A/N: Thanks for all the comments and encouragement, guys, I really appreciate it. I'm sorry that my work commitments haven't been letting me post every day, but I'll keep posting as regularly as I can. Thanks again!

Beating, Ch. 4

Three weeks later, Kurt sent his dad home. "You can't stay here forever, Dad. Go get the business running again. I'll be here when you come to visit." He flashed his father his most charming smile. It looked almost normal; his cheekbone was healing well, and the worst of the bruising around his jaw was gone. "I'm doing okay. Get things normal at home so – so when I go home..." He fought to keep the smile going, but it slipped just a little bit.

"It'll be perfect, Kurt. Just like before..." Burt closed Kurt's hand in his own, stopping himself just short of clasping fiercely enough to hurt. "Better. We'll redo your room, get you that piano that hooks up to your computer so you can write your music real easy –"

"Arrangements for Glee." Kurt's eyes sparkled. "Thanks, Dad. But more than that... I just want to go home, and have it all be like it used to be. Settle back in. I'll be home soon."

Burt bit his lip, watching Kurt's face for a long time. "I'll visit you every day," he said finally.

"I know." Kurt smiled back.

If he cried when Burt left, no one had to know about it. Sometimes that was what you needed: time to cry alone.

But he wasn't alone very much, after all. Burt was there every day, and the Glee kids were in and out all the time, singly or in pairs, even the whole group once a week or so. Nothing was ever said about rehearsal or about regionals – Will took his cue from Kurt on that, and Kurt remained silent on the matter. Even if Kurt were out of the hospital in time, if they couldn't find a replacement for Puck they couldn't go; and no one ever, ever spoke of finding a replacement for Kurt, even if it were just to boost their numbers to qualify for the competition. If they didn't have Kurt, they didn't have Glee. Period.

But they gathered in his room, and they sang. Nothing from their official repertoire, all harmonies improvised on the fly, just picking songs they loved and making it up as they went along. Kurt took the showboat high parts, and Rachel let him. She wore an expression of great self-sacrifice, and the other kids giggled at her, but she never noticed. Why would they laugh, after all? She was perfectly sincere. She loved Kurt enough to let him be first soprano. When he came back, she'd show everyone how much she cared, how humbled she was by his strength: she'd give him her high parts then, too. Some of them.

Sometimes Kurt's showboating collapsed in on him. The beating had left him with a couple of fractured ribs and a small puncture in his lung; Will wouldn't believe it at first when Kurt told him the lung puncture had healed within two weeks, didn't want to let him sing at all at first, until he saw Kurt's gaze set cool and hard as steel and realized that his choices were either to let Kurt sing with the group or make him sing alone in his room. The lung puncture actually didn't cause too much trouble – Kurt hadn't been lying about the short recovery time – but the broken ribs still twinged now and again, and although the doctors had assured him that was normal, Kurt couldn't keep a fleeting look of fear out of his eyes, and he couldn't help breaking the note off sharply. He'd never forget the feeling of the ventilator in those first few weeks after the accident, controlling his every breath, keeping him mute and tethered to the bed. As far as he'd known then, he'd never sing again. The terror of those weeks flashed back with every twinge of his ribs – and then Rachel would burst in too loud, too fast to take over the high part, pushing sharp as often as not, and he'd look around the room and see the fear on everyone's face. The fear, and the embarrassment. No one knew what to say, but after a few weeks they'd all memorized the pattern of the floor.

Still, they came. During the day they sang with him. And at night, the boy on the CD sang to him, the boy on the CD no one else had ever heard. Kurt stowed it away carefully in his nightstand drawer each morning, hidden inside the CD case for a Gypsy revival starring Tyne Daly that someone had unwisely given him one Christmas ("if it's not Merman it's got to be Patti, and if it's not Patti, thanks for the new coaster"). No one knew of its existence at all except Kurt's dad, and although he'd considered taking the headphones from Kurt in the night and listening to a bit of it more than once, he'd always decided against it. The CD was Kurt's business. No one's but Kurt's. Kurt's and the singer's.

So one day Kurt asked Will to stay a bit after the group was leaving, and when everyone else had filtered out, he asked Will to tell Puck to come see him.

Will was floored. "I... I don't know if I can, Kurt," he said, finally.

Kurt looked back at him, his eyes clear. "You have to, Mr. Schu. There's no one else who will."

"You asked..."

Kurt shook his head. "I don't need to. They won't. You know it, too."

Will did.

"I'll send you a note to give him, if you want. But I need to see him... before I leave. Before I..." Kurt looked down. "Before I have to go back there."

"You're going back to McKinley?" Will would have snatched the words back out of the air if he could have. He'd been too preoccupied with Kurt's request to keep track of what was coming out of his mouth.

But Kurt shook his head slowly. "I don't know. I meant – before I go back there." He tilted his head toward the window. Outside, he meant. Out into the world.

"Oh. I... right. Okay," Will said, processing slowly. "You write a note, and I'll give it to Puck. And... if he doesn't show, let me know, and I'll talk to him. I can't promise anything. But I'll talk to him."

"Thank you, Mr. Schuester." Kurt lay back on the pillow for a second, looking exhausted. Feeling badly, glancing repeatedly at the door, Will found a pen and paper, and Kurt wrote a careful message in a neat, precise hand. Will looked away until Kurt had folded it, then took it and pocketed it. "Thanks, Mr. Schu," Kurt said again, and gave him a fading smile as he lay back on the pillow and closed his eyes again. He was asleep almost before Will was out the door.

His dreams were jumbled, full of narrow hallways and dark corners, brief confusing conversations and short bursts of running pell-mell down locker-lined corridors that swelled and stretched like funhouse mirrors. The people he spoke to were people he knew and didn't know, the alien melding strangely with the familiar. The voice on the CD sang to him from around corners and behind doors, and he knew the voice, but he couldn't find the singer. The voice sounded like safety and warmth and home. The voice was a mirage.

He woke up abruptly, the eerie claustrophobia of the dream still with him. He'd kicked the covers off the bed in his sleep, tossing and turning. Carefully, he swung himself partway out of bed to retrieve them. His ribs prickled; his shattered knee made movement awkward. Huddling under the blankets, he reached reflexively for the Gypsy case, then stopped: for the first time, the CD didn't offer unmixed comfort. He reached for his iPod instead and pulled up a compilation of ballads sung by Bernadette Peters. Then, after a moment's hesitation, he rang for a nurse, asking for a ginger ale – and oh, by the bye, could she grab that teddy bear off the windowsill, the one with the little "From All Your Friends in Glee" tag on its paw, and hand it to him? By the time the nurse came back with the ginger ale, the little Styrofoam cup complete with a too-tall bendy straw, Kurt was asleep again, the teddy bear folded securely under his arm. But his sleep was fitful all night. Asleep or awake, he was waiting.

Then Puck came in two days later, without warning.

He came alone, in the middle of the school day. He didn't say hello, and he didn't look down at the ground or fidget nervously, the way so many visitors did. He just looked at Kurt, and if there was a little apprehension deep in his eyes, it didn't show in his bearing or the set of his jaw.

Kurt looked back with equal steadiness. He wasn't going to look down, he'd told himself, and he didn't. His voice wasn't going to shake, he'd told himself, and it didn't. Once he found his voice, the words came out clearly, his diction precise.

"You sent Brandon back to the locker room that day, didn't you?"