Title: Breathing In Pairs
Rating: T/PG-13 (WILL go up)
Genre: Slash, Supernatural/Romance/Drama/Mystery
Summary: Noah Puckerman has been dead for over a hundred years, trying to reach out. When Kurt's family moves into the once famed Puckerman manor, will Noah get all he's been looking for? Including someone to help him find out what happened to him?
Pairing: Puck/Kurt, Kurt/Blaine, Finn/Rachel, Burt/Carol, Santana/Brittany, and Tina/Mike mentions past Puck/Karofsky
Words: 1,013
Warnings: Main Character Being Dead, Mentions Implied Rape, Murder,
Disclaimer:
A/N: Ghost!Puck. Should be interesting. Reviews are love!
Prologue
Take a breath. Nice and slow.
Savor the air going into your lungs through your nose, and the carbon dioxide coming out from your mouth.
This breath, this thing you do hundreds of thousands of times a day, is proof you are alive. Proof that you have oxygen flowing into you blood, and from your blood into your brain. And your brain is sending millions of signals to the rest of your body's nervous system and other parts, telling it to do it again.
This proof, this act of breathing that you take for granted so easily…
It's beautiful.
Beautiful to feel the rush in and out like waves of an ocean.
And beautiful to see happen for the first time when a child is born, and their tiny chests rise and fall welcoming in the gorgeous air around them to wail and scream.
Breath is life and it is beautiful.
Because there will come a day when you take your last breath; and unlike what they sensationalize on television and in movies, it is not your life that you are thinking about as you die. It's about struggling to get to the next breath. To stay awake. To not fall to the blackness.
And yet we do, because we must. There must be a balance or the world descends into utter chaos.
A chaos never ceasing.
You must be wondering I would know this, why I am so obsessed with the simple act of breathing. The answer is simple: I don't breathe anymore, I am dead.
I have been for more than a hundred years; walking about this manor, watching the families come and go. It's so funny watching how they grow and change and leave. I try and try to reach out to them, to touch them but all it does make them leave me faster. And just when I think I might start to be getting to a place where I think they could be receptive of me, maybe even ready to see me, but apparently I scare them.
I don't mean to. I guess having been a ghost or whatever I am right now has made me forget how easily spooked humans get. I'm just tired of being alone.
That's definitely the one thing you aren't prepared for in life before you die; the loneliness of death. Forever on the outside, never to feel again.
My name is Noah Puckerman, and I'm a seventeen year old ghost.
I died here in Lima, Ohio at my family's old manor. How, I don't know exactly.
I remember the struggle to breathe, to stay awake. I remember my seventeenth birthday party and my friend David Karofsky leading me away from my family's dining hall, but I don't remember much else. Just waking up lengthwise across my bed, and everything being so much greyer than I knew it to be.
And when I found Sarah, my younger sister, she was sitting alone on the front steps of our manor staring at the towering gates as if waiting for something with dread. I tried to get her to talk to me, but she wouldn't. Soon I realized nobody was talking to me, nor were they even looking at me. Like they were cross with me, but I couldn't remember anything wrong I had done.
And the next thing I knew a black car came through those gates that my darling sister had been forlornly gazing at, and she and my parents got in it and left. Leaving me and our staff behind. But soon even the staff left this place as Puckerman Manor was placed up for sale, and all of our things moved out.
And no matter how hard I tried, or how much I begged, I didn't leave with it. I stayed. And I have stayed for one hundred and thirteen years.
Never aging.
Never changing.
Just here, stuck to watch from the outside.
Almost like an unofficial guardian of my family's place. Except it's a job I never wanted. I never had any dream of being here or in my family's fortune forever. I wanted to travel on my own through Europe. I wanted to be more than the investment banker my father wanted me to be, he never agreed with my…predilections.
But that's a different part of my story.
Nowadays, this place looks nothing like it used to back in 1901. Gone are the perfectly polished marble floors, and freshly varnished hand carved wooden banisters. Gone are the Persian rugs and silk draperies, and any and all sparkle or shine to the crystal chandelier in the foyer. Gone is the well kempt bushes that sometimes were trimmed into shapes, and perfectly watered and fed roses my mother loved so much.
Gone. It's all gone.
I don't really mind though, because I was never impressed by the pomp and splendor my parents and sister were. I was an artist and spent most of my days in the gardens drawing still life scenes. My favorite thing was the feel of the scratch of charcoal across drawing paper and creating life for everyone to see.
And that's now one of my biggest laments. That I'm not able to hold pencils and paper and sketch the people that come in and out of here, because as the years go by it gets harder and harder to remember everyone. And I don't want to forget.
It may seem foolish for a ghost to get attached to people who not only can't see him, but also fear him; yet it's all I have in this pathetic nonexistence. Attachments to real live people who might as well be ghosts to me. Passing in and out of my life, in and out of my manor. So close and so far away.
And as I watch a sweet, but totally self absorbed girl named Sugar leave with her father and mother still ranting about her purse collection and it being disorganized, and the "For Sale" sign go back up, my metaphorical heart sinks.
I'm doomed to forever be alone.
