Some Company

Kurt was the only person there for me when Babygate blew up. He was my confidant, the keeper of my secrets, and for a while, my best friend. Filling Puck's role didn't seem at all hard for him. Hell, he was better at it than Puck had been, most of the time. So when I saw him, broken, after all that had happened between us and everyone else, I knew I had to do something.

I guess I should have seen it coming; the inevitable naivety-causing-heartbreak scenario. I didn't. I don't think I'm perceptive enough to pick up on such things. But I'm his friend. I should have seen it coming.

I gently put a hand on his shoulder, and the whole scene seemed implicitly like déjà vu; was this not the same spot where, months before, he had found me crying after Sectionals? Had he not done the same thing for me then as I was doing for him now? I shook my head and sat next to him on the sun-warmed bleachers. Everything was the same. And yet, everything was different.

"Are you okay?" I asked, because the quiet was unnerving. Kurt had obviously known it was me long before I spoke; I could tell because he didn't tense up when I touched him. If it had been him, coming back after all the trouble he'd caused, I had a feeling Kurt might've flinched.

He shook his head a fraction, not lifting his head from his knees. "Not really," he whispered into them, his voice cracking. I rubbed his shoulder gently, trying for the life of me to remember what Kurt had done to make me feel better when I had been the one in tears.

"Do you want to talk about it?"

The fact that he laughed at my suggestion had me wondering what I'd done wrong. Sometimes people laughed when I said something stupid, and I felt myself flushing slightly (yes, flushing; blushing is what girls do, while flushing can be manly).

"Sorry, I have no idea what I'm doing here," I admitted, removing my hand from Kurt's shoulder and rubbing it across my face. "Comforting is not my... forte?"

Kurt looked up from his knees and smiled at me weakly. "You used that right," he said almost gleefully. He had been subtly trying to increase my vocabulary for weeks, and had this proud look in his eye whenever I correctly used one of his suggested words. His face fell after a moment, but he continued to look at me.

"It's not every day your gay friend gets unceremoniously dumped for a girl, huh?" he said sarcastically, sighing slightly at the end. I let out a long breath.

"Well, no."

He laughed, but it wasn't like a happy laugh. It was a sad little laugh, like how he laughed when someone talked about his mother and he tried to brush it off. I knew that laugh. It was the same laugh he used when I told him we would never be more than good friends. He had laughed and said, "I never expected anything more." The sad thing was that I knew he hadn't.

We sat on the bleachers silently, each in our own thoughts. The quiet was kind of nice, once Kurt had wiped the tracks of his tears from his cheeks. It was filled with a sort of contempt sadness, if that makes any sense; Kurt was unhappy, but I knew he was happy I was there.

"He said he was taking gayness for a test-run," Kurt said after a while, and it took me a moment to figure out he was talking about his break-up. "He said he decided he preferred women, but then asked if we could still be friends."

"Yeah, well, Puck's always kind of been a douche bag." I looked at Kurt, who was staring blankly at the empty football field. "You deserve better." I thought I saw his eyes light up a little, but I couldn't be sure.

He turned to me, scrutinizing my face. He frowned. "You actually mean that," he concluded, turning back to stare at the field, his expression a little warier.

"Of course I do, Kurt," I said, my mind wandering to times when things had been simple; before the drama of Regionals, before the drama of Sectionals, even, back when glee club was easy and fun and not complicated. "You deserve someone who loves you for who you are, inside and out. And Puck is stupid if he thinks any girl he can get is better than you." Kurt was tearing up again, and doing a bad job of hiding it.

"Thank you, Finn," he mumbled, looking away.

"No problem." I paused, wondering what there was to do now that Kurt had stopped crying. "Do you... want to go toss the football around?" I asked, because that was the only thing in sight, and the first thing that came to mind. Kurt shook his head.

"I'd really rather not," he said, looking down, "These are new shoes."

I laughed then, because even when Kurt was in foul mood, his sense of fashion and loyalty to his clothes hadn't been altered in the slightest. He was smiling slightly, that little closed mouth smile he put on when his mind was elsewhere.

"Would you mind just... sitting with me for a while?" he asked, and I shook my head.

I didn't mind at all.