Hey, everyone! So this is one of those been-gathering-dust-on-my-laptop kind of fics. I wrote this ages ago. Like, before Beth even had a name. Obviously, that makes this AU. As always, please review!

Warnings: AU after Sectionals, mentioned drug use, and implied character death.

Disclaimer: I don't own Glee. I'm just borrowing the characters for my evil, evil ways.

He Was My Best Friend
One-Shot

Finn didn't want to be worried about him. After everything Puck had done to him, he wanted nothing more than to wash his hands of the other boy and leave him behind. He'd planned to do it.

When he'd stormed out of the choir room, his plan had been to never look back. Then he showed up at Sectionals and by the end of the day, he was in Glee Club again. He told himself that he didn't come back for Puck or for Quinn, that he was really done with both of them. He told himself he came back for the others, but he knew it that was only partly true.

He kept going to Glee Club and worked with the two of them, but he didn't forgive them and eventually, they stopped trying. It hurt to watch them quit, but not as much as it hurt to find out that they'd both betrayed him.

Quinn had Beth later that year. They both held her once and then she was handed off to the nurse that would transport her to the morgue. That little baby that had been the subject of so much drama had died before she was even born. Quinn cried, curled up into a ball in her hospital bed. Puck looked like his world had just been shattered. He disappeared for a week after that. He left his phone behind and as far as they knew, only took himself and his car. None of them knew where he went, but when he came back, he'd seemed fine.

Finn hadn't believed it for a second, but he didn't pry either. He kept his hands washed of Puck as much as he could.

Then he saw the empty baggy fall out of Puck's jacket and it felt like his own world had come undone.

Puck was using drugs.

Again.

Finn had never run out of a room as fast as he did that day. He didn't stop, ran through the halls, ignoring the teachers that yelled at him to slow down. He didn't stop running until he got to the roof. He didn't start crying until he'd already thrown up twice.

His fist slammed into the concrete ground before he actually thought about it. Pain ripped up his arm, but he did it three more times, tears mingling with the blood his torn knuckles left behind.

"Stupid," another hit, "fucking," another, "idiot!" One last slam and he fell forward, knees pressing into the course ground as his forearms held him up.

They'd been through this before. Why the hell would Puck want to put himself through withdrawal again?

Unless he doesn't want to quit, a snide little voice whispered to him.

No. Puck didn't get that option. The last time...he'd stood by for a year last time, watching Puck poison himself with whatever he could get his hands on. For a year, he'd dragged Puck into bed, unconscious or so far gone that he might as well have been. For a year, he'd snuck his breaking best friend past sleeping parents and sometimes past suspicious teachers if Puck had chosen to use at school.

He wasn't doing that again. Never again.

The memory of that day was still burned in his mind. Puck's dad had come back to town again and he'd seen Puck begin to unravel even more than he already had been. Mr. Puckerman was gone before the week was out, but Puck had been left with too many bruises to count and there had been too few moments where he was actually sober.

Finn had found him later that night, seizing on his bedroom floor while his mom and sister were God knows where.

That night, Puck's heart stopped.

That same night, Finn performed CPR on his best friend, his cell on speaker as the 911 dispatcher talked him through it.

Puck had been dead for one minute, sixteen seconds before the paramedics had rushed in and shocked him back to life.

It had been the worst minute, sixteen seconds of his life.

And now he was using again.

Finn could feel the bile halfway up his throat as his mind conjured images of Puck shooting up with a dirty needle or snorting something through a rolled up bill. He imagined the joints, trying to remember if he'd smelled it on him recently. He couldn't remember, but he hadn't been close enough to tell, either. He felt sick when he realized he hadn't seen Puck in short sleeves since the day he took off.

"Puck..." Tears came to his eyes and he let them fall. Looking weak didn't matter. Puck may have failed him first by sleeping with Quinn, but he'd failed his best friend by not looking deep enough to see that he'd relapsed.

He kneeled there for another minute before he almost jumped to his feet and back to the school. Never once did he think about the vomit staining the sleeve of his letterman jacket; it didn't matter.

Puck was gone when he got back to the choir room.

He didn't come to school the rest of that week.

The next time he heard anything was when Mrs. Puckerman called him, crying that they'd found Puck in some motel thirty miles away, a needle in one hand and the only picture of father and daughter ever taken in the other.

The phone hit the floor seconds before his knees crashed to the hardwood. He didn't hear the rest of Glee Club asking what was wrong, didn't feel Quinn or Rachel's hands on his arm, didn't feel Mr. Shue's hand on his back, didn't hear the sound of Puck's mother crying over the tiny speaker of his cell phone.

All he heard was Puck's voice, soft and scared as it spoke, barely louder than the phantom beeps of the heart monitor he still heard in his dreams.

"Help me?"

He tried.

He failed his best friend.

The End

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