"Hey."
Nobody said it would be easy. In fact, nobody said anything. And he didin't ask. He just went with an impulse. Followed his guts and ran after him without really putting thought into it.
"Hi, Noah."
It wasn't the fact that he'd deflected to enemy lines. He got that. He totally got that. He wasn't selfish enough to be mad at the dude for not them when he was so obviously distraught and scared as all shit.
Blue-green-gray eyes are inspecting him; looking him up and down, with a quietness that isn't brash, isn't haughty, isn't out there to be seen and admired. Wrong.
Something. Something is wrong. Wrong.
"What's up, dude? Thought I'd check up on you to see if those Gambler punks are treating you right." Light, light and brazen, and friendly enough in its Puck-ness.
An outstretched hand.
And then, a smile. A slow, painfully reluctant one. With no white teeth. And Puck is already regretting this, whatever this is. But then Kurt talks, in his high, girly pitch.
"Why are you all so nice to me now?"
And Puck doesn't get it, doesn't get what Kurt means by those words; what he gets, however, is that Kurt is okay with him. Strangely okay. So he does his best to answer something mildly smart (and a bit embarrassing, perhaps).
"We're not mad, dude. We all like you. We get that you were going through a lot of shit. Nobody holds you to the 'leaving us before sectionals' thing. Not even Rachel."
Kurt looks like he wasn't expecting that statement, like he didn't even know what brought it.
"That's good to know." He answers, after a while. Kind of soft, and kind of unsteady. Wrong.
"Yeah. We just miss you, dude."
There, there, he can see it. Kurt's eyes kind of widen, and his expression crumbles for a second, and with the same unsteady voice he says:
"I miss you all, too." And "I really got to go."
And Kurt tries to walk away, maybe because he is showing too much.
(Much more than he's ever shown to Puck, at least.)
But now? Now that he knows the way things are? He can't let go.
"Hey?" He grabs Kurt's arm, in a firm grip that makes the other boy flinch, and makes him want to kick himself a few times for scaring him (Because, really? What the fuck?).
"You're lonely." He says, stumbling over his own words in his haste to explain his actions. "That's not cool. Aren't you supposed to be better at that school, man?" And he's mostly talking to Kurt's stiff back, and not having to face those listless eyes (Wrong) gives him momentum, so he keeps talking. "Are they being asses to you? Is that why you were so damn awful today? Is that why you are acting nothing like yourself? Dude, are they trying to change you or something? Because if they are, I can seriously beat the shit out of them."
(After he says all that, he feels like something has shifted. That something has changed. That his loose mouth has done something that can't be undone. He just doesn't really get what that is, yet. )
"Thank you." It's almost a whisper, but Puck hears it clearly; it sounds sincere, grateful, a little broken. .
While Kurt walks away from him, he doesn't think about much more than those blue-green-gray eyes that once held so much pride.
Wrong.