For Better For Worse
Chapter 2 – Just Another Lima Loser
Puck's Story
When Puck woke up that morning he felt good. For the first time in months he had slept well without waking up wondering where he was or why he was alone. He had woken up just once in the night but the presence of his wife in the bed beside him had soothed him and he was asleep again in no time. He couldn't believe how long he had gone without this. Without her. When he had felt the sun coming in through their bedroom window and warming his face as he woke, he thought that today could be the day things changed, the day when he no longer missed his wife. Now he was staring at the paper she clutched in her hands and he knew that day would never come.
If 10 years ago somebody had said that one day Rachel Berry would break his heart so badly that he would feel like he was dying he would have said they were full of shit before throwing them into a dumpster. Now he just wished that somebody could have warned him. Maybe then he wouldn't be sitting here staring at his ex wife as his whole life seemed to flash before his eyes or, to be more specific, his life with her. He saw all of those times he had wiped those tears from her face both because she was deliriously happy or in so much pain she thought she would die. He had always tried his best to be there for her and it killed him that it hadn't been enough.
Because they were both from the same small town everyone assumed that they had been childhood sweethearts. Not only did that phrase make him want to gag, it was completely untrue. During childhood, and even adolescence, they were very much on the periphery of one another's existence. They went to Sunday school together and he recalled she had the best Bat Mitzvah party ever but she was never more that a girl he knew of. Even during the Slushie soaked mess of early high school they were just acquaintances. In truth the first time he did it, it was an accident. He stumbled and the ice went flying. He had been mortified thinking that he had shown himself up as a complete klutz and was about to apologise when everyone started laughing and high fiving him and a reputation was born.
They both went off to college without any thought for what the future held for the other because despite their short relationship and being in Glee together, they still weren't friends. She went off to New York which everybody expected, and he went to OSU which nobody expected. After he and Quinn gave Beth to Shelby he had felt so ashamed. Ashamed that he was too much of a loser to look after his daughter; ashamed that he was turning into as much of a douche as his father; ashamed that he had made his mother cry. He knew he had to get out of this town and do something that would make his Mom proud. He started going to class and, while he still thought it was boring as hell, managed to pull his GPA up to something respectable if not stellar and got unexpectedly good SAT scores. He saved his money from his pool cleaning business and enrolled in OSU's summer football camp. After impressing the coaches with his playing skills and the admissions guys with his academics he somehow managed to get an athletic scholarship. He'll never forget how his Mom cried when he told her and he realised that making people proud of you could be addictive.
He learned a lot about himself in his first year of college. Going to his classes taught him that he liked knowing stuff; he actually thought it was pretty cool. He became much more discerning when it came to women, realising that happiness doesn't necessarily go hand in hand with long legs and a nice rack. This discovery that he liked smart women was something of a revelation. It led him to take Communication 101 with the hot pre-law redhead in the room below him which in turn led him to Professor Walker who revealed one of the biggest lessons of his college career to him. He was a natural writer. His spelling and vocabulary sucked but he definitely had talent. The other lesson was that he was a much better football player than he had thought. The move from wide receiver to running back was paying off and he was starting most games. For the first time ever he actually had options and he really seemed to have a future.
Before he could really consider any of this it was summer and he had to haul himself all the way to Connecticut. At some point, probably when he was very drunk, he had agreed to go with a couple of the guys from football to help coach at some camp for inner city kids that they had both been to in high school. He didn't know what he had expected but bumping into Rachel Berry wasn't it. As soon as he had realised who the hot girl counsellor playing the piano was Rachel he couldn't stop himself from looking at her. Inevitably they talked and made arrangements to meet for coffee. Over the course of the next few weeks they met up quite a few times and he had yet another revelation. Rachel Berry was really not bat shit crazy. College had been very good to her and he sort of wanted her to know that college had been good for him too. That he wasn't the jerk everyone thought he was. If he could just get one person from the past to believe that then maybe he really had changed.
When he got back to Columbus for summer training he intended to email her or something to let her know that he enjoyed hanging out with her and they should keep in touch but he never got round to it. Once classes started again he was persuaded/strong armed into taking more communications courses by Professor Walker who really wanted him to consider journalism as a major. His first assignment was to write a letter to someone. Not an email or a text but a proper, old school letter with a pen and a piece of paper. He could only really think of one person who would genuinely appreciate getting a letter rather than an email and that's how he came to engage in correspondence with Rachel Berry
In her letters he realised just how funny she was. He could often be found in the quad outside his dorm eating his lunch and laughing his ass off at her descriptions of her crazy tutors and insane classmates. After a few months he realised that every word she wrote evoked a reaction in him, including jealousy when she told him about the dates she went on. He couldn't work out when but at some point he had started to think of the crazy midget as his. He started making his letters a little more personal, revealing more about himself to her. He wanted her to maybe start feeling the same way about him but she never gave him any indication that she might. It took him another few months and a few too many beers to man up and do something about it. He was incredibly relieved when she wrote back and agreed to meet with him in Connecticut during the summer. He had already lost too many friends through drunken mistakes and he couldn't lose her. Despite the changes in him, he was too much of a badass to pull off heartbroken.
The summer was another important learning experience. He learned that Rachel Berry was everything he could possibly want in a woman. His list was pretty demanding; hot, smart, talented, confident and sexually aggressive. As well as being all of those things Rachel could also add adventurous and flexible into the mix. He was one lucky stud.
That summer they didn't really talk about the future but he was fine with that. He didn't need to talk about it to know that they had one and so he spent his final 2 years of college living 600 miles away from his girlfriend just wishing they could be together more often. Not that they never saw each other. He tried to make it to as many of her showcases and recitals as possible and she, being the perfect girlfriend, was always there when he needed her. During Michigan week she got her roommate to tell her tutors that she was sick so that she could watch him play. When he was having a hard time and feeling really guilty after he wrote an exposé in The Lantern she dropped everything and got on the first plane to Columbus. She was the perfect date to the Heisman dinner where he officially picked up the Heisman Trophy; being beautiful and charming when she had to be but blending perfectly into the background when it was his turn for the spotlight. When he learned three months later that she had passed on an invitation to a song writing master class with some Broadway dude that she loved just to be his date he was livid but at the same time it made him realise that he had to do whatever he could to hold onto her.
When he started getting calls from agents promising him that he would be going number 1 in the Draft he realised he had a decision to make. If he decided to go for it and try to play professional football he was sure that Rachel would follow him. She had already said as much when she told him that she could write songs anywhere. He knew he wouldn't be able to live with himself though if he took her away from the place where she belonged. New York was the place that had turned her into the woman he had fallen in love with. New York was the place he wanted them to be. Besides he wasn't sure that he wanted the NFL. To be a pro athlete was never an ambition of his. The scholarship was a way of going to a college that his family would never have been able to afford and doing something that they could be proud of. Education had given him new goals. He had talked to Professor Walker about his chances at making it as a journalist and she confessed that she had already been talking to her contacts about him and people were impressed. So with her guidance he did a couple of internships and got himself a place on the Masters course at NYU. He was going to New York.
Of course she graduated top of her class and picked up a job straight away freelancing for an ad agency which was beneath her and a total waste of her talent but they had to eat. He felt a little guilty that she was stuck doing something she hated so that he could go to school and he was terrified that he wouldn't be able to make it up to her. He was nowhere near as smart as the others in his class. He thought he'd be lucky to be writing the obituaries in the Lima Gazette when he graduated so he was floored when he beat out thousands to get an internship at the New York Times. When that actually led to a job he thought he was dreaming and he was going to wake up in his old room in Lima and have to get up to go to school.
The first year blew. He was fetching coffee for the editors and running errands for the reporters and he was earning less than he had been behind the bar in SoHo. In fact he had seriously been considering calling one of the sports agents who stuffed their card into his pocket and told them to call him if he changed his mind about the NFL when the sports editor came to him and asked for a sidebar to fill a gap on the big Superbowl preview story. That led to a couple more slightly longer pieces and by the time the Draft came round he was covering it as a permanent member of the Sports Desk team.
After a couple of years in New York they were finally finding their feet. He was bringing home a good wage and was becoming respected as a sports journalist; Rachel was finally doing the things that she loved, writing contemporary pop songs for some pretty big recording artists, orchestral performance pieces and they finally had enough money to get a better place. By the time Passover came around and they went back to Ohio to celebrate with their families he had made a big decision. First he had to get to see his mom without Rachel so that he could ask her for his Grandmother's ring and again he got that rush when he realised he had made his mother happy. Once that was accomplished he got his mom to take Rachel to lunch or shopping or anything so that he could sit down with her Fathers and ask their permission to marry their daughter. Despite the initial reservations they'd had about their precious baby girl getting mixed up with the scary kid with the Mohawk, they didn't even pause to think before standing up, shaking his hand and welcoming him to the family. He wanted to propose in the little wood that they used to walk in during their summers in Connecticut but he didn't want her to suspect that he was going to do it. He put a picture that she had taken of the woods up in the hallway; left the lifestyle section open at the page talking about homes in New Haven; talked about the really great sandwiches they used to in the deli in town. It was anything to make her think that heading up there for a day or two was her idea. That night, after they got back to the city, he slept well for the first time in ages, without the fear of a future without her.
Things seemed to happen fast after that. They were married six months later on one of the best and most terrifying days of his life. There was no question that he wanted to be with her but the spectre of his dad and the douche he had turned out to be haunted him. Did he really have what it took to be a good husband? He got the answer a year later when Rachel turned to him in bed and seductively whispered in his ear 'let's make a baby'. He must have been a good husband to her if she had so much faith in him to be a good father to her children.
When he was at high school he had thought he was a stud. That cocky, mohawk wearing little bastard didn't know studly. No guy truly knew what it was to be a man until he had been in bed with his pregnant wife and laid his hand on her belly to feel his son kick for the first time. He couldn't really count what happened with Quinn. He wasn't a stud when he got her pregnant, he was a dick. She was his best friend's girl. That shit was not cool. He had thought he was badass. Now he knew that badass was not being afraid to shed tears at the birth of your child. Only a complete douche would be so concerned with image that he would hide that emotion.
Before Danny was born he would have confessed that he was a little scared by the prospect of fatherhood. He didn't exactly have a good role model to base himself on. The second his son entered the world though he knew that his doubts were for nothing. He knew that there was nothing he wouldn't do for the kid. Fatherhood was a gift unlike any other and he had no idea how he could ever repay Rachel for giving him that opportunity. He used to go into the nursery when Rachel was asleep just to look at him. He was so perfect. In those moments his mind would sometimes wander to the child he never got to look at like this. Rachel got occasional letters and phone calls from Shelby giving updates about how she was doing but they never saw her. It was just too awkward for all of them. It didn't stop him though, when he sat in the nursery in the dark, from thinking about whether she looked like Quinn or like him and what sort of kid she really was beyond the picture of a little angel that Shelby painted. Then he would realise that Danny was awake and looking at him and he was brought back to the present. Just as long as his little girl was happy and well cared he would concentrate on looking after his little guy just as well.
When Danny was 4 months old Rachel mentioned to him that he was covered in weird spots but when the nurse said it was fine and nothing to worry about he accepted that. Then it was bruising on his legs. Rachel was worried but he thought the kid was probably kicking at the sides of his crib, preparing for the day when he would be as good a football player as his old man. Finally when she was freaking out about his fever he realised that she had a point. Their doctor said they should give him Infant Tylenol and see what happened but Puck wasn't happy about that so they got him in his car seat and drove him to the hospital. He was admitted that night and his parents had an anxious wait. Puck kept telling himself that it was nothing, they were being over cautious, so when the doctor sat them down and told them it was cancer he was completely unprepared.
The following days and weeks saw his rage at the situation fester and grow inside him. The catalogue of errors that had led to his son being sicker than he had to be made him want to hurt someone. The only thing that stopped him was the fact that no matter how hard he was taking it Rachel had to be feeling it worse. She was his mother for God's sake. Puck couldn't begin to fathom the sort of bond they had. There came a point though, not even the prospect of his wife's disappointment in him held him back. He was covering a Knicks game and the big mouthed bastard behind him kept giving the team shit. When he started talking about the Point Guard's pregnant wife Puck just lost it and pummelled the guy. He couldn't stop himself. It was like he wasn't controlling his own body. He was arrested but the guy decided not to press charges after his editor came to bail him out and explained the situation. After that it was decided that he should take a leave of absence. He agreed, not really having the strength to argue.
When it was decided that Danny needed a bone marrow transplant all of their friends and family stepped up. When that led to nothing Puck swallowed his pride and went to find the man he had vowed he would never take anything from. He knew Rachel had even gone to Shelby and she and Beth had been tested but there was no match so he had to try and find his father. He followed a few leads but the trail went dead at a motel near Louisville and for the first time ever Puck genuinely hoped the son of a bitch was dead. It was at that moment that he realised there was really nothing he could do. He just had to sit back and watch while his baby suffered.
Every morning he saw Rachel get up early to go to Shacharit where he knew she was begging God for a miracle. He had done the same thing when he first found out his son was dying but not anymore. God had clearly given up on them and the moment he felt his baby boy's tight grasp on his finger loosen and saw his little chest stop moving was the moment that he gave up on God.
In the days after the smallest thing set him off into a rage. Somebody would call the house trying to sell them something or the mailman would rattle to letterbox too loudly and he would go nuts. His Mom and sister and Rachel's Dads had flown in to arrange the funeral and even they were avoiding him lest they set him off. It wasn't until the morning of the funeral when he yelled at his sister for breaking a glass that his mother decided enough was enough. When she told him that Rachel was frightened of him because of his temper he couldn't take it anymore and he broke down crying in his mother's arms. He clung to Rachel throughout the funeral, partly because he felt so ashamed that he hadn't been there for her when she needed him and partly because he felt if he let go of her he would be letting go of himself.
After a couple of weeks their families went back to Ohio and they were left with their own thoughts. He reined in his temper after his talk with his mother. He didn't want Rachel thinking that he wasn't there for her. She had been through enough already without thinking that she was losing her husband. He was frankly amazed that she wanted to be anywhere near him. If he had only listened to her when she first mentioned she thought Danny wasn't well. What sort of father was he? The least he could do was try to be as good a husband as she was a wife.
He went through the next few months like a robot. He went back to work but his passion for writing was gone and all of his colleagues were tiptoeing around him. More than once somebody he hadn't seen for a while would ask how fatherhood was treating him and somebody would quickly guide them away and explain what had happened. The worst thing was the pity in their eyes as they looked back at him. He was used to people looking at him with fear or anger and even disgust, but never pity. The problem was he didn't even care. He tried to be strong for Rachel but there were days when it was impossible to hide the fact that he missed his little boy terribly. It was on a day like this, when he had shed a few silent tears over breakfast, that he came home to find that Rachel had brought him then one thing that could help. His daughter.
The 9 year old sitting alone on the couch looked so much like him that he knew instantly who she was and they spent hours just talking. She told him about school and how much she loved writing which led them to his talking about his job as a professional writer at which she looked at him like he was some sort of hero. Surprisingly it wasn't awkward when she asked him to tell her about Danny. It felt good to talk to his daughter about her little brother. When Shelby took a sleepy Beth back to their hotel and Rachel emerged from upstairs where she had been talking to her mother, Noah pulled her into his lap and thanked her for being such an amazing wife. He knew how hard this must have been for her. Seeing her husband's healthy daughter; the child her own mother had raised with all of the love and attention she had never given to her. In that moment as he held her to him he made a silent promise that he was going to do whatever it took to get her through this and make her smile again.
Bringing the smile he loved back to her face was easier said than done. Most evenings when he got home he would find her crying because a friend who hadn't heard had asked her about Danny or she had received a brochure from a pre-school. She wasn't writing anything. Like he had lost his passion for words, she had lost her passion for music. He just didn't know how to help and her, and it scared him. She refused to see her doctor, claiming she would just put her on medication and she flipped when he suggested a few sessions with a therapist might help. She screamed at him that she wasn't crazy before locking herself in the music room for the whole night. He regularly spoke to his Mom and her Dads and even once or twice to Shelby and they all suggested that she might want to get out of New York for a while. Spend some time in a place where she wasn't reminded of Danny every place she looked. He wasn't too keen at first. Sure she was acting all kinds of crazy but she was his wife and he loved and needed her. Could he cope with her not being around? It became clear pretty quickly though that he was being selfish. He could handle being away from her for a few months if it meant she could find some peace.
The three months she was away was the longest three months of his life. He hadn't realised before just how much he relied on her being around. It wasn't the sex he was missing. Aside from the night before she left for Ohio, they hadn't made love in months. What he missed was her. The house was just so lonely without her in it. He got into a routine of speaking to her Dad's every night to see how she was doing, knowing that she would lie to him and say she was fine. As soon as he was done speaking to them he was call her, already knowing what sort of day she'd had and knowing what he might be able to say to make her feel just a little better. He found that she was happiest on the days where she had seen somebody she knew from school or the community theatre so he made a few calls. Dinner with Will and Emma became a regular thing. Kurt brought forward his trip home to visit his father and Carol. She even started having brunch every Sunday with Santana! She started spending time with Shelby and Beth at their home in Dayton, getting to know them as her mother and little sister and it was this that seemed to bring the spark back.
When she told him she was ready to return to New York he was a little apprehensive but at the same time he desperately wanted his wife back. On the day she flew back into La Guardia he borrowed his editor's Town Car and driver for a few hours and whisked her off to a suite at the Four Seasons. He just wanted to show her how much he missed her and that he treasured every moment that he was with her.
After she got back things started to go pretty well for them for a while. Puck was starting to enjoy his work again. He started to do some work on the stories he used to tell Danny about Felix the Fantastic, a 10 year old football player with the Cleveland Browns, who was whisked away to another time and place every time he scored a touchdown. Rachel had insisted that he write them down so that she could read them to Danny when he was away. They had been stuck in a drawer in the nursery until recently when Puck discovered that editing them and writing down new ideas inexplicably made him feel closer to his son. Rachel was working on music again. Her college roommate Kirsten, hot off a Tony nominated run in a revival of Annie Get Your Gun, had decided she wanted to make another album and of course the only songwriter and producer she would consider was Rachel. There was the occasional rough patch to contend with. The anniversary of Danny's death was hard on both of them but it didn't set Rachel back any, which he had feared. There were a couple of days of tears but she was right back in the music room or in the studio after that.
He genuinely thought that she was over the worst of her grief and was becoming herself again. He forgot that, despite her decision to follow music as a career, she was also, potentially, the best actress of her generation. If he had thought for one minute that she was still so messed up he would have kept the suggestion that they try for another baby to himself. She went along with him, going off the pill and taking the vitamins again, but he could tell that something had changed.
She started locking herself in the music room or sleeping at the studio. She 'forgot' important dates and bailed on him at really bad times so that she could get hammered with music execs and session musicians. When the musical she had written a few years ago was picked up for a Broadway run, she got a role in it herself. If she wasn't rehearsing at the theatre, she was recording with Kirsten or partying with God knows who. When he was offered job back on the Sport's Desk he turned it down, not wanting to get sent away on assignment regularly but Rachel went nuts when she found out, insisting that sports writing was what he loved and there was no reason for him to pass the opportunity up. After that he was sent away on assignment at least twice a month. It got to the point that a week could go by and he wouldn't see her at all.
It wasn't until Kathryn Gold entered the picture that Puck realised that Rachel was really spiralling out of control. Rachel met the Children's book editor at a party and told her about the manuscript for Felix. She was interested in the concept and Rachel set up a meeting. Puck found it a little weird that it was in a candle lit restaurant. It was more the sort of place you would take a date. Because of this he kept it strictly professional, talking only about the book and none of the experiences that had inspired it. She seemed genuinely interested in hearing more so a second meeting was arranged and before he knew what was happening he was being invited to her apartment. When he, rather angrily, reminded her that he was married she looked shocked. It soon became apparent that Rachel had never mentioned that the handsome, brilliant author she was raving about was also her husband and that the stories were written for their dead son. As far as Kathryn was concerned she was being set up on a date as well as a meeting with a potential new author. Even after this came out though, Kathryn was adamant that the invitation to go home with her still stood and Puck could not deny for a few moments that he was tempted. In another life Kathryn could have been the one for him. She was smart, beautiful, confident and Jewish. In this life though he had already found all of those things in Rachel and no matter how crazy she was getting, he was committed to this life with her. He brought his professional relationship with Kathryn to a close that night and went home to Rachel.
He drove himself crazy after that, trying to figure out what to do. Everything she did seemed to be calculated to hurt him, like she wanted him to leave her. He talked to everyone he could think of, his mom, her dads, Shelby, Kristen. They all agreed that she needed help, that she was out of control, but nobody could think of a way of convincing her without her going nuts. A few weeks after the Kathryn incident, the solution finally presented itself to him. When he found her fucking her co-star in their living room he was apoplectic with rage. Not at her, it was clear that she barely knew what she was doing any more. He was incensed at the sick son-of-a-bitch who was taking advantage of a woman who clearly wasn't in her right mind. He had dragged him off of his wife and punched him before throwing him out of the house, not caring that he didn't have his clothes. When they were alone it just didn't occur to him to be mad at her. He just handed her the blanket from the back of the couch and calmly asked if she had used protection. It was at this point that she flipped and everything came out. She had never stopped her birth control. She had no intention of having any more children, just like she had no intention of staying in this marriage any longer.
The demand for a divorce made him see the situation clearly. She needed him to be out of the picture if she was going to get better. He was a constant reminder of everything that had gone wrong in the past few years. So, even though he had no intention of going through with it, he agreed to the divorce and moved out that night. That's not to say he wasn't always in the background, he just made himself an invisible part of her life. The day he moved out he called Shelby to tell her it was time to step up. Rachel needed her Mom. A few days later he got an excited call from Beth to say that she and her mom were moving to New York at the end of the school year and she would finally be able to go to the newspaper offices with him like he had promised. Strangely though, it was Quinn who turned out to be his best ally. He knew that Rachel had been in contact with some of the Gleeks after her stay in Lima so he sent out an SOS to all of them asking for them to call her or visit her, anything so that she knew that she wasn't alone. A couple of weeks later Quinn landed on Rachel's doorstep and announced that they were going on vacation to her house on Martha's Vineyard that she got in her divorce settlement. When she got back to New York a week later she made her first appointment with a therapist.
At that point Puck had thought that things would get better that it would only be a matter of time before he moved back into their house. He therefore wasn't sure how he had ended up standing on the doorstep of his old house the night before with divorce papers in hand, ready to be signed. He had never intended for it to get this far. He had hoped that he would be able to persuade her that they didn't need to go through with it and he thought he had succeeded when she took his hand and led him to their bedroom.
Now, as he watched his ex wife retreating into the office to feed the papers into a fax machine to send them to her lawyer, he felt defeated. Only three things had ever mattered to him, his wife, his son and his daughter, and he had lost all three. He'd come a long way since high school. He'd made his mother proud. But in that moment he realised that they were all right. He was then, now and forever just another Lima Loser and without Rachel in his life he had no hope of being anything else.
A.N. So that's it. I hope you enjoyed and if you did please review. I have a few ideas for extending on this, going into what happens next and expanding on some of the flashbacks. If you want to read more, let me know.