AN: I've been on a strange Grilled Cheesus AU trip lately, mostly because I think there were a thousand different directions that episode could have gone.
Enjoy, read, and review! I own nothing.
Kurt thought he had known tired.
He thought he knew tired after five hour weekday practices under a scorching summer sun, courtesy of Sue Sylvester, and fueled on nothing but a thermos of Gatorade and fear. He thought he knew tired after that last semester of six AP classes, an endless bog of timed writings and coffee and early morning exams, no space left over in his brain to memorize so much as a song lyrics.
As it turned out, he was wrong.
This was tired.
Sitting alone with his father in a hospital room, the clock ticking away the visiting hours. This was tired.
He had thought it was fear, at first. Ms. Pillsbury leaving him, a glance back with those big brown eyes. A dear trapped under fluorescent lights, he'd thought. Bambi at the hospital. He thought of Bambi and he thought of his mother and he thought of the last time he'd had a parent in the hospital.
It might've been fear.
But now, going home to an empty house, shuttered windows watching him, he knows that he's tired.
Kurt wants to go to bed. He wants to swathe himself in seven hundred thread count Egyptian cotton and dream the night away. He wants to wake up to his father clattering out the door in his peeling work boots and find out that it's all been a dream, or maybe a byproduct of that pot brownie that Puck shared with the club last Tuesday.
But the stack of bills sitting on the dining room table has other plans for him.
He's never paid a bill before. Hell, he's never signed a check before. But he does just that, working through the stack methodically, painstakingly, pausing every now and then to rest his forehead against the cool edge of the table.
It's nice to know that his artistic talent hasn't withered away along with all of his free time, he thinks. A little nagging voice at the back of his head reminds him that his father probably wouldn't be too proud of him, forging signatures and all. The same voice also reminds him that his father wouldn't be proud of getting the power and water shut off, either.
He licks the envelopes, seals them, and goes to bed without dinner.
Lying in bed in the cool dark Kurt thinks to himself that if there was ever a time to cry and get it all out of his system, this would be it.
He doesn't, though.
Six thirty the next morning and Kurt can't go to school just yet. He has to go to the shop, set things in order, get all the guys going.
He sees an odd sort of expression shared by all of them and it occurs to him that maybe it's pity. These are men that he's worked with since he was about seven or eight, coveralls monogrammed with his initials in pink rhinestones, and they're sorry for him.
But there's nothing that they can do.
They take their jobs and their paychecks and he goes to school, temples already throbbing.
Midday and already everyone seems to know.
Tina and Mercedes and Artie and sometimes the others, he sees them whispering and knows they're sorry for him.
Gay in Ohio and a dead mother and now this? Poor guy. What if he loses his dad too?
I won't lose anyone, he wants to say. I'm gay and I'm not sorry and my mom's dead but things were getting better and my dad will wake up soon, just you wait and see.
He doesn't say anything, though. He takes his seat and puts his nose in the air and tries to look strong. He's trying to channel Glinda or Patti Lupone or anyone else in the world, really, and it's almost kind of working.
But then Brittany hands him that homemade book, that construction paper book, and he almost cries a little bit.
Almost. But not quite.
"Why didn't you tell me?" Finn is asking him and he's jerked out of his own mind.
He can feel his mouth moving, making excuses, but the honest truth is that Finn Hudson had never crossed his mind in first the panic and later the torpor that had smothered.
He had thought of Carole Hudson. She was kind and had nice eyes and made his father laugh sometimes.
But he hadn't thought of Finn.
"No change in condition," the red-headed nurse tells Kurt, her blue eyes pitying just like everybody else.
He sits down in the same chair anyway. Watching, waiting.
He hears her white Keds squeak away down the halls, down the tiled floors, and he's lonely.
His friends sort of hate him. They think he's being his usual prickly, defensive self, not wanting to hear their God songs. They don't understand.
It hurts, to be adrift at sea like this and hear everyone tell him that it will be alright if you have faith in Jesus.
He doesn't have faith in Jesus. The only people he counts on are himself and his father. He's told them that.
They don't listen, though, and all they can tell him is just hang on and have faith in Jesus and God will make it better.
He doesn't see how it's supposed to make him feel any better being told that the situation is in God's hands when he doesn't believe that there is a God. It only makes him feel more hopeless. It only makes him that much more lonely.
The male nurse, the one with the greying temples, kicks Kurt out as gently as he can at eight o'clock.
He goes down to the shop and does an oil change or a tire or two and puts the files in order and answers all the calls on the answering machine before locking up the place.
It seems woefully empty without that baseball cap bobbing around.
He goes home and finishes that paper that he couldn't type while at the hospital, prints it out, and sinks into the couch.
Eleven o'clock and he's so tired he feels soaked in maple syrup, but he can't fall asleep.
Eleven o'clock and he feels shivery and paper thin, but he can't bring himself to eat.
He turns on the television instead, and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone is on. He hasn't seen this movie in years.
He gets that constricting sensation again, like he's supposed to be crying right now but it's stuck in his throat.
A year ago if he looked into that mirror, he might've seen himself on the Broadway stage with the lights making him golden, ready to fly.
But this year he knows if he looked into that mirror, he'd only see what Harry saw.
The difference is, he's got no Hogwarts to run away to.
The rest of the week follows the same pattern.
Going to school, Kurt feels like the chirping bird on the cuckoo clock, having to pop out every day at the same time with a smile on his face.
He doesn't know why he lies when people ask him if he's okay, if he has a place to stay, and how is your father doing?
Part of him kind of wants someone to care enough to shake him until his teeth chatter and the truth falls out. The other part wants to march soldier-like, hold it together for his father's sake.
Mercedes is avoiding his eyes and it kills him. He'd like nothing better than to curl up on the couch at her house like they always did.
She can't look him in the eye, though, not now that she's finally figured out that their worlds spin on a different axis, he doesn't follow the same candle that guides her.
She thinks he's with Tina who thinks he's with Finn (who was almost a brother after all, he supposes) who thinks he's with Mercedes and nobody bothers to confirm any of these theories.
They have other things to worry about anyway. Boyfriends, girlfriends, what to wear to church next Sunday.
And meanwhile he's trying to keep the garage running and his grades steady and his hospital visits regular.
He visits every day, but there's never a change.
Tuesday morning and Kurt wakes up late. His alarm clock is still blaring, hopping up and down on his nightstand indignantly. A little bit of dust floats down from the ceiling.
How could he have slept through this?
He gets his answer when he tries to put spearmint paste on his toothbrush and ends up vomiting all over the sink instead. He sinks to the tiled floor, knees shivering, and wants to cry.
But he doesn't.
Instead, he throws up again into the toilet. He puts on his lazy day jeans and sweatshirt, pops an Advil, and heads out to open up shop. They taught him how to use concealer in theatre class. He'd put some on, but his skin is so hot it would probably melt right off, along with the rest of his composure.
When the first slushie of the day slaps him in the face, he almost wants to thank the hockey jock responsible. It eases the burning, the hot, the sticky.
By lunch, though, he isn't sweaty. His skin is all clammy and his bones are shivery. Kurt should be at lunch, begging a spare jacket off of Tina or somebody, but he's in the library doing that assignment due next period, the one he didn't finish because he spent the evening listening to the heart monitor thrum.
The bell rings and he doesn't hear it. He only leaves when the librarian lady with the glasses halfway down her nose taps him on the shoulder.
He spends the entirety of Glee practice sitting in the back with his eyes screwed shut, a spike slowly driving itself through the side of his skull. Rachel's voice sounds like so many birdcalls, so many whistles.
Nobody talks to him.
He can't honestly say that bothers him.
He sits in the back until everyone has left, then leaves by himself, one shuddery step at a time.
Halfway down the corridor he stumbles and his book bag and papers go flying. When he bends down to pick them up, his fingers come away damp.
His water bottle has sprung a leak, and the calculus homework that he managed to finish in class is an unintelligible wad of smeared ink and lead.
One second of clumsiness. It will cost him an hour of sleep tonight. He sits down, hard.
He wants to cry.
Instead, Kurt starts laughing uncontrollably.
"Whoa. Dude. You okay there?"
He stops laughing abruptly. Noah Puckerman is not somebody that he wants to talk to right now.
He opens his mouth to protest, but instead a wave of light-headedness washes over him. His world lists to the side.
Then it rights itself.
Noah Puckerman is on his knees next to Kurt, an arm bracing him upright, and the whole thing is probably a fever dream.
"Fuck. You don't look good."
A large palm covers his forehead.
"Jesus Christ, you're burning up. You got a fever?"
"No shit, Sherlock," he tries to snap, but it comes out as more of a slurred mumble.
Puck ignores him. "Shit, you're really sick. No wonder you weren't bitching at Berry today."
Kurt nods, because his brain can't really process much right now.
"You're not driving like this," says Puck, knitting his brows. "You probably don't even know what the hell I'm telling you. You're good as drunk."
He hoists Kurt to his feet, then stretches out his palm. "Give me your keys."
On another day, he would sooner throw himself off a cliff than entrust his baby to Puck. This, however, is not a normal day. And besides, Puck has a point. If he got behind the wheel now, he'd be no better than the woman who killed his mother.
So he drops his keys into Puck's outstretched hand and allows himself to be steered to the backseat of his car. He doesn't even offer a perfunctory complaint when Puck takes over the driver's seat.
As they drive, Guns N' Roses blares through the speakers. He sees Puck raise his eyebrows through the rearview mirror. He doesn't have the energy to explain that it was his dad's favorite, next to Mellencamp.
They pull up next to a modest one-story house.
"I don't know your address," Puck explains, he helps him out of the car. "And you're so high right now if I asked you you'd probably tell me fuckin' Sesame Street."
When he was three, Kurt's dad would watch Sesame Street with him. And the Muppets. Kurt had always liked Miss Piggy.
The living room is a little dim, but spotlessly clean. It smells a little like baking sugar cookies.
His mom liked sugar cookies.
Puck guides him to the couch where he collapses gratefully.
"Sleep it off until you're san enough to call someone, yeah?" Puck tells him.
He doesn't need to be told twice. He passes out, like someone took a hammer to his head.
When he returns to consciousness, massive brown eyes are level with his nose. Someone prods him in the side.
"He looks dead."
"Piss off, Sarah."
The girl scampers away.
Kurt sits up, feeling groggy. Puck is sitting at the end of the couch, watching him. It takes him a moment to remember how he got there.
"You feeling better?"
"Kind of?" He immediately winces. His throat is raspy and raw; it hurts like hell to talk.
"I think your fever broke. When you were sleeping." Puck looks as awkward as Kurt feels. He doesn't blame him.
"That's good. I think." Kurt feels monumentally stupid.
Puck is running a hand over the back of his mohawk. "So. Are you gonna call your mom or something?"
Kurt laughs. "She's dead."
Puck gapes a little bit, but recovers quickly. "A great-aunt? Aretha? Finnessa?"
Kurt would like to object to Puck's insulting of Mercedes, but only gives a weird diagonal shake of the head.
"You're telling me you're not staying with anyone? You're holding shit down by yourself? Christ, you got balls of steel, keeping it together this long."
Kurt should be smiling at the odd, roundabout compliment. Instead, it feels like a gale-force wind is building in his chest. He kept a lid on this feeling for so long. Self-pity is deadly, it takes away the energy he needs to keep on trucking.
Sitting on Puck's couch, wrapped in a throw blanket, delirious from sickness. This is the lowest he's ever felt. He can't help it anymore.
A tear, falls, then two, then three, then he's burst into inelegant, jagged sobs. Puck looks scared for a moment, but then seems to make up his mind.
Of all the shoulders Kurt expected himself to be crying into, the last would be Noah Puckerman's. And yet there he is, crying like he hasn't cried since he was eight years old, muffled in Puck's shoulders.
When he eventually drops off to sleep again, the last coherent thought he can form is that it smells nice. Musk and cinnamon and something he can't quite place.
When Mrs. Puckerman arrives home that night, she is first shocked and then appalled to hear Kurt's story. She promptly whips up a chicken noodle soup, a cold compress, and forces Puck to give up all of his pillows for the night.
Puck, surprisingly, does not complain.
Kurt's eyes are mercifully shut, but he hears whispers and shuffling.
"I'm proud of you, Noah," says the warm round voice that is Mrs. Puckerman. "I'm proud of you, for doing the right thing."
"It's not the right thing," says the low deep voice that is Puck "It's the human thing." Another pause. "He's a friend.
A friend? Kurt repeats mentally. Since when?
But if he thinks about it, he hasn't taken a dumpster dive in ages and except for Karofsky and the hockey jocks who don't listen to anybody anyway, he's been mostly left alone.
In his own way, Puck has been looking out for Kurt and the rest of the club.
The next day, Mrs. Puckerman refuses to let him go to school. She gets him the proper drugs this time as well as plenty of soup and crackers. She even hugs him when she has to leave. Like Carole did. Like his mom did.
It's strange.
By three-thirty, when school is out and Puck is home, he's feeling well enough to function. So Puck drives him to the hospital, and once again he sits on the plastic chair and runs his thumb over his dad's hand and waits for something to change.
Nothing changes.
At least this time, it's not only him and the heart monitor until dusk creeps in. Puck is slouched in the chair next to Kurt, thumbing through an old copy of Cosmopolitan he found in the waiting room and passing snide comments about the sex tips.
Kurt laughs at some of Puck's rude jokes, brings him some food from the hospital canteen. Puck does not complain once about the long hours, keeps a vigilant eye on Burt Hummel himself.
As time passes, they fall into a kind of routine. Puck stays with him at the hospital, helps him around the shop, snaps at anyone who tries to needle him over the religion thing. Kurt tutors Puck in English and Chemistry, makes dinner for the family, keeps Sarah occupied.
They might even be real friends now, not just dysfunctional ones. Kurt knows that Puck's actually watched and enjoyed West Side Story, takes his sister to the library every two weeks, and knows the number to every Chinese take-out place within a twenty five mile radius. Puck knows that Kurt can hotwire a car, makes a mean soufflé, and has rewatched the Godfather more times than he cares to count.
For the first time in forever, Kurt is not lonely.
A month gone by and Kurt is against his will starting to lose hope. His father never moves, never blinks.
Puck has gone to the vending machines or something to get a drink. Kurt is hanging onto his father's hands for dear life. He might just cry again.
"Please," he whispers. "Please, please, please."
He knows he's hoping against all hope. He can't count the number of times he sat by that bed and begged his father to say something, anything.
His father doesn't say anything.
But his fingers move, and outside the window, the sun breaks through the clouds.
When Puck comes back to the room, Kurt immediately tackles him in a hug. Puck asks no questions, only pats his back.
When Kurt raises his hand in Glee practice and tells them that he's prepared a number, Mr. Schuester's eyebrows almost fly right off of his face. This may or may not have something to do with the fact that Kurt hasn't opened his mouth to sing in Glee club in almost a month.
Some people put their heads together to whisper, some smile.
He steps up to sing, and it's like coming home again, finding his voice.
Life won't be perfect. It's a long road to recuperation for his father and most of the school still hates and will always hate him for who he is, but it's okay. That much, he can handle.
The song he's singing, it's a little out of his comfort range. No belting, no Barbra, no dramatics. The lyrics are something he means though, and he's looking at once person in particular in that audience when he sings
They'll all imply that I might not last the day
And then you call me and it's not so bad
It's not so bad
And he's directly speaking to that one person when he sings
And I want to thank you for giving me
The best day of my life
When the applause has been given and he's taken his bows, he goes back to his seat next to Puck, expecting maybe a pat on the shoulder or one of those gruff, back-slapping man hugs. Instead, he gets a kiss, square on the lips. It's a little awkward, because they're both standing on the risers in the choir room, but it's warm and perfect and he smiles into it all the same.
The room immediately lights up with whistles and catcalling. Schuester slaps on the top of the piano, trying in vain to call the class back to order.
When things have calmed down and Kurt is sitting quietly, his fingers twined with Puck, Mercedes whispers an "I'm sorry. Can you forgive me?"
And he does.
Things are looking up.
The song is by Dido, and I also do not own that.