TITLE: Play This Thing By Ear
AUTHOR: Mari
RATING: PG-13
DISCLAIMER: Ain't none of this mine.
FANDOM: Glee
PAIRING/CHARACTERS: Burt Hummel, Kurt/Puck
CONTAINS: Language, angst, and good parenting. Contact me if you need or want to know more.
SUMMARY: You protect them. That's just what parents do.
Whenever he doesn't have glee or football or isn't doing something with Mercedes after school, Kurt's usually at the garage by 3:45. Burt doesn't have to look at the clock in order to know this. He raised a good kid. Almost too good, in fact; there have been a couple of times when he's wished that for once Kurt won't call ahead, won't be sure to be in before curfew, won't take such care to make certain that Burt doesn't worry about him.
At 3:57 on a Wednesday--Burt knows this because he's so startled that he actually looks up and at the cracked, greasy clock that's been hanging off the wall since he bought the place--he hears his son enter the garage. There's a second voice with him, rising and falling. It doesn't belong to Mercedes. Burt very carefully puts down the pen that he was using to do payroll.
"Aw, hell," he says when he sees the much taller, much broader, and written all over with not a good influence and not going to end well kid that Kurt has with him. He notices that the kid is carrying a box with him filled with miscellaneous mechanical pieces. He notices that the kid--if that even fits, how the hell is he still in high school--is looking at Kurt from the corner of his eye with an amused expression and one half of his mouth lifted into a smirk. He notices that Kurt is nearly glowing.
"Aww, hell," Burt repeats, with much greater conviction than the first time around. Jack, who ought to be rebuilding an engine block nearby but is instead finding great reason to linger around Burt's makeshift desk to see if he's going to be getting his bonus, looks up. One word, and Burt swears to God that he'll fire him. He might fire him still just for that grin.
"Hey, Dad," Kurt says. One corner of his mouth is twitching, like he wants to grin but wants to play it cool at the same time, no big deal, he takes guys who look as though they're one parole violation away from a rewarding career as an illegal tattoo artist to his dad's garage all the time. "This is Noah Puckerman, he's in glee club with me."
"Ah, it's Puck," the man-child corrects almost too quickly, flicking Kurt a sideways look. He doesn't offer Burt his hand. It could be because he's holding a box of miscellaneous car parts, if Burt were feeling generous, but bullshit. The box ain't that heavy.
"Puck," Kurt corrects himself quickly. "Anyway, he has an auto shop project, and I told him that he could use some of our tools. Is that okay?" Kurt looks caught halfway between nervous and entirely willing to make Burt's life hell if he says the wrong thing. It's a very teenaged look.
Burt takes a second glance into the box that Puck is carrying. It's a carburetor, or will be. Puck could probably put it together in an actual garage-garage, if he actually gets off his ass and puts in the effort. It damned sure doesn't need any special tools that they have here.
Burt looks up again, and at his son's face, and says, "No problem, just clean up after yourselves and stay out of the guys' ways."
"Okay." They disappear together around a Honda that's sans transmission at the moment. Burt takes a deep breath and tries not to swear. When Jack picks up the hidden copy of Always My Child and flips it open to a highlighted passage on first crushes, Burt takes a second deep breath and doesn't fire him.
*
Burt is dreading the next day, and he nearly gives everyone at the garage a spontaneous raise when he hears a girl's voice alongside of Kurt's instead of the delinquent's. "Hi, Mr. Hummel!" Mercedes yells across the garage at him. She's stubbornly ignoring Kurt as he's trying to drag her into Burt's unoccupied office, and she nearly drops her backpack while she waves at Burt with her free hand. Amused, Burt lifts his own hand in return. Kurt had told him that Mercedes might be coming to the garage that afternoon in order to study; they have used his office in order to do their homework before. Funny how the noise of machines and people working had never bothered them so much that they had had to close the office door before.
"You know, my daddy had a policy," Jack says when Burt passes by the office to get a fresh cup of coffee. Jack is running water through a flat tire and struggling to find the place where it's leaking. Mostly he's just getting water down the shins of his coveralls. "Boys and girls don't go into rooms together and close the door. Period."
"The office has glass walls," Burt points out. He doesn't bother saying that it's not Mercedes that he's concerned about; no one gets hired here unless they pass his Kurt-approval tests.
"You should think about putting those into his bedroom," Jack says. He swears amiably when his shoes squelch. "Goddamned luxury cars, every little wobble and they think they gotta bring it in."
"It's in the sidewall," Burt says. He reaches out and taps at the small series of bubbles that Jack missed while he was slinging water. Jack mutters something about not wanting to be the one to tell the customer that she needs an entirely new tire, while Burt glances through the office window at his son. Kurt's saying something to Mercedes that makes her squeal and slap him on the arm. While their books are scattered all around them at Burt's desk, Burt very much doubts that it's the mysteries of lipids making Kurt's face light up like that.
"My kid's bedroom is in the basement," Burt finally says, and does his best to pretend that he didn't spend a few seconds weighing the pros and cons of the idea.
"Hey." Burt recognizes the voice. Months, and Mercedes still calls him "Mr. Hummel", but after two days, to this kid he's already "hey." He turns and sees Puck standing with a backpack slung over his shoulder. Burt doesn't try to keep what he's thinking out of his face. The epic mistake that his son is making doesn't flinch. He gestures instead towards the office door, which Burt only now realizes he was subtly angling his body so as to block. "Study date, so.."
Burt firstly doesn't think that Puck has ever sincerely said the word "study" in his life, and he doesn't even want to think about this kid and "date" in the same context as his son. "Just don't screw around with my ledgers," he says as he moves out of the way. Puck's eyebrows tick up slightly before he enters the office and shuts the door behind him.
Not good enough, Burt thinks. Kurt looks up at Puck's entrance and grins. Mercedes tries, not entirely successfully, to hide her smile behind her hand.
*
Man might be able to live on Chinese take-out alone, but Burt learned soon after his wife's passing that that is not the case with small children, especially children who display the kind of finickiness that Kurt made his own as soon as he was able to eat solid foods. One more thing to like when it came to Kurt discovering at least a slight interest in one sport: for four months out of the year, at least, his son could be counted on to eat just about anything set in front of him and then look longingly at the plate when he was done. Football is over now, though, and Burt is having to rediscover his skills with pot roast.
"Oh, come on," he says at dinner, watching Kurt push his food in ornate circles about his plate. "I didn't burn it this time, and I measured the salt."
Kurt looks up. "It's great, Dad," he says, but he puts one of the carrots that he prepared himself into his mouth as an example. "I'm just thinking."
Thinking. Burt knows exactly what his son was thinking about. He takes a bite of his own pot roast, which might be a little too salty, but come on, the kid's a bean pole and it's not like a little water weight is going to kill him. Under his stare, Kurt sighs and very carefully cuts off a sliver of pot roast no larger than his thumb nail. "Happy?" he asks when it's gone.
Burt points across the table at Kurt with his fork. "Starving kids. China," he says. "I let you eat too many donuts at the shop, anyway, they're going to slap me for bad parenting."
"You eat the donuts," Kurt argues back, "I know how much trans fat is in those things." But he takes a larger bite of the pot roast, and then even some of the best boxed mashed potatoes that money can buy, before he goes back to arranging his food into some kind of abstract art. They've had nights like this before, Kurt stubbornly within his own world and refusing to be pulled out of it, but usually there's a load of clothes in the washer when Burt gets in from the garage, even if laundry day was the day before. And it's a different kind of quiet, then.
Burt clears his throat. Kurt glances up at him. "So, this Puck kid," he starts. Kurt's ears go pink, and he begins to cut his carrots into dainty circles, as if he's looking for tree rings. "You haven't really hung out with him before, have you?" Even though the name is vaguely familiar to Burt, for reasons that he cannot quite place. Considering how few friends Kurt had before things started to get better this year, though, Burt doesn't think that his instincts are leading him in the wrong direction.
"No." Kurt takes a mouthful of pot roast so huge that Burt worries for a couple of seconds that his son is going to choke on it, as if maybe he thinks that he can flatter Burt into not pushing any further. Burt stirs circles into his mashed potatoes and waits until Kurt has no other choice but to go on. "He's in glee club with me. I'm just, um, helping him with some grades and stuff so that he can stay eligible and stay in the club."
Burt developed a special kind of parental radar on the day that he brought Kurt home from the hospital, and it's going off like a siren inside his head. "Helping him out, huh?" he asks, thinking of how fantastically happy Kurt had looked every time that Puck was with him, how offhandedly amused Puck had been by that happiness, and how very fucking hard Kurt worked to have the kind of teenage experiences that he deserved. "That's it?"
"We hang out sometimes. I'm trying to convince him to buy some new clothes, anyone who wears plaid without irony deserves what's coming to them."
"So he's a friend," Burt says. The sirens haven't died down. "Like Mercedes."
If Kurt cuts those carrots into slices any thinner, they're going to be transparent. "No," Kurt answers so quietly that Burt can barely hear him. The tips of his ears are the color of strawberries. "Not like Mercedes."
Oh, goddamnit.
*
Every teenager has to have at least one friend that their parent hates, Burt had decided, and Kurt had so few friends for such a long time that it was pure karma that he would finally get one that Burt outright loathed. Mercedes helps set the table when she comes over for dinner and, while she could not help Burt install the new windshield in Kurt's car, had sat close by and watched intently enough to make Burt wonder if windshield-breaking was going to be a fixture in her life. As a counterweight, he's now tempted to check into Puck's background to make certain that the man-boy doesn't have a history of setting fires.
Kurt gets home almost an hour and a half late from glee rehearsal and runs straight down to his room, but not before Burt notices that his face is flushed and his lips are swollen. Kurt doesn't close the door all the way; Burt can hear him talking excitedly to someone on the phone, though he cannot make out the exact words. He is not, he tells himself, going to be the kind of parent who needs to eavesdrop on their kid's every thought and action. He raised a good son. He's not worried that Kurt did something wrong. That doesn't mean a damned thing about what he thinks of other people's kids.
Burt returns to the kitchen and discovers that the stir-fry that he was experimenting with in a half-hearted attempt to save money on take-out has burned to the bottom of the skillet. He mutters an obscenity and scrapes it into the trash, then picks up the phone to order dinner in. By the time he had bought everything, they might as well have just said "screw it" and bought pizza, anyhow, and the monthly budget would not have reflected a difference.
Kurt comes up from his room just as Burt is tipping the delivery guy and closing the front door. "Soup's on," he says, shaking the box lightly in his son's direction. Where most teenaged boys would be delighted at the prospect of getting to gorge on pizza for no good reason at all, Kurt's already making a face. "Oh, come on, you weigh ten pounds, you can handle grease and cheese for one night."
"I'm blaming my skin in a week on you," Kurt says, but he still makes a pleased noise when he sees that Burt has ordered olives.
"You should invite your friend Puck over," Burt says, although he probably wouldn't have if he had realized that it would bring his so near to choking.
"Oh. Why?"
"Because I haven't really met any of your new friends," Burt says, carefully omitting the fact that none of the other kids that Kurt has begun to mention in regular conversations set off the bad news brewing parental radar like Puck does. "If the two of you are getting, ah, close--" He really thought that he would choke the first time that he said something like that out loud. It's not nearly as hard as he thought it would be. "I'd like to get to know who my kid's hanging out with for longer than it takes to say hello." Or "hey", for that matter.
"Oh, my God." Kurt looks as if he might throw up the half-slice that he's managed to consume so far. He sets it back down on his plate carefully. "Dad, please don't--"
"Have him come by the garage," Burt says. Matter settled.
*
Jack is working on a Cadillac with a busted alternator on the far side of the garage. Burt made certain of that beforehand, even though there is realistically plenty of work that Jack could be doing which would bring him with easy hearing range. Jack is on the verge of outright sulking. Burt does not care. This is actual parenting business that he has going on here, and it's not for outsiders to use in order to satisfy their curiosity.
Burt invites Puck to sit down on the other side of the folding table that he uses as an impromptu office when the actual one won't let him keep an eye on goings-on in the garage. The kid unfolds himself down into the chair with a lazy, almost insolent grace, arms folded loosely across his stomach. He has his head cocked slightly to one side as he looks Burt up and down. Burt weighs the odds of Kurt telling Puck why he suspected that his father wanted to speak with him against the fact that the neighbor hasn't called to tell him that Kurt had a stroke in the backyard.
"Look, man, that thing was broken way before Kurt and I started messing around with it," Puck starts after Burt has stared at him without speaking long enough to make him visibly uncomfortable.
Burt's going to check his tools later, but that's not the point right now. "What the hell are you doing with my son?" he asks.
Puck actually looks a little discomfited. Burt is surprisingly gratified to know that he's capable of it. "Uh..." Puck puts his hand on the back of his neck and grins a little before he ultimately answers firmly, "Studying."
"Really." Burt folds his hands together and leans across the table at Puck, just enough into Puck's personal space that he can tell Puck's getting a little nervous. "See, when I was in high school, there were always a couple of hot-shot punks who thought they were real slick, and they would find themselves a girl who maybe wasn't that pretty, or maybe was real shy, and they would get her to do all kinds of things for them and with them even though they didn't give a damn about her at all by paying her a little bit of attention that she wasn't used to. They did it because it was easy and they were assholes." Puck has gone very still in his chair, and his eyes are glittering. Burt honestly has no idea whether it's a righteous anger because Burt is farther off base than he's ever been before in his life, or a guilty one because Puck is exactly the kind of hot-shot punk that Burt pegged him for the second he laid eyes on him. "And the worst thing about it was that they always thought they were running some kind of brand new con, when the generation before them did it, too, and the one before that, and I'll lay down this shop and everything in it that yours is no different."
If Puck's smart, he realizes just how much comes down to what he says next. It's, "And let me guess, you never did anything like that."
Question answered. "No," Burt says, leaning back in his chair. "I never did. Now get the fuck out of my garage, and stay away from my kid."
*
Burt gets home hours later frankly surprised that he hasn't received a screaming telephone call from his son. He smells smoke and swears, knowing immediately that it's not coming from the kitchen. Even if Burt still insists on taking most of the cooking load because, hell, what is a parent for, Kurt has been rivaling him in skill ever since he was trustworthy with anything more complicated than a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. There is a plume of smoke coming up from the backyard. Burt swears again and hurries.
Kurt has not decided to give vent to his teenaged angst by setting blaze to the dormant holly, or to the neighbors' rhododendrons. He is, however, scorching the living hell out of what was, when Burt left to put in a few weekend hours at the garage that morning, an entirely serviceable casserole dish. While Burt hangs back against the house for a few seconds and watches, Kurt squirts even more lighter fluid into the dish--it's not big enough for much more than kindling--and then holds his hand out solemnly to Mercedes, who has been standing by his side the entire while. She gives over a small piece of fabric, which Kurt then throws into the fire and watches intently for several seconds before he holds his hand out for another one. After squinting a bit in the failing evening light, Burt realizes that the swatches are plaid.
Burt goes up to Mercedes first, even though he knows that Kurt realizes he's there. "Am I going to be replacing anyone's windshield?" he whispers to her.
"You had better not," Mercedes whispers back just as fiercely.
Burt claps her briefly on the shoulder. "Atta girl," he says, and then, "Give me a sec with my kid, all right?" Mercedes nods, but not before Burt holds out his hands so that she can very carefully pile all of the pieces that she had been holding into his palms. Burt examines them carefully and sees a button, the hem of a sleeve. Stepping up close to Kurt, he throws all of them into the fire at once.
"I was hoping to savor that," Kurt says from the corner of his mouth.
"Plaid and irony," Burt says. Kurt tries to pretend that his sidelong glance is not surprised, but Burt decides to play-act a mild indignation all the same. "Hey, I listen."
"I know," Kurt says. "I know you do." He tilts his body just slightly sideways, and even though the rules of teenaged boys are normally inviolate, Burt recognizes an invitation when he's being given one. He puts his arm about his son's shoulders and pulls him close. There aren't any salt tracks under Kurt's eyes, but that doesn't mean that he doesn't want to cry, or won't soon. Burt remembers how much of a bitch first love is, and how much he wanted to punch in the face everyone who tried to offer him a platitude to make it better, so for now he just tightens his grip around his son's shoulders and waits.
After a few moments, Kurt says, "He left it my car the last time that we..." And snaps his mouth shut in apparent mortification, but this is the last opportunity that Burt is going to take to lecture Kurt on the sexual mores of his generation. "He left it in my car. That was stupid."
Burt, if he as Puck's measure, really does not think that that kid is going to place that much stock in Kurt destroying his fifteen-dollar J.C. Penny's outer shirt, but it's obviously giving Kurt some catharsis, so what the hell. "He was just using you, kiddo," he says, and rubs at Kurt's shoulder. Kurt squirts more lighter fluid into his fire and watches it blaze higher. That's a good way of handling it, too.
And then Kurt says something that alternately shocks Burt straight out of his universe and makes him want to kick the whole goddamned thing right into the balls at the same time. "I know," Kurt says again. He lays his head against Burt's shoulder, just for a second, before he straightens again. "I know what he was doing."
If Puck were standing in front of him, Burt is not certain that he would be able to avoid punching him right in the face, minor or not. He barely stops the hold that he has around Kurt's shoulders from becoming painful as Kurt goes on, "You don't know what it's like to want someone to want you so much--"
Right in the face. Burt turns the grip that he wants to put about Kurt's shoulders into a reassuring rub of his bicep instead and turns to lead him into the house. He kicks the casserole dish over as he does so, thanking his lucky stars that Kurt decided to exercise his pyromania on the patio. The flames are smothered out within seconds.
"Nope," Burt says, while he doesn't know whether to be pleased or upset that he mostly handled his aggression issues while he was still in college. "No, I really don't, kiddo." He presses his lips briefly to the top of Kurt's head, both of their bodies turned away so that Mercedes can't see, before he turns them both back towards the house. To Mercedes he says, "Are you staying for dinner?" and "I won't be cooking," when she looks dubious.
The seconds of dubiousness stretch out until Burt realizes that Mercedes is not concerned about the quality of the meal at all, however much she might have reason to be. She strides up to Kurt's other side, takes his hand, and, after he apparently squeezes or gives some other kind of signal to let her know that she's not intruding on a family moment, answers, "Yeah, I can stay."
*
Burt's son hasn't been happy-go-lucky since he was old enough to realize that Play-Doh might be molded into the shape of a cookie, but that didn't mean that he could actually eat it. He's not expecting him to get over this easily. He's expecting a solid uptick in the number of snide comments floating around the house in general and for the emergency credit card to be hit with a bout of retail therapy that he was, just this once, going to pretend not to notice. Burt's not expecting Kurt to, goddamn it all, pine. He doesn't eat even when Burt orders in from the organic deli that he loves, he has hair that's dangerously approaching that of typical teenaged boy hair. Burt swears that he even hears Alanis coming up the basement steps one time, even though neither one of them are supposed to admit that they recognize her, so they don't. Three days in, Burt chucks the book against the wall of the garage and swears that he'll fire Jack on the spot if he says one fucking word, he ain't kidding this time. Jack evidences a rare self-preservation and doesn't, though Burt does see him carefully taping the broken spine back together later, smoothing out a ripped page.
It's four days before Burt realizes that, goddamn it, he's going to have to do something about this, as Kurt's moping so solidly that he's started eating Burt's cooking without bitching about the use of margarine vs. butter vs. vegetable oil, and even that's progress after Burt thought that Kurt was going to keep going until he passed out from hunger. So he makes a fucking call, and tells a certain fucking punk that if he wants to make it up to Kurt, if Burt was wrong about him or he has something of a conscience in him anywhere, he had better get his ass over there.
*
It's a loud damned argument that's happening out there in his driveway. Burt wants to eavesdrop, and badly. He's pretty certain that there's some rule of parenting that'll actually let him do it, and even more about being a decent human being that won't. That's not going to stop him from knocking the hell out of the chicken-fried steaks that they will theoretically be having for dinner, though, especially the third one. Burt has a feeling. He stays in the kitchen until he hears the word "sorry" being repeatedly loudly, and often, and by his best estimation sincerely, and then looks out the front window just in time to see his son's face being tipped up, and if kisses like that are the standard between them, then maybe Burt understands how Puck can manage to forget things like his iclothing/i when he exits Kurt's car at the end of the night.
Damn it. This is nothing like the books outlined, and Burt is going to burn all of them so that Jack can't tape them back together again. He returns to the steaks until he hears Kurt reenter the house and sees that the pink is back in his son's face. "Invite your friend in for dinner, if you want," he says carefully, like that's not going to make Kurt's entire face light up. He hasn't had a happy-go-lucky kid since the days of Play-Doh, but he swears to God that Kurt skips as he dashes out of the kitchen again.
*
After dinner, during which Burt has managed not to kill the fucking punk that his son has chosen as his first love, he snags said punk by the elbow before he can get too far away from the table. Said punk lifts one of his eyebrows, very slightly. Burt already hates it when he does that; Kurt starts to look mortified, right on cue. "Dad--" he starts.
"Why don't you go load the dishwasher, Kurt," Burt says in a voice that he doesn't have to use often, because it's eerie how little Kurt actually pushes against the rules. Kurt freezes for a moment, but ultimately goes, mouthing something that looks like, I am so, so, so, so sorry, before the kitchen door swings shut behind him. The amused smirk is back on Puck's face, but Burt catches him mouthing back, Don't worry about it. He's not used to being wrong about people. He's also not used to watching his kid dance around the house in the throes of puppy love, and it's making him want to hurl down a protective shield around Kurt's everything, but especially his heart. He is not certain that he's ruling physical violence out of the equation in order to make that happen.
"Here's how it goes," he says to Puck. "Kurt doesn't help you study any more."
"Done," Puck says, a little too quickly. Well, Burt already knew that Puck had left his shirt in Kurt's car at some point, and he's been bracing himself for the realities of his kid having sex every since Kurt hit middle school and they had their first locker room crisis.
"You don't get him to steal for you," Burt goes on, because he's not discounting that as a possibility.
Puck doesn't look nearly nervous enough for someone who has already screwed over Burt's kid once and currently has a suspicious parent holding him by the arm. "What if I steal for him?" he asks.
"Oh, for Christ's sake--nobody steals for anyone." He squeezes Puck's upper arm a little harder and leans in close. "And don't you dare do anything like what you did before again." He doesn't want to know the full details of what Puck actually did before. If he's wrong, then Puck can revel in his martyrdom. If he's right, then he's going to have no choice but to kick Puck's ass, and that's not going to do well for the fact that Kurt and Puck have apparently kissed and made up. Burt waits until Puck dips his chin, very slightly, and then releases him just as Kurt all but sprints out of the kitchen again. He looks mildly shocked to discover that his boyfriend--there, he said it, and it wasn't even that hard--is still standing, but grabs Puck by the arm and all but hurls him down the stairs towards his room.
"Studying!" Kurt yells over his shoulder.
"Not my fault if it's his idea!" Puck yells back when he catches Burt's glare.
*
Burt is well aware of what kind of studying he did when he was Kurt's age, and that's why he makes certain to swing by after fifteen minutes and pound his fist hard against the closed door. "No locks in this house!" he hollers. There's a moment of shocked silence before Kurt yells back, mortified, "Dad!" and Burt hears, dimly as a rumble through the door, "You're dad's a fucking hardcase, man."
"I'm going to put him a home," Kurt answers back, aggrieved, as he pounds up the stairs to open the door. "I wasn't kidding," he says when he sees Burt still standing there.
Burt grabs Kurt by the back of his neck and pulls him close for a moment before releasing him. "I'm your dad," he says. "You're just going to have to cope with that."
End