Disclaimer: Unsurprisingly I don't own Glee and I'm not making any money from this.

For Better For Worse

Chapter 1 – Who Will Dry My Tears?

Rachel's Story

As Rachel stared down at the piece of paper on the table before her she couldn't help but wonder what it was that had brought them to this. At what point did this moment become inevitable? Noah would say that it was when she flipped and demanded it. She had done everything she could to get it after all and there was only so much that he could ignore before he had to give in and admit she had him beaten. She was sure however that her demand had not been the reason that this day had become inevitable.

She paused for a moment and started to think hard about what had happened over the course of their time together for this to happen. Perhaps she had to go right back to the beginning. Unknown to most people they had known each other most of their lives. Shabbat services and Sunday school at Temple meant that the handful of Jewish kids in Lima all knew each other from a young age. They were kind of friends but not really. She went to his Bar Mitzvah only because everyone from Temple was invited and the same happened with her Bat Mitzvah a few months later. They really didn't know each other well enough back then for it to have any bearing on what was happening now.

Maybe it really started when he tossed that first Slushie in her face. That first time she kind of got the impression that it was an accident and he had just stumbled because for a moment he looked like he was going to apologise but when everyone started laughing he pulled himself back. So if it wasn't the first Slushie maybe it was the last. The few times where they dated or almost kissed in high school definitely changed things between them. Sure they still weren't best friends but they definitely tolerated each other better than before. Certainly she started seeing him as something other than just a Neanderthal jock and she was fairly sure his opinion of her changed too. Whatever it was it still wasn't significant enough for it to have anything to do with all that came after it.

Perhaps the day that she truly realised that he wasn't a complete jerk had some significance. She never gave any thought to the idea of seeing him again after Graduation; after all they were acquaintances at best. As planned she went to New York where she was enrolled at Columbia. Originally her intention had been to go to Julliard or NYU but when she got the Columbia acceptance she couldn't really turn down an Ivy League school so her dad's agreed that she could hire private teachers to keep her performance skills up while she studied for something a little more conventional. That is how she met Miles Hartley who became more than a piano teacher to her, he discovered her.

She had always been a precocious performer but he was the first one to see past that and realise that her real gift was for composing. She planned to major in Italian with a minor in French but Miles was insistent that music was the only major she should consider. For the first time in her life though she doubted her ability and resolutely stuck to her intention to continue with languages. In order to prove to her that she could be a great composer, Miles persuaded her to volunteer as his assistant at a summer camp in Connecticut where he ran courses on music and song writing. It was here that she saw Puck again. Despite being in the worst high school football team in the state, he had somehow managed to get an athletic scholarship to OSU and he was volunteering with some other members of his team, coaching the kids. As he talked about some of the kids he was working with she realised that he was a good guy after all, he just needed something more than a small town that didn't appreciate him to realise it. That was the day she realised he wasn't a jerk. They made plans to have coffee again on his day off and after that it seemed to naturally progress into a friendship.

So much happened in that first year of college that changed the course of her carefully planned future. If she hadn't met Miles she would never have found out that she was good at song writing; she would never have gone to Connecticut and she never would have had the opportunity to see the real Puck. In many ways it was the most momentous year of her life, but it still wasn't definitive enough to have brought her to this point ten years later.

That summer was enough to convince her that her future was in writing music and not performing it and she decided once and for all to major in music, pleased that she had taken Miles' advice. She was even more pleased when she received a letter from Puck thanking her for the coffees and the nights out. The first thing that got her was that it wasn't an email or a text but a full, handwritten letter. She couldn't remember the last time she had actually taken the time to sit and write a letter. The next thing was that it was a really good letter. His spelling and grammar were appalling but her assumption that he was a man of action and not words lay smashed on the ground by his surprisingly elegant and witty writing style. She found herself writing back just to see if he would write to her again. After that they started a regular correspondence and the letters became longer and more frequent and she became more and more interested in the once standoffish teenager. She even started tuning in to watch his games on the TV. She didn't have the first idea about football but the excited ramblings from the guys doing the talking suggested that he was pretty good. Her roommate Kirsten almost swooned at the idea of her friend receiving old fashioned love letters from a handsome, athletic man. Rachel tried to convince her that it wasn't like that but she couldn't be persuaded.

After seven months of correspondence things changed when, out of the blue, he confessed that he wanted a relationship with her. Even though he hadn't seen her since the summer he felt he had learned about whom she really was through their letters and, if she was up for it, he would really like to give it a try and see where it went. She didn't respond straight away. She was too stunned by what he had said. Was this letter really from Puck? She took out all of his letters and read them again right up to that most recent one which she read so much it became a little dog-eared. She hadn't realised before how much of himself he had given to her in the letters. He didn't just give her accounts of what he did from day to day but he told her about how he felt and she realised that she probably knew Noah Puckerman better than anybody else. Once she realised that he was no longer the angry, hostile teenager from high school she found that she in fact did have feelings for the man she had come to know. She wrote back to him telling him that she agreed that they owed it to themselves to at least try and see if they could make it work. When she put the letter in the mailbox she felt giddy, like she was opening a new chapter in her life. She couldn't know it at the time but she knew now that posting that letter really did open a new door for her. Had it led her to this point, papers on her desk and pen in hand? Maybe, but surely this hadn't been inescapable at that point in time. There must have been something else.

There was only a month between those letters and summer. He was volunteering in Connecticut so she decided to go back too. As excited as she was she could never have imagined that it would be so amazing. That was the summer they fell in love. She got into town a few days before him so she was waiting when his truck pulled into the parking lot. She wasn't sure what she had been expecting but she was a little surprised when he casually kissed her lips, draped his arm around her shoulders and said 'thanks for meeting me babe' as if they had been dating for years. In that moment she realised that Noah didn't only exist in his letters. He was flesh and blood and when she looked at him she no longer saw Puck.

At first they took things slowly. They went on dates and they had long make-out sessions but they were counsellors at a kid' summer camp. The opportunities to get it on weren't exactly abundant. That isn't to say that it remained innocent for the entire summer. There was only so much kissing Rachel could take before she persuaded her fellow counsellors to help her out and get them some privacy so that he could finally show her how much of a stud he really was. All that talk in high school wasn't an exaggeration. As his summer training drew near they didn't talk about what was going to happen next, they didn't have to. They didn't need to make plans to know that this was going to work.

The ensuing 2 years of college were happy but frustrating. They kept up their correspondence and his letters became more, for want of a better word, puckish. He would wildly veer from the everyday mundane to the wildly romantic to the downright naughty. They supplemented the letters with phone conversations where she would play her latest compositions for him and he would read to her from the stories he wrote for the Lantern. She had never really thought about him as anything other than a football player so he had shocked her when he told her he was majoring in journalism and was thinking about doing a couple of internships to see if it was for him. He knew that he had a good shot at the NFL but he didn't want it. He had new goals and all of them included Rachel.

She was so happy to be part of his life and her only frustration came from not being with him. She saw him when he had some big event like Michigan week or when he came to New York to get some award. In turn he came to her concerts but the trips were expensive and not as frequent as either of them would have liked. She had little things that made her feel closer to him like wearing his jersey - much to the dismay of her friends who didn't understand what she saw in a jock - and feeling proud when she overheard guys talking about how big a star he was going to be.

By the time graduation came round she was practically bursting with excitement at the thought of them finally being together all of the time. She was so proud when she sat next to his Mom and sister and watched him get his degree that she actually thought she was going to explode. He had finally convinced a dozen NFL teams that he wasn't interested in going pro and once both of them were graduated they packed up their dorms, putting their stuff in storage for the summer, and headed off for their next big adventure. Three months in Europe, a graduation gift courtesy of their parents. That was a perfect time for them; it couldn't possibly have anything to do with the tears that were now pooling in her eyes.

The first couple of years of them living together were great. Sure they had no money but they were finally in the same place. They had a tiny apartment in the East Village which was just big enough for her, Noah and an electric piano. Rachel spent most of her days in the music room/living room/bedroom writing jingles for commercials. It was a crappy job but it meant that they could eat and at least she was getting heard. Noah was doing a Masters at NYU while working nights behind a bar in SoHo. He was so confident that he could make it and that dedication paid off when he landed an internship at the New York Times followed by a job offer. It was low paid but it was worth another year of having no cash when he got his chance on the sports pages. Suddenly he was writing regular articles and he was quickly promoted. At the same time Rachel was starting to get her name known and better commissions were coming her way. A couple of TV shows and a small indie movie later and they were buying their first apartment together. Her life wasn't what she had planned when she was in high school but she didn't care because it was better than she ever could have imagined and it was about to get better.

She could never forget the day she woke up and on a crazy whim decide that they should head up to Connecticut for a few hours because that was the day that he went down on one knee, gave her his grandmother's diamond and asked her to marry him. Six months later her Fathers were giving her away in the New York Public Library and they became Mr & Mrs Puckerman. He had been so nervous but so handsome and the look of intense devotion in his eyes as he gazed at her and slid the ring on her finger still gave her shivers. How could that feeling have resulted in this? It just wasn't possible.

Just like the years before, their first year of marriage was too glorious to have contributed to what came next. She moved on from writing minor scores to collaborating on a musical which took up a lot of her time but she had a wonderful husband who was behind her every step of the way. Every time he showed up at the theatre with flowers just because he could, or when he was on the front row on opening night applauding the loudest and beaming with pride, she would fall a little bit more in love with him.

As she considered what happened next she thought she was perhaps getting closer to the truth she was grasping for. Was it the moment that she rolled closer to him as they lay in bed, wrapped her arms around his chest and whispered in his ear 'let's make a baby' that set them on this course? When she saw the look of pleasure on his face as she asked him to be the father of her children he had never looked more handsome. In the following months they began to make plans. They were both tested to make sure they weren't carriers for any genetic diseases and they started looking for a house. They talked about names, nursery decorations, music lessons, little league and anything else they could think of to give their baby the normal childhood neither of them had really had. As soon as they moved into their new house in Brooklyn she stopped her birth control pills, started taking folic acid and within 3 months she was pregnant. The speed of it all was surely a sign that it was meant to happen. There was no way that the decision to have a child had made this day a certainty.

Her pregnancy was everything she could have hoped for. Noah took a job on the city news desk so that there was no chance he would be sent off on assignment to cover a game. He never missed a doctor's appointment. He would go out in the middle of the night in search of the weirdest things because she had a craving. He held her gently and dried her tears when she decided that she was fat and ugly. When her crazy hormones kicked in and she wanted him all the time he was more than happy to oblige her. She laughed when she thought of the times that he had pressed his open hand to her stomach as if to high five the baby for making Mommy lust after Daddy so much. She always pretended to be outraged for a moment before she would pull him to her and demonstrate just what the baby he had put in her belly was doing to her appetites.

The sonogram where they had found out that they were having a boy was the first time she had ever seen him have to brush away a tear. He had been through some rough times over the years but she had never seen him cry. The fact that their son meant so much to him he momentarily forgot his badassness, moved her more than she could express.

The birth of their son was not quite as peaceful as she had hoped. Her plans for a natural childbirth were forgotten when, after 6 hours of labour, she was demanding drugs and threatening to cut Noah's balls off if he ever tried to get into her bed again. He was clearly blocking her out because he just held her hand, kissed her brow and whispered to her about how wonderful she was. After another 8 hours of screaming, swearing and plotting revenge, Daniel Caleb Puckerman made his grand entrance into the world. He was exactly 7 pounds of angry, bawling perfection. It took just one shriek from her son to move her from wanting to castrate her husband to wondering how she would ever be able to repay him for giving her this moment. As she looked from the tiny baby in her arms to Noah's eyes, which were unashamedly shedding tears of joy, she had never felt so complete. It was the most wonderful moment of her life and she would not taint it by suggesting it had anything to do with what she was going through now.

They had four months of blissfully happy family life before Rachel realised something was wrong. Daniel started to get little red spots over his belly and back and occasionally it seemed like he was out of breath but when he had his well baby check up he seemed alright and the nurse told her not to worry he was fine. Another month went by and she noticed bruises on his legs that she couldn't explain. Next he got a fever that didn't seem to be going away. After a couple of days Noah and Rachel put their baby in his car seat and took him to the hospital. Tests were carried out and the doctors sat them down and uttered the words that all parents feared more than anything 'Daniel has Leukaemia'. They stayed at the hospital with him that night and just watched him sleep while they held each other and prayed to whatever God would listen to them for a miracle.

The days following the diagnosis were hard. Initially they had hope because they had requested that Daniel's cord blood be frozen but this hadn't happened due to an 'administrative error'. When they were told this Rachel had never seen Noah so angry. Not even Puck had ever gone off like this before. Once they had gotten over this news they found out that the cancer was more advanced than they thought and his chances weren't as good as hoped. This only fuelled the rage they both felt. Rage at the nurse for telling them that everything was fine; rage at the hospital for screwing up; rage at God for doing this to their baby; rage at themselves for not being able to help him.

It was the self hatred that haunted Rachel the most. The fact that she was powerless to help her child as she watched him slip away destroyed her. All of their friends and family were tested for bone marrow donation but there were no matches and they were left to the mercy of the transplant list. She even contacted Shelby for the first time since she had sent her photos of her wedding to see if either her or Beth were a match, they weren't. All the waiting with nothing happening wound them up tighter and tighter until the day Noah was arrested for assault after beating up some mouthy jerk at a Knicks game he was covering as a favour. After that it was decided he should take a leave of absence until Daniel was better. The reappearances of Puck scared Rachel out of her mind. She was already losing her son she couldn't lose her husband too.

In September, after months of chemo, Daniel finally decided enough was enough. The doctors told them that he wasn't responding to treatment and that he probably wouldn't survive the night so Rachel took him in her arms and he nestled into her, just as he had when he was a newborn, while he held his father's finger in his tiny hand. Just before midnight he looked up at his parents for a few moments, as if he was saying goodbye, closed his eyes and he was gone. They held him for a little while longer before the nurse took him then they collapsed into one another's arms, sobbing the terrible sobs of parents forced to accept the death of their child and Rachel thought she was going to die from the pain.

The funeral was the worst day of her life. Her dads made the arrangements as neither Rachel nor Noah were in a fit state to do anything. Aside from the tears that would not stop, Rachel felt empty. She couldn't even reach out to Noah for fear of provoking one of the terrible rages he had been flying into. They had both known that it was coming but the shock of losing their child left a hole in their lives that couldn't ever be filled. She had been surprised when he held her all through the service, never once letting go to wipe at the tears that were streaming down his face. Despite the terrible anger he had been displaying he was there for her that day. He was the only one able to give her any comfort and he had sacrificed his masculine pride to do it. Despite the circumstances she had never seen him show her such devotion before and she returned it in equal measure.

The following months were spent in a state of numbness. Noah went back to work and Rachel would spend her days at home trying not to cry. Occasionally she would go into the music room and play around with some melodies but she never bothered to write anything down and she would always have forgotten them by the time Noah got home. She just couldn't shake the thought that she had let this happen. She knew that something was wrong, she should have insisted on the tests earlier instead of letting the damn nurse talk her into thinking he was fine. What sort of mother would take the word of a stranger over her own instinct when it came to her child?

As this guilt took over she didn't know what to do with herself. She would wander around in a daze until suddenly something would happen and she would remember that Daniel wasn't there anymore. The first time she went out after the funeral, she heard a baby cry and started to lactate. She received letters from pre-schools they had put their names down for when they first started trying for a baby. She kept finding his clothes in the laundry. Every time she was reminded of what she had lost she hated herself a little bit more.

The day that would have been his first birthday was naturally hard for them. They went to Temple in the morning and prayed with the Rabbi and then Noah drove them up to Connecticut and they walked in the wood where he had proposed to her. They both needed a happy memory to get them through the day. It was here that he suggested she should maybe think about going to stay with her dads for a while. Perhaps getting out of New York would do her good. She knew that watching her moping must be getting tedious for him and he probably needed a break from being her only shoulder to cry on. She was a handful at the best of times and these were the worst of times. They went home that evening and Noah ordered dinner for them and booked a flight to Columbus while she packed a suitcase. They made love for the first time in months that night. He mapped her entire body with his big hands and soft lips. The thought of the care and attention he had shown her that night still gave her shivers.

As always, Noah had been right. The time away was good from her. Her dads enjoyed taking care of her and they cheered her up without trying to make her forget. They hadn't known their grandson as well as they would have liked so they were keen to hear anything Rachel was willing to tell them. She met up with old friends who were able to take her mind off things, if only for an hour or too. She also took the opportunity to head over to Dayton a few times to see Shelby and Beth. It was sometimes hard to see how much the little girl looked like Noah without wondering if Daniel would have been the image of his father too. At the same time though she began to really think of the little girl as a sister and her laughter genuinely brought joy to her heart.

She spoke to Noah every night. Her Daddy had an overseas client who he called every evening at 6.30 and then as soon as that was done Noah would call. She had asked him why he waited for the line to be free and didn't call her cell phone but he just made some caveman comment about not being able to have good phone sex with the threat of the battery running out hanging over them. He always knew just what she needed. If she was down he would have something to lift her spirits; when she was angry he would soothe her; when she was lonely he would engage in the sort of naughty talk that she had come to expect from him but still got her hot under the collar.

Once her muddled mind began to emerge from the fog a little Rachel started thinking about the future. Obviously another child was out of the question. She clearly wasn't fit to be a mother. Once she realised this the next step was to consider the position of her marriage. She loved her husband. She couldn't think of any way she could love him more and without him she probably would not have survived but could she really be so selfish as to condemn him to a life without children? The more time she spent with Beth the more she realised that any child of Noah's is guaranteed to be special. Then there were the tears in his eyes when Daniel was born that said everything. He was born to be a father and the more those images of Noah and Daniel together invaded her mind it became more obvious what she had to do. She had to go back to New York and ask for a divorce.

To the outside observer it would seem clear this it was this moment that had led her to being here today but Rachel wasn't so sure. Noah's stubbornness and loyalty made sure that she was not going to get what she wanted easily.

She had intended to sit down and talk about it the day she returned to New York but after he greeted her at the airport her with flowers and whisked her off to the Four Seasons for a romantic/dirty night together, she just didn't have the heart to bring it up. Over the next few months she would spend whole days building up the courage to talk to him only to lose it when he would come home with gifts or announce he was taking her out. It soon became clear that she was too much of a coward - another reason why she was no longer right for him – to do it the honest way. This failure made her realise that the only way she could do this would be to push him so that he no longer wanted her.

She started by closing herself off from him. She would spend all of her time in the music room or at the studio where she was producing an album for her college roommate. She would even sleep there some nights. When she did sleep in their bed she would always come up with a reason why they shouldn't have sex. When her musical was picked up for a Broadway run she negotiated a part for herself so that she had rehearsals to add to her reasons for not being at home. Next she persuaded him to go back to the sports desk so that he would have to start travelling again. The separations didn't seem to bother him too much though and he even suggested that maybe the time was right to try for another baby. He looked so hopeful that she didn't have the heart to tell him what she had decided so she told him that she would stop taking her birth control pills while at the same time secretly refilling her prescription. It was clear that more drastic action was needed.

She started to 'forget' important days like their anniversary and his birthday. She spent Yom Kippur on a day long bender with a record producer who wanted to her to write songs for the label even though she knew he was cooking dinner for them after sundown. They went to a benefit hosted by the Times editor and she slept through the speeches, flirted outrageously with a teenage waiter and left while the awards were being given out so that she could meet with some of the session musicians from the studio. When she stumbled into the house at 3am completely hammered she had expected him to lay into her. Instead he handed her a bottle of water, kissed her forehead and told her not to stay up too late. The following morning there was another bottle of water and 2 Advil on the nightstand with a note telling her to get some rest. When nothing seemed to making him mad she set him up on a date with a beautiful young book editor she had met at a party. He thought they were meeting to discuss the possibility of publishing the book he had written but Rachel made sure that they met alone and in a romantic setting. However, even with opportunity and encouragement, nothing happened. He came home one day, told her that the publishers weren't interested in the book and he would try again at a better time. At this point Rachel knew she had only one card left to play.

It wasn't hard to get the male star of her show naked on their couch at the exact time she expected Noah home. What was hard was listening to him forgive her yet again. It had been the last straw; she couldn't play these games anymore. When he asked if she had used a condom because she wasn't on the pill anymore she flipped. She told him all about her secret birth control and the fact that she never had any intention of getting pregnant again and then she demanded a divorce. The strangest thing was that he agreed. It seemed he could handle her craziness and determination to hurt him; it was the lies that were the step too far. He moved out of the house that night and he had been living in an apartment on the Upper East Side ever since.

She had thought that being out of his life would be a relief. That she would no longer feel guilty about dragging him down with all of her crazy. The truth was though she didn't. All she could think of was the pain she had already put him through. It was only made worse when Quinn of all people turned up on her doorstep and almost forcibly removed her from the house to take her to her cottage on Martha's Vineyard. She had gone through a divorce herself the year before and had a rough idea of what Rachel was going through but she pulled no punches when she told her that Noah was worried sick about her. After a week of talking and soul searching she agreed to go to a therapist, if only to ease Noah's concern. When Shelby called and announced that she and Beth were going to move to New York at the end of the school year she saw Noah's hand in it straight away and she knew that the only way to make him let her go and live his life was to ensure that this divorce happened, the sooner the better.

Back in the present Rachel looked over her shoulder through the open door to the bedroom where she could clearly see the naked form of Noah Puckerman asleep in the rumpled sheets of her bed. He had come over the night before to give her the divorce papers to sign. One thing had led to another and here she was wearing his shirt, about to end her marriage with a flick of her pen and wondering how the hell she had got here. It bothered her that she couldn't come up with some definite answer. There was nothing about their life together that had made this moment unavoidable. Only her own inadequacies as a wife and mother.

She took one last look at her husband, picked up her pen and with a few strokes of ink she was no longer Mrs Puckerman. Suddenly how this had happened no longer mattered, the past was no longer important. All she could think of was, without Noah, who was going to dry the tears that fell onto the desk now?