Title: How can you miss something you never really had?
Part 1 of 4
Prompt: Parents
Disclaimer: I own nothing and no one
Finn
His dad's picture lives by his favourite armchair. His ashes live in an urn on the mantle. When he says live, he knows they're not like, alive, but he thinks it's nice to think of it like that. Like his dad still lives in the house with them, just in a different way to other kids' dads. It's not true, obviously, he's not a moron or anything, but it's just a little bit of, what would Rachel call it? Self-indulgence, or something. He just likes to pretend sometimes.
He and Puck first bonded over their mutual lack of dad. It was at a little league game when they were kids, all the other kids' dads were there, but Finn's mom and Puck's mom were there by themselves standing on the sidelines cheering their kids on.
"Dude, where's your dad?" Puck had tossed at him as they sat, sweating in their gear under the blazing sun.
"Oh, he's not here. We keep him in a jar at home, so that he won't blow away or something."
Little Finn was sorta stupid, but Puck seemed to get it anyway, he didn't make fun of him at least, just kind of grunted.
"Where's yours?" Finn asked back when he realised Puck's dad wasn't there either. Puck got this creepy kind of smile on his face, the Puckerman smirk he's come to know it as, but back then it was kind of just a sneer.
"He blew away." Puck had said. Finn had nodded, he felt bad for the guy, he'd feel bad if his dad blew away, that's why they kept him in a jar.
Finn now knows the truth about Puck senior's disappearing act, but sometimes he thinks it's kind of the same as his dad. Maybe even kind of worse, cause at least he still has the jar, and the chair and the photo of them together. Puck doesn't even have that. Not that he should really care what puck has or doesn't have. Guy's a complete asshole.
It's just that, it's something that they'd always shared, something they'd kind of joked about together. And without Puck to keep him cracking wise, he's finding it's not really so funny anymore. He doesn't have like a dad man. You know? Like, that's huge. And he never really realised it because Puck didn't have a dad either and they kind of stuck together with that. But now he's like, alone, and he keeps thinking, a dad would have been really goddamn handy to have had around when everybody he knew was lying through their teeth to him and he had no fucking clue.
A dad would have been really handy to have around when he was trying to deal with his, like, arrival issues, and fuck it, yeah, when he was learning to drive as well. Although if he'd had his dad teaching him to drive he probably would have never hit the mail-main and then he would have had more trouble, you know, with the other thing.
He loves his mom, she's totally awesome, with the whole Quinn thing and letting him give up homework cause he was too tired to do anything, but she is, without question, a mom. She's all soft and calm and comforting words. He thinks what he's really been needing, what he's totally missed out on in his life, is something hard. Someone to tell him to pick himself up instead of doing it for him. Someone to tell him he's being a complete dick to people he actually cares about and that using girls because they let you and you need what they have is not cool. Someone to tell him he's actually just a moron and that there's absolutely no freakin way you can get a girl pregnant if you've never even gotten underneath her cheerio uniform.
Someone who would have taught him how to be like, a man, or something. But all he had was his mom, and a stupid urn filled with ashes that probably weren't even his dad's anyway, and a photo from when he was a baby, and how is that any help? It's just not. At all. If he's gonna be a man, he's gonna have to figure it out for himself.
He just can't stop himself from thinking that trying to be a man was a lot easier when Puck was standing next to him, trying to be one too.