Thursday, February 14, 2013.
9:06am.

For Ale.
Love.

1
The Echoes

Once upon a time, there was a squirrel. Amidst a hostile world of pain, this squirrel lived in a town where differences would one day flow through each other, harmonizing into a beautiful song that would bind people together.

The squirrel itself possessed no such beauty. Honestly, it was an ugly, terrifying little creature that took pride in its bald patches and scraggly, rabies-infested tail. Shunned by the squirrel population, it was most often found alone. However, one spring day, its madness finally drove it to incinerate the Laws of Squirreldom. It pattered across the sidewalk and clambered up the leg of a park bench to sit a foot away from a little girl in a cream dress with a purple sash around her waist.

The stare-down that ensued (fearful on the little girl's part and menacing on the squirrel's) ended when the filthy little bastard vaulted onto her head and began gnawing on her white carnation hair clip. The unholy scream that rang out had her two fathers sprinting full-tilt, but they were still too far to help. However, they were close enough to see it all unfold. A branch whipped out and whacked the animal off the bench in an explosion of leaves. It scampered off, carnation hair clip locked between its decayed, misaligned teeth.

The little girl tore her eyes away from the escaping squirrel to turn back and follow the length of the branch until she reached the arm of a little boy with big, bright hazel eyes and a Mohawk. Usually, she would've balked at his attire, his stance, his weapon, the general air of violence. He was more of a pint-sized, heroic Navajo in Osh-Kosh than a knight in gleaming armor.

Regardless.

Her little heart was doing the bunny-hop.

"Honey! Honey, are you okay?!" her dad screeched, stumbling to a stop on his knees in front of his daughter. He smoothed her hair and frantically checked for scratches.

"What happened?!" her daddy demanded worriedly, pushing his husband away and hauling the little girl into his arms.

"I-I-It was a squirrel," the little girl explained, squirming in his grip. "I'm okay, though, Daddy. Please let me down."

Her daddy frowned, but when he spotted the little boy still wielding the branch like a baseball bat, he stifled a smile and let her down.

"You okay?" the little boy asked, lowering the branch and tossing it over his shoulder.

The little girl, now back on solid ground, approached her savior and nodded. "Yes. Thank you for helping me."

"I hate squirrels," he said by means of an explanation.

"I liked them," she said, "up until today. I'm Rachel."

He held out his hand, and she glanced down, smiled, and slipped her hand into his. He squeezed. "I'm Puck."

"Puck," she groaned, long and deep, as he tongued her earlobe and hoisted her up. Once secured against his chest, legs locked around his waist, he walked them to his couch and collapsed onto it. She giggled and scraped her nails through his closely-shaved hair, straddling his lap as she sucked on his lower lip and worked on peeling off his leather jacket.

"Mmm, baby," she hummed against his lips.

Puck leaned forward so she could pull the jacket off, but when he pulled one arm out, she elbowed something on his side table. The smash slapped him out of the haze long enough for Nana Connie's face to register through the broken shards of the picture frame.

"Whoops," Allie said, completely unapologetic. She smiled in mock-guilt and leaned forward to nip his jaw. "We'll find Grandma a new frame later."

Puck grinned, and pushed the face of his grandmother out of his mind as he twisted his head to kiss Allie's lips again. No one should ever be thinking of their grandmother at a time like that. He palmed her thighs and slid his hands upward to grip the hem of her red sequined dress.

"Off, off, off," she panted. "Take it off."

He was more than happy to comply. Slipping the dress up from her hips and then higher, the flash of the sequins in the dim light of his apartment made something twinge in the back of his mind.

Cool metal wire in his hands, his foggy breath clouding in front of his nose. He looked down at his own spare football helmet and the big caramel-brown eyes that stared up at him with this wild, manic glint he'd come to associate with Broadway and solos.

He swallowed the small pinprick of worry about finding her teensy little body mangled by some thousand-pound linebacker and asked, "Are you ready?"

Eyes flashing, she reached in through her face mask, yanked out the mouth guard, balled up her fists, and shook them in excitement. "Let's kick some ass!"

He watched her ass sway in the night air as she bent down into formation, one leg extended to the side like she was lunging. Crazy girl dates the goddamn quarterback for how many months and she can't even crouch right?

He rolled his eyes and got into position, keeping a close eye on all the girls. God knew they were all at risk of playing hero and bolting with the rest of the guys—Rachel most of all. Chick may not be a football player, but if she had an opportunity to shine, there'd be no doubt in his mind that she'd take it. Even Lauren had a sixty-percent chance of bolting 'cause she'd rely on her wrestler skills and her…intimidating demeanor.

So when it was Tina who sprinted off with the fumbled ball, Puck was temporarily frozen on the field because what in the hell? He took off after her, but before he could really pick up speed, he passed by Rachel, gently pushed her down on the ground where she'd dropped, and said, "Stay."

When Mike made sure Tina was alive and kicking, Puck glanced back to see Rachel was still flat on the ground. He jogged over and helped her up, ignoring the way she brushed herself off like a princess.

"Is Tina okay?" she asked, peering over his shoulder.

"She's fine," Puck answered, glancing back over his shoulder and watching Mike help up his girlfriend. "Really shook up, but she's good. But this is it, woman. No more."

"What?!"

"All of you—no, just no. Especially you. Our nerves can't take the stress of worrying about you guys getting squished, okay?" Puck insisted. "Go sit on the bench. We can…we can take it from here."

Rachel nodded and took a few deep breaths. "Okay."

And then it kinda hit him. While he was just, uh, slightly nervous about her being in the game, this chick was actually scared shitless. She was the one against playing such painful and violent contact sports, and she up and fucking volunteered for it.

So he pushed her in the direction of the benches, gesturing for Lauren to follow. If that feeble little pacifist could walk onto this field in spite of the fucking creepers and big-ass fuckwits standing out here, then his pansy-ass teammates could ball up and sing one goddamn song.

"Puck! Puck, hey!"

Puck blinked and focused back on Allie, who was still on his lap and shaking his shoulders. But "focus" was kind of a loose term since everything was swaying and his dinner was T-minus five seconds from blast off. Not even her boobs could settle him. His stomach lurched and he nearly lost it right there.

"Are you okay?" she asked, sounding more irritated than worried.

"No, no, sorry," Puck said, trying to hold it together and patting her hip. "I feel kind of nauseous."

"What?"

"I. Need. To. Throw. Up," Puck enunciated. He pushed her off his lap and booked it to the bathroom.

"Was it the dinner?" she called.

Puck slammed the bathroom door and braced himself over the toilet, but the swishing of his insides stopped as soon as the door shut. He clamped his eyes shut and took exactly nine deep breaths—in and out, in and out. (This was definitely not the in-and-out process he thought he'd be doing earlier.)

"Puck?" Knock, knock, knock. "Baby, you okay in there?"

He blinked and saw stars for a few seconds before hunching over and forcing the toilet to host his reunion with the fajitas he had for dinner.

"Oh, ew," he heard Allie mutter. And then: "Um, I think I'd better just head out, okay? I don't want to, uh, be here if I do wind up having the same bug. I wanna throw up in the privacy of my own…bathroom, you know?"

He didn't respond; he just retched some more.

She made a little gagging noise. "Okay, bye."

It took a minute for her to get her stuff together, but soon enough, his front door was slamming shut and the nausea was abating. He rinsed his mouth, brushed his teeth, and gargled Listerine 'cause he absolutely fucking hated the taste of vomit. Hated doing it, hated tasting it, hated smelling it, hated seeing it in real life. It was gross.

He slowly walked out of the bathroom and made his way back onto his couch. He sat down—nope. He lay down, closing his eyes and letting the smooth leather cool his face. The position, though, had him at the perfect angle to see the broken glass of Nana Connie's picture frame again.

He groaned and reached over, brushing the shards aside and picking up the worn photo. There she was, wearing a ginormous straw hat that he had decorated with a bunch of huge-ass, fake-ass, dumb-ass flowers in some kindergarten arts 'n crafts class a long time ago. She was gardening, of course. She hated gardening, but she loved her herbs, so she sucked it up and sweated and weeded out in her yard. Oftentimes, he'd be forced to help her, and for five minutes, he'd bitch about it, but eventually he'd get into it just 'cause he was doing it with Nana. That was usually when her grins came out—those smug, mischievous little grins that his ma said he inherited straight from her. That was what was on the picture—that trademark grin.

And then he nearly slapped himself out of sheer embarrassment.

From the day a little boy in a green dinosaur shirt and jeans saved a little girl with a purple sash around her cream dress from a psychotic squirrel, all Constance "Connie" Puckerman could see were little great-grandbabies with curly dark hair and laughter in their warm brown eyes, singing songs from The Sound of Music and Hello, Dolly! in her living room. Apart from that first incident, however, Puck and Rachel weren't on the same wavelength, let alone Nana Connie's.

He got chocolate on her dress and she nearly tore his ear off.

But Nana Connie was relentless. She organized play dates (emphasis on the "date"), gave Puck guitar and piano lessons (so they could practice making sweet music with each other), bought Rachel those Cabbage Patch babies (so she could "practice"), and was the unofficial manager for the Rachel and Puck duo—scheduling performances at every Jewish gathering. From that fateful first day at temple to the cold February day in Puck's sophomore year of college when the spry old lady finally fell asleep and never woke up again, Connie Puckerman was dead-set on having Rachel become part of the family.

Which was why it made sense that Puck would suddenly zone out and think of Rachel Berry, of all people, as he was with another girl. Frickin' Nana Connie—guilt-tripping him even from the grave.

"Puck?"

"Yeah?"

"What are you gonna do about hi—?"

Puck rolled his eyes and turned back to the ledger he'd been using to track his lessons before he'd gotten distracted thinking about Rachel fucking Berry for the eightieth time in the three days since that bizarre…episode. "Don't look at him."

"But he's been—"

"Ignore him."

"I think he's cry—"

"He's faking it. Either pinched or poked himself in the eye or something. Ignore him."

"But he's been there for, like, the last fiftee—"

Puck looked up from his ledger and leveled Jo with a dark look. "Ignore him."

The blonde twelve-year old's mouth immediately snapped shut, and she went back to packing her guitar and sheet music.

"S'gonna take a lot of Windex to get those smears off the glass, by the way," Jo pointed out matter-of-factly.

Puck snorted. "Well, good thing it's all on his side of the door then, huh?"

"He reminds me of a puppy when he looks like that," Jo mused, zipping up her bag.

"Except puppy dogs don't generally have salmon lips."

"Salmon don't have really great abs either."

Puck's head snapped up. "Missy, you get your butt outta here now. You got no business checking out a guy that's actually twice your age. Go on. Your dad just pulled up."

Jo huffed and rolled her eyes before slinging her bag over her shoulder and grabbing her guitar case. "Fine. You're just getting rid of me so you can make out with him after I leave."

Puck's glare darkened, and he chucked his pen at her, clipping her ear and cutting off her giggles. "Out! 'Fore I tell your daddy how you're really getting the hang of that Robin Thicke song you wanted to practice and exactly who you're practicing it for!"

Her chin rose defiantly. "Dean is a good guy. I have nothing to be ashamed of."

"He's eight years older than you!"

"Love knows no bounds," she countered, nose in the air.

"Your dad's rage will know no bounds," Puck shot back. "Out, Jo, before I crack your guitar on your ass!"

Jo blanched. "I'm going!" She darted out the door, the bell jingling above her.

"Come on, Puck!" came the muffled plea through the door—the only weakness in the otherwise soundproof wall Puck insisted on installing as soon as Sam Evans decided it'd be a fun idea to open up his own café/comic book store right next to him. "I'm hungry, dude, let's go!"

Puck locked the door behind Jo, waving goodbye through the glass with the fakest smile he'd put on all day. He flipped the "open" sign and then turned and flipped the bird at Sam. "There is a fucking café behind you, Evans! Go eat your own damn food!"

"I don't have real food here, man! It's just little club sandwiches that won't make it past my throat!"

"Not my problem. You're the one ordering the food."

"Open the door, Puck," Sam whined.

Sometimes—sometimes—Puck wished Sam hadn't quite gotten over that whole body dysmorphic disorder. Puck had a kickass metabolism, but it couldn't keep up with Sam's. "Calm your shit, Trouty Mouth," Puck grumbled. "I'm almost done."

"Can't you just open the door?! I've been standing here for, like, half an hour!"

"Then go sit down in one of the tables and chairs behind you, dumbass!"

"No! 'Cause if I sit down, people will see me through the windows. I've already closed for the night, but you know how some of my more… zealous customers are gonna insist on being let in if they see me here. Then I'll never get home!"

Puck stowed his ledger and locked the drawers and register before shrugging on his jacket and grabbing his keys. He slowly walked over to the connecting door, glaring at Sam the whole time. He had his hand over the handle and was just about to pull it open when—

Puck shouldered past the closing auditorium doors. "Hey," he said, reaching out to grab her arm. "Wait."

"What do you want, Noah?" she said through a frustrated sigh, turning around to face him. "Are you going to chew me out like everyone else? Thank you for sticking up for me—I know it must've taken a lot out of you to merely say you kinda liked me. But now—oh, now you have to supplement it with some sort of insult to make sure my head doesn't swell too much! What are you going to say? I shouldn't have done this? I shouldn't have kissed you to get back at Finn for not telling me about Santana? For lying to me? For forgiving Quinn the egregious transgressions she did against him but breaking my heart when I actually confessed and didn't sin as horribly? I shouldn't have gone ahead and confessed what I did? I shouldn't be picking fights with—"

"Rachel, Jesus Christ, shut up, I'm not gonna tell you that," Puck snapped, finally cutting her off and grabbing her shoulders and shaking her a little.

"Then what?!" she cried, the corners of her lips turning down no matter how hard she tried to stop it from happening. "I-I-I should be happy that we won regardless of whatever drama I caused? I should—"

"You should shut up," Puck said flatly, pulling a small packet of tissues he'd filched from the dressing room and handing it to her. "I was going to ask if you were okay—don't flip your shit on me now, Berry."

She took the tissues but didn't look like she was about to use it. "Well, obviously, I'm not okay, Puckerman. That's why I'm leaving early. I don't want victory doughnuts or drinks or whatever—I just…I just want to go home."

"Then… Then I'll take you home," he said. "I took my truck 'cause I had to drop my ma off. 'S why I didn't take the bus with you guys."

She frowned and glanced back at the doors. "W-What about Lauren?"

"Lauren's living it up in there—first show choir victory and all. She'll be fine without me," he said. He tucked her arm in the crook of his elbow and led her out of the building. "Come on. Let's go home."

"Why are you doing this?" she asked, her grip on his arm tightening as her voice got thicker.

"'Cause you know I hate seeing you cry," he answered. "So please, for the love of God, don't. You waste enough tears on them—on us. We're not worth it."

"Whoa, dude, you okay?"

Jesus, these little zone-outs were getting more vivid. Puck blinked and shook his head of the weird-ghost-sensation of her hand on his arm. What was actually on his arm wasn't any better. He brushed off Sam's hands from his shoulders and pushed the blonde away. "Personal space, Evans. We talked about this before."

But not even a second later, the hands were back on his shoulders. "Potentially life-threatening situations throw that kind of agreement out the window. You just, like, froze, dude. Like you were having a stroke or something. You went pale and looked like you were about to keel over on the spot."

Puck scowled, slapping Sam's hands off again. "It's 'cause of your cologne, jackass," he said, deflecting.

"Why? You swooning?"

"I'm dying 'cause your noxious stench is killing all my brain cells."

"Is this your way of asking me to give you the kiss of life?"

"This is my way of telling you that you smell like a douchebag."

"You would know, right? It's the smell you lived with for a good portion of your life."

"'Cause I had the reputation to supplement it. You just smell like a poser."

"I think it's one of those situations where talking the talk is a whole lot better than walking the walk."

"That's the thing though. You still can't talk the talk either 'cause those rancid fumes of yours would offend the actual douchebags."

"That's why you're so defensive?"

"That's why I'm about to keel over—I ain't going down without a fight, especially if it's against your goddamn cologne, Evans."

"People die for love, I totally get it. You don't have to fight it."

"I see it now, Trouty. Gotta get rid of that fish smell. It's cool. I totally understand."

"I hate you."

"This is what you get for forcing me to come with you. As if we don't spend enough time near each other these days. Shit."

Two days later, they were supposed to be going out to a club or something—guy's night out, 'cause Sam kept nagging him that he was overworked. So White Chocolate brought someone else into the mix to keep things interesting. At first, Puck thought it was gonna be a chick, and Sam was gonna get him smashed as all fuck to have a threesome. If it was with two girls, yes, Puck would gladly volunteer, but if it was with another guy and a girl, just no.

So when it was Mike Chang who pulled up to the curb, Puck punched Sam in the shoulder.

"Ain't no way I am having a threesome with you two!"

"We're not having a threesome!" Sam cried.

"What?! A threesome?! Evans, I don't know what you've been smoking, but that is not happening!" Mike roared. "Even if you two had sex change operations and turned out to be the hottest chicks on the face of the earth—no!"

Puck paused. "Well…now I'm offended."

"Now that I think about it, me too," Sam agreed, crossing his arms over his chest. "You didn't have to take it that far."

"I'll take it as far as I want considering this is my car you two wanna use," Mike said.

Puck pointed at Sam. "He started it." Then he hopped into the Camaro and completely checked out of any conversation from thereon. It wasn't until they were probably halfway to wherever it was they were going that Puck's lack of sleep caught up with him. He slumped deeper into the seat and sighed.

"I mean, look at him! Saying he looks like death warmed over is saying Finn is just a little bit slow!"

"That's mean, dude."

"Finn was the one who called Brit stupid but cheated off her test—you're the one who told me that, remember?"

"No, that's mean to Death. You're gonna build up some bad juju with the ol' Pale Horseman."

"I thought you were Buddhist."

"Racist!"

"That's not racist! I saw one of those Buddha statues at your parents' house last time we visited!"

"My grandmother has a figurine of a cat—does that mean she worships glittery porcelain cats too?"

"The Egyptians did!"

"The Egyptians had a complex religion. Cats weren't the central idea!"

"They had some complex burial rituals too. Priests would recite spells to reanimate the mummy so the poor guy could breathe and talk in the afterlife."

"You're supposed to be the anthropology nerd—that was symbolic, Sam!"

"Still applicable to Puck!"

Mike Chang glanced at the man in question, hunched in the shotgun seat with a pounding headache. "Did you hear that? You look like a reanimated corpse."

"Practically a zombie, dude," Sam added, his head poking out from between the two front seats.

Trouty Mouth's lips were directly in line with Puck's elbow, but Puck just didn't have the energy anymore. It'd been a week since that first godforsaken flashback/hallucination/episode/symptom-of-his-yet-to-be-diagnosed-brain-tumor, and he was just stressed the fuck out. He thought it was him zoning out and just remembering a really vivid memory, but at this point, he was sure he was going into a full-scale psychotic breakdown.

The prospect of having another episode was hanging over his head all the damn time, and he wound up wondering if any sort of innocuous object had some sort of association with Rachel Berry. Because if a fucking red dress and a doorknob could have him temporarily blacking out of reality, he may as well go ahead and lock himself in a padded room.

Hell, if he did that, he might wind up with a flashback about pillows. And the Lord God knew there were a lot of memories of Rachel Berry he could associate with pillows.

"Seriously, Puck," Mike said, signaling to merge into the left lane. "What's up?"

"Well, him, for one thing," Sam pointed out. "I saw his list of things to do the other day when I was using his computer—guy's been staying up to unholy hours, clearing through the repairs and orders."

"That's obvious enough. His raccoon eyes are worse than Santana's whenever she forgot to take her eye makeup off at night," Mike reminded them with a small shudder. "What's going on with you, Puckerman? I haven't seen you like this since you made that little girl cry back when you were working the Chinese Thea—"

"SHUT UP, CHANG!" Puck growled.

"FINALLY!" Mike and Sam chorused.

"What's crawled up your nose and squatted in your skull?" Sam sighed, patting Puck's head. "You've been out of it for the past couple of days; it's getting kinda scary, dude."

Puck scrubbed his hands up and down his face. "Just having some issues—nothing to worry about."

"Horseshit."

"Chang!" Sam shrieked, ever the good Christian boy (who once moonlighted as a stripper…). "What would your mother say?!"

"If she heard that and saw Puck? The exact same thing—only in Cantonese."

Puck sighed. How the hell was he supposed to get out of this one without looking like he needed therapy or a CAT scan? "Look, I'm just…not having a good week, okay?"

Something seemed to dawn on his friends' faces because Sam leaned back, subdued, and Mike nodded understandingly, his anxious grip on the steering wheel relaxing.

"Oh, yeah," Mike said sadly. "It's March."

And then Puck nearly punched the car window. THAT EXPLAINED IT. Okay, now it all made fucking sense. It was March. Three day's time would mean the seventh anniversary of Nana Connie's death. But he kept his mouth shut and didn't tell his friends about the correlation between March 22nd and his random memory attacks of Rachel. No CAT scans, remember? Regardless of how believable it was that his grandma was haunting him for not getting into Rachel Berry's pants.

So the three of them lapsed into a sad silence, Mike and Sam having been on the receiving end of many of Nana Connie's lectures, meals, and hugs. The silence was too much space for the sad memories to fill, so Mike did what any normal dude would do when confronted with a quiet like that: he turned on the radio.

Puck respected his friend; he really did. Mike was a kickass dancer on top of being second in their graduating class. There were some things that neither of them mentioned in casual conversation 'cause they respected each other too much (Chinese Theater for Puck, L'Oreal for Sam, and Cheerios for Mike), and then there were the things that had to be commented on. And he was just about to say something about Mike' s hillbilly Asian tendencies and the fact that the radio was already programmed to the country station when he heard the very first chord of a painfully familiar song. He went rigid.

"No."

"For crying out loud, Noah! We've been at this for three hours!"

"Don't tell me you're at the end of your mile-long list of Broadway show tunes."

Rachel opened her mouth to respond and then promptly shut it again. She decided to smack the stack of sheet music onto her desk and slump into her computer chair instead. "That's beside the point! No matter what song I offer, you turn it down!"

Puck shrugged and folded his arms behind his head as he lay sprawled out on Rachel's bed. "You're the one that asked for my help, sweetheart."

"Yes, your help singing a song, not choosing it."

"Well, that falls under the category of singing it, don't you think? I mean, how am I supposed to kick a song's ass if it's a bad song to begin with?"

She shot him a dirty look. "That makes no sense."

"You make no sense," he shot back wittily, smirking when Rachel huffed in frustration again.

She stared—no, sorry, glared—at him for a solid minute, and he smirked all the while. She finally closed her eyes as if internally preparing herself for something. When she finally reopened them, she took a couple of breaths before straightening her back, flipping her hair over her shoulder, and then hopping up onto her feet. "I need a break," she announced, pushing optimism into her tone hard enough to try and convince herself of it. "Would you like something to drink?"

"Bourbon?"

"Fruit punch, it is."

She flounced out of her room, leaving Puck to look around. Not much had changed since the year before. The sheets weren't quite as frilly. It was more of a "classic" type of girly instead of the "frilly" kind. He could deal. There were the framed playbills, the white Phantom of the Opera mask, and that useless pink electric guitar she never played. Then there were the pictures of the gleeks—with the trophy from Sectionals, before the Regional performance, and then a candid of them just sitting and fooling around in the choir room. Those three were positioned at the top of a collage of pictures tacked to a cork board. He should've been worried about his subconscious or something 'cause out of every other picture, the one he zeroed in on was an old Polaroid-thing of when he and Rachel were, like, eight. They were sitting side by side on a bench, Rachel strumming the guitar and Puck fingering the chords. Both of their mouths were open as they sung whatever song Rachel had forced him into singing, but the upturned corners of his mouth…

"Which picture are you looking at?" Rachel asked when she came back and found Puck studying her collage.

"Why'd you bitch about me singing a solo?"

A little thrown off by his random question, Rachel frowned and set the two glasses of fruit punch on a couple of coasters on her desk. "What—"

"When you and I were making out last year, you stopped and started saying stuff about how I needed to sing a solo to be worthy of your high-maintenance ass or something," he reminded her, still frowning at the picture. "You forced me to sing a gazillion solos when we were little. Why'd you make a big deal about it in glee when you already knew I could do it?"

Rachel walked over, spotted the picture he was looking at, and then pulled it off the board. She took his hand and led him to her bed where they sat down on the edge.

"I knew you could do it," she said, looking down at the picture.

He frowned. "So why'd you make a big thing out of it?"

"Because the gleeks didn't know it."

He turned to study her expression, their faces as close as it had been that night she convinced him to do that God-awful "Run, Joey, Run" horseshit. But this time, it wasn't a kiss he was looking for. When she met his gaze , she gave him a small smile.

He figured it was a loaded answer. Singing "Sweet Caroline" had been, like, a formal initiation into the club. He went from prop to contender. He thought he'd been trying to prove himself to Rachel. Turns out, she made him prove himself to the nonbelievers of his badassness.

"No Broadway songs, Berry," he said, breaking the three-minute silence they'd fallen into. "No Celine Dion or whatever either. You gotta learn to expand your horizons."

"I'm not doing death metal."

Puck snorted. "I ain't doing that to my ears either."

She sighed in defeat, still fingering the picture. "What do you have in mind then?"

Puck reached over to the other side of the bed for his guitar and positioned it on his lap. "I heard this song the other day when I was hanging out with Chang…"

"For crying out loud, Sam! Just call nine-one-one!"

Puck's eyes snapped open, and—hand to God—Mike and Sam yelped in surprise.

"Puckerman, for God's sake! Did you finally get diagnosed with a brain tumor or something?!" Mike screeched.

He'd pulled over on the side of the road and had been about to bolt out of the car to drag Puck out and perform CPR or something. Now two fingers were on Puck's carotid artery.

"You looked like you had an aneurism or a stroke or, like, a brain hemorrhage, Puck," Sam growled, face pale and strained. "You scared the ever-loving shit out of us."

"Tell us what the fuck is going on right now, or so help me God, I am throwing you into the nearest hospital and ordering a battery of tests from MRI's to a fucking pap smear! I should probably do that regardless!" Mike barked angrily.

Puck shifted in his seat, rubbing his temples. This was getting way out of hand.

"PUCK!"

"Calm your herpes, Chang!" Puck snapped.

"THEN ANSWER THE GODDAMN QUESTION!"

"I'm just not feeling well, all right?!"

"You do have a brain tumor!" Sam shrieked an unholy pitch. That's how he'd managed to pull off Bruno Mars.

"No, numbnuts! The flu!" Puck countered, thinking fast. "My meds are screwing with my brain. I just zone out a lot. I'm tired, okay?"

"If this is the flu, Puck, you've got a whole new strain that'll probably ring in the zombie pandemic!"

"YOU NEED THE HOSPITAL—NO, SHUT UP! MIKE, DRIVE!" Sam screamed.

The bells of the door of 7-11 jingled as Puck walked in. He nodded at Trey the Stoner Cashier before taking a deep breath and walking forward into the store. It had taken him a long-ass fucking time to get Mike and Sam off his back about his whole…issue. Convincing them he'd survive the night was like convincing Fox Mulder and Dean Winchester that the supernatural didn't exist. But once he finally did it, he collapsed on his couch and didn't leave the apartment for another three days.

Which meant today was March 22nd. Today was the anniversary of his grandmother's death, and he just kind of wanted to crawl under his bed with his comforter and never leave.

Yeah, bitches. He wanted to be a mole.

But he wasn't going to be a mole.

He wasn't going to be a mole because his nana would probably kick his ass as soon as he died, and he really didn't want that to happen.

So instead of going out and getting smashed or visiting his grandmother's grave in Ohio, or even eating a meal like any other normal person, he went to fucking 7-11.

Puck stopped in front of the slushy machine—grape, of course.

Why the fuck was he doing that?

'Cause he was just a morbidly curious kind of guy. When his ma told him people actually ate cockroaches in certain parts of the world, he decided to try it for himself. He nearly got his hand sawed off 'cause he went into an abandoned house and got chomped by a snake. He doused his arm in alcohol and set it on fire. He wondered if singing ability directly correlated with kissing ability; he wondered if a passionate singer and actress could be a passionate, hormonal teenager too; he wondered if she really did understand him like she always insisted she did.

So he bought that goddamn grape slushy—again—and took it home. Ain't no way was he gonna do this shit in public.

What was he doing?

He was going to induce an episode.

And while he may not have known the difference between Benedict Arnold and Eggs Benedict back then, even he knew how significant slushies were between him and Rachel. This was gonna induce the mother of all zone-outs—no question.

So he sat at his dinner table, the slushy on the table in front of him. He took a deep breath and brought the cup to his lips.

"I picked it up for you when I was buying dip. It's grape. I know that's your favorite 'cause the last time I tossed grape in your face, you licked your lips before you cleaned yourself off…"

Puck walked into the locker room at exactly 3:15pm. He sure as hell wasn't proud of it, but he had responsibilities. His first commitment had been the game, so he was gonna stick with it. He had a reputation to uphold.

"This is the right thing," Finn said, coming up beside him and patting him on the back. "This is the best thing for us, dude. This is our shot at getting through high school and moving on to college and stuff."

Puck wasn't really quick to agree with that considering it wasn't like the Titans were on this major winning streak that was gonna get them scouted. But he didn't say anything. He yanked open his locker and pulled out his equipment instead.

"Glee… Rachel, Mercedes, and them can have glee 'cause their talents would benefit them more there, you know? For guys like us—for you, me, Mike, and Matt—this is where we should be. Like…destiny."

Puck paused and scowled at his shoulder pads. Destiny, his perfectly shaped ass. Finn would be the one to think siding with a shitty football team would be his destiny, and for all Puck cared at that point, it could be. Fuckin' Finn.

Puck totally got how important a quarterback was. He'd call the shots in the game, and the other guys had to trust their QB. But just 'cause Finn was the football quarterback didn't mean he could call the shots in their actual lives too. He was sure some other asshole would appreciate it, but not him.

Jesus Christ.

He'd pretty much convinced himself that what he was doing was okay as he walked into the damn locker room, and instead of, like, reaffirming his decision, Finn's shitty-ass pep talk only convinced him otherwise.

This was such chickenshit!

Tanaka was such a fucking asshole, making 'em choose between football and glee 'cause of some dumbass competition he thought he was having with Schue. What the fuck?! So much for being a goddamn authority figure, that fuckwit. Fuckering fucking fucker fucking fuck—

"Hey, Rutherford!" Puck called down the aisle.

"Yeah?" came the sullen reply.

"You took Sunday school, right?"

"Yeah…?"

"Who was that one super-wise Jew king?"

"Uh, Solomon?"

Puck nodded. "Yeah, that's the one."

Solomon.

Solomon who had to deal with these two women who both tried to claim the same baby. Solomon, this badass genius, pitched the solution that if these two women couldn't decide who was gonna keep the baby, they should just split it in half. He figured the one who refused to let the baby get hurt would be its mother. And he was right.

This was exactly like that.

Tanaka was there, but instead of Schue, all he could see playing tug-of-war with his arms was Rachel. Rachel, and her big brown eyes, was just holding his hand while Tanaka had him in a choke-hold. She didn't even ask him to choose glee or choose her. She just…

She just forgave him. And kissed him on the forehead. And washed slushy out his hair. And actually gave him a little head massage in the process.

"Hey, Puck?" Mike called.

"What?"

"You thinking what we're thinking?"

"Wait, what?" Finn asked, looking around.

Puck smirked. "Don't wanna be the ripped baby?"

A few chuckles and then a simultaneous "yeah."

Puck smiled a little and tossed his shoulder pads back into his locker. Fuck this noise. He slammed his locker door. "Let's bounce. We've got a better shot of winning with the gleeks than with these dipshits."

Mike and Matt whooped, grinning like idiots, as they made their way out of the locker room. Puck turned to see Finn standing there, looking like a lost, kicked puppy.

"What…?"

"Maybe it's the right thing for you, dude," Puck said evenly, patting Finn's chest. "But the three of us don't believe much in destiny."

"Puck," Finn called, grabbing Puck's shoulder. "But you don't even like glee."

Puck frowned. "And you're the one who joined it first."

And then Puck walked out. He was a little late, but he made it. And he may have walked in there looking eight shades of sheepish as Rachel came up to him with the most perfect and heartfelt smile he'd ever seen her make. He didn't hesitate as he turned Finn down, he didn't hesitate as he walked in, and he wouldn't hesitate in answering Rachel.

He glanced at the rest of the gleeks, seeing how they were grinning at him proudly. Then he turned back to Rachel, still smiling warmly. "Bring it."

"Noah… Noah, neshama…"

Puck blearily opened his eyes and lifted his head from where it had apparently dropped onto the table. He sleepily turned to his left and legitimately fell off his seat. He could pick her out of a crowd after nothing but a glance—from her brightly colored, printed shirts to the pastel-colored pants, from the daisy earrings to the random braided lock of hair under her left ear—Puck knew this woman. Which is why she scared him so bad he nearly pissed himself.

"NANA?!" he cried, scrabbling across the floor away from… from… "NANA?!"

But instead of answering him like she normally would ("Don't scream in the house unless there's something evil nibbling or gnawing on you."), she started going off in some other language that may or may not have been Hebrew—don't ask him, he wasn't the expert. For all he knew, she could've been speaking in Tongues, so he decided to focus less on deciphering the babble and more on figuring out WHAT THE FUCK WAS HAPPENING. She wasn't glowing or falling apart at the limbs, so she wasn't a ghost or a zombie or something. Honestly, she looked straight-up real. And she looked…worried.

"Nana—Nana, I don't—I—no me comprendo! Like… shit!"

But even cussing didn't do anything. She just kept going. He just gawped at her until she finally stopped jabbering and walked over to him. She bent down and rested her hand on his cheek, and he would swear up and down the universe that she was real. And then she finally said something that had two words he recognized: "asher" and "boog."

Unfortunately, he had no clue what they meant, only that they sounded familiar. In his currently fucked-up condition, they probably just sounded like words he thought he might have recognized.

And then she was patting his cheek and saying, "Shalom, Noah. Kol tuv."

And then Puck woke up. Again.

His cheek was stuck to his table, and the table smelled like grape slushy. Joy. The slushy had spilled and melted. He slowly peeled himself off and sat up in the chair, just blinking and trying to get his shit together.

Two seconds later, he lost it anyway.

He scrabbled at his pocket and yanked out his phone. That CAT scan sounded like a damn good idea right then. He scrolled all the way down to the hospital contact—yes, it was programmed onto his phone 'cause being in the guitar-making business still had its dangers—and tapped on it at least four times. He held it up to his ear as he ran around his apartment trying to find his shoes.

But when the ringing stopped, he froze again. 'Cause since when did nurses answer phones sounding like they were in the middle of having sex?

"Hello?" Pant, pant, pant.

Puck frowned and cleared his throat awkwardly. "Uh, is this Northwestern Memorial Hospital?"

"What? No—wait. Noah?"

WHAT THE FUCK—

"Who—what—you're not a hospital."

"No, Noah, this is Rachel Berry."

He suddenly got tunnel vision and teetered in the middle of his living room. That was… Okay, what… Hm. "You're…not a hospital."

"Are you all right?"

"No," he said evenly. "No, I'm not okay. I was calling the goddamn hospital!"

"OH, MY GOD! HANG UP AND CALL NINE-ONE-ONE!"

"Sh—Just shut up, crazy. I'm not, like, bleeding out or anything. Don't panic."

"Well, when you accidentally call me after God-knows-how-many years, thinking that I'm a hospital, I have grounds to panic!"

"Well, you shouldn't. Christ, I'm the one with brain damage?"

"Excuse me?!"

"Are you having sex?"

"WHAT?!"

"Quit screaming in my ear, woman! I'm asking if you just finished having sex."

"Why would—no! I'm not even—why would you ask me—I just—I can't believe you!"

"Then why were you breathing so hard?"

"Because I was jogging!"

He stopped. Then he snorted. "You were jogging or jogging?"

There was a long pause before she sighed. "I honestly don't know how jogging could be a euphemism for anything."

He carefully walked toward his couch, and sat down slowly, not wanting to jostle his deteriorating brain any more than necessary. "Well, considering it's like…pitch-black nighttime and you've always had this paranoid fear of stepping outside your house by yourself after nightfall, I really fucking doubt that you're jogging."

She huffed, and he knew she was rolling her eyes. "I have a treadmill."

Puck laughed. "Your neighbors must wanna kill you."

"I have soundproofed walls, thank you very much," she snapped primly. "And my neighbors love me. I bake them cookies every Sunday, and they come and see my shows."

"They're celeb moochers then?"

"Did you mistakenly call me only to harass me?" she sighed.

"No, I mistakenly called you 'cause I wanted to make an appointment to get a goddamn CAT scan," Puck sighed right back.

"Why do you need a CAT scan?"

"Because I'm brain damaged."

Anyone else would've been like, Could've told you that years ago, dumbass. But Rachel Berry went, "Noah, are you sure? I mean, we all think we're brain damaged at some point, but please tell me if you're serious. Tell me straightaway; you can't joke about things like this."

He genuinely debated between telling her the truth and harassing her some more. Eh. "What about things like what exercising at night says about you?"

"What?"

"You know, Berry."

"No, Puckerman, I don't."

"You're exercising at night 'cause you don't have anyone to exercise with instead. I'm only a couple states away, Rach. You can always fly me over if you want the company."

She chuckled quietly. "Noah, you haven't changed at all."

"How much you wanna bet my guns and my ass are sexier than before?"

"Letch."

"You love it."

"I'm going to hang up now."

"No, you won't."

"Oh, really? And you know this how?"

"'Cause you miss me."

"How did you deduce that?"

"We haven't talked in almost a decade. We went from never being able to get away from each other to total radio silence. You miss me. You haven't had your daily dose of Vitamin Puck."

"I've been perfectly fine for the last nine years, Noah. I think I can survive without it."

"You think that 'cause you had a drastic environment change. If you had the Puckerman supplement up there, you'd see that your life as it is now would totally pale in comparison."

"And you're absolutely sure of this?"

He leaned back and threw one arm over the back of the couch, settling in for a conversation that would help him catch up to his quota of harassing Rachel Berry. "Sure as death."

"Don't be so morbid."

"It's the truth. You know what else is the truth?"

"What?"

"You totally miss me now, don't you?"

"Seriously? We're back to this?"

"You miss me 'cause you haven't hung up or made any excuses to hang up or nothing."

"Maybe I'm going to catch up with you this once and leave it at that?"

"You won't."

"Why?"

"'Cause you're gonna call me back in a couple of days wondering if I really did need a CAT scan or if this was just a ploy to talk to you."

"And how do you know this?"

He smiled. "'Cause I know you."

"Well, if you're going to play that card, I know for a fact that you're going to call me again soon."

"Huh—never really thought of doing that."

"Yes, you did. Because out of every other girl in your contacts list, you accidentally call me. If I had been any other girl, you would've mindlessly flirted and called me babe. Then you would've made an excuse—something about bar-hopping or clubs or hanging out with the boys—so as to make yourself seem available by being unavailable, ensuring future attention from whomever you'd be talking to. But you're not going to do that with me."

"Listen, babe, I gotta go bar-hopping with the boys. What'chu say we pick this up another time?"

"You're not going to do that with me because you never call me 'babe.' You call me 'baby,' and you wouldn't try to blow me off because you have too much fun teasing me. And you're going to call me back tomorrow and ask if I'm going to exercise again. You know why?"

He couldn't stop his smile from turning into a grin. "Why?"

"Because apparently, Noah Puckerman, you miss me too."

Special thanks go to the painfully talented Silke, who made (or is still in the process of making, actually) the graphic for this fic. Y'all should see some of the shit she can do. It's wizardry. I'm convinced she went to Hogwarts. She doesn't use Photoshop. She uses her wand.