"Time heals everything: Tuesday. Thursday. Time heals everything: April. August. If I'm patient the break will mend, and one fine morning the hurt will end." Mack & Mabel

.***.

Thanksgiving 2010

There are a couple of important things that happened that frigid Thanksgiving that changed things, that made everyone think that, maybe, just maybe, things weren't as bad as they seemed. They could move on. That maybe, just maybe, time could heal everything.

For one, Puck made a pact with the jocks, which made Kurt's and, especially, Eric's lives so much easier from then on. This was after Puck saw Eric's hand, after he heard the story of how it had happened to the boy – six on one, seven on one, and the kid wasn't even an athlete. He didn't even have a chance.

There had been a week where Puck's only steady companion was Eric, when he'd wake up in the dark of the night, pillow over his mouth to muffle his screams, and hear the kid's high, soothing voice from across the hospital room. So, yeah, this was his business. Or at least he made it his business when he barged into Joe's, the dive restaurant that the jocks hung around, and confronted Karofsky and Azimo and all the others.

"You think it's okay to jump a kid walking by himself?" Puck snarled, grabbing Karofsky's collar and pulling him up until they were both standing. "You think it's okay to carve words into his body?"

"What are you on, Puckerman?" Karofsky yelled, jerking out of Puck's grip. "Those fags killed Mike Chang and your singing teacher and that hot cheerleader chick. Don't you think they deserve it?"

Puck was floored by this. He'd expected a fight, had come for a fight, but this lie, slipping so easily from this guy's mouth anyone else might have mistaken it for truth, made him angrier than ever.

"I was there, Karofsky!" He shoved the other boy, but only so he could see past him to the table of spectators, "All of you! I was there – it wasn't Eric who killed anyone, or Kurt. It's not the fucking homosexuals who are shooting up schools. They were the victims! They were both shot! You guys – all of you – not hurt at all. No wounds, no stitches, no broken bones."

Two boys had the decency to look at the table, but Puck was undeterred by this small act of shame. "I got shot-" he lifted his shirt enough so that the place the bullet was, still red and angry, was exposed, and more looked away, "Stopping the guys who actually shot up the school and killed your friends." The football team had lost Jackson, a huge linebacker with a personality and heart as big as his body.

"I'm sorry that anyone had to die, and so's Eric. Sawyer, I'm sorry about your brother." The lanky Senior running back looked down at his hands, probably thinking about the younger Sawyer that used to hang on his every word, used to want to be just like him until a ricocheting bullet tore up the kid's insides. "But can't you see that it's not Eric's fault?"

"What do you want from us, Puckerman?" Azimo didn't sound angry, he just sounded sad, and Puck remembered that the big black guy had taken a liking to little Sawyer, had been showing him the ropes out on the football field the day before the shooting.

"Just leave them alone. Don't jump Eric in the parking lot. Don't shove Kurt into the fucking supply closet. Just…stop."

"Or what?" Karofsky sneered.

"Or I'll kick your ass."

All of the jocks looked over at Sawyer, who's huge hands were curled into fists. He was glaring at Karofsky, "Lay off the fags, or I can show you exactly what a bullet in the side would feel like."

And that seemed like the appropriate place for Puck to make his exit.

.***.

Dean was pretending to study when Sam came back from his first appointment with a shrink. He let his younger brother make a sandwich for himself and sit down at the table before laying into him. "How was it?"

"Why are we doing this, Dean?" The words were quiet, tired, "Can you even afford therapy?"

Not on his meager salary as an intern. "The school's paying for it." If they hadn't…well, Dean needed food a lot less than Sam needed to stay alive. "Look, I just…I don't know what else to do, Sammy. Do you think this might…help?"

"Do I think we'll be jumping off bridges any time soon?" There was a note of desperation in Sam's voice now, as the kid valiantly tried to cling to the edges of sanity. "Nah, bro. Maybe this will help. I just need to…I need to talk it out, you know? About mom and dad, and Quinn, and the shooting." He gestured at his arm. The cast wasn't coming off until Christmas.

Dean felt hurt for half a second – after all, he was supposed to be the one fixing Sam, not some stranger with a degree to shrink his brain – but shrugged it off. Anything to keep the kid breathing. "On a different subject, then…"

Sam immediately brightened at the prospect of a different subject.

"Tomorrow's turkey day, dude. I don't have to work the whole afternoon."

"We can't play football."

"No, not with your hand like that."

"You can't cook worth a damn."

"Thanks for pointing that out."

Sam suddenly smiled, and the sight was a welcoming one for his harried big brother. "Sounds like a perfect day to me."

.***.

Eric rolled out of bed and crawled over Kurt's still-sleeping body to glance at the alarm clock. 6:20. Damn, why was he up so early?

As quietly as he could, he pulled on a pair of loose shorts and a T-shirt and made his way towards the kitchen, thinking about a glass of water before a run, and then maybe another hour of sleep. He was still rubbing his eyes when he walked in on the biggest array of food he'd ever seen in his life.

"Wow." He said, stunned by the sheer enormity of the spread laid out before him.

"What, you never seen Thanksgiving before?" Eric could have kicked himself when Burt looked at him over the stuffing. Thanksgiving. The whole reason why he wasn't in school already.

He tried to play it cool, like he hadn't forgotten about the holiday at all. "Just not enough of it to feed a third world country…for about a decade." He let out a low whistle, mindful of the still-slumbering household.

"Well, we got three teenage boys in this house, and even though Kurt eats…well, about nothing...both you and Finn seem to be hell-bent eating us out of house and home."

Eric felt his face get hot, and he started to apologize when Burt saw his face and cut him off. "Don't even start with that. I like having an audience that appreciates my cuisine. Kurt keeps telling me to go healthy, but who doesn't love fried stuff? You'd never make any friends if you serve people grass and rabbit food."

"I totally agree. Is that deep fryer for the turkey?" Eric leaned against the counter, smirking, and didn't even attempt to get out of the way of the gentle swat Kurt's father aimed at him. And maybe he actually was healing, like the doctors had promised, because his bruises didn't scream out in pain at the contact.

Burt continued to add whatever mystery ingredients he was adding to the stuffing while Eric pulled out some lettuce, carrots, cucumbers, onions, because if there wasn't a salad on the table Kurt might just lose whatever cool he'd managed to gather up for himself in the past month.

"So, no calls from your family about the holidays?" Burt's tone was too casual for it to be true, and Eric recognized this questions as one the older Hummel had been waiting to ask for a while now.

"No." Eric thought about Joshua barging in, about his nose that was still sore and the eyes that were still dark with bruises, and wasn't sorry for the lack of communication. Still, he often wondered how long he could encroach on the Hummel's charity before it was clear he had to hit the road.

"Well, I can't say that's any great loss." Eric looked up and Burt plowed forward, "I know they're you're blood, but I wouldn't feel comfortable with you going back to an environment with that much hate. It's not right what your mother and that church are saying about you gays."

Eric smiled thinly, "Thanks for saying that, Mr. Hummel. Sometimes I think me and Kurt forget that those people are just the minority. A really, really loud minority."

"Yeah, most of us just don't care." Finn said, coming up behind Eric, intent on getting to the fridge and food. "Or, at least, we've worked on not caring."

"At least you try." Burt admitted, and then turned to Eric. "Look, you and Kurt both have this year and next left in high school, right? That's not so long. And the house is pretty big. One more person more or less should fit in just fine."

A slow smile was spreading over Eric's before Burt even finished. "You mean I can stay?"

"Well, Carol and I will expect you to follow the same rules as the boys – no partying, no going out with girls – or boys, as the case may be – unless they're planning on having a civilized dinner once in a while. I suppose I can't stop you from dating my son, but keep it PG under my roof, alright?"

"Mr. Hummel, this is so…you have no idea how much this means to me." He must have looked a sorry picture, a mostly-grown boy with bruises across his face on the verge of tears in a sunny kitchen on Thanksgiving morning, and Finn wrapped an arm around his neck for just that reason.

"You know football, right?"

"Sure, I've seen all of your games, Finn."

Finn winced, "Right, band, I keep forgetting." Weird, that both the band's and Glee's directors had been taken out in the bullets that destroyed the school. "Well, me and Puck kind of have this tradition…"

"Don't tell me you guys have a turkey bowl!" Burt sounded so happy that both Finn and Eric turned to gape at him.

"No way have you ever gotten Kurt out on a football field." Eric said, eyebrows raising into his hairline at the thought.

"Hey, I'm a good kicker." Kurt protested, walking in before his hair had its usual product-induced shine. "You guys want to get a game going this afternoon?"

Finn almost fell to the ground from the shock of Kurt proposing a football game. Kurt, who'd been known to launch into long diatribes about the dangers of the sport as soon as Finn reached for the remote for Monday Night Football. He said the only logical thing he could think of. "Can you play in a cast?"

Kurt rolled his eyes and raised his cast-encased arm. "Are you kidding? This is my get-out-of-jail-free card. I'll play cheerleader. Or score-keeper."

Eric smiled, and, impulsively, leaned across the counter and planted a kiss on Kurt's cheek. "Your dad just invited me to stay here until we graduate." He said, unable to contain his joy. He tempered in down a little when he thought of something else. "As long as you want me to."

"Of course I do!" Kurt turned his head and kissed Eric full on the mouth (over the too-loud beating of his heart, Eric heard Burt say, quite loudly, that he was putting the two of them in separate rooms.) "You're so important to me. You saved my life, and I could never have gotten through this past month without you."

"Right back at you, babe."

.***.

That afternoon, in between stuffing themselves with turkey and lounging around over desserts and coffee, they all played football.

Kurt, true to this word, was scorekeeper. Eric, still bandaged, was going against Puck, also still bandaged (the good thing about having invalids on the team was that two-hand-touch never became more than two-hand-touch.) Sam showed up, and Finn went over to him and figured out in a quick look what Dean still wouldn't bring himself to believe – Sam wasn't a hundred percent, and maybe would never be the same boy he'd been before that day in October, but he was not suicidal. Sam ended up on Eric's team, and they used the blond's brother as quarterback.

And then there were the girls. Santana, showing up with Rachel near the end of what they'd dubbed the first quarter. Santana joined Finn's team and turned out to be a beast on the field. Rachel wandered over to Kurt.

"I'm transferring from McKinley next week." She said, looking straight ahead, not really seeing the field. Kurt turned, though; turned so fast his neck hurt from the motion.

"What? Why?"

"The only reason to stay was the Glee club, and without Mr. Schuester…well, it's falling apart, Kurt, you have to admit that. And the classes are not what they used to be, not that they were top notch before, and the kids…you got hurt, you don't know what it's like for those of us who didn't." She saw his murderous expression and winced. "Okay, so that's not the smartest thing to say, but you get my point, you know it's true."

"So you're running away just like Quinn." Kurt said flatly. He didn't know why the departure of one of the biggest bitches in the school, and his own personal pain in the ass, should affect him like this, but he was mad as hell.

"No! Kurt, you don't get it. You have Eric, and Finn. There's nothing keeping me here, and there's so much more out there, and I have to get over the shooting. I can't do that in Lima. Everything froze in October, and it hasn't even begun to thaw yet."

She touched his shoulder, the one that wasn't injured, and smiled slightly. "Did you hear about Puck and the jocks? Apparently, he made a deal with them. They're going to stop harassing you and Eric."

"Really?" Kurt brightened at that, sneaking a glance at Puck, who had just caught a perfectly thrown ball from Finn and was dancing in the end zone. "That's…kind."

"Maybe things will work out for all of us." Rachel said, and Kurt found in that instant that he could believe her. Things were changing, everyone was moving on, or forward, or away, and as Kurt looked out over the football field filled with the walking wounded, he began to believe what all those shrinks and professors and media people had been saying for the past month. Years from now, the memory of what had happened to students and teachers and innocents in October of his Junior year may still sting, smart, but it wouldn't bleed like an open wound. He was figuring out, on that beautiful Thanksgiving morning with the world laid out open and ready before him, that time heals everything.

.***.

Excerpt from TIME magazine, Thanksgiving issue 2010

LIMA – Everyone knows the story of the town that was rocked by a devastating school shooting this past October, but fewer know of the strides they are making to overcome the hatred and devastation.

"People underestimate kids." Officer Kelvin of the Lima Police Force said. "These guys are bouncing back. The school is up and running, sports are going strong. Do I think they're healing? Sure. I think we're all beginning to heal."

Emma Pillsbury, the guidance councilor, offers a difference perspective. "I was very close to one of the teachers killed in the shooting. A lot of these kids lost friends, or siblings, or teammates. We're all dealing with it together. The kids have a sign-up sheet so they can carpool to physical therapy. Signing casts has become an art. There's still life at this school, no matter how much a couple of kids tried to snuff it out."

It's just a few small steps in the right direction, and Lima will never forget the two dozen people killed on October 7th, but rest assured this community is coming together, hoping together, and they are moving towards a future with the same goal as every other town in America – to be better than they were in the past.

.

The End

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There are some people in this world who can't get over hate, who don't understand that on the fundemental level, the spiritual level, the biological level, we are all made of the same stuff, we all have the same shit to deal with. And then there are those people who go out of their way to make things better for others (like Puck in this story, like Burt Hummel). There's a couple major decisions everyone has to make in their life, and this is one of the most important ones: spread the hate or spread the love?

What will you do to change the future?

peace,
us