Sorry about the wait; but I did write a Puckish oneshot with a side of Kurt, Lid Wide Shut if you want to check it out. :)
Every time he passed her in the hallways (Rachel, not his baby mama, or Santana, who seriously, always wanted him. He was such a stud. If he had one more girl drooling over him, he'd have to start keeping a photo album in his wallet to keep them all straight.) guys were giving her sideways glances and like, giving little waves.
And even though Puck clearly did not care, because, hello, he got to much action to wish sexual repression on anyone (see what a good guy he was?) but really, part of him was a tiny bit irritated. Seriously, she was still Rachel Berry, school pariah. Half of them had given (or funded, or fantasized about) her a slushy facial, and certainly none of the others had ever done anything to stop it.
And of course, it would be today, with her looking sort-of kind-of hot and in his jacket -- seriously, from the back, it looked like that was all she was wearing, her long legs (and they did seem ridiculously long for her being practically a midget) poking out for about a mile before they ended in her six inch heels, that she'd be in his sight all day.
And really, Puck could not stress this enough to himself: he did not care. His jaw was locking and teeth were on edge because of a preexisting medical condition.
At Glee practice, when Mr. Shue walked in, he was already holding a hat he'd used once to pair them up, to like, give them some sense of team spirit, or get them out of their boxes like they were new appliances (or some kind of gay metaphor like that) and Puck groaned. He wasn't sure what he wanted (or didn't want) to happen, but he knew that he had a feeling.
Rachel went to sit next to Kurt, and when she tried to tug down the hem of her dress, he slapped her hand away.
Puck almost laughed. Even the queer wanted Rachel Berry to show more leg. He couldn't blame him; if there were a pair of legs to make a man hang a U-turn on the sexual superhighway, they probably belonged to her.
Mr. Shue cleared his throat, and he realized he was staring at the aforementioned pair. He felt a little less like a middle school dweeb when he looked up to see Mike still looking.
They all watched as Mr. Shue rapidly pulled out six of their slips and looked at them. He frowned, and tossed them all back in.
"What about, the fates have spoken, Mr. Shue?" Finn teased. Rachel and Kurt looked over at him at the same time, like they were both so aware of him, all the time.
"The fates don't know what they're talking about when it comes to group dynamics," he muttered, shaking the hat vigorously, and pulling out another six slips, reading off their names as he went. "Alright. Rachel, Santana, Mike, Finn, Artie, Matt."
Before Mr. Shue could explain, Puck's brain hit an idea like a car crashing into a bank, and chimed up from the back of the room. "Alright -- I nominate myself as team captain, and my team's got dibs on Shirts."
Laughing, Matt and Mike grabbed the hems of their shirts. Santana shoved Matt with a smirk, the way she touched everybody (too much sex appeal like a pheromone handprint) but she looked at Puck while she did it, and skanky and sassy. She might as well have been licking her lips.
Dude. Puck was such a babe magnet; he didn't know how he'd ever thought something like glee could change the kind of status his guns had brought him. He patted them in appreciation under the guise of smoothing over his shirt.
And then he saw Rachel Berry looking like she was seriously contemplating it, and Shue butted into his fantasy of getting all three of the girls shirtless (and then of course, realized that the non-friendship they had was just a cover for their hot lesbian lust towards another, and then they would got into an argument over who was the best kisser and they'd need an unbiased judge ... Puck had a pretty good imagination) by like, actually explaining what the teams were for. Sometimes Puck hated him.
(They were both going to do the same song and inventing their own choreography for it, he explains as they start to move into their groups, and they'd adopt the best dance for sectionals, because Mr. Shue liked to shake things up because he was all into, like, team loyalty or something dumb like that and always trying to get them to form new connections. Probably had to change the groups because the first time the hat had given him an arrangement that actually worked.)
"What's the song?" Kurt asked, looking at his fingernails instead of Mr. Shue.
"A song about loneliness and being an outsider, and makeup," Mr. Shue explained with a smile, "by a tiny little band with seventies hair called--"
"--Elenor Rigby." Puck guessed, only, he was pretty sure, and it came out confident. He hadn't meant too, because he wasn't Rachel -- every moment of his life wasn't a competition of musical one-upmanship.
Mr. Shue made a gunpoint gesture at him and fired, grinning. "Elenor Rigby."
And then the room erupted into chattering, and from across it, Rachel is looking at him all big-eyed like she's proud he knows a classic song. He rolls his eyes.
"So," he said, in a weird moment of taking charge. (He might as well, because Tina's too shy to take charge of anything and Brittany may or may not know how to tie her own shoes and if he waits for Mercedes or Kurt to start them off they'll either end up doing to ghetto or the gay version, and he really likes this song, and he had a babymama to impress.)
And what he's thinking is seriously, Shue's not going to give me any guys to cover my back? He knows Hummel doesn't even count, but what he says is, "Let's make them cry for their mommies."
And Mercedes laughs and nods, even though just a second ago he heard her use the phrase another white-guy song, like they're all oppressing her by not making every song something off the radio during Black History Month.
"Alright," he says, and he can sort of hear Rachel's voice from across the room, but kind-of quietly, like she was trying to whisper, but couldn't get the hang of it, which was so like her. "They've got Berry, and Santana, and Mike, so between Rachel's robot showbiz brain and their collective moves," Puck shrugged, and the rest of his group was looking at him like he was certifiable, but he kept soldiering on, in part because Quinn's mouth was hanging open like she'd never have expcted him to be doing this (whatever it was he was doing) and, well, doing what he'd been doing up until this point hadn't worked so much in his favor, so he might as well shake things up. "But they also have Frankenteen, and -- no offense, Chang -- Artie, to be counterproductive."
Quinn and Tina, who Puck had never expected to have anything in common, both frowned and slowly brightened simultaneously.
"That's true," Quinn said finally, with an appraising look at him.
Hummel smirked like he knew something he didn't. Puck stared at him hard, to remind him who had the ability to toss who in the trash (just because he hadn't exercised this ability in the last few weeks didn't mean his muscles had atrophied -- he just hadn't been in the mood) and he didn't stop.
Finally, when it was getting a bit awkward, and they could kind of hear Rachel's wolf-in-sheep's-clothing-but-not-wearing-them-convincingly megaphone voice trying to be quiet ("The mood of this song, of course, would make jazz hands entirely inappropriate, but I feel they could be utelized nicely for irony") and he was still staring at Hummel and everyone else in their group was staring at him, Hummel pened his mouth with the final verdict, after a slow once over.
"Gleek."
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PS HOLY FRIGGEN CRAP A HUNDRED AND FIFTEEN PEOPLE GET AN EMAIL WHEN I UPDATE THAT STORY -- THANK YOU SO MUCH TO EVERYONE WHO IS A PART OF THAT NUMBER. :) Ps. you should say hi. :)
