Basic Disclaimer:

1. I don't own Glee.

Notes: This took forever to write. It's probably the most challenging thing I've ever written, not only because it covers three perspectives but also because it just would not get to the point and, when it did, it just wouldn't end. I finally beat it into submission for your reading pleasure. Again, for the PR drabble (HA!) meme over at Livejournal. Basically for cheapen.

Warnings: Puck's mouth, Santana's mouth, general unhappiness for dumb reasons.

Spoilers: None.

Feel You Flowing In Me

"OI! Puckerman, open up!"

The automatic response, regardless of time, age or location is always, "Fuck you, Lopez!"

Then Puck puts his laptop aside, stands up and moves toward the intercom. He pauses to taunt his unexpected visitor for a moment. "What the hell are doing here, Lopez? It's two in the morning. Aren't you supposed to be out collecting souls or some shit?"

"Noah!" His breath catches. Rachel. Shit. "Don't be mean to my friend! Now, let us up."

Her voice is still all prim and proper but Puck can tell that she's very drunk. He knows her well, okay? You don't date someone for three and a half years and not get to know them. It's physically impossible. And even if it's been three years since their break-up, he still knows her that well. It's not like they had a huge circle of friends to keep them separated for long. Everyone they're close to in the city is either someone they knew in high school (Santana, Kurt, Mike) or people they met while they were together (these are the ones who, like Puck, just can't understand why they're not together anymore).

He resists the urge to thump his head hard against the exposed brick wall. Lopez was a dead bitch for this.

He mumbles something like, "Whatever. Door's open, come up."

Santana knows full well that this whole separation thing that Puck and Rachel have going on is coming to an end. She doesn't totally understand why it happened in the first place. Rachel is the one person in the whole world she can see Puck being happy with forever. Once, long ago, Santana may have wanted to be that one person but, yeah, that was a long time ago. Now they're both her friends and she's fucking invested in both their happiness. The irritating thing about that? It's so fucking obvious that they're happiest together.

So, when she and Rachel decide to head out for a night on the town, Santana does a little of what she's best at and manipulates Rachel into going to club not three blocks from Puck's apartment. It takes roughly two shots before Rachel thinks she's being all stealthy and mentioning how close they are to Noah's. Santana turns away to hide her snort.

Three hours, countless drinks and two sleaze-balls later, Rachel is three sheets to the wind and flailing. Eventually, Santana corrals her into leaving and, as soon as they hit the street, Rachel takes a deep breath then turns unsteadily and starts a wobbly march in the direction of Puck's apartment. Santana just laughs and follows. The girls fall into step beside each other and Santana lets Rachel interlace their arms to keep her balance.

Fifty yards away from Puck's building, Rachel stops and pulls her friend to a halt beside her.

"What the fuck, Ray? Why are we stopping? I'm tired, I'm getting cold and these shoes aren't made for walking."

Quietly, Rachel asked, "Why are we going to Noah's?"

Santana shrugs. She's a little irritated at the fact that she's standing outside, in the cold, in fucking uncomfortable shoes, talking about obvious shit. "Fuck if I know. You started walking and I wasn't just gonna leave you alone on the street."

Her tone is just edged enough for Rachel to start moving again, though much more slowly. After a few moments of silence, Rachel murmurs, "I miss him, you know."

Santana can't help but scoff at this. "Everybody and their dogs know, Ray."

"Hmm." Rachel's head leans lightly against Santana's shoulder. "Do you think he misses me too?"

Knowing she won't be seen, Santana rolls her eyes. "Ask him yourself," she advises before turning to the buzzer.

The girls stumble off the elevator of Puck's building. Rachel is infinitely glad that she didn't have to deal with stairs. She isn't as drunk as she could be but she's neither as coordinated nor as poised as she normally is. What she's feeling a pleasant buzz—a bit beyond tipsy but definitely not smashed.

When they get to his door, Santana pushes it open and lets Rachel walk in first. She stops short at the end of the foyer and just looks at him. Sometimes she forgets how beautiful he is. Noah looks like some piece of magnificent Renaissance sculpture brought to life and it takes her breath away. Right then, freshly showered and comfortable in pyjama pants and a faded t-shirt from his alma mater, in the soft gold lighting, he looks like something out of a magazine. He's model perfect. Then he raises his eyes from the absolutely huge textbook he was holding and meets her gaze.

There's something about Noah's eyes that has always captivated her. Even when he was tossing slushies in her face, they would lock eyes in the moments before and after and, more than once, she woke with a fluttering heartbeat and the memory of green, green eyes in her sweetest dreams. She thinks she loves his eyes more than any other part of him. And, yes, she is quite aware that she just thought 'loves'. She has never stopped loving him; they didn't break up because they weren't in love anymore. They broke up because of a whole lot of other things that have started to mean less and less over the course of the past three years. In fact, it's gotten to a point where she wakes up in alone every single morning and wonders what she was thinking when she walked out.

Something must show on her face because his eyes narrow the way they do when he's concerned. Before he has a chance to say or do anything, Santana brushes past her to flop messily onto Noah's black leather recliner.

Obviously ignoring the tension in the room, Santana gestures at the mess of books and notes and laptop on Noah's coffee table. "So, Puckerman, what the fuck is all this about?"

Noah turns away and mumbles his reply to Santana, "Paper."

Santana snorts. "You're doing homework? El-oh-el."

Smiling, Noah tosses a balled up sheet of something at her. "Fuck you, Lopez."

Rachel knows that whatever Santana says, the two of them will sit there and spar for a good fifteen minutes at least. She kicks off her shoes while they bicker and laugh and pads barefooted to Noah's kitchen for a glass of water. She's been in this apartment enough to know her way around. She has to admit, she likes it.

When she and Noah broke up, they hadn't been living together but he hadn't been living here, either. He used to be a tiny two bedroom with Adrian, his best friend at Columbia. It had been the quintessential bachelor pad decorated with supermodel posters, pizza boxes, videogame cases and one uncomfortable Wal-Mart futon. This apartment is Noah's grown-up home decorated in dark greens and dark blues and browns, with comfortable leather furniture and plush carpets that she, Santana and Kurt helped him choose and Mike helped him transport. He has proper art hung on his walls now, has gotten some of his favourite band posters framed and Rachel thinks it suits him perfectly. It feels like him, masculine and warm, and it feels like home.

She wanders away from his kitchen, water in hand, and finds the piano he keeps in the den. It's a baby grand his grandmother gave him five years ago. It's a gorgeous instrument. She sits down and presses a few of the gleaming keys. It's perfectly tuned. Noah has obviously been taking care of it and, if the sheet music spread on top of it is any indication, he's been using it. She's glad. She never wanted Noah to lose his music. She wanted it so much she lost him.

He notices the minute Rachel wanders off. He doesn't mind her being on her own all over his apartment. He doesn't have anything he would want to hide from her and the one thing he doesn't want her finding, he has locked in the safety deposit box under his bed. It's his mother's combination so she'll never get it open even if she does find it. So he watches her tiny (adorable) feet move softly across the cold floor until she disappears around the corner into his kitchen.

Santana has stopped talking and is just watching him watch Rachel. It's a little weird and very uncomfortable so he arches an eyebrow at her. "What?"

She shrugs and leans her head back against the armrest. In the time he's been distracted by Rachel leaving, she's repositioned herself to sit sideways on the loveseat. She's looking directly at him. Her face is unusually serious and sincere when she speaks again.

"How long is this going to drag on, Puck?"

He knows exactly what she's talking about. He doesn't have an answer for her because he doesn't think any of the reasons for he and Rachel's split have been resolved. At least, on his end, he still feels the same way he did when it happened: Rachel is insane and irrational but he loves her more than anything. The thing is; he still thinks he made the right choice. It was Rachel who decided to walk away and he was (is) still just that bit too proud to beg her to come back. It wasn't his fault; he shouldn't have to apologize for his life choices.

"Dunno," he finally responds. "She say something?"

"No. Just wondering."

And the silence stretches comfortably. He leans forward to drop to the book he was holding onto the table and grab the remote.

"It's still weird, you know," Santana says with a smile before he even sits back. "You: doing homework."

He can't help but smile a little in return. "'S how I got into college, San."

She shakes her head, a wide smile across her face. "I still can't believe you managed to pull that shit off. Fucking Columbia, man. I'll be honest, even when you were done fucking around and started studying at school, I didn't think you'd go farther than OSU. No offense."

He doesn't take anything San says as offensive. It just serves to remind him of how far he's come, how hard he's worked and what he's managed to achieve. "I know. I just applied because I could. Didn't expect to get accepted and really didn't expect the scholarship but who was I to pass up free shit?"

"I never asked but did you get into Harvard too?"

He shakes his head as he flicks through the guide on screen. "Never tried."

"I did," Santana confesses quietly. He looks at her because he has some idea of what a disappointment that would have been for her. Her father went to Harvard. Her face brightens as much as Santana's face can when she adds, "NYU wasn't a bad second though. It was either that or Boston but New York's the shit."

That's a double entendre if Puck's ever heard one. He agrees because he knows what she means. Then he wonders why they're even having this conversation. It seems like they're a couple years too late. Santana is in law school now and he's sitting there working on a paper for his M.S. in Financial Engineering. The woman wandering around his home somewhere is a Julliard graduate, now the female lead in a critically acclaimed off-Broadway production that he's heard is soon to be the next Broadway hit. It's like everything's coming together for all of them.

Everything is coming together except for them.

(And he's mature enough now that he doesn't even mean that in the perverted way.)

Santana is kind of curious, because they've never really talked about how they all wound up in New York, so she asks. She's blunt as fuck, of course, because she's Santana Lopez. Eyes focused on Puck, she asks, "Did you apply to anywhere outside of New York?"

He looks at her warily. She likes that she can still set him on guard. His eyes flicker to where Rachel was last standing and she feels like she's just rooted out Babygate all over again.

"You didn't, did you? I fucking knew it." She's probably grinning like the Cheshire cat right now. She doesn't care. She knew shit was going down at the end of high school. Puck and Rachel had been dancing around each other from the minute Rachel and Finn stopped nauseating the whole school with their excessive displays of cheesiness and lack of sexual chemistry. Seriously, Santana had seen them kiss more than once. It never looked anything other than awkward.

But then there had been Rachel and Puck. The first time around, when Puck had sung Neil Diamond and gotten slushied for Ray, Santana had been pissed. That was back when she still liked to think Puck was hers. By the end of the first semester of senior year, that was a notion best left in the past. Puck was her boy, but he wasn't hers. He wasn't anybody's for a long time but judging by the way Rachel seemed to be able to make him move, he was well on his way to being hers even before graduation. Santana had even walked in on them a few times. Not kissing but, well, they had this way of looking at each other sometimes. 'Eye-fucking' was too vulgar a term for it but 'eye-making-love', as Kurt once called it, was just fucking stupid. But they still do it now so it must mean something.

Puck never replies to her question. The television he had switched on to the Daily Show buzzes almost ambient in the background.

Santana needs to pee and then she's crashing in Puck's guest bed. Rachel can either join her or sleep with Puck when she's ready. It—Rachel and Puck sharing a bed—happens more often than you'd think. Santana announces that she's done for the night and heads toward Puck's bathroom. She sees him get up to find Rachel before she closes the door.

Maybe in the morning she'll wake up alone and be happy for them again, finally.

Rachel hears him coming toward her and keeps right on scribbling. Noah had left his composition book open to a fresh page. She had stared at the blank staves and suddenly there was music in her head fighting to get out. It doesn't happen often, this urge to compose. It's not even that she can't or doesn't want to write her own music—please, she went to Julliard, of course she can write music—it's just that she hardly ever has time to anymore. And she hasn't had anything to sing about—truly, honestly, Disney-princess sing about—in years.

Tonight there's a song in her head that wants out. It's not an original song. She remembers it from that vampire series that was popular when she was in high school. It had struck a chord with her then, sticking in her subconscious just like the lyrics said, but she had never found a reason to sing it. Tonight, it almost feels like it's clawing at her skin, itching its way out of her fingertips and onto paper and piano. Her throat feels clogged with the lyrics. She doesn't stop writing even as Noah comes to stand behind and read over her shoulder.

When she jots the final note down, she double bars the last staff then signs her name with a flourish. She's almost breathing hard from the effort. A part of her is surprised that she knew the song well enough to write it all in one go. A part of her wants to sing it. A bigger part of her wants Noah to sit down beside her and sing it to her.

Noah's hand reaches around her and snaps the sheet up. She tips her head back, lets the crown rest lightly against his stomach right above the drawstring of his pants, and watches him read. He glances down at her in amusement once he's done.

"That was pretty furious, Rach. I could've just downloaded the sheet music for you, you know."

She snorts at the suggestion. "Please, Noah. That's a personal arrangement, for a female singer."

He nudges her slightly with his hip then lifts one leg and straddles the piano stool. His body is completely oriented toward her while she's still facing the keys. She thinks this might be a metaphor for their relationship. It's a bit too far into the night for her to think about that too much. His left hand raises and she startles when his fingers touch her hair. She locks eyes with him as he tucks some strands behind her ear.

"I know this is all yours, babe."

His voice is quiet and sort of rough. It's her tone he's using—that special inflection he only ever uses when he's speaking to her. It makes her heart pound and her body tingle and her panties wet.

She feels a little stupid just sitting there staring at him but he seems perfectly content to sit and stare back. They used to be able to do this for hours: sit close and quiet and just appreciate the fact that the other was there in their lives. Now that they're not a couple, this just seems... well, it still feels right.

Noah is the first to look away. He turns and places her freshly composed piece on the music rack. Then he turns back to her and says, "Sing it for me."

There's no way she can say no. So she positions her fingers delicately atop the keys and begins. After a few bars, she's all in. The music flows down from her shoulders, she's got her foot on the left pedal to keep things quiet, and she sings the way she does when she's alone. Noah is the only person in the world apart from herself who has heard her sing like this.

She ends with a single digit holding a single note as it tapers off into silence and keeps her eyes straight ahead. Like the music from her fingers, words come rushing past her lips and she lets them go because she has needed to say this forever. She doesn't know what's so special about this night, what makes right now the right time to say these things. All she knows is that this song and these words are all Noah's. They might come from her but they belong to him and she gives them over freely.

"I'm sorry," she whispers, "I'm so sorry I ever walked away from this, Noah, from us. Look at me, I'm not even drunk but here I am reeking of a club and composing covers in your manuscript. It's two in the morning and I'm writing a song about three years without you. I still can't get you out of my head. I can't get you out of my system. It's like you're in my veins, Noah; under my skin and in my bloodstream. Sometimes, I can't breathe for wanting you. I look at you and my hearts stops, Noah, because you're so gorgeous and I had you. And then I remember that I don't have anymore and a part of me dies—"

"You'll always have me, Rachel. I've always been yours."

She looks at him then because how can she not? She turns her head and their eyes meet. He's looking at her the way he used to when he thought she wasn't looking at him in high school, the way he used to when they woke up together in college and the way he hasn't for the past three years. It's like water after singing a full set list.

"It can't be this easy," she murmurs with a shake of her head, "it can't be".

They've spent three years in the most painful clusterfuck (that's a word he gave her) of emotions and all she had to do was sing him a song and say sorry? This isn't glee club anymore. This is them—her—having made a mess of real life. He can't forgive her like this. She was wrong, she knows it.

She lowers her eyes and shakes her head. She opens her mouth to protest again but then Noah takes charge. To be honest, she's amazed he let her say what she needed to say but now he has both hands in her hair and his mouth slanted hot and desperate over hers. He kisses her like he needs her to live and she kisses him back just a fiercely. It's not soft or gentle or pretty but it's how she knows he means it.

Kissing Rachel like this is legitimately the same as coming home. That may not sound remotely badass but Puck has realized something in the time between following Rachel to New York without really knowing if she wanted him as much as he wanted her (he had hoped), being with Rachel in a relationship that honestly felt like the rest of his life, and then losing Rachel over a decision he made for her. He has come to understand that sometimes, stepping up and being a man, doing the right thing no matter what, that's the most badass he can be. And getting the girl? Does he even have to explain?

Rachel eventually pulls her face away, gasping for air but leaning into him, grip firm on his arms, and forehead resting heavy on his shoulder. He turns to press a kiss into her hair because, fuck breathing, he needs to keep kissing her.

"I love you," she says when he does it. "I love you so much."

He smiles. "I love you too, Rach."

They sit there, wrapped up in each other, and just exist. He pulls her tiny form into him and sips softly at her lips. Her hands flutter all over, touching every part of him and making him slightly crazy because Rachel's hands are his kryptonite. He's fucked her in her unlocked bedroom at one of her father's parties for less than what's she's doing right now. Finally, he reaches out and grabs her wrists. She looks into his eyes and he sees all the longing he's felt reflected there.

"Tell me we can do this, Noah. Please?" she begs

Like he would ever say no. "We can do this, Rachel. We can be whatever you want, just let me be with you again."

She nods and then pulls back even farther. What the fuck? His confusion is probably obvious because she smiles beautifully at him and says, "I want everything with you, Noah. And I'm sorry I ever made you feel like you made the wrong choices. I didn't want you to lose your music. I wanted everything for you and with you and I wanted it so much I lost it all."

She takes a deep breath and Puck feels like he's the one breathing in. This apology, this admittance that he hadn't completely fucked up by choosing finance over music—by wanting to give her stability while she achieved her dreams, was all he'd ever wanted to hear.

He pulls her forward and kisses her hard again. "It's cool, babe. It's done."

Rachel wraps her arms around his torso and murmurs, "I just wanted you to have everything."

"All I ever wanted was you."

When Santana wakes up in the morning, Puck's coffee table is still a wreck of economics books. The TV is off and Rachel's shoes are just where she left them. San makes a beeline for the percolator and sets a fresh pot. Behind the couch, she notices the bra Rachel wore last night on top of a crumpled blue cloth that is probably the t-shirt Puck was wearing. She can't even take that as a definite sign because Puck and Rachel can't really keep their hands off each other even if they aren't together.

Santana just goes back to hunting for breakfast food in Puck's fridge. She rolls her eyes at some of the shit she finds in there. Of course he still has soy milk and vegan eggs.

She's just extracted the normal eggs and two-percent milk when Rachel greets her. When Santana turns around, she takes one look at Rachel and lets out a string of Spanish curses. Rachel just laughs.

Santana glares at her then inquires pointedly, "So?"

Rachel's ducks her head down and plays with the hem of the shirt she's wearing. It's totally one of Puck's dress shirts. At that exact moment, Puck walks in wearing just his pants from last night. This is not unusual. However, when he stops behind Rachel, hands possessive on her hips and lips mumbling softly against her neck? That's new. Or, rather, it isn't because this is what it was like before.

"So we're all good now?" Santana asks from where she's prepping French toast.

Puck leans down and practically ravages Rachel's mouth before answering, "Yeah, we're good."

Santana's happy. That's fucking saying something.

the end

Prompt: It's 2AM and I'm writing a song about something that happened three years ago. I still can't get you out of my head.

The Song: bloodstream by Stateless