Hey, everyone! Yet another fic, but this time, it's a three-shot. The other two chapters are already complete on my laptop. It's just finding the time to get it up. I'll hopefully get the next chapter up in a couple days. School is just a bit insane at the moment. As always, please review!
Disclaimer: Glee doesn't belong to me.
Silence
Chapter 1
It was sometime around March that Burt finally caved and let Kurt take the live-in option at Dalton. The drive to and from every day had just been too much on his mind and on their wallets, so when Kurt had to call halfway home one day and ask his dad to pick him up because he'd almost fallen asleep at the wheel, they made their choice. Kurt was moved into his dorm by the end of that weekend.
He'd known going in that things would change. Even when he was commuting and living at home, he'd been starting to feel detached from his friends. Now that he was living away, he saw Mercedes less and less. He barely talked to the others. Finn, he occasionally saw when he'd come home on weekends, but then Blaine kissed him and became his boyfriend and...he stopped coming home.
Looking back now, he knew that he'd all but abandoned his new family for a guy and a relationship that didn't even end up working out. He and Blaine had been nice while they lasted, but crashed and burned a week before finals that June. He'd wanted to go home then, but he'd gotten wrapped up in studying and another weekend went by with Kurt shut up in his dorm room.
Moving out had been a long process. He didn't have many street clothes there since the other guys around Dalton tended to wear their uniforms a majority of the time, but his skin care products, trinkets, and everything had stacked up in the small single.
The room looked a hell of a lot bigger once all his stuff was crammed into the Navigator his dad had driven up.
Burt hadn't gotten there until dinnertime, foregoing his own to pick up his son. They'd gone to dinner together and talked on the ride back, but Kurt had been inside all of five seconds before he realized his dad had forgotten to mention a very important something.
Namely, Puck.
Living in his house.
He'd frozen in the doorway of the living room, eyes wide at the sight of Puck sitting on the couch (in PJs and looking too damned comfortable), feet curled under him as he and Finn watched some movie. Well, it was more Finn watching the movie. Puck was more focused on whatever he was scribbling in a notebook.
His dad smiled at them both, saying hi to Finn as he put a hand on Puck's shoulder, called him freaking Noah, and asked him how he was doing. Puck gave a small smile in return, more polite than anything (and wasn't that weird), and shrugged a shoulder before he inclined his head towards Finn. He rolled his eyes slightly and Kurt didn't know how, but it was like the former (ex-former? Current?) best friends spoke with their eyes because a second later Finn said he'd see him later and Puck gave him an acknowledging nod (was Kurt crazy or did he see a "welcome home"?) and disappeared upstairs.
"Forget to tell me something?" he shrilled.
"You said you were going to tell him, Finn!"
"I was! He never called me back! I wasn't going to tell him over a text!" Finn defended as he shut off the movie and looked at Kurt. "Um...Noah's living with us."
"Since when? And Noah?"
"He didn't tell him, did he?" Carole sighed from behind them.
"No!"
Finn shifted, uncomfortable. "Burt, can I... He's less likely to kill you."
"Go."
Finn was gone a second later.
"Dad-"
"Kurt, sit down," Burt said. He sat himself, Carole standing behind him, hands on his shoulders.
Kurt sat beside his father and attempted a calming breath. "How long has he been living here? You didn't think that was something I should have been involved in?"
"It was my idea," Carole said, locking eyes with Kurt when his gaze snapped to her. "A lot's changed while you've been gone. And it's not your fault," she hastened to add when he opened his mouth. "Dalton has been good for you. You've been safe there. And it's been a hard adjustment.
"We should have tried harder to tell you and that's our fault that we didn't. Everything just got hectic these last few months." She sighed. "It was my idea for Noah to move in with us. Your father and Finn agreed and there hadn't been many options at the time."
"What options? Why would the only option be for Puck to live here? And where...he's not in my room, is he?"
"He's sharing with Finn," Burt said. "We traded out his queen for a couple singles."
Placated by the fact that at least Puck wasn't in his room, Kurt nodded. "Now, how about why he's here!"
Almost like they'd been rehearsing it from the day Puck moved in, his dad and Carole traded off as they told the story no one had thought should be told over the phone. Carole's eyes teared up as she reminded him that she'd known Puck since he and Finn met in pre-school, that he'd been like another son to her for years, no matter what had happened with Quinn. One fell down her cheek as she looked him dead in the eyes and said Noah is bisexual.
Come again?
The idea alone had made Kurt's jaw drop. Literally. Because...what? Puck. The bully that had thrown him in a dumpster for a year and a half was bi. Something Kurt honestly wasn't even sure if he believed in. Before Rachel's party and the drama that unfolded after that, he'd never even considered bisexuality. Always saw it as gay or straight, because, if you were going to be with someone the rest of your life, you had to choose. He'd done some thinking after everything. Thought about what Blaine might have been feeling then and the confusion that had to have come with not knowing if you liked one gender or both. Even during his straight phase with Brittany, he'd never considered it. He still didn't fully understand it now.
But...Puck?
In a weird way, it almost made sense. With Puck's sexual history, he had to run out of girls eventually. Most learned their lesson after the first time, so repeats weren't likely. If Carole didn't look like she was about to burst into tears or something, he would have snorted and said that of course it would be Puck that ended up sleeping around with guys too.
Then the rest of her sentence kicked into his head and his heart almost dropped.
"Noah is bisexual and his mother's boyfriend..."
She hadn't even finished the sentence, but it had been enough for him to understand. He watched her head drop and his dad reach behind him to hold her hand. He watched her shoulders shake for a few seconds and knew.
Knew that whatever this guy's reaction had been, it was probably worse than anything Karofsky had ever handed out to him.
"He hurt him bad, son."
His dad now. Voice soft, but still holding a hint of anger. The tone that screamed everything Burt wanted to do to that man with his shotgun.
Carole walked out of the room, hand over her mouth, when his dad started to tell him how Puck had tried to come out to his mom and how her boyfriend had heard. His own eyes started to burn as his dad started to list injuries and the shakily scrawled note Puck wrote when he woke up in the hospital a day later.
She just stood there.
It made him sick. Made actual bile rise in his throat. He could taste it as he swallowed it back, a broken why slipping past his lips instead.
"I don't know," Burt sighed, his ball cap clenched in his fists as he twisted it.
Concussion. Three broken ribs. Strangulation. Left wrist broken. Damaged vocal cords from something Burt refused to describe to him.
Puck doesn't talk anymore.
Can't. Won't. They don't know, his dad told him. In the beginning, he said that the doctors thought he wasn't talking because of the trauma to his cords, but now they weren't sure if it was the trauma of the actual event keeping him silent.
"If he can talk, the doctors say it's up to him to decide when. We'll know which it is if and when he does try, but for now, he has a notebook. That girl from Glee, Tina, is taking Sign Language for her foreign language. She's teaching all of us some stuff. The alphabet. Basic words. We're not sure how long this will last, but we're just trying to go with it."
That explained the tiny hand twitches his dad's right hand kept doing when he wasn't strangling (an image of Puck, hands around his neck, flashed across Kurt's vision) his hat. He was running through the alphabet. Probably didn't even realize what he was doing.
They were spelling out God-knows-what absentmindedly as his dad told him that Puck had nowhere else to go. Explained that Puck's little sister had called Finn in hysterics when her mom and her boyfriend walked out, cried that Noah wouldn't wake up. Finn had been the one to get there and call 911. Had been the one Sarah clung to for hours in the hospital waiting room until Mrs. Puckerman showed up and demanded Sarah go home with her. Carole had apparently needed to be held back.
Sarah was still with her mom. The cops, homophobic assholes that they were in this town, had ruled that Ken Miller (Kurt still thought he was an ass) wasn't at fault. Didn't believe a word Puck...wrote. They said Sarah would be safe there and sent her back.
That ruling alone had made Finn punch a wall. He nearly broke his hand.
It had all happened just after Regionals six weeks ago. Literally. Just after. New Directions had won and his dad guessed that Puck had just been going off the high from that. Came out to his mom and...
Kurt realized as his stomach churned that could be the last time he or anyone else ever heard Puck sing. It was then that a tear fell. It just wasn't right. Puck may not have been the best guy Kurt had ever known, but he'd been better since he joined Glee last year. He'd stopped bullying the other Glee kids and himself. Kurt had seen the man in him come out. When he spoke about Beth. When he offered to protect him. Puck wasn't perfect, but even Kurt could admit now that he wasn't a bad guy anymore.
Didn't mean that his original reaction was any less well deserved, because Puck was still his former bully. He may not hate the guy, but...come on.
It didn't stop a second tear, though.
His dad said Puck was still in Glee Club, that he would still be able to participate in it for Nationals at the end of the month. The rules said there had to be twelve members. They didn't say that all twelve members would have to sing. Puck would do his part in the group, dancing with them and playing guitar. Just because he couldn't sing didn't mean he was out.
Kurt smiled softly, proud of the friends he'd left behind at McKinley. They rallied around their own. They were a family.
"And Noah?" he asked softly.
"I think it had something to do with Miller," Burt sighed, hat twisted in his fists again. "He kept flinching every time someone called him Puck. He seemed okay with Carole and Rachel calling him Noah, so we just went with it."
Kurt nodded.
Noah.
Got it.
"Kurt, I know-"
"It's okay."
And it was. Yeah, it was still a little weird to think that Pu-Noah was living with them now and it was even weirder to think that it's because he was bashed. But he understood. He understood why his dad and Carole took him in. He understood why they didn't tell him on the phone. Knew himself well enough to know he would have hung up the second Noah is moving in passed his dad's lips. Part of him wished someone had driven up to tell him, but he wasn't going to split hairs. There wasn't anything that could be done now.
"Is he okay?" he asked, glancing up the stairs of the new house he was still getting used to.
"He's healed. His wrist is out of the cast. Still has a brace, but it's not his writing hand."
Kurt nodded, part of him grateful that he wouldn't have to see the bruises and have to think about what Noah had been through.
He hugged his dad before he left the room. Gave a crushing one to a still softly sobbing Carole in the kitchen and kissed her cheek.
Finn was sitting on the top of the stairs, bottom lip drawn between his lips nervously. He jumped to his feet when he saw Kurt. "Man, I should have told you. Burt told me to, but I didn't know how to bring it up and-"
"Finn. It's okay. My dad explained everything to me."
"Did he tell you not to-"
"I'll call him Noah. Don't worry." He shook his head, eyeing his stepbrother. "You're starting to obsess."
Finn sighed. "I know. I'm just-"
"Finn!" Kurt chuckled, putting a hand on Finn's arm. "He's your best friend. I get it." He glanced at Finn's closed bedroom door.
Finn followed his gaze and nodded. "I think I'll go grab another slice of my mom's cheesecake," he said before he slipped past Kurt and down the stairs.
Kurt stared at the door for a long moment before taking a breath. He knocked softly, turning the knob as he did, and poked his head inside.
"Hey."
TBC
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