A/N: I'm so sorry this took such a long time to be posted. I decided to have a social life and it got in the way. I promise it won't happen again, lol.

Thanks to everybody who reviewed last chapter. I love, love, love the reviews and can never get enough of your inputs. Also, it warms my heart big time to know that I'm not alone with my love of Shelby, Idina and Shell.

Difficult and Dangerous Times

Will was parked on the side of the road, roughly at the same spot where he experienced the Journey epiphany all those months back. The radio was off and he wasn't really expecting an illumination moment. This time around, he was building courage. It was a Tuesday.

Although there was no establish rule of when he could or couldn't call Shelby, they had been meeting on weekends. Will didn't want to push her buttons, because Shelby was unpredictable. But Will necessitated her advice.

Nervously taking the cell phone to his ear, he waited, hearing it ring.

"Hello?" She seemed calm and relaxed, he thought optimistically.

"Hi, Shelby. It's Will."

"Hey, how are you?"

"Ah, okay. Kind of. Would it be all right if I stopped by?"

"Sure, but Mary already left, so we might get interrupted by Beth. A lot." She laughed a little. She wasn't mad! Will was so relieved that he smiled.

"No problem."

Will followed Shelby into Beth's nursery. He hadn't been in there before, so he took some time to assimilate every detail. This room was so much bigger than his craft room. In all honesty, everything in Shelby's house was bigger and better. He had presumed the place to be all pink and full of stuffed animals and dolls, because that's exactly how Terri would do it, but it was a little more low-key, elegant. White, with some very light yellow. Everything was pastel and soft, the few dolls looked imported. It was classy and soothing.

"I loved your decoration. I'm already calming down."

She frowned at that. "You were nervous?"

"Angry."

Shelby straightened up a pile of bookmarked childcare books on an end table before signaling for him to join her in the couch. She had huge comfy sofas spread through the whole house and he always found her like this, languishing in one of them. He sat on the floor, though. He had no idea why, it was an impulse.

"Did your kids ever get picked on?"

"What are we talking about here?"

"Were they ever bullied?"

"Will, have you met me?" she asked rhetorically, a humorous glint in her eyes. "Yes, they have been bullied, by me, a lot."

"I don't mean it like that," he chuckled. "You are never aggressive or truly vicious."

She wasn't? Shelby genuinely wondered about this a lot. Had she never crossed the line? She was able to cite a few occasions in which it felt like she did. Disregarding her self-condemning trail of thought and focusing back on Will, she merely shrugged. "The Vocal Adrenaline performers rule that school. I don't think any of them are likely to be picked on."

Of course, there were some intimidation tactics she was biased to, and malicious stories about her and her behavior she had all too willingly fueled over the years. Perception was everything, and she was the queen of masquerade. However she didn't feel comfortable confessing those things to him in the least. How could she explain, for example, that she had let people think and accuse her of being behind Rachel's egging?

"You haven't told me yet what this is about." She tried to pull that conversation into another direction. A direction that wasn't about her. Shelby could feel a knot form in her stomach as she felt Will push against her barriers. The problem was, he looked so lost and she already liked him so much, it was easy for her to just let him.

"The jocks keep slushie-ing the kids. Tina had a cold this week and after being hit, she broke into a fever this morning. The doctors suspect pneumonia. It's already so serious and so wrong, but those kids have no idea how much harm they can do sometimes and they simply don't care."

Will's built-up anger had burst through him. He didn't mean to, but it was almost a relief. Except his voice had gone up and his tone was so frustrated, he was afraid he might have scared Shelby. He steadied his breath and looked up at her, concerned, but she seemed to still be unaffected.

"What's slushie-ing?"

Will laughed humorlessly, feeling silly that he hadn't explained this ridiculous trend that he apparently becoming was immune to, which was part of the problem to begin with. He just didn't have a solution, and it was driving him crazy. "Throwing slushies at someone's face."

"Like the drink? That's sick. And that happens all the time?"

Will nodded, getting a little flustered again. "It's so bad, Rachel, Kurt, Mercedes, and the other less-popular kids have to keep spare clothes and shampoo in their locker."

Shelby was livid. Rachel was being bullied? This badly bullied? She was so disturbed, she didn't even break into reflecting on what it said of her, as a mother, that she didn't know about this at all and wasn't there for her, which was becoming a typical train of thought.

Will looked up at her, waiting for some validation here. He's been beside himself all day at McKinley because it seemed like he was the only one that took this seriously, which was a constant source of irritation. His students had been threatened of expulsion because of the Glist and slashed tires, but this veiled form of physical violence simply slipped under the radar.

Shelby understood how he felt though, she had been there. And she didn't want him to feel like he was alone with this agonizing matter. Taking a deep breath, she readied herself to share a story that she had never told anyone before.

"My first year in Vocal Adrenaline, I had this student called Alexandra. She was amazing. She is an understudy on Broadway today, actually. Tzeitel, in Fiddler on the Roof." She couldn't resist a proud smile, which faded along with the focus of her eyes as she continued. "But she was a transfer from this posh boarding school at Texas, an all-girls academy. She had to come home because her father got sick with cancer, and of course she didn't fit in at all. She just wasn't Carmel High material. She was used to an uniform, good manners classes, debating societies being awesome, and god, boys were something so totally out of her grasp. She auditioned and got in VA, with all the merit, but she thought the choir was something completely different. She was a chamber choir singer and a classical ballerina, so it took her a while to acquire a taste for show faces and jazz hands. I was so focused in breaking her in and pushing the club up that I wasn't really paying attention to her, until this one day I found her sitting in the dark in the auditorium, shaking. I sat next to her, not really knowing what to do; my experience with kids was still so limited and I hadn't really mastered the soft/hard duality of being a teacher yet. So I just imagined that girl was my little sister Meredith. . I sat in silence with her for a big while, because that was what my sister and I did when we were upset: we sat with each other, in silence. Eventually, I told her that she could tell me anything, and that I would try really hard not be an adult to her. She revealed to me how some boys had cornered her after school hours and this boy Brad or Jack or something, had copped a feel while the others held her and laughed. They called her names, and one of them had given her a bruise in her left arm. This is shitty in any case, you know? But this girl was not in the sex territory, so I knew she had to be freaking out twice as much. Besides, it was a serious assault inside school premises and I was privy to the information. As the responsible adult, what do I do? You can report it, but the kids won't be too happy with you because it will be even more humiliating and they will feel even more helpless, and the bullying might escalate. In the end, you can't call CSI in, it's the word of the accuser against the word of the accused, and can you ever be certain the kids will have the courage to step forward? It's terrifying."

"What did you do?" Will was so focused on her that he could have bored holes into her skin. This story – her notes on it – he felt like she was reading his mind. She got this on a deeper level, and not even Emma could have talked to him like this.

"I spent days thinking it over, so agitated I couldn't sit still for more than two minutes at a time because my mind was working so furiously. Finally, I gathered the team. We were sixteen back then, my golden era hadn't quite begun yet. I sat them in a circle on the stage and asked them to each tell me one bad thing that had been done to them, even if was minor and how that felt. Of course, nobody volunteered, so I went first. I had this impressive story about some guy who had tried to force himself in a bathroom stall. It wasn't a lie, not completely. But it didn't happen in high school at all; it happened years later in some club in New York. I was big girl and I kicked that guy's ass. But it worked, because the kids started talking and I was horrified about the shit going on silently in that school, Will. The things they hide and let eat them away. I mean, I got a lot of whining about bad break-ups, bad boyfriends and girlfriends, incomprehensive parents, absent parents, but then there were kids being picked on, crude nicknames, gum being put in clothes and hair, people who were spit at, you name it. They regarded the word 'bullying' as normal, inevitable even. So I started to talk to them about the concept of abuse, because they seemed to think it only applied to sexual violence and battery and but I wanted them to grasp stuff like moral harassment as serious things. I told them VA was to be a family, a safe place, and that I was always there for them, but that wasn't going to be enough; they needed to be there for each other. And not subtly, I encouraged them to get united to face these things, especially at school. I didn't mean for my pep talk to be ambiguous, but what did I want, really? In the end, if I am sincere, I know I was pushing for the kids to become bullies themselves too. I just wanted retribution after that meeting. I was just so angry at the unfairness of it all, I might have been a little too caught up to fully realize they were impressionable kids, picking up on my mood."

"But I don't want to teach the kids to be like that."

Shelby felt so exposed she couldn't even meet his eyes. That was a dark side of her that she had been horrified about at the time, and still was. She had started regretting the decision to open up to him, fearing completely that he would be disgusted with her and walk out on their still blossoming camaraderie. Either way, she couldn't leave it at that. She had to at least explain herself properly.

"I know, and consciously I didn't either. Nonetheless I was secretly gunning down for blood and not really thinking like an educator. And it wasn't without consequence. That kid Brad or whatever the hell his name was, he was assaulted while leaving a party a while after. He left school. I knew what had happened and I kept quiet. I still carry that on my back and it repulses me to no end. I pulled the brakes on my kids and tried to convince them to burn all that hatred energy in Glee. That was when I started rehearsing them six, seven hours a day. To protect them – and to protect people from them – I would keep them locked in a room and exhaust them. If I noticed something off, I asked for a talk, but mostly they started talking to each other. I turned that meeting into a regular thing. We would sit and talk about the bad things that happened in our week and how we felt about them. It didn't have to be melodrama—I had a few students over the years who came out about their sexuality, I let them talk about how much they hated the others teachers… I let them have some private meetings without me and I never asked anyone to tell me what was talked about. That's how I did it. Still do it, actually. They get that I have a baby now, but I let them come by one Saturday a month, and I trust them to keep it up without me. And though it's not much, I think they became healthier, less insecure and happier teens. They can be little shitheads from time to time, but I showed them other outs and mostly they use it."

Shelby had been focusing on her hands throughout the whole monologue and she kept staring down, almost being able to sell that she was truly entranced with her twisting fingers. Her throat felt so dry all of a sudden, she just wanted to run down the stairs and drink a whole bottle of water.

"So, your very long advice…it's to try and make them be there for each other?" Will raised his eyebrows at her, and she didn't know if he was teasing her or really was just lost. Either way, she felt a little frustrated.

"No, my very long advice is to find the solution that will get them protected but won't compromise your integrity and dignity. Or theirs. And I'm sorry if I babbled."

"You didn't, at all. Thank you so much for that."

Will reached out and grabbed her hand. Shelby was feeling a little nauseated to have talked about all that, so she curled up and focused on breathing, on not thinking. That conversation felt like a detox. She felt Will caress her hand, rubbing little circles at her palm with his finger and gave him a faint smile.

"Did I help?" she asked. She sounded tired.

Will smiled kindly at her. She looked so small, he would never have brought it up if he knew it would harm her to talk about it like it seemed to. She could have been vague and equally wise, but he was grateful she had been so sincere. As he sat there in her daughter's room, that little girl that it was almost his to love and raise, he felt naked. And his soul was already bruised, and this week's event was taking its toll too. He sought counsel, but she gave him so much more. She gave him friendship. She shared, and though it wasn't in her best interest at all, she let him in. He was appreciative more then she could ever be aware, more then he could ever tell her. So he just pated her soft skin fondly and sat in silence with her.

Almost a half an hour later, Shelby squeezed his hand and Will looked up. His gaze had wandered away from her to Beth sleeping but didn't let go of Shelby and never stopped caressing her hand with his thumb. Maybe she thought it was time for him to go, he imagined.

But Shelby had been quiet because she felt overwhelmed. The way he kept holding on to her and comforting her so subtly felt so nice and she just didn't want to break it off. However, she was feeling better, and since she felt guilty for doing most of the talking and then getting despondent, she was actually trying to give him some attention.

"Do you want to talk about anything bad that somebody did to you?"

Will was shocked by this for a flash. The he blinked the surprise away and lifted himself to the spot next to her. "As a matter of fact, yes."

Will took his shoes off, curling around her a little. They snuggled closer, so close they were almost touching, but not quite. And Will told Shelby everything about Terri and the fake pregnancy.