A/N: Work-in-progress. Responses, positive or negative, are welcome; I'm using this story to try to work on one or two particular aspects of my writing, and I'm curious as to whether it's working or not.

Beating, Ch. 2

Brandon Jamison was the kid who'd set off the firestorm, but he was sullen now and neither the police nor his buddies were getting much out of him. At first he'd told the police that Kurt was the one who'd punched him out in the locker room, but he dropped that story in record time after a cop inquired how a kid like Kurt could have taken out a linebacker like Brandon. So he reverted to the story he wound up sticking with, which happened to be the true story anyway: He'd walked into the locker room and seen "that queer" kneeling in the locker room, sucking someone off. There was a locker in the way and Brandon couldn't see who the other guy was. Before he could get his bearings – "I was just trying not to puke, man" – Kurt had looked up, his skin had blanched, and the other guy had dodged around the locker and punched Brandon in the side of the head hard enough to make him black out for a minute. When he came to they were gone. Brandon never saw the other guy. The police ran a polygraph and decided to believe him.

When they asked him why he'd tried to pin it on Kurt, he shrugged and got more sullen. From the bits of mumbles they picked up, they pieced together that he'd figured if Kurt hit him first, the beating Kurt took might be considered justifiable and no one would be prosecuted. Since half the football team was under suspicion, it didn't take long to figure that Brandon was looking to protect someone.

"So you beat him up in the locker room? Right there?"

Brandon shook his head vigorously. "No, man. I told you, I had nothing to do with the beating. Shit, that was the next day."

"You sure about that?"

Brandon stared at the table, face blank. "That's what you told me."

The guy cop, the one with the paunch, sighed. "Yeah. Tuesday, right?"

"Tuesday what? Tuesday he got beat up. Monday I saw them in the locker room."

The cop exchanged a look with his partner. There was no physical evidence in the locker room, and life would have been a lot simpler if Brandon and some of his buddies had jumped Kurt for no reason after school one day, but things weren't shaking down that way. Paunch-Cop tried one more time, just for the hell of it: "See, the problem is, Brandon, you trying to blame him for that punch you took to the head don't mean a thing unless you're calling this self-defense. Which –"

"I didn't hit the kid." Brandon shoved his chair back, kicked the table leg. "Not then, not the next day, not ever. Can I go now?"

They didn't let him go for another two hours, but it was a waste anyway. They knew everything he could tell them: locker room on Monday, beating on Tuesday, a bunch of football players were involved, Brandon spread the rumors that kicked everything off, and -- weirdly enough – according to the lie detector, he hadn't been part of the lynch mob himself. "Go get some new friends," were the cop's parting words to him.

So no luck with Brandon, and no luck with anyone else either. Kurt couldn't tell anybody anything. None of the people who cared about him – his dad and the Glee kids, basically – knew anything. The guys on the football team all had alibis, and half of them were giving alibis for one another, which proved nothing but had to be run down anyway. Parents were giving their kids alibis you could sieve marbles through, just to keep them out of it. Everyone was oblivious or lying or both.

There was one guy who knew everything, of course. He knew what had happened in the locker room and it was a fair bet that he knew what had happened the next day. But no one knew who he was, and he wasn't telling.

Scared.

Everyone was scared. The football players were scared. You heard it in the whispers on the sidelines, in the slurred arguments in middle of the woods on Saturday night with empty 40s scattered on the ground:

--We're playing football with this queer. Every time someone tackles me it creeps me out.

--Yeah. They should give us, like, ass shields.

--But we don't know it was a football guy, really.

--Brandon saw the team uniform crumpled in the corner, douche.

--So? There's team uniforms on the floor in there all the time.

--Better than figuring it's someone on the team.

And the conversation always turned to Finn and Puck, Puck and Finn:

--It's got to be one of them.

--I dunno, man. Finn's Quinn's babydaddy and Puck's got more chicks than Perdue.

--So what? You never heard of bisexuals?

--Gross. I'm trying to drink a beer here, dude.

--All I'm saying's it don't have to be a Glee guy. Could be some guy on the dl.

--Brandon didn't say the guy was black.

--You don't have to be black to be on the downlow, dumbass.

--Yeah? You know that much about it, huh?

--Shit, forget it. Figure it's one of the Gleeks. It sure wasn't me.

The refrain at the start and end of every conversation: It wasn't me.

Finn never hung with the guys anymore. He'd've quit the football team if Quinn hadn't talked him out of it. "Quit and they'll be sure it was you." She placed his hand on her stomach. "I need you here with us, safe." And Finn nodded, but his eyes were as vacant as they'd been since that ten-year-old on a bike found Kurt curled on the sidewalk. On the team or off, Finn would have fared worse if it hadn't been for Puck: Puck made it clear he was ready to kick anyone's ass who messed with him or with Finn, and everyone knew he could make good on the threat. A few days after Kurt was hospitalized, some idiot tried to shave off Puck's mohawk. Puck landed one kick that cracked two of the kid's ribs, then told him what else would happen to him if he told anyone. The kid taped his own ribs up with instructions he found on the Internet and breathed shallow for a few weeks.

No one was going to mess with Puck, anyway. Not until they were sure he'd been the other guy in the locker room; maybe not even then. Puck was everyone's dealer, and there were a lot of drugs going around McKinley High lately. No one wanted a clear head these days.

Glee wasn't doing well. They were down two male voices and no one could pull themselves together long enough to sing anyway. The group spent a lot of time talking – about what had happened to Kurt, about what was happening at the school, about hate crimes in high school and what it all meant – but they were all hanging suspended, really. Waiting for Kurt to wake up and bring the life back to Glee. Trying not to think about what might be if he never woke up at all.

The only singing they did was the tapes for Kurt, something to keep playing by his bedside, swapped in and out between the soundtrack to Wicked and Madonna's Immaculate Collection by a trembling father whose face got grayer every day. Cut after cut, every song they knew, trying to get it perfect. It never was, of course: Will could sing one guy's part, but not two, so without Puck they were kind of screwed. Then one day Will found a tape in his mailbox, unlabeled. It turned out to be Puck, singing the baritone line on all the songs in Glee's repertoire. Will handled it carefully, thinking. He figured the kids would smash it to pieces with a hammer if they found out about it. Half of him wanted to do that himself.

But he still didn't know who had been behind that locker, and maybe... well, maybe Kurt would want Puck's voice on the tape.

Will spliced it in later, not telling the kids about it.

And the rumors thrived and grew, and the newspapers were running articles on hate crimes and retrospectives on Matthew Shepard, and the guidance staff held assemblies without knowing what to say in them, and Principal Figgins kept threatening to shut down the football team until this was settled and never got around to doing it. Sue Sylvester, oddly enough, spent quite a few episodes of "That's How Sue C's It" explaining why people who did stuff like this should be cut up for shark chum, or sent into hand-to-hand combat with a couple of grizzly bears, or something. Will didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

And Mr. Hummel never left Kurt's bedside. He shut down the business until further notice and he stayed at the hospital, eating trays of hospital food brought to him by sympathetic nurses, his eyes zeroing in on them with hope distilled into desperation as they told him "stable condition" and "swelling receding" and "GCS 7." The words didn't always make sense, but he learned to read their faces. They hadn't given up hope. That was all he needed to know. He held on to that. He held on to Kurt's hand.

Then one day Kurt's eyelids started to twitch.