4:00

Over the last few weeks, Kurt had been amused to notice, the Glee club had tended to park their cars together, clustered around his SUV as if they were a herd of some sort of strange metallic beasts huddled together for protection. Maybe it was just that they all left at the same time after practice, but it seemed, well, friendly. That Friday afternoon, Rachel's gold Prius and Mercedes' hand-me-down sedan sat companionably alongside Puck's ancient, beat up, rust bucket of a truck and Mike's decrepit Honda. Artie's father's van idled near the little group -Finn was helping with the wheelchair access lift.

Halfway across the parking lot, Kurt stopped dead in his tracks, making Mercedes, who had been close on his heels talking animatedly with Tina and Artie, swerve sharply around him.

"What are you doing, dude?" groused Puck, sweeping fast-food bags off the seat so Matt could get in. "You nearly caused a four-geek pileup. Not that that wouldn't be hi-lar-i-ous..."

"Forgot my jacket," Kurt said apologetically to Mercedes. Her answering grin was forgiving, and she gave him a one-armed hug as she moved past him. "My phone is in it. Can't make it through the night if I can't text you on Friday Night Lights - I guess Finn and Dad are hoping there's a common ground between me and them in a football drama, but I just can't bear to tell them it makes me want to weep at the hideous fashion errors, and they totally don't want to hear about how hot I think Luke is. See you tomorrow? Bring Quinn; she looks like she could use a spa day." He nodded towards the car where Quinn was leaning tiredly against the door, which diverted Mercedes' new-found protective instinct to the blonde, instead.

He turned to catch Puck's exaggerated eye-roll as he slid into the car. "It's a brand new Armani, Noah, not that I expect you to understand." Puck just waved a "whateva" hand at him and started the engine with a couple of loud revs. "And I could totally fix that loose belt," Kurt muttered as the truck roared away with a painfully loud squeal. He waved at Brit and Santana as they squeezed into the Honda, practically in each others' laps.

Rachel stopped a little ahead of him, looking at him uncertainly for a moment. He raised an inquiring eyebrow at her, (he'd been practicing that, it had looked so cool in the Star Trek reboot when ZQ had done it, even if he'd only gone because Artie had wanted to see it) and she turned and took two more steps toward her car before spinning around. "Look, I still haven't completely forgiven you for your 'makeover' advice. In addition, I know, I'm your closest rival for the drama queen tiara around here, but..." She moved a little closer, her voice softening a little bit. "What happened the other day with those two Neanderthals was... intense. Do you want me to go back in with you? Or," she glanced over to where Finn was now closing the van's door and getting ready to climb into the passenger's seat, "I'll let Finn know to wait for you?"

Advice from Mary Poppins popped into his head -"Close your mouth, Michael, we are not codfish"- and he followed it, and found himself offering her a small smile. Rachel Berry, he thought, worrying about him. "I'll be fine," he reassured her, waving off Finn, who had hesitated, looking back at the two of them. The van rolled slowly away, and Kurt turned back to Rachel, gesturing at the nearly empty parking lot. "Looks like we're the only ones left, except Mr. Schuester and Ms. Sylvester. The janitors are still here. And trust me; I'll hit that F if I need to scream for help. Besides, Finn has work tonight and I don't want to make him late. Artie's father is going that way anyway." That made her smile a little, but she still looked concerned, as she dug out her keys and headed for her car.

He felt bad enough that Finn and his mom had moved back home after the "incident" over the room decor. He really didn't want to have Finn feeling like now he needed to watch over him every minute to prove himself. Tonight's football fun was all about trying to mend those fences and rebuild a family he hadn't known he wanted until it felt like it would be impossible.

He knew both he and Finn had been wrong. Sometimes he forgot just how much his taste didn't translate to anything Lima was ready for. And particularly Finn, who still had cowboy wallpaper in his room at home. He'd also heard about the razzing Finn had gotten from Azimio and Karovsky. No wonder Finn had freaked. Not that he was excusing the word itself, but once he'd gotten over the shock of having heard someone he liked, someone he trusted, using it like the weapon it was, and of his father's reaction to it... he could concede that Finn had had a right to be freaked over having them move him into their house without so much as a head's-up, and that while sharing a room had sounded great in theory, he had missed his own pristine little haven when it came to the reality. (It had made Kurt uncomfortable watching how tentative Finn had been in the Hummel house, keeping all his stuff packed in the boxes he'd brought and trying not to "be in the way" while they tried to figure out how to fit together as a new family).

And he really should have had Finn help him redecorate the room. That had really not been fair, he realized in retrospect.

But he'd missed Carole more than he'd imagined he would, and while it had taken some time for her to get over her own anger, she and Burt had agreed that maybe they had moved too fast for the good of both boys, and that they were willing to try again, with more caution and less haste this time.

Kurt opened the SUV's back door and tucked his messenger bag into the back seat, locked up again, and headed back inside, squaring his shoulders as he pushed open the door. (He had to admit, the Cheerios uniform, in addition to giving a little bit of camouflage and a veneer of popularity in the hallways and still being enough like a costume to appeal to his dramatic side, also did nice things for his shoulders –- and his butt - and oddly, made him feel... taller.)


Rachel watched Kurt go, wondering just how it was that that stupid cheerleader's uniform managed to make him look even smaller than almost anything else he wore (not that she was jealous, but he really had a teeny waist). Not as bad, she had to concede, as the football uniform had. That had made him look like a little kid trying on his big brother's clothes. Not that she'd been all that interested, or that she'd paid any special attention to the local sports report of the game that particular weekend (the sports report that she certainly did not watch every week just for the two or three seconds that Finn might have been onscreen as quarterback, during most of which he mostly was getting tackled horribly).

And if she had watched the clips of the dramatic game-winning kick, (complete with dance number, so very Kurt Hummel) it certainly would not have been with one bit of concern that those big bruisers on the other team might crush her fellow glee-mate. After all, he seemed to think his freakish soprano range had made him a potential rival for her from the start. She had actually been worried when he'd challenged her for the right to solo Defying Gravity; with Artie, Tina, Mercedes and Finn firmly on his side, and the fact that Quinn, Santana, Brittany and Puck actively hated her, compared to the mere disdain and scorn they felt for Kurt…. But she'd been fairly certain that the F would be the clincher, and she knew that was comfortably in her range.

Still, she had to admit that, like most of the Glee Club, he'd been more... sympathetic lately, not just to her, but to all of them. (Except for Noah, but she really couldn't blame him for that. She would probably have a lot of trouble finding sympathy for Puck if he'd been throwing her into a dumpster at least once a week since their first day of high school, too. It had been hard enough to forgive him for the many, many slushie facials he'd "treated" her to over that same period of time, but those sad eyes when he'd been slushied himself... and those really, really toned arms... had won her over. Briefly).

And she'd begun to see through Kurt's often annoyingly smug, superior attitude enough to realize that it was mostly an act. The haughty expression he affected seemed to be a defense against the casual cruelty and outright threat he seemed to attract like a magnet, just by being himself. He was a lot like her, really; he clearly wanted the attention, wanted to stand out, but the only attention he often got from his classmates was, well, most emphatically not good. Even more not good than what she herself often dealt with. And like her, he didn't seem to know how to change that, even if he wanted to.

His recent attempt to be more, well, butch, had just made him seem... stilted, unnatural. Stagey. And his voice - dear Sondheim, what could have possessed him to sing like that? It had made her throat ache even more than her tonsillitis, just listening to it, knowing what he was actually capable of. Especially since he had just now pretty much admitted he'd blown that F on purpose... and she couldn't imagine why he would even do that.

She did know, though, that he hadn't done it for her.

Ok, he wasn't a saint, none of them were, but he was beginning to seem like a decent kid, now that she had some insight into him. And maybe because she was also getting a little insight into herself.

Her therapist would be proud. She should share this with him.

She'd talked to Tina, and realized that the incident last week had been fairly typical of his life; he really did walk the corridors most of the time waiting for someone like Azimio to decide that his very existence somehow threatened them. It might have escalated a little more than was usual because of the Gaga getup, well, that and the fact that he'd actually said something to them for once (because they had also shoved Tina, too), instead of just making a smart remark under his breath. Tina had told her that she thought he had deliberately managed to trip and fall on Karovsky, which had bought her time to run away from the pair, because he'd told her later he'd known he was never going to outrun them in those absurdly high heels without breaking an ankle). Rachel'd been scared later, when the glee club had found the two goons cornering Kurt, and she'd been with the whole glee gang. (Puck and Santana were often very scary. Which, in this context, was reassuring).

She almost turned the car around. But her phone buzzed to remind her that her appointment with her therapist was in half an hour, so she kept going. The school had been deserted, and it wasn't like Kurt'd want to have someone hovering all the time, like he couldn't be let out alone. He wasn't a child, after all, even if he looked ridiculously young.

Still, she made a mental note to text Finn later. Kurt didn't even need to know she'd been checking up on him.