Kurt was hooked up to a million monitors, and they were beeping out of key.

"There's no real way of knowing, but we believe he can hear you," the nurse had told Kurt's dad sympathetically. "Talk to him. Hold his hand. It will comfort him to know you're here."

Burt nodded, then pulled a chair close to Kurt's bed and sat. The metal legs of the chair let out a long skreeeeeeek as it moved across the floor, and Burt flinched, then grabbed Kurt's hand and began stroking it compulsively. "It's all right. It's all right," he repeated, his voice sweet and soft to keep it from breaking. "Shhh. It's okay." Burt's face was gray and his eyes hung loosely in bunched pockets of skin.

After awhile the nurse brought in a more comfortable chair. Burt took it, sat back down, took back his son's hand, and eventually fell asleep.

The Glee kids weren't allowed in, which left half of them torn up and the other half relieved that they wouldn't have to find any excuses. They made him a recording of the group's songs instead. It didn't go very well. Brittany wept extravagantly and had to leave the room repeatedly, although she'd never had much to do with Kurt when he was conscious. Rachel couldn't get through Defying Gravity without crying either, insisting over and over that it wasn't right for her to sing the solo and were there any recordings of Kurt singing it and were they sure he hadn't made any of himself singing it at home and could they maybe get Mr. Hummel to search his room for one? Quinn and Santana jumped in to let her know that searching Kurt's room was a huge invasion of privacy, Mercedes tried to break up the fight but wound up making everything louder and angrier, Tina found she'd developed a for-real stutter and Artie wheeled himself out of the room to figure stuff out on his own. Finn and Will were the walking dead.

Puck was gone.

As soon as he heard about Kurt, Puck went to Will and told him he was dropping Glee. Will had been so lost in his grief all day, and struggling so hard to think of everything that Glee could possibly do – another bake sale? car wash? benefit performance? – that it had never occurred to him that Glee itself might not stand united. At first he didn't understand what Puck was telling him.

"Leaving," he said. As though it might mean leaving school. Leaving the state. Something. Something not-this.

"Dropping Glee." And Puck held Will's gaze. How dare he hold Will's gaze? "I'm not up for this."

"Up for what?"

"Up for getting my head kicked in. Sorry, Schu. I'm not doing it."

Will's head was whirling. "None of us are getting –" Oh Jesus. "Staying with Glee will not get your head kicked in, Puck."

Puck stood up, shot him a level glance. "I'm one of two football players in Glee, Mr. Schuster. If Finn's got half a brain he'll quit too. This ain't over, and it ain't a good time for a football player to be singing in benefit concerts and holding bake sales for the fag who just got –"

Will was up so fast his chair fell over behind him. "How dare you use that word, Puck, how –" He was choking and talking anyway. " -- how can – you don't –"

Puck took the tiniest of steps back, and if you'd been listening closely you could have heard his breath quicken, but Will couldn't hear anything but the blood rushing through his ears. He barely heard Puck's next words, and wished he hadn't heard at all:

"It's fag-bashing, Mr. Schuster. Nothing else to call it. And it's not happening to me."

Will thought he'd remember the set of Puck's shoulders as he walked out of the room until his dying day.

So Will had the job of telling the group, at the emergency session they'd convened, that Puck was gone. Responses were in character, but Will found the only kid he could see was Finn, sitting with his face in his hands. Finn hadn't dropped yet, and Will wondered if he would. He wondered if Puck was right, if now wasn't a safe time for a football player to be on Glee.

And he wondered who Kurt had been kneeling in front of in the locker room that day -- the day before he got his head kicked in.