wrong with the way his face looks, but Mercedes sure thinks so.)
Man, he thinks furiously, even Santana Lopez isn’t this mean to him-and Santana is mean to absolutely everybody.
He just doesn’t get it. Yeah, he picks on some people or whatever, but he has to. He’s not the biggest kid around, or the smartest; if he doesn’t do something to get their attention, people will forget about him completely. Bad enough to have a dad who goes off for weeks at a time without calling or caring. He doesn’t need his fifth grade class to lose track of him, too.
And anyway, it’s not like it’s Mercedes he’s picking on. The chick’s way too scary for anything like that. He’ll take on Santana and her aluminum baseball bat before he even thinks of making fun of Mercedes and her funky-cool sneakers or whatever, although he’s never told her that to her face. He just figures it should be apparent from…his general lack of bullying her. Or something.
She shouldn’t hate him if he’s never done anything to her, that’s all he’s saying.
All Noah Puckerman knows is, Mercedes Jones seems for some reason to think he is the scum of the earth, and though he normally wouldn’t bother giving a singular crap, something about that bugs him.
***
“You got such a problem with it, then fix it,” Finn tells him wisely, seconds before ramming Puck’s cart off the Mario Kart track. He howls with glee, pumping a fist dangerously near Puck’s head, then winces when he gets a punch in the thigh for his troubles.
“S’not that easy,” Puck mumbles, returning his attention to the game. “She’s weird.”
“You’re weird,” Finn fires back, grimacing a little as he rubs his thigh. “She’s just a girl. Do girly things for her.”
“Like I know what girls like!” Puck exclaims, whooping and jerking the controller violently to the left. “Dolls or something? I don’t have anything like that.”
“You could steal Anna’s,” Finn suggests. Puck shakes his head.
“Mom would notice. And anyway, she’s four. What the hell would Mercedes want with a four-year-old’s toys?”
Finn’s whole upper body jerks toward the door, one hand coming down too hard over Puck’s mouth. “Dude! Swearing! My mom just bought a new bar of soap!”
“La di da,” Puck snarks back, but he has the grace to feel a little bad about it. Carole Hudson’s an awesome lady who makes awesome cookies and never makes him feel weird about tagging along on mother-son movie outings. He’s not big on letting adults tell him what to do, but if Carole doesn’t want them swearing in the house, he figures it’s not so bad agreeing to her terms.
He is a little pissed about how hard Finn felt the need to smash him in the mouth, though. He’s pretty sure his lip is bleeding, and the last thing he needs is to talk his way out of another ‘you’ve been fighting again’ accusation.
“Sorry,” Finn mumbles, shoving a tissue into his hands. “Anyway. I dunno what Mercedes would want with any toys. Do girls even play with dolls and stuff anymore?”
He doesn’t know. He does, however, have an idea of who might.
***
“Dolls?” Kurt Hummel drawls skeptically, one eyebrow arched. Puck stares at it for a minute, jealous (he can raise his eyebrow too, but only if he jams one eye closed first-not half as cool as he’s aiming for), then shrugs.
“Dude. It’s just a question.”
“About Mercedes,” Kurt responds icily, tapping his fingers against the desk Puck has him pinned behind. “While we’re both supposed to be outside? At recess? Don’t thugs like you live for the playground?”
He’s pretty sure being called a thug would be a punching offense normally, but Kurt will be so much less useful if he’s crying like a big sissy. He decides to let it slide this time.
“Whatever. Just tell me what I should do, okay?”
Kurt’s eyes narrow. “And if I do, you’ll let me go?”
“Yeah, whatever,” Puck snaps again, doing an uncomfortable little jig in place. He sort of has to pee, and he definitely wants to get to the soccer field before Lopez takes over the better side. Either way, this needs to speed along a little.
“Fine,” Kurt huffs, like he’s doing Puck the biggest favor in the world (the fact that he sort of is has no relevance at all). “Mercedes likes music. Okay?”
“Music.” He can do that. His dad’s an asshole, but he’s also a rock star, and Puck has always suspected the trait to be genetic. “Cool, yeah. Music.”
“Yes,” Kurt says dryly, “exceptionally cool. Also, flowers are always a good idea for women. My mom always-“
He falls abruptly silent, his pale face creasing with barely-restrained agony. Puck shifts uncomfortably from foot to food, rubbing his head.
“Right. Thanks, Hummel. I ‘ppreciate it, or…”
“Or whatever,” Kurt fills in, tone a little too strangled to be mocking. Puck shrugs, stuffing his hands into his pants pockets and shifting towards the door. At the last second, he remembers to turn back, pointing an aggressive finger at the boy behind the desk.
“And you’re not gonna tell anybody about this, right?”
Weariness drags across Kurt’s face like a wet dishrag. “Wouldn’t dream of it,” he mumbles. Puck nods and is out the door before his brain can dwell much on why a kid like Kurt should be so sad.
***
His dad would kill him if he knew. It has been rammed into Puck’s head since he was tall enough to see over the coffee table: these are not playthings. They are not to be breathed on, let alone picked up and snuck out the back door on the way to school.
And yet here he stands, proud and tall atop the pirate ship in the middle of the McKinley Elementary playground, acoustic Gibson slung heavy around his shoulders. He has never felt cooler.
The whole playground is staring up at him, slack-jawed. Finn keeps shaking his head in amazement; beside him, Quinn Fabray’s sparkling eyes ruin her otherwise bored expression. Kurt’s got his arms crossed over his scrawny chest, looking equal parts amused and disdainful.
And there, in the middle of it all, is Mercedes Jones. Looking more or less like she can’t decide whether to smile or throw a rock.
Puck grins.
His hands are too small to fit over the frets the way his dad does it, but he makes a valiant attempt anyway. Tongue stuck between his teeth, he presses weak fingertips hard against the strings, wincing a little at the unfamiliar bite. Dad always makes this look so easy, but right now, Puck’s kind of rethinking this whole plan.
Down below, Finn is pumping one fist up and down in the air, bouncing on the balls of his feet. “Go for it, dude!” he calls, cupping his free hand around his mouth. “Do ‘Freebird’!”
Oh, Puck thinks uneasily, he might not have thought this through all the way. He can sing just fine, he’s sure-rock star isn’t a career choice, his dad always boasts, it’s in the blood-but just holding this thing up is taking an amazing amount of energy. If he drops it, he’s screwed.
If he doesn’t play, he’s really screwed.
It's bad enough he couldn't find a flower.
Mercedes has one eyebrow quirked, her eyes flicking from his face over to Kurt’s. The smaller boy shakes his head subtly, and Puck makes a mental note to hold him down in the sandbox later.
“Come on!” Finn shouts. Puck considers adding him to the sandbox list as well. “How about ‘Back In Black’?”
He’s going to kill him. Really.
His throat has gone horribly dry, his cheeks flushing with heat. He half-wishes the wooden boards beneath his feet would just melt away and let the earth swallow him whole, but that would be such a sissy way to go out. He’s Noah Puckerman, for the sake of all that is Jewish and awesome. He’s a badass.
He strums a few times, experimenting. It’s clumsy and sad, barely qualifying as chords at all, but when he starts to sing, no one laughs. They wouldn’t dare. They know how hard he can punch.
Besides, everyone loves Lenny Kravitz.
He really gets into it, punctuating every burst of the chorus with a swing of his hips and a tuneless strike of the strings. Strutting back and forth across the playscape, he bobs his head to the tune in his head-complete with drums and backing vocals-and rocks out to the best of his ability. Down below, kids cheer and giggle. Santana Lopez is smirking. She’ll never say it, but he’s pretty sure that’s pride in her eyes.
He turns and gives his butt a hearty shake, spurred on when a handful of girls shriek and Finn whoops with laughter. This is great. This is amazing. If this is how his dad feels at gigs, no wonder he stays away so long.
He’s so caught up in the adrenaline rush that he fails to really think about his next move. It’s the rock star energy (or so he will argue later, knees drawn up to his chest in the principal’s office). The music courses through him, taking control of his arms and legs like he’s nothing more than a really awesome puppet strung up on his own guitar strings. He feels alive for the first time in his life, and the best thing he can think to cap it off is to really go where the music takes him.
And right at this minute, the music wants him to fly.
Humming his way towards the song’s finale, he slings the guitar across his back and spreads his arms. One step, two steps, three-he’s nearly there now. Several feet below him, he hears someone (Rachel Berry, if he had to guess), gasp.
“He’s going to jump!”
Hell yeah, I am, he thinks, seconds before his legs pinwheel in the air, head thrown back with the final bars of “American Woman.” His eyes scan the ground, catching Mercedes just in time to fling her a roguish wink.
And then he lands-directly on top of her.
It is not, all things considered, the best performance of his life. And it does not get him the girl. If anything, as she groans and flails her fists against his ribcage, doing her best to shove him off, Mercedes seems to hate him now more than ever.
But even as she cries, “Get your ugly face off me, boy!”, Puck grins.
Had to start somewhere.
2
She doesn’t get him.
He’s leaning against her locker, looking for all the world like a puppy recently booted out of its cardboard box, jacket hiked up to his ears. His t-shirt is torn and grungy, his mohawk a little greasy. She’s pretty sure he’s been wearing those same jeans all week.
She keeps finding him like this. Every morning, long before the rest of the world shows up, at a time where she’s only here because she’s getting a little extra help in Geometry. Sleepy-eyed, misery playing at the corners of his usually-sneering mouth, he looks like a rumpled mess.
It took days for them to speak.
She doesn’t like Noah Puckerman-has never liked Noah Puckerman, not since she saw him drag away a headlocked Kurt in the second grade and refuse to let him out of the coat closet until the afternoon snacks were already cleaned up. Noah Puckerman has a long-standing record of being a bully, an asshole, and a grade-A idiot.
Plus, there was that time he concluded an impromptu concert by falling five feet onto her head.
The thing about this kid, however, is that no matter how hard she tries (and she has always tried), she can’t seem to get rid of him. Oh, he’ll wander off for a little while, attention captured by the nearest cliché in a mini-skirt, but in the end, he tends to find her again.
At her locker.
At 7:08 in the morning.
It started a week ago-probably on the very same day he last pulled those raggedy-ass jeans out of the wash-and it took her three days to muster up the strength to look him in the eye. Not that he said a word. In a manner very unlike the boy the whole town calls Puck, he only scooted aside, one ankle still crossed over the other, and leaned against the next locker over. Waiting for her to pull the necessary books off the shelf, apparently, because as soon as she bumped the door shut, he unfolded his arms and held them out expectantly.
The first time she laid a textbook across his crooked elbows, she fully expected him to turn and heave it down the nearest staircase.
He didn’t. He never seems to do anything the way she expects. Even before the bonding experience of a lifetime that is Glee Club, she couldn’t figure him out. One minute, he’d be grinning suggestively at her from over Santana Lopez’s shoulder; the next, he’d dump a raspberry Slushee over her head and high five Karofsky. It’s like he lives to drive her insane.
Most of the time, she wishes he would just leave her alone. It’s obnoxious and confusing-not to mention more than a little heart-wrenching-to be jerked around for years on end by one of the biggest (and douchiest) studs in school. She knows she’s not his type, knows that she never will be, and she hates the way her heart twitches expectantly whenever he smiles. She doesn’t have blonde hair, or a perfect complexion, and she’ll never weigh less than 120. It’s not that she doesn’t have her own thing going on (Beyonce herself would kill for this booty, as she reminds herself daily), it’s just that “her own thing” isn’t his thing.
She accepts that. She has no choice, especially now that her friend is carrying his baby. It’s just a little hard to keep it all in mind when he’s standing here an hour before the first bell, hands in his pockets as he waits for her to reach him.
“Don’t you ever sleep?” she demands today. His head rolls up, expression brightening half a watt. He doesn’t seem to expect conversation.
“Quinn talks in her sleep,” he admits, shrugging. “Hard to get decent shut-eye through that.”
It hurts her chest to imagine them together, curled under the same quilt. Stupid to let that weigh her down. Quinn Fabray, aside from being unbelievably pretty, is her friend. She’s a good person, a bright and funny young woman who sometimes makes some sincerely dumb decisions. Mercedes likes her a lot, and the last thing you should do to someone you like a lot is hate them for having what you can’t.
“What’s she say?” she makes herself ask as she turns the lock idly. He scratches his head, fingernails itching back and forth through the longish fuzz. She wonders what it would feel like under her palms, whether it would scratch like stubble or feel soft like an old velvet couch cushion.
“I can’t hear the words,” he admits. “She’s got my bed, I-“ Something like panic flares in his eyes. “Oh! I'm not up there, I stay downstairs. Couch. Mom doesn’t dig on the sleepover idea, even though I told her, y’know, I don’t do pregnant chicks. No telling what freaky shit those hormones might make her do in the middle.”
Mercedes cringes, shaking her head to push the images away. “Right.”
“Seriously!” he presses, straightening up. “I’ve…I mean, you said it, right? I’ve done enough. Messed up her life and…”
He trails off, tired eyes snagging on a light fixture. Mercedes sighs.
“I’m sorry about that.”
“You were right,” he mumbles. “Everybody knows I fucked her up. Fucked up Finn, too. I fuck up everything.”
Enough. The last thing she needs two hours before a test on the War of 1812 is a self-pitying stalker-jock. She cuffs him on the shoulder just hard enough to drag his gaze back to her face.
“How come you’re always here so early?” she asks, prying her locker open and unloading the first book into his arms when they obediently spread. “And she’s not?”
“She is,” he corrects, shifting the Bio text more comfortably. “Early Cheerios practice. She likes to sit and watch.”
It’s the dumbest thing Quinn could be doing right now, but Mercedes isn’t surprised. For all her stony scowls and raised eyebrows, that girl cares a hell of a lot more than she likes to let on. Especially about her extracurriculars.
“I used to wait in my truck,” he goes on almost absently. “Trying to catch a little shut-eye or whatever. Not like I care about showin’ up on time. But lately, I dunno. Just doesn’t work.”
“So you creep on me instead,” Mercedes drawls, tossing her purse atop the stack and slamming the locker with a satisfying clang. He has the grace to look mildly sheepish.
“Yeah. I guess.” She notices he doesn’t apologize. Unsurprising. Noah Puckerman isn’t the apologizing type.
They angle towards the choir room, Puck shuffling just enough to keep the purse from dropping to the ground as he walks. He looks like he’s running on all of two hours of sleep. It’s miserable.
Feeling sympathy for a kid who cheated on his best friend, got a girl pregnant, and, until a few months ago, routinely started his mornings by chucking her best friend into a dumpster seems ridiculous. Still…
“You don’t have to carry those,” she blurts, embarrassed when he meets her eyes. “I’m not one of your cheerleader bimbos. I can do it.”
He shrugs. “Got it. And I know you’re not a bimbo. S’why I like you.”
Ignore that, she advises herself firmly. It never happened. “Whatever you say, white boy.”
“Jew boy,” he corrects with a shadow of his usual grin. For half a second, the image of a clumsy airborne guitarist burns in her mind.
“And technically,” he adds, seeing her tiny smile, “you are a cheerleader.”
She elbows him a little too hard, sending her own books cascading out of his arms. He swears, dropping to his knees and fumbling to scoop them up.
It’s a strange Noah Puckerman, this boy who shows up daily at her locker. She doubts their classmates would recognize him. He goes so out of his way to forget names and remember schedules, all the better to pummel and plunder from, acting every inch the moronic bad boy-and yet, here he is. Kneeling at her feet, mohawk pointed at the ground as he shovels change back into her purse, eyebrows knitted tight over exhausted eyes. The boy who sleeps on the couch so his pregnant not-girlfriend can be comfortable, who drives to school hours early for someone else’s sake, who carries the books of the very girl who let his secret run rampant through Glee.
Noah Puckerman is an asshole, there is no denying that. He is brutish and sometimes cruel, regularly dumb and thoughtless. She doesn’t like him much.
Except on mornings like this. Watching him scramble to his feet, blushing to the tips of his ears and cursing under his breath, she thinks maybe this Puck isn’t so bad.
He does need more sleep, she notes as he stumbles through the choir room door and sinks down in the nearest chair, head lolling back. A lot more. He’s juggling class (well, once in a while, anyway), basketball, Glee, Quinn. Having all the energy of the walking dead can’t make that any easier.
Maybe one of these days-not now, not yet, but soon-she should have a little chat with Quinn. Puck thinks he can do it all: be a jock, a ‘Glee stud’ (she really can’t take them seriously when they call themselves that), a brother, son, father. He can’t. Not alone. Not on the bare minimum of sleep and absolutely no one to turn to.
Her brother’s at college now; his room is gathering dust, sitting lonely and ignored in the back corner of the house. Maybe someday soon, Puck can sleep in his own bed again.
It’s a plan that merits some working out yet. For now, she watches his head thump against the wall, long eyelashes fluttering against his cheeks, and thinks that Noah Puckerman could definitely use a break. And, like him or not, she doesn’t mind sticking around.
Even obnoxious Jew boys need a little company now and then.
3
Reunions are bullshit.
Five-year reunions are even more bullshit than the rest, Puck thinks; just enough time for everyone else to show off their fancy college degrees, but not enough for anyone to have a decent career built up, or a family, or even to have changed much from the pictures on Facebook.
He actually has all three, if you want to be particular about it: his pool-cleaning business is legit now (no more nipple rings, and he hasn’t banged a cougar in a year and a half), and he’s got a daughter he sees once a month.
And he deleted his Facebook with a delicious vengeance the year Finn Hudson joined the Army and scampered off the continent to make his father proud. They communicate via scratchy letters in ever-boyish handwriting now. It’s ridiculous how into it Puck gets.
All things said, there’s no real reason for him to go to his reunion at all. He lives dangerously near Lima, visiting fairly often to see Anna and his mother. He plays on an indoor football team with Mike Chang and exchanges occasional awkward emails with Quinn (a recent Columbia grad), Santana (living with Brittany just outside of Vegas, of all places), and Artie (who, last he heard, is working on his very own video game and sharing an apartment with two other geeks just like him). He hasn’t heard from Rachel directly in years, but last Hanukkah brought to his door a tiny menorah with a gold star fused to its base. It made him smile.
Put simply, he’s happy. Or, if not happy, then fairly content. There are things he misses, of course; sometimes it’s hard to sleep with all the thoughts in his head, dipping and tangoing with the phantom scent of Rachel’s lip-gloss, or the echo of Quinn’s giggle as she cradled Beth for the first time, or the glitter in Finn’s eyes whenever he blew a character off the screen. Sometimes, he thinks whoever said high school made up the best years of his life was probably right.
Still, here he is. Probably going to be the first and last arrival to represent the McKinley Glee Club, class of 2012. He feels like an idiot in his old football jacket, but hey, it still fits and this is Ohio. Nostalgia is practically law.
And anything is better than a tie.
The gym feels smaller than he remembers, the smell of history digging its rabid little claws into his senses. Immediately, he hates it. The mass of falsely smiling people, the red-and-white decorations plastered to the walls, the balloons he’s been kicking his way past since walking through the door. He even hates the stick-on nametag with “Noah” scrawled on it. It’s like they didn’t know him at all.
Not surprising. He’s pretty sure the only people who really knew him didn’t RSVP. It makes him wonder what he’s doing here.
“Puck?”
It’s a nickname he’ll keep until the day he dies, and for that, he feels powerful. A name is the root of an identity, and he crafted his all by himself. He is the pinnacle of a self-made man.
Leave it to Mercedes Jones to remember.
He hasn’t heard from her since that last hectic teenage summer, caught up in the constant bustle of swimming pool days and beer pong nights. She went off somewhere-to U of M, or some little place in Boston, maybe; could be any place-and just never came back. Or maybe she did, and he was too busy to notice. He gets that way sometimes now.
Looking at her, he can’t stop the spread of an ear-to-ear smile. She’s beautiful in that same old way, radiating confidence and endless diva ‘tude. He remembers staring at the back of her head in grade school, puzzled as to why she was always scowling his way. Remembers, too, the ups and downs of high school: Slushees and ballads, secrets spilled and that brilliantly awkward week of dating.
God, Santana hated that.
“You look old,” she tells him now, eyes bright, and he knows it’s a joke. He works in the sun until snow comes and forces him indoors; the price is a well-muscled, tanned body topped by a lean, comfortable face, his ‘hawk long since given up on. He looks good.
He wonders if she notices.
“Didn’t expect to see you,” he admits, scratching his head. “Figured you’d be off forcing Mary J. into final retirement by now or something.”
“Kurt blackmailed me into coming,” she informs him with an eyeroll he remembers all too well. “He couldn’t make it, but he just had to know what everyone was wearing.”
He feels her eyes burning his skin, drinking in the clean jeans and terrifically sad jacket. “It’s warm,” he mutters defensively. “And it looks good on me.”
“Always has,” she drawls, grinning when he flexes and winks. “Oh God, you haven’t changed a bit.”
“Have too,” he retorts, but he’s laughing. Of course he’s changed; he hasn’t gotten a girl pregnant in years, he wants to say. Hasn’t locked any skinny losers into a porta-potty, or peppered his best friend with paintball pellets. Hasn’t channeled Billy Joel or zombies. He’s practically a whole new man since she last saw him, and thank every god in the sky for that.
It’s funny that he hasn’t thought about this in years, this strange hungry pull in his gut at seeing her. Mercedes Jones, the girl he never could explain or make sense of. The girl who never did take his shit. It’s amazing how appealing that’s always been.
It comes rushing back as they grin at each other, all the things he always refused to embrace bursting in to nail him between the eyes. He sees himself presenting her with a corsage before Prom (a fabrication; it was Rachel he took, pretending not to notice how she spent half the dance making sad eyes at Finn across the room). He visualizes sweeping her into his arms at graduation (in reality, Tina was the one he impulsively swung around, laughing as she playfully beat at his shoulders with tiny gloved fists). He pictures coming home from work, throwing his keys on the counter, curling up with her on their couch. Watching TV while her fingers massage the memory of a mohawk, while she teases him about everything and nothing.
Somehow, that one cuts the deepest-not because it never was and never could be, but because he’s not sure it will become a reality with anyone.
He’s been in love a hundred times, and in lust a thousand more than that. Nothing has ever been like Mercedes. She doesn’t make sense; doesn’t want him, didn’t even like him for most of their time together, and yet here she stands. The one person left over from the past he sometimes feels he’s still drowning in.
He opens his mouth-to say something that will ruin the easy moment, no doubt-and she throws up her hands. Catching him, as always, in the act.
“Don’t even say it, Puckerman.”
He doesn’t ask what. It would be an insult to them both. Instead, he grins again and tilts his head towards the door.
“Wanna get out of here?”
“Oh God,” she groans, hand dramatically splayed over her eyes. “You went and said it.”
He throws his head back and laughs like a seventeen-year-old boy, linking his elbow through hers. “Admit it, Mercedes Jones. You love me.”
“Never,” she replies, her smile brilliant. “I can’t stand your face, white boy.”
“Jew boy,” he corrects witheringly, nudging her side. “And you can too. You love me, and you’ve missed me, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
She shakes her head, bumping him with her hip, and he feels unreasonably near the top of the world. It’s not the same as cradling Rachel close during a slow song, or feeling the heat of Santana’s mouth against his skin, or watching Quinn deliver his child. Mercedes has never been like any of them, but she’s sure as hell something.
The girl he took up guitar for.
The girl he tried to fly to impress.
The girl he told his darkest secret to.
The girl whose company kept him sane at his wildest.
The girl he dated for a week to keep a reputation he cringes to look back on.
The girl who, through it all, has never let him steer the way he’s used to.
He feels the comfortable weight of her arm on his own and thinks everyone should be so lucky to have a Mercedes Jones walk back into their life. Even for one night of beaten-up football jackets and midnight Denny’s conversation.
It just feels right.