A/N: This is just a little one-shot I wrote about how I wish Born This Way would have ended.

Disclaimer: I don't own Glee.

"What do you want?" she asks.

"You didn't come to Spanish. I was worried about you."

"You don't care."

"Yes, I do."

"If you really cared, you wouldn't have let your girlfriend tell everyone at this school about me. I told you about that last year because I trusted you, because I thought I could confide in you and you just threw it back into my face."

XXX

Quinn still hadn't spoken to him the entire way home but instead of looking angry, there was a cloud of sadness that hung over her. She was slumped against the car door, staring out the window as the rain pummeled the glass. The past few weeks since she moved in had been…weird to say the least and now they were in a relationship of sorts, but Puck never felt like her heart was really in it. At least, not as much as his was. Even though he was grateful to her for giving him a chance, he still had a tendency to mess up, to say stupid this. Case in point, his comments to her earlier that day.

He wasn't even sure why he's said them, they sort of just fell out of his mouth. "I don't dig on fat chicks". Of course, he didn't think she was fat. In fact, over the past couple of months, he thought she had become even more beautiful. He had read somewhere- in one of those books that he borrowed from that place called a library- that pregnant women had this glow about them and he had to agree. Even with the current frown tugging at her soft, pink lips, she still looked sullenly beautiful.

"Are you…OK?" he asked, glancing over at her briefly.

"Mmmhmmm," she replied, not even turning her head, but he remained unconvinced.

"Do you want to stop for ice cream or something?"

"You don't dig on fat chicks," Quinn bit out, her words stinging him like a slap on the face.

"I'm sorry I said that. You know I didn't mean it."

"No, I didn't know that. For all I know you meant every word of it. You who have gone from cougars to Cheerios in the blink of an eye."

"Well you know now. I didn't mean that. It just slipped out," he admitted.

Quinn shook her head and didn't answer him, sinking back down into her seat and gazing out the window once more. He just didn't get it. She knew he was a guy and that they said stupid things fifty-percent of the time, but he had no idea why he had struck such a sour note with her and she wasn't sure she was in the mood to enlighten him. It was easier if she just brushed it aside, didn't think about because then it might just go away. If she just ignored a problem or covered it up, then it would just go away. It always had. What Quinn didn't expect was for him to follow her into the room she shared with his little sister.

"Can I help you?" she asked, dropping her satchel into the bed.

"There's something else that's bothering you," he declared.

"What are you, a psychic?"

"No, I can just tell."

"Well you're wrong because I'm perfectly fine."

"I don't buy that," Puck replied, plopping down into the bed.

"What are you doing?" Quinn sighed, the annoyance evident in her tone.

"Sitting here until you tell me what else is bothering you."

"No you're not. Get out."

"Nope."

"I don't want to talk to you about it. Get. Out. Of. My. Room."

"This is my house," he said, throwing down his trump card. "I'm not leaving."

Quinn's blood began to boil. If he really wanted to know why she was upset so badly, he was going to find out. Not only was she going to reveal everything to him, but she would make him feel like an even bigger jackass in the process.

"You want to know what's bothering me?"

"Is there an echo in here? Yes, I want to know what's bothering you."

"Fine, get comfortable."

For the next half hour, Quinn told Puck everything while he sat slack-jawed, listening to her words. For a moment he thought she was joking, that she made the entire story up until the tears started to flow uncontrollably down her cheeks.

"And I swore to myself," she finished, taking in a long, ragged breath. "That I would never be that girl again. I wouldn't be called 'fat' or 'ugly'. I would be able to look at myself in a mirror. I would be pretty and popular and people would want to be me for a change."

"Quinn, I never-."

"Well there, now you know why what you said hurt so much. As if it's not enough for me to hate myself every time I look in the mirror again or try to button my jeans, but for some reason, I always thought that you accepted me no matter what. Can you please go now?"

Puck stood up slowly from the bed and walked towards Quinn. Everything made sense to him now. Her constant obsession with her image, why him telling her she wasn't fat won him the keys to the kingdom and why she hated herself so much again. He gently lifted her chin and forced her to look him in the eyes.

"No," he said, in a low, hoarse voice. "I'm not leaving. I'm so sorry for what I said. You're beautiful."

"Now you're just saying that to make me feel better. If I still looked the way I did then, I can guarantee that we wouldn't be standing here right now."

"Maybe, maybe not. Look, I can't go into your past and make you feel better about who you were then, but I can look at you right now and say that, when you let yourself just be you, you're one of the most beautiful people I know."

"You…you really mean that?"

"Have I ever told you something I don't mean? If I didn't mean it do you think I'd be hanging out here every night with you and Sara? You can change who you are on the outside. We can call ourselves different names, but on the inside, underneath all of the bullshit fronts you put up, you're still the same person. It doesn't matter what your name is or was."

"Thank you," Quinn said, unexpectedly wrapping her arms around him.

"Uhh, you're welcome," Puck replied a bit awkwardly. They weren't exactly great at the whole 'expressing affection' thing. "Do you want me to go now?"

"No, I want you to stay."

XXX

"Do you want to know why I helped Lauren find that information about you?"

"Yes, I do. I would love to know what possessed you to do something like that to me."

"Because I miss you."

"What are you talking about?" Quinn asks, rolling her eyes. "How can you miss me? We go to school together I see you every day."

"No, I miss you. The real you. Not this," Puck replies, gesturing up and down at her. "I miss who you were last year."

"I'm still her."

"Maybe when you want to be, but it's like after she was born you tried so hard to push it away again, to hide it."

"You know why that is, don't you?" she asks, standing up from her chair and walking towards him as he shakes his head. "Because every day I held on to that part of me- that good part of me- was a reminder that I was still missing another part of me. It hurt so much and so I decided again that it would just be easier to be apathetic, to build a wall because that's what I know and that's what I'm good at, even if it meant pushing people away I cared about, or still care about."

"That's why you ended things over the summer?"

Quinn nods her head sadly. "I knew what I thought I needed to do and where I thought I wanted to go. At the time, I thought you were holding me back."

"I was just trying to help."

"I know that now," she says sadly. "Hindsight is twenty-twenty, you know."

"If you could go back would you change it?" he asks, hopefully.

"I don't know. It's hard to say, but I know that I wouldn't hurt you if I could change it. I thought you would have been happy to not have to put up with me."

"I didn't put up with you. I loved you."

"And now?" she hears herself questioning him.

"I still do," he admits.

"Why?"

"Because, like I said, there are just some things that, no matter how hard you try, never change and they never should."

"You know, there is one thing I wish I could change about last summer."

"What's that?"

"I would have told you that I loved you, too."

"What about now?"

"Like you said," she replies with a slight smile on her lips. "Some things like that never change."