Fic: Higher Education, 6/?
Title: Higher Education, 6/?
Author: knittycat99
Rating: R for language, kissing, and potential future sexual situations
Character(s)/Pairing(s): Puck/Kurt
Genre: Romance, Angst
Warning: AU
Spoilers: Nope. I've left canon in the dust here.
Disclaimer: I don't own the boys; they belong to Fox. The quote from To Kill a Mockingbird belongs to the magnificent Harper Lee. Lyrics from "The Story" by Brandie Carlile came from this website. There are a couple of different versions of the lyrics out there, but this was the one that best suited my purposes.
Author Notes: My take on what the future holds for our boys.
Summary: They move into and out of Kurt's life over the years, showing up sometimes when he needs them and more often when he doesn't.
Word Count: 2,429
I’m gonna free fall out into nothing. I’m gonna leave this world for a while.
-Tom Petty
Puck woke slowly, to what sounded like a symphony. When he opened his eyes, he saw that both his and Kurt’s cell phones were ringing and buzzing on Kurt’s desk. His own phone was chiming the bells that were his mom’s ringtone. He started to reach across Kurt to climb out of bed, but Kurt stopped him. “I’ve been lying here listening to them for the last half hour. So far, I think it’s just your mom calling you. Mine. . .” he paused, as “Little Pink Houses” started up. “That’s my dad.” The phone fell silent for a few seconds, and then the gentle strains of Carole King filled the room. “That would be Carol,” Kurt said with a smile. And then “Don’t Stop Believin’”. Puck smiled down at Kurt.
“Finn?” he asked.
“Predictable, I know.”
Puck laughed as the same song started on his own phone.
“Finn?” Kurt asked with a laugh.
“Yeah. Not so predicable, apparently.”
“Your disappearance seems to have been noted, and I’m assuming you at least told your mom you’d be here, or else nobody would bother calling me. I mean, we haven’t exactly been friends in the past.”
Puck’s heart ached at that thought, at the idea that he had wasted time that he could have had with Kurt. “Yeah,” he said softly. “I left a note for my mom.”
Kurt’s voice was gentle. “I think you need to answer her next call. And I think I’m going to call Carol.”
“Not your dad?”
“Sometimes it’s easier to talk to Carol. Especially where matters of the heart are concerned.”
“What time is it?”
“Oh. Early. 7 am.”
“God, I’m sorry this all got you up.”
“No, no. I have to work at 8, so it’s okay.”
Puck hadn’t even thought to ask if he was intruding on Kurt’s plans for the rest of his break. But he somehow knew that now he was Kurt’s plan for the rest of his break.
“Speaking of, I’m going to go shower. You should call your mom. If you leave the room, prop the door open with something so it doesn’t lock behind you.”
Puck watched Kurt gather towel and shower caddy, and when the door closed behind him, he rolled out of Kurt’s slightly-too-tiny bed and picked up his phone. He bypassed his voicemail and all of the missed calls, and dialed his mom’s cell with shaking hands.
“Noah!” Her voice was heavy with relief. “Are you really in Boston?”
“Yeah, Mom.”
“Why, baby? What was so important that you just ran off like that? What about spring semester, and your job?”
“I, um . . . I think I’ll be home on Monday, but I’ll call when I know for sure. I’m not going to blow off work or school.” The truth was that he had been planning on doing just that if things hadn’t gone the way he wanted to with Kurt. But now he felt like he had a reason to go back and follow through with his plans.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” He swallowed. “I’m fine. I just. I had something I needed to do here.”
“Kurt.” How the hell had she known?
“Yeah.”
“Baby, why didn’t you tell me?”
“There was nothing to tell. I just had to come here and see.”
“See what?”
Oh, what to say. How to tell her in a way she’d understand? In a way he’d understand? His silence must have spoken volumes.
“It’s okay, Noah. You can tell me all about it when you’re ready.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
“I’ll let you go, honey. Have fun and be careful. Come home safe.”
“I will.”
“Love you.”
“Love you, too, Mom.”
He clicked off the call and bent to start making Kurt’s bed when his phone rang again. He really needed to find a better ringtone. “Hey, man.”
“Dude. What are you doing? Your mom was like, totally panicking.”
“It’s fine, I just talked with her.”
“Why are you in Boston?”
“I just needed to get away, and Boston was the cheapest flight to where I knew somebody.” Finn wasn’t smart enough to listen through the lie.
“Kurt didn’t mind you just showing up like that?”
“Nah. He and I are cool.”
“Okay. Hey,” Puck could hear whispering in the background. “Dude, I gotta go.”
Before Puck could answer, he heard the dead air of a disconnected call. He set his phone back on the desk next to Kurt’s, finished making the bed, and got dressed in his jeans and a hoodie he had stuffed in his pack. He found his toothbrush, stuck a shoe in the door, and went up the hall to the bathroom to brush his teeth. Kurt was at a sink, towel wrapped around his waist, shaving. Puck watched him from just inside the door for a moment before crossing the room and plucking Kurt’s toothpaste from his caddy. Kurt’s eyes twinkled at him, and they finished getting ready in silence.
When the bed was made and Kurt was dressed in jeans washed so dark they were almost black and a thick, light gray sweater that was all-over cables (“Carol knitted it for me for Christmas” was Kurt’s response to Puck’s raised eyes, “and today is Casual Friday in campus offices”), Puck asked him what his day looked like.
“I have work from 8-noon. You can come with me, if you want, and hang out in the office, or you can stay here. Either option is pretty boring. Or, you could explore Boston.”
“I’d rather explore Boston with you. I think I’ll stay here. If that’s okay.”
“Of course. You can use my computer if you want; I’m logged into my Netflix account, so you can watch movies or whatever.”
“I’m sure I can find ways to amuse myself.”
Kurt smiled at him, teasing in his voice. “I’m sure you can.”
*****
After Kurt had left for work, Puck spent a few minutes poking through the stacks of paperbacks until his hand fell on a familiar slim volume. Kurt’s copy was dog-eared and had a spine broken from multiple readings. Puck had never read it; it had been assigned in 10th grade, and he’d paid just enough attention to the in-class discussions to pass the test. It looked like it was one of Kurt’s favorites, thought, so he figured he’d give it a try. He turned on Kurt’s iPod, nested in it’s speakers, scrolling through playlists titled “Dalton”, “Broadway Divas”, “Mr. Schue’s Music I Can’t Stop Listening To” and “Senior Year” until he found one titled “Freshman Mix.” Puck listened for a minute as the soft strains of a ballad he didn’t recognize filled the room. He settled back on Kurt’s bed, propped his head up with pillows, opened the book and started to read. “When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.” That wasn’t too bad of an opening line, so he kept with it. It was kind of a quirky book in the beginning, but he liked the little kid voice of it all. He wasn’t a fast reader, but it was fun to tune the world out that way. He got absorbed into the book, and the sensation of listening to music. When he got cold, he pulled the throw blanket from the bottom of the bed up over himself. At some point, he must have closed his eyes because when he opened them the book was open across his chest and Kurt was standing above him.
“Good nap?”
Puck stretched and yawned. “Apparently. I didn’t realize I was tired.”
“We were up kind of late last night.”
“Yeah. How was work?”
“Busy, but good. I’m glad to be done, though. I kind of . . .” Puck watched as Kurt blushed pale pink. He turned away and let the rest of his words out in a rush. “I couldn’t wait to get back here to you.”
Puck felt his stomach turn over. He had it bad, he had known that coming in. The surprise was that Kurt seemed to feel the same way. He sat up and pulled Kurt down next to him on the bed. He looked into Kurt’s eyes and told him “I have to go home on Monday.”
*****
He hadn’t expected Puck’s announcement to make his heart break just a little bit. He should have expected it; Puck had his own school semester starting up. He just wished that they could have a little more time together before being separated for the 7 weeks until Kurt’s spring break. He smiled a weak, trying-too-hard smile up at Puck and said “Then I guess we’ll have to spend as much time together as we can until you have to leave.”
“Do we need to go anywhere, or can we stay right here?”
“If right here means in my bed, then yes.”
“Good. Come here.”
Puck stretched out again, and waited while Kurt pulled off his shoes and sweater and slid under the blanket and into the warmth of Puck’s body. He hadn’t felt like this since breaking up with Blaine, a kind of completeness that came only from being physically close and emotionally intimate with another person.
“When do your classes start?” he asked as he settled with his back against Puck’s chest.
“Tuesday. I start work on Friday, too.”
“You didn’t tell me you had a new job. Where?”
“Down in Dayton, as an EMT with the fire department.”
“That’s awesome. Are you excited?”
Kurt could hear the almost-sheepishness in Puck’s reply. “Yeah. I really am, actually.”
“That’s great. You’ll be busy.”
“Mmm hmmm. You will, too. It’ll be good, I guess.”
“It’ll make the time till spring break go faster.”
“Yeah.”
Kurt felt Puck’s hand start to trail through his hair.
“I’m still kind of surprised that you showed up here. I’m surprised that you’ve had these feelings about me for so long.”
“Yeah, well.”
“Puck?”
“Yeah?”
“What do you want to tell people? I mean, I just want to know what you want me to say because people are going to ask, if they haven’t started already.”
“I don’t know yet. I don’t know how to do this. I mean, I’m used to just fucking and going, y’know? But I don’t want to do that. You mean more to me than that, and I don’t know what to do with any of this.”
“Any of what?”
“What I feel for you. How I feel when I’m with you. The kind of person I want to be for you.”
“Oh.” Kurt could hear the feeling behind Puck’s words and feel the depth of emotions there. This was bigger than Kurt could have imagined. The more Puck put himself out there, the more trust he showed when he shared these things with Kurt, the harder Kurt fell. And he knew, in that instant, that Puck was either going to end up being the love of his life or his greatest mistake. Regardless, he had no doubt that his heart was going to break many, many times over Noah Puckerman. That knowledge scared him to his core. So did the fact that he was too far gone already to do anything but go along for the ride.
“I’ll tell them whatever you want. But you have to understand a couple of things if we’re going to do this.”
“I thought we already were. Doing this.”
“We are. I don’t think I could stop it if I wanted to. Which I don’t. But if we’re going to be all-in, we’re all-in. I stop going on all those wretched first dates. And you stop fucking girls.”
“I haven’t. Not since summer.”
“Really. Hmmm. We’ll come back to that later. The other deal-breaker is this: I will not go back into the closet for you. I’ll keep our relationship a secret, if that’s what you want, but I cannot lie about who I am. The closet is a dark, sad, suffocating place, and I won’t go there again. So you just need to tell me what you want me to say.”
“I think,” he felt Puck’s breath shudder as he ground out his next words, “that we should be honest.”
“Are you sure? Because once it’s out there, once you’re out there, you can’t take it back.”
“If I ask you to lie about us, that’s just as bad as asking you to lie about yourself, right?”
“It’s not the same.”
“Yeah, K, it kind of is. And if I’m going to go all-in, and be in this with you, I need to be a man and be honest about all of it.” He paused, gathering his next thoughts, which he released in a whisper next to Kurt’s ear. “I’m not ashamed that I love you.”
*****
Puck held those moments in his mind when he slipped out of the warmth of Kurt’s bed in the dark of Monday morning. He was a different person than the Puck who had come to Boston four days ago. He dressed silently, working hard to keep from waking Kurt or his roommate Greg, who had appeared late the night before. When he was ready, he shouldered his pack and grabbed his guitar. He stashed his electronics in the pockets of his jeans, and pressed a gentle kiss to his boyfriend’s forehead. Puck left him curled in sleep as he went out into the cold alone.
*****
Kurt didn’t recognize the music blasting through his docking station; it wasn’t his usual wake up, which had been random selections from Les Miz. When he opened his eyes, he saw an unfamiliar iPod Touch docked in place of his red Nano. There was a sticky note stuck to the screen, and when he wiped the sleep from his eyes he could see Puck’s handwriting. I can’t stay here with you, so I left you a little bit of myself. I hope you don’t mind that I took some of you with me.
Kurt sighed, and tucked the sticky note into his top desk drawer. When he tapped the iPod screen, he could see the name of the playlist: “For Kurt.” He hauled his empty, aching heart out of bed and started his day while Brandi Carlile sang.
“I climbed across the mountain tops
Swam all across the ocean blue
I crossed all the lines and I broke all the rules
But baby I broke them all for you . . .”
Author: knittycat99
Rating: R for language, kissing, and potential future sexual situations
Character(s)/Pairing(s): Puck/Kurt
Genre: Romance, Angst
Warning: AU
Spoilers: Nope. I've left canon in the dust here.
Disclaimer: I don't own the boys; they belong to Fox. The quote from To Kill a Mockingbird belongs to the magnificent Harper Lee. Lyrics from "The Story" by Brandie Carlile came from this website. There are a couple of different versions of the lyrics out there, but this was the one that best suited my purposes.
Author Notes: My take on what the future holds for our boys.
Summary: They move into and out of Kurt's life over the years, showing up sometimes when he needs them and more often when he doesn't.
Word Count: 2,429
I’m gonna free fall out into nothing. I’m gonna leave this world for a while.
-Tom Petty
Puck woke slowly, to what sounded like a symphony. When he opened his eyes, he saw that both his and Kurt’s cell phones were ringing and buzzing on Kurt’s desk. His own phone was chiming the bells that were his mom’s ringtone. He started to reach across Kurt to climb out of bed, but Kurt stopped him. “I’ve been lying here listening to them for the last half hour. So far, I think it’s just your mom calling you. Mine. . .” he paused, as “Little Pink Houses” started up. “That’s my dad.” The phone fell silent for a few seconds, and then the gentle strains of Carole King filled the room. “That would be Carol,” Kurt said with a smile. And then “Don’t Stop Believin’”. Puck smiled down at Kurt.
“Finn?” he asked.
“Predictable, I know.”
Puck laughed as the same song started on his own phone.
“Finn?” Kurt asked with a laugh.
“Yeah. Not so predicable, apparently.”
“Your disappearance seems to have been noted, and I’m assuming you at least told your mom you’d be here, or else nobody would bother calling me. I mean, we haven’t exactly been friends in the past.”
Puck’s heart ached at that thought, at the idea that he had wasted time that he could have had with Kurt. “Yeah,” he said softly. “I left a note for my mom.”
Kurt’s voice was gentle. “I think you need to answer her next call. And I think I’m going to call Carol.”
“Not your dad?”
“Sometimes it’s easier to talk to Carol. Especially where matters of the heart are concerned.”
“What time is it?”
“Oh. Early. 7 am.”
“God, I’m sorry this all got you up.”
“No, no. I have to work at 8, so it’s okay.”
Puck hadn’t even thought to ask if he was intruding on Kurt’s plans for the rest of his break. But he somehow knew that now he was Kurt’s plan for the rest of his break.
“Speaking of, I’m going to go shower. You should call your mom. If you leave the room, prop the door open with something so it doesn’t lock behind you.”
Puck watched Kurt gather towel and shower caddy, and when the door closed behind him, he rolled out of Kurt’s slightly-too-tiny bed and picked up his phone. He bypassed his voicemail and all of the missed calls, and dialed his mom’s cell with shaking hands.
“Noah!” Her voice was heavy with relief. “Are you really in Boston?”
“Yeah, Mom.”
“Why, baby? What was so important that you just ran off like that? What about spring semester, and your job?”
“I, um . . . I think I’ll be home on Monday, but I’ll call when I know for sure. I’m not going to blow off work or school.” The truth was that he had been planning on doing just that if things hadn’t gone the way he wanted to with Kurt. But now he felt like he had a reason to go back and follow through with his plans.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” He swallowed. “I’m fine. I just. I had something I needed to do here.”
“Kurt.” How the hell had she known?
“Yeah.”
“Baby, why didn’t you tell me?”
“There was nothing to tell. I just had to come here and see.”
“See what?”
Oh, what to say. How to tell her in a way she’d understand? In a way he’d understand? His silence must have spoken volumes.
“It’s okay, Noah. You can tell me all about it when you’re ready.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
“I’ll let you go, honey. Have fun and be careful. Come home safe.”
“I will.”
“Love you.”
“Love you, too, Mom.”
He clicked off the call and bent to start making Kurt’s bed when his phone rang again. He really needed to find a better ringtone. “Hey, man.”
“Dude. What are you doing? Your mom was like, totally panicking.”
“It’s fine, I just talked with her.”
“Why are you in Boston?”
“I just needed to get away, and Boston was the cheapest flight to where I knew somebody.” Finn wasn’t smart enough to listen through the lie.
“Kurt didn’t mind you just showing up like that?”
“Nah. He and I are cool.”
“Okay. Hey,” Puck could hear whispering in the background. “Dude, I gotta go.”
Before Puck could answer, he heard the dead air of a disconnected call. He set his phone back on the desk next to Kurt’s, finished making the bed, and got dressed in his jeans and a hoodie he had stuffed in his pack. He found his toothbrush, stuck a shoe in the door, and went up the hall to the bathroom to brush his teeth. Kurt was at a sink, towel wrapped around his waist, shaving. Puck watched him from just inside the door for a moment before crossing the room and plucking Kurt’s toothpaste from his caddy. Kurt’s eyes twinkled at him, and they finished getting ready in silence.
When the bed was made and Kurt was dressed in jeans washed so dark they were almost black and a thick, light gray sweater that was all-over cables (“Carol knitted it for me for Christmas” was Kurt’s response to Puck’s raised eyes, “and today is Casual Friday in campus offices”), Puck asked him what his day looked like.
“I have work from 8-noon. You can come with me, if you want, and hang out in the office, or you can stay here. Either option is pretty boring. Or, you could explore Boston.”
“I’d rather explore Boston with you. I think I’ll stay here. If that’s okay.”
“Of course. You can use my computer if you want; I’m logged into my Netflix account, so you can watch movies or whatever.”
“I’m sure I can find ways to amuse myself.”
Kurt smiled at him, teasing in his voice. “I’m sure you can.”
*****
After Kurt had left for work, Puck spent a few minutes poking through the stacks of paperbacks until his hand fell on a familiar slim volume. Kurt’s copy was dog-eared and had a spine broken from multiple readings. Puck had never read it; it had been assigned in 10th grade, and he’d paid just enough attention to the in-class discussions to pass the test. It looked like it was one of Kurt’s favorites, thought, so he figured he’d give it a try. He turned on Kurt’s iPod, nested in it’s speakers, scrolling through playlists titled “Dalton”, “Broadway Divas”, “Mr. Schue’s Music I Can’t Stop Listening To” and “Senior Year” until he found one titled “Freshman Mix.” Puck listened for a minute as the soft strains of a ballad he didn’t recognize filled the room. He settled back on Kurt’s bed, propped his head up with pillows, opened the book and started to read. “When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.” That wasn’t too bad of an opening line, so he kept with it. It was kind of a quirky book in the beginning, but he liked the little kid voice of it all. He wasn’t a fast reader, but it was fun to tune the world out that way. He got absorbed into the book, and the sensation of listening to music. When he got cold, he pulled the throw blanket from the bottom of the bed up over himself. At some point, he must have closed his eyes because when he opened them the book was open across his chest and Kurt was standing above him.
“Good nap?”
Puck stretched and yawned. “Apparently. I didn’t realize I was tired.”
“We were up kind of late last night.”
“Yeah. How was work?”
“Busy, but good. I’m glad to be done, though. I kind of . . .” Puck watched as Kurt blushed pale pink. He turned away and let the rest of his words out in a rush. “I couldn’t wait to get back here to you.”
Puck felt his stomach turn over. He had it bad, he had known that coming in. The surprise was that Kurt seemed to feel the same way. He sat up and pulled Kurt down next to him on the bed. He looked into Kurt’s eyes and told him “I have to go home on Monday.”
*****
He hadn’t expected Puck’s announcement to make his heart break just a little bit. He should have expected it; Puck had his own school semester starting up. He just wished that they could have a little more time together before being separated for the 7 weeks until Kurt’s spring break. He smiled a weak, trying-too-hard smile up at Puck and said “Then I guess we’ll have to spend as much time together as we can until you have to leave.”
“Do we need to go anywhere, or can we stay right here?”
“If right here means in my bed, then yes.”
“Good. Come here.”
Puck stretched out again, and waited while Kurt pulled off his shoes and sweater and slid under the blanket and into the warmth of Puck’s body. He hadn’t felt like this since breaking up with Blaine, a kind of completeness that came only from being physically close and emotionally intimate with another person.
“When do your classes start?” he asked as he settled with his back against Puck’s chest.
“Tuesday. I start work on Friday, too.”
“You didn’t tell me you had a new job. Where?”
“Down in Dayton, as an EMT with the fire department.”
“That’s awesome. Are you excited?”
Kurt could hear the almost-sheepishness in Puck’s reply. “Yeah. I really am, actually.”
“That’s great. You’ll be busy.”
“Mmm hmmm. You will, too. It’ll be good, I guess.”
“It’ll make the time till spring break go faster.”
“Yeah.”
Kurt felt Puck’s hand start to trail through his hair.
“I’m still kind of surprised that you showed up here. I’m surprised that you’ve had these feelings about me for so long.”
“Yeah, well.”
“Puck?”
“Yeah?”
“What do you want to tell people? I mean, I just want to know what you want me to say because people are going to ask, if they haven’t started already.”
“I don’t know yet. I don’t know how to do this. I mean, I’m used to just fucking and going, y’know? But I don’t want to do that. You mean more to me than that, and I don’t know what to do with any of this.”
“Any of what?”
“What I feel for you. How I feel when I’m with you. The kind of person I want to be for you.”
“Oh.” Kurt could hear the feeling behind Puck’s words and feel the depth of emotions there. This was bigger than Kurt could have imagined. The more Puck put himself out there, the more trust he showed when he shared these things with Kurt, the harder Kurt fell. And he knew, in that instant, that Puck was either going to end up being the love of his life or his greatest mistake. Regardless, he had no doubt that his heart was going to break many, many times over Noah Puckerman. That knowledge scared him to his core. So did the fact that he was too far gone already to do anything but go along for the ride.
“I’ll tell them whatever you want. But you have to understand a couple of things if we’re going to do this.”
“I thought we already were. Doing this.”
“We are. I don’t think I could stop it if I wanted to. Which I don’t. But if we’re going to be all-in, we’re all-in. I stop going on all those wretched first dates. And you stop fucking girls.”
“I haven’t. Not since summer.”
“Really. Hmmm. We’ll come back to that later. The other deal-breaker is this: I will not go back into the closet for you. I’ll keep our relationship a secret, if that’s what you want, but I cannot lie about who I am. The closet is a dark, sad, suffocating place, and I won’t go there again. So you just need to tell me what you want me to say.”
“I think,” he felt Puck’s breath shudder as he ground out his next words, “that we should be honest.”
“Are you sure? Because once it’s out there, once you’re out there, you can’t take it back.”
“If I ask you to lie about us, that’s just as bad as asking you to lie about yourself, right?”
“It’s not the same.”
“Yeah, K, it kind of is. And if I’m going to go all-in, and be in this with you, I need to be a man and be honest about all of it.” He paused, gathering his next thoughts, which he released in a whisper next to Kurt’s ear. “I’m not ashamed that I love you.”
*****
Puck held those moments in his mind when he slipped out of the warmth of Kurt’s bed in the dark of Monday morning. He was a different person than the Puck who had come to Boston four days ago. He dressed silently, working hard to keep from waking Kurt or his roommate Greg, who had appeared late the night before. When he was ready, he shouldered his pack and grabbed his guitar. He stashed his electronics in the pockets of his jeans, and pressed a gentle kiss to his boyfriend’s forehead. Puck left him curled in sleep as he went out into the cold alone.
*****
Kurt didn’t recognize the music blasting through his docking station; it wasn’t his usual wake up, which had been random selections from Les Miz. When he opened his eyes, he saw an unfamiliar iPod Touch docked in place of his red Nano. There was a sticky note stuck to the screen, and when he wiped the sleep from his eyes he could see Puck’s handwriting. I can’t stay here with you, so I left you a little bit of myself. I hope you don’t mind that I took some of you with me.
Kurt sighed, and tucked the sticky note into his top desk drawer. When he tapped the iPod screen, he could see the name of the playlist: “For Kurt.” He hauled his empty, aching heart out of bed and started his day while Brandi Carlile sang.
“I climbed across the mountain tops
Swam all across the ocean blue
I crossed all the lines and I broke all the rules
But baby I broke them all for you . . .”