Don't Make it Bad
Title: Don’t Make it Bad
Author: jockchic
Pairings: Tiny bits of Puck/Kurt and Finn/Quinn
Rating/warnings: R for a serious car crash, language, blood, and gratuitous Beatles references.
Disclaimer: So not mine!
Summary: Puck and Kurt say hello.
AN: In my most honest of Puck/Kurt moments, I grudgingly acknowledge that the two of them might not talk to each other under normal circumstances. The way around this? Abnormal circumstances! I’ve never officially posted fic here before; thanks so much for letting me share. Sorry this one is so heavy.
*
To be very, very clear: Puck blamed Finn for their being in the middle of nowhere on a Saturday night. He blamed Finn for opting to see a performance by some tone-deaf garage band in Mansfield to fulfill Mr. Schue’s “expanding your musical horizons” assignment. He blamed Finn for inviting Kurt Hummel along, and he definitely blamed Finn for the seating arrangements-Puck and Kurt sharing the backseat in dead silence, with Quinn merrily riding shotgun. But Puck did not blame Finn for the accident.
It was a quarter after three now, and Quinn’s McCartney mixtape had finally stopped looping don’t carry the world upon your shoulders. Puck could see a patch of stars through the back window if he twisted his head just right, but his neck was cramping, so he relaxed back against the bed of broken glass and stared up at the car seat instead. They’d gotten blood all over the upholstery. Finn had flipped; no pun intended. To Puck’s right, Kurt Hummel lay pinned in the wreckage, his closed eyelids fluttering like butterflies on pins. At least he was moving a little now.
“He’s really hurt,” Quinn had wept five minutes earlier. She and Finn were lifting Kurt free of his seatbelt, probing him for pulses, holding their sweaters to his bleeding head. “Don’t move him anymore! We’ve got to go get help!”
“No!” Finn shouted. “We can’t just leave him here!”
Finn hadn’t been able to lower his voice once since the car stopped rolling. If he was anything like Puck, he was still hearing metal on metal, the sounds of shattering glass. Puck had to rap on a twisted steel frame to get their attention, accidentally knocking the door off its single intact hinge in the process. It crashed to the ground. Alight with adrenaline, Finn and Quinn had nearly leapt out of their skins.
“Sorry,” said Puck. His left knee throbbed with a dull, broad fire that he felt even in his teeth. “Hey, go find some help, both of you. I’ll watch him.”
“We’re not leaving you, either!” Quinn declared, her voice shrill.
Someone’s blood had streaked sunsets in her hair, and Finn was staggering to maintain his footing. They were only keeping their balance because they were linked at the elbow. The physical realization of this relational codependency was enough to make Puck want to puke, but he knew he would just have to sit in it, if he did. “I’m not going anywhere anytime soon,” he said, grimacing. What the hell was crushing his legs? The seat? “Get help. Before it’s too late.”
So Quinn and Finn had limped off into the darkness together, moving too slowly toward a gas station that might or might not actually exist, and Puck extricated his trapped arm from the debris so he could keep some pressure on Kurt’s head. Quinn’s tape began to skip again, still stuck on Hey Jude-you’ll do, you’ll do, you’ll do-then purred, stammered, and stopped.
Since then, the silence had been complete. No birds, no wind from passing vehicles, not even a hum of power lines. Puck caged his panic with deep, calming breaths, practicing Beatles guitar chords with his free hand. Take a sad song and make it better. No sense in panicking. Either help would come, or it wouldn’t.
He was floating somewhere between song and sleep when Kurt’s eyes flickered open, very pale in the darkness.
“Aah,” was his waking contribution to the world. Then, soft and indistinct: “Is that you, Puck?”
“I’m here, Hummel,” said Puck. “Nice of you to finally join me.”
Kurt swallowed with great difficulty. He looked around the car, his gaze detached. “What happened? Did we have an accident?”
If getting struck broadside by an inebriated trucker could be called an accident, then, yeah, that’s what happened. Puck had seen the guy coming two seconds before the collision: a red pickup with one of those brassy, I’m-compensating-for-something engines, roaring through a yield sign on their right-of-way. Finn! Puck yelled. And then the impact had knocked all thought clean out of his body, and Kurt was swallowed in a wall of shrapnel, and the car was rolling over and over in a tumult of crumpling metal and splintered safety glass. The dome lights sputtered off. Quinn split the night with one high, harrowing shriek. By the time they finally lost enough inertia to come to rest upside-down in the center of the road, Puck was swiping blood out of his eyes, and the truck was driving away. The truck was driving away.
It might make a great story for the grandchildren one day, but Kurt’s expression was stunned, uncomprehending. He didn’t even look like he should be conscious. Puck sucked in a quick breath and touched one finger to a stream of blood that had slipped down Kurt’s jaw line, playing on the delicate curve of his throat, tender as prayer.
He was bleeding from one ear.
“Yeah, accident,” Puck said simply. His heartbeat was so loud he was sure Kurt could hear it. “Don’t worry, man…help is on the way.”
Kurt shifted minutely and dampened his lips. “Is Finn…?”
“He’s fine. He and Quinn left to get-”
“Quinn, oh my god,” Kurt interrupted. “The baby!”
Puck rushed to placate him: “No, she was fine, too; she was walking and everything. Don’t strain yourself, all right? You’re the one everyone’s worried about. How do you feel?”
Considering the question for the first time, Kurt creaked his jaw open and shut, then tested out his limbs. He only managed to move a few fingertips on his right hand. “I think I’m okay,” he said, regardless. “There’s a funny taste in my mouth, and my head really, really hurts, but…I don’t feel much besides that. My head hurts, but I don’t really feel much. I think I’m okay.”
His repetition made Puck’s stomach grow heavy with ice, but he only nodded, trying to sound casual: “Good. You look better than you did a minute ago, too. Considerably less dead.”
“Good,” echoed Kurt. He swallowed again. “How about you?”
“I’m pretty sure my leg’s broken, and there’s a scratch on my head that stings like a bitch,” said Puck. “I’ll live.”
“Football?” Kurt asked distantly.
“Ah, fuck it. We suck. I won’t miss it for a season.”
“Glee?”
Hey, cool, now he could opt out of all those faggy kick ball changes. But he knew better than to say that to Kurt. “Yeah, that’ll be a real bummer,” said Puck, with a valiant attempt at sincerity. “At least there’s still the wheelchair number…which is disturbingly prophetic, now that I think of it. If Schue assigns us ‘Back Stabbers,’ we should probably quit.”
Kurt chuckled. “Or ‘Tearing Us Apart.’”
“‘Complicated Disaster?’”
“‘We Don’t Need Another Hero.’” He paused. “And now let’s pretend we don’t know so many Tina Turner songs.”
Puck surprised himself by smiling. It felt genuine, uncomplicated. “Sounds good to me.”
They sat there without speaking for a few minutes, and this time, the silence didn’t feel quite as pervasive. Kurt drew in soft, measured breaths, and Puck hummed slowly along to the cadence of his respiration: hey, Jude, begin, you’re waiting for someone to perform with. Stupid Quinn. He was going to have the damn song stuck in his head for the rest of his life.
Kurt sang along for a verse, his voice faint and fragile. When they reached the third better, his eyes rolled back in his head, and he began to tremble.
“Hummel,” said Puck, alarmed. “Hummel…Kurt!”
Kurt’s body convulsed. His arms leapt up and down against the ground, legs shuddering beneath the seat that kept them both pinned in the car. Puck seized onto his minimal health class knowledge and tilted Kurt’s chin up and to the side, struggling to clear his airway. Blood and vomit spilled free from Kurt’s lips. His eyelashes quivered, as if deep in sleep. Puck held his head in place until the tremors began to abate, and Kurt lay there unconscious for the longest minutes of Puck’s life, ashen and immobile. His breathing was shallow. He’d bled right through the sweater Finn had pressed to his temple.
Puck just watched him. He tapped an imaginary fretboard and hummed anxious harmonies and waited and watched him.
It was too long before Kurt’s eyes finally drifted open again. One of his pupils had invaded the iris, leaving only a tiny periphery of gray to catch the fading glow from Finn’s dashboard lights.
“Head hurts,” he murmured, panting. His voice was thick; he swiped his arm across his lips. “Did I fall asleep?”
You had a fucking seizure, was what Puck intended to say. What came out instead was, “Yeah, just for a bit. Feeling any better now?”
“My mouth tastes like you should be throwing me in it.”
“What?” Shit. Tack incoherency onto his long, disconcerting list of symptoms.
“My mouth tastes like a dumpster,” Kurt clarified.
“Oh,” said Puck. He stared at the mangled window frame behind Kurt. The trucker’s headlights had illuminated the soft ends of Kurt’s hair and clothes split-seconds before the corner of the bumper announced itself in the cabin. He’d looked so ethereal, lit up at the filaments like that…as if he had a halo. As if he was shining from the inside. “Um…look. I know we’ve been doing the dumpster thing for-”
Kurt cut him off by lifting one finger. “Are you trying to apologize?”
Puck was stunned speechless for a moment, embarrassed. “Well…so what? Come on, let me say my piece.”
“No. If we’re going to have some stupid ‘General Hospital’ deathbed moment, it should at least follow a series of steamy affairs. Preferably not with each other. But beggars can’t be choosers.” He paused to gauge Puck’s reaction. Puck could only stare at him, and Kurt stared back, his expression unreadable. “Puck,” he said at last.
“Hm?”
“This is just about the first conversation we’ve ever had.”
It sounded terrible when he said it that way, considering how many activities they shared at school, but it was true. Puck couldn’t even remember the last time they’d spoken. “Damn,” he muttered. “You’re right.”
“I didn’t even say ‘hi’ when I got in the car,” said Kurt.
“Neither did I.”
Kurt opened his hand in greeting and treated him to a small, sleepy smile. “So. Hi there.”
“Hey, Jude,” said Puck, by way of salutation. He found a dry patch of sweater and pushed it to Kurt’s head, felt the blood soak through almost immediately. It sobered him like a slap in the face. “Seriously. Hi.”
“Am I bleeding?” Kurt asked, startled.
“Just a little. Stay still. I, uh…I think it’s stopping.”
He sucked at lying like this. Give him his best friend’s girlfriend and an illegitimate child, and Puck was a marvel of deceit-it was the gracious duplicity that gave him problems. Yes, Quinn, you’re bloated from those wine coolers. No, Santana, I only wanted to get into your pants. There was a big difference between Kurt Hummel and a one-night stand, and “you’ll be okay” was still harder to say naturally than “I don’t really love you.”
Puck wondered what that said about him.
“I can’t feel my arm,” said Kurt, his voice soft.
“It’s still there,” Puck assured him.
Kurt stirred a fraction of an inch. His breath hitched. “I can’t feel my right leg, either.”
“It’s still there, too. You haven’t lost anything. Everything is still there.”
This was so sick and fucked up. Kurt’s blood swelled hotly between his fingers, and Puck set to work shrugging off his top to use as a compress. His whole body had broken out into a cold sweat. The pain in his leg felt pale, faraway. By the time he had finally fought his shirt over both arms, Kurt was drooping toward the opposite door, silently slipping back into convulsions.
“No, no, no,” Puck chanted in a whisper, holding Kurt steady. No throwing up this time, at least-his stomach had nothing left to expel. “Kurt. Come on. No more of this.”
Kurt just shook. He shook and shook and shook.
Puck held his shirt against Kurt’s head, swiping the hair out of his face when the paroxysm finally began to subside. Glass crunched beneath his elbows. Sirens blared somewhere in the distance; it was too soon to know who they were for. Kurt looked so goddamn precious in his checkered cardigan, a father’s cared-for child, his shadow smooth and streamlined against the floor of wreckage. Even veiled in blood, Puck could tell that someone was cherishing every fiber of this kid. He was the type of son a parent would actually mourn for.
“My dad never loved me,” Puck confessed to him, his voice low and unsteady. So much ruin. The smell of iron and gasoline. “I’ve never had a real family. I’ve never ridden a motorcycle fast on a highway. I’ve never seen Angel Falls.”
Kurt surprised him by responding, barely audible in the approaching roar of traffic: “I’ve never worn rosso Valentino. I’ve never been kissed.”
“Okay,” said Puck.
When Kurt’s head lolled in his direction, Puck leaned forward and touched their lips together. It was a faint gesture, one with no pressure or passion, and Puck tasted only the electrified air between them. Kurt’s eyes were closed. His breath was thin and labored, desperately slow.
“Hey!” An unfamiliar man’s voice. Footsteps and slamming doors, a rush of purposeful motion. “We’re here! Are you guys okay in there?”
“Half of us are,” said Puck. “Hurry.”
A tool whirred to life. Sparks lit the darkness behind Kurt’s shoulder, and the easy purr of parting metal was nothing like the sound the truck had made when it hit them.
“Keep talking to me!” the man ordered. “Say anything!”
So Puck sang. He found Hey Jude in the back of his heart and sang as loud as his lungs would allow, pushed forward past the bridges, let his shaking hands seek out the chord progressions like steps up a staircase. Kurt Hummel lay perfectly still beside him. Kurt Hummel who had spared a thought for Quinn’s baby in crisis. Kurt Hummel who had never worn rosso Valentino or known a day when his dad didn’t love him. Puck took coda after coda to keep the song from ending, sweeping through the verses and watching Kurt’s stationary silhouette pick up fire from the sheared steel.
The EMTs freed a space in the debris. The sky expanded above them in a rush of cool wind, boasting a thousand stars like searchlights.
Don’t make it bad, thought Puck, as they eased Kurt out into the open air.
Don’t make it bad.
*
Author: jockchic
Pairings: Tiny bits of Puck/Kurt and Finn/Quinn
Rating/warnings: R for a serious car crash, language, blood, and gratuitous Beatles references.
Disclaimer: So not mine!
Summary: Puck and Kurt say hello.
AN: In my most honest of Puck/Kurt moments, I grudgingly acknowledge that the two of them might not talk to each other under normal circumstances. The way around this? Abnormal circumstances! I’ve never officially posted fic here before; thanks so much for letting me share. Sorry this one is so heavy.
*
To be very, very clear: Puck blamed Finn for their being in the middle of nowhere on a Saturday night. He blamed Finn for opting to see a performance by some tone-deaf garage band in Mansfield to fulfill Mr. Schue’s “expanding your musical horizons” assignment. He blamed Finn for inviting Kurt Hummel along, and he definitely blamed Finn for the seating arrangements-Puck and Kurt sharing the backseat in dead silence, with Quinn merrily riding shotgun. But Puck did not blame Finn for the accident.
It was a quarter after three now, and Quinn’s McCartney mixtape had finally stopped looping don’t carry the world upon your shoulders. Puck could see a patch of stars through the back window if he twisted his head just right, but his neck was cramping, so he relaxed back against the bed of broken glass and stared up at the car seat instead. They’d gotten blood all over the upholstery. Finn had flipped; no pun intended. To Puck’s right, Kurt Hummel lay pinned in the wreckage, his closed eyelids fluttering like butterflies on pins. At least he was moving a little now.
“He’s really hurt,” Quinn had wept five minutes earlier. She and Finn were lifting Kurt free of his seatbelt, probing him for pulses, holding their sweaters to his bleeding head. “Don’t move him anymore! We’ve got to go get help!”
“No!” Finn shouted. “We can’t just leave him here!”
Finn hadn’t been able to lower his voice once since the car stopped rolling. If he was anything like Puck, he was still hearing metal on metal, the sounds of shattering glass. Puck had to rap on a twisted steel frame to get their attention, accidentally knocking the door off its single intact hinge in the process. It crashed to the ground. Alight with adrenaline, Finn and Quinn had nearly leapt out of their skins.
“Sorry,” said Puck. His left knee throbbed with a dull, broad fire that he felt even in his teeth. “Hey, go find some help, both of you. I’ll watch him.”
“We’re not leaving you, either!” Quinn declared, her voice shrill.
Someone’s blood had streaked sunsets in her hair, and Finn was staggering to maintain his footing. They were only keeping their balance because they were linked at the elbow. The physical realization of this relational codependency was enough to make Puck want to puke, but he knew he would just have to sit in it, if he did. “I’m not going anywhere anytime soon,” he said, grimacing. What the hell was crushing his legs? The seat? “Get help. Before it’s too late.”
So Quinn and Finn had limped off into the darkness together, moving too slowly toward a gas station that might or might not actually exist, and Puck extricated his trapped arm from the debris so he could keep some pressure on Kurt’s head. Quinn’s tape began to skip again, still stuck on Hey Jude-you’ll do, you’ll do, you’ll do-then purred, stammered, and stopped.
Since then, the silence had been complete. No birds, no wind from passing vehicles, not even a hum of power lines. Puck caged his panic with deep, calming breaths, practicing Beatles guitar chords with his free hand. Take a sad song and make it better. No sense in panicking. Either help would come, or it wouldn’t.
He was floating somewhere between song and sleep when Kurt’s eyes flickered open, very pale in the darkness.
“Aah,” was his waking contribution to the world. Then, soft and indistinct: “Is that you, Puck?”
“I’m here, Hummel,” said Puck. “Nice of you to finally join me.”
Kurt swallowed with great difficulty. He looked around the car, his gaze detached. “What happened? Did we have an accident?”
If getting struck broadside by an inebriated trucker could be called an accident, then, yeah, that’s what happened. Puck had seen the guy coming two seconds before the collision: a red pickup with one of those brassy, I’m-compensating-for-something engines, roaring through a yield sign on their right-of-way. Finn! Puck yelled. And then the impact had knocked all thought clean out of his body, and Kurt was swallowed in a wall of shrapnel, and the car was rolling over and over in a tumult of crumpling metal and splintered safety glass. The dome lights sputtered off. Quinn split the night with one high, harrowing shriek. By the time they finally lost enough inertia to come to rest upside-down in the center of the road, Puck was swiping blood out of his eyes, and the truck was driving away. The truck was driving away.
It might make a great story for the grandchildren one day, but Kurt’s expression was stunned, uncomprehending. He didn’t even look like he should be conscious. Puck sucked in a quick breath and touched one finger to a stream of blood that had slipped down Kurt’s jaw line, playing on the delicate curve of his throat, tender as prayer.
He was bleeding from one ear.
“Yeah, accident,” Puck said simply. His heartbeat was so loud he was sure Kurt could hear it. “Don’t worry, man…help is on the way.”
Kurt shifted minutely and dampened his lips. “Is Finn…?”
“He’s fine. He and Quinn left to get-”
“Quinn, oh my god,” Kurt interrupted. “The baby!”
Puck rushed to placate him: “No, she was fine, too; she was walking and everything. Don’t strain yourself, all right? You’re the one everyone’s worried about. How do you feel?”
Considering the question for the first time, Kurt creaked his jaw open and shut, then tested out his limbs. He only managed to move a few fingertips on his right hand. “I think I’m okay,” he said, regardless. “There’s a funny taste in my mouth, and my head really, really hurts, but…I don’t feel much besides that. My head hurts, but I don’t really feel much. I think I’m okay.”
His repetition made Puck’s stomach grow heavy with ice, but he only nodded, trying to sound casual: “Good. You look better than you did a minute ago, too. Considerably less dead.”
“Good,” echoed Kurt. He swallowed again. “How about you?”
“I’m pretty sure my leg’s broken, and there’s a scratch on my head that stings like a bitch,” said Puck. “I’ll live.”
“Football?” Kurt asked distantly.
“Ah, fuck it. We suck. I won’t miss it for a season.”
“Glee?”
Hey, cool, now he could opt out of all those faggy kick ball changes. But he knew better than to say that to Kurt. “Yeah, that’ll be a real bummer,” said Puck, with a valiant attempt at sincerity. “At least there’s still the wheelchair number…which is disturbingly prophetic, now that I think of it. If Schue assigns us ‘Back Stabbers,’ we should probably quit.”
Kurt chuckled. “Or ‘Tearing Us Apart.’”
“‘Complicated Disaster?’”
“‘We Don’t Need Another Hero.’” He paused. “And now let’s pretend we don’t know so many Tina Turner songs.”
Puck surprised himself by smiling. It felt genuine, uncomplicated. “Sounds good to me.”
They sat there without speaking for a few minutes, and this time, the silence didn’t feel quite as pervasive. Kurt drew in soft, measured breaths, and Puck hummed slowly along to the cadence of his respiration: hey, Jude, begin, you’re waiting for someone to perform with. Stupid Quinn. He was going to have the damn song stuck in his head for the rest of his life.
Kurt sang along for a verse, his voice faint and fragile. When they reached the third better, his eyes rolled back in his head, and he began to tremble.
“Hummel,” said Puck, alarmed. “Hummel…Kurt!”
Kurt’s body convulsed. His arms leapt up and down against the ground, legs shuddering beneath the seat that kept them both pinned in the car. Puck seized onto his minimal health class knowledge and tilted Kurt’s chin up and to the side, struggling to clear his airway. Blood and vomit spilled free from Kurt’s lips. His eyelashes quivered, as if deep in sleep. Puck held his head in place until the tremors began to abate, and Kurt lay there unconscious for the longest minutes of Puck’s life, ashen and immobile. His breathing was shallow. He’d bled right through the sweater Finn had pressed to his temple.
Puck just watched him. He tapped an imaginary fretboard and hummed anxious harmonies and waited and watched him.
It was too long before Kurt’s eyes finally drifted open again. One of his pupils had invaded the iris, leaving only a tiny periphery of gray to catch the fading glow from Finn’s dashboard lights.
“Head hurts,” he murmured, panting. His voice was thick; he swiped his arm across his lips. “Did I fall asleep?”
You had a fucking seizure, was what Puck intended to say. What came out instead was, “Yeah, just for a bit. Feeling any better now?”
“My mouth tastes like you should be throwing me in it.”
“What?” Shit. Tack incoherency onto his long, disconcerting list of symptoms.
“My mouth tastes like a dumpster,” Kurt clarified.
“Oh,” said Puck. He stared at the mangled window frame behind Kurt. The trucker’s headlights had illuminated the soft ends of Kurt’s hair and clothes split-seconds before the corner of the bumper announced itself in the cabin. He’d looked so ethereal, lit up at the filaments like that…as if he had a halo. As if he was shining from the inside. “Um…look. I know we’ve been doing the dumpster thing for-”
Kurt cut him off by lifting one finger. “Are you trying to apologize?”
Puck was stunned speechless for a moment, embarrassed. “Well…so what? Come on, let me say my piece.”
“No. If we’re going to have some stupid ‘General Hospital’ deathbed moment, it should at least follow a series of steamy affairs. Preferably not with each other. But beggars can’t be choosers.” He paused to gauge Puck’s reaction. Puck could only stare at him, and Kurt stared back, his expression unreadable. “Puck,” he said at last.
“Hm?”
“This is just about the first conversation we’ve ever had.”
It sounded terrible when he said it that way, considering how many activities they shared at school, but it was true. Puck couldn’t even remember the last time they’d spoken. “Damn,” he muttered. “You’re right.”
“I didn’t even say ‘hi’ when I got in the car,” said Kurt.
“Neither did I.”
Kurt opened his hand in greeting and treated him to a small, sleepy smile. “So. Hi there.”
“Hey, Jude,” said Puck, by way of salutation. He found a dry patch of sweater and pushed it to Kurt’s head, felt the blood soak through almost immediately. It sobered him like a slap in the face. “Seriously. Hi.”
“Am I bleeding?” Kurt asked, startled.
“Just a little. Stay still. I, uh…I think it’s stopping.”
He sucked at lying like this. Give him his best friend’s girlfriend and an illegitimate child, and Puck was a marvel of deceit-it was the gracious duplicity that gave him problems. Yes, Quinn, you’re bloated from those wine coolers. No, Santana, I only wanted to get into your pants. There was a big difference between Kurt Hummel and a one-night stand, and “you’ll be okay” was still harder to say naturally than “I don’t really love you.”
Puck wondered what that said about him.
“I can’t feel my arm,” said Kurt, his voice soft.
“It’s still there,” Puck assured him.
Kurt stirred a fraction of an inch. His breath hitched. “I can’t feel my right leg, either.”
“It’s still there, too. You haven’t lost anything. Everything is still there.”
This was so sick and fucked up. Kurt’s blood swelled hotly between his fingers, and Puck set to work shrugging off his top to use as a compress. His whole body had broken out into a cold sweat. The pain in his leg felt pale, faraway. By the time he had finally fought his shirt over both arms, Kurt was drooping toward the opposite door, silently slipping back into convulsions.
“No, no, no,” Puck chanted in a whisper, holding Kurt steady. No throwing up this time, at least-his stomach had nothing left to expel. “Kurt. Come on. No more of this.”
Kurt just shook. He shook and shook and shook.
Puck held his shirt against Kurt’s head, swiping the hair out of his face when the paroxysm finally began to subside. Glass crunched beneath his elbows. Sirens blared somewhere in the distance; it was too soon to know who they were for. Kurt looked so goddamn precious in his checkered cardigan, a father’s cared-for child, his shadow smooth and streamlined against the floor of wreckage. Even veiled in blood, Puck could tell that someone was cherishing every fiber of this kid. He was the type of son a parent would actually mourn for.
“My dad never loved me,” Puck confessed to him, his voice low and unsteady. So much ruin. The smell of iron and gasoline. “I’ve never had a real family. I’ve never ridden a motorcycle fast on a highway. I’ve never seen Angel Falls.”
Kurt surprised him by responding, barely audible in the approaching roar of traffic: “I’ve never worn rosso Valentino. I’ve never been kissed.”
“Okay,” said Puck.
When Kurt’s head lolled in his direction, Puck leaned forward and touched their lips together. It was a faint gesture, one with no pressure or passion, and Puck tasted only the electrified air between them. Kurt’s eyes were closed. His breath was thin and labored, desperately slow.
“Hey!” An unfamiliar man’s voice. Footsteps and slamming doors, a rush of purposeful motion. “We’re here! Are you guys okay in there?”
“Half of us are,” said Puck. “Hurry.”
A tool whirred to life. Sparks lit the darkness behind Kurt’s shoulder, and the easy purr of parting metal was nothing like the sound the truck had made when it hit them.
“Keep talking to me!” the man ordered. “Say anything!”
So Puck sang. He found Hey Jude in the back of his heart and sang as loud as his lungs would allow, pushed forward past the bridges, let his shaking hands seek out the chord progressions like steps up a staircase. Kurt Hummel lay perfectly still beside him. Kurt Hummel who had spared a thought for Quinn’s baby in crisis. Kurt Hummel who had never worn rosso Valentino or known a day when his dad didn’t love him. Puck took coda after coda to keep the song from ending, sweeping through the verses and watching Kurt’s stationary silhouette pick up fire from the sheared steel.
The EMTs freed a space in the debris. The sky expanded above them in a rush of cool wind, boasting a thousand stars like searchlights.
Don’t make it bad, thought Puck, as they eased Kurt out into the open air.
Don’t make it bad.
*