Warnings: None

Summary: Mike let the jocks throw Artie down the stairs, but at least he goes down to get him out of the basement. It was just bad timing that the school caught on fire right then.

.***.

"Lean on me when you're not strong and I'll be your friend. I'll help you carry on." Lean On Me, Ballads

.***.

Some days were better than others when it came to getting around the jerks at school, that was for sure.

Artie never looked for special treatment, it just wasn't his MO, but he did smile when Santana held open the door for him. She continued to chatter with Brittney and then let the door slam in the rest of the class's face. Sometimes it's nice to have friends.

He took off down the hallway, stopping often to wait as this group or that group walked in front of him. He sighed, stopped dead in the middle of the hallway with his hands on his knees, staring at the chaos in front of him and kind of missing the year before, when Puck had taken him on as his "community service." Puck had a way of clearing space in the hallways.

Hands grabbed the handles of his chair and Artie looked up, already smiling. Weird coincidence, thinking of Puck and actually getting him. Sometimes the Glee club would do this – help him through the hallways and talk about Glee or football and at the end he didn't feel like a charity case but like someone other people cared about.

Except it wasn't Puck. It was a hockey player, a clean-cut cocky brand new Senior who wanted to show off to his new varsity teammates by bullying the cripple. Classy. "Clear off, Harvey. I'm already late for lunch."

Ben Harvey raised an eyebrow. "I don't think you really have much say in that. Not like you can get up and walk away."

This raised some snickers from Harvey's cronies, but the vast majority of the hallway was oblivious to what was going on. They were always so oblivious…scurrying past, talking and laughing in groups of two or three, moving around the distraction in the middle of the hallway like water moves around stone. As if Artie and the others weren't even there.

Harvey was steering him down the hallway, and to anyone else this might have looked like when Puck or Finn or Mike would grab onto him and get him to his next class, but Artie knew what came next and wasn't so much dreading it as he was resigned. It had become a sort of tradition among the sports teams to grab one of the cripples and push them down the basement steps.

It could be worse, Artie told himself, Harvey could have gotten Mariah. Mariah, the sweet sophomore with spina bifida, had been seriously hurt the year before when a baseball player had dropped her down the stairs. She hadn't been found for three hours and she'd needed surgery to fix the damage to her already damaged spine. Hopefully his fall wouldn't be like that.

Still, it wasn't like he was going to take this sitting down (no pun intended.) "You don't have to do this, Harvey. Do you really want to perpetuate the stereotype of a dumb, bullying jock?"

"It's not for that, crip. It's because it's fun." They were nearing the basement, the door halfway down a back corridor that wasn't frequented by people who really gave a damn. No turning back now. The only people around were the jocks, guffawing to encourage the violence.

And then Artie saw him out of the corner of his eye. Mike Chang, walking around the corner with books tucked under one arm, head turned and tilted to stare at the scene. They locked eyes, and both knew, in that instant, what was going to happen.

Artie would take a tumble down the stairs and pray to God that he didn't get hurt that badly.

Mike would keep walking and pretend nothing had happened, because even a super Asian couldn't realistically take on six huge hockey players and he'd just end up in the basement next to Artie, which would be no help at all. Better to keep moving, then come back later and help pick up the pieces, because grand gestures were nice and all but practicality was far more important.

That's what Artie thought anyway when he went down the stairs head first, chair flying out from under him. He fell through the darkness, giving thanks once again that it was him and not sweet Mariah, that Mike Chang had seen him, that he would be found. Eventually.

.***.

Across the school, a chemistry experiment went wrong. Every year, Mr. Rose had filled up a balloon with helium and set it on fire, and it would cause a spectacle and the students would applaud and that's how he kept his rep as the coolest science teacher. This year the ceiling caught fire.

Noah Puckerman, who seemed to have been looking forward to it his entire high school career, sprang out of his seat and pulled the fire alarm. Mr. Rose made sure all the students were out of the room before he left himself, moving as fast as he could without actually running. The fire was spreading. He would have tried to stop it, of course, but someone needed to watch these kids. And the fire was so big…over the ceiling, out in the hall, climbing up and down the walls. The gas was propelling it forward…

It would not have been that big a deal. The students got out of the school in a somewhat orderly fashion. Most didn't even know it was a real fire. They had so many drills, why not just assume it was one of those? And then they saw the flames shoot out of the building. Someone made a joke about wishing they had s'mores fixings.

The teachers took roll and counted heads, but some people had been between classes. They relied mostly on accounts from the students, encouraging them to text for once.

Tina happened to be in Mr. Schuester's Spanish class. "Mike won't answer his phone, Mr. Schuester. He always has it on him."

"Maybe he lost it in the fire drill, Tina," Schue was trying to take roll, and had lost his place between Myers and Newton.

"Artie won't respond either." Finn said, scrolling through all the texts he'd just received and looking through them again to make sure. "And…wait a second…yeah. Santana and Brittney had class with him ten minutes ago. But they were off to lunch. He's not with them."

"I'm sure they'll be okay." Schue said. He put Kurt in charge of making sure Tina didn't have an emotional breakdown and went back to his other twenty-six students. Still, every thirty seconds he'd look over at Finn, who would shake his head. Still no answer.

So when Sue came around asking if anyone knew of anyone missing, Schue put in the names of two glee club members. The only two people to really be lost in the fire.

.***.

After Artie went down the stairs Mike lost it. He knew he couldn't win – he was strong, and had taken the four obligatory years of karate when he was younger and had been a pretty decent contender. But he wasn't three hundred pounds, and couldn't take on guys that were three hundred pounds.

Still, he balled his hands into fists, dropped his books, got in Harvey's face. The kid was laughing. "You're seriously off the deep end, Harvey. Tossing a cripple down the stairs? What are you going to do next, beat up an old lady?"

Well, Mike got beat up after that, and thrown down the same basement stairs. He deserved it, though. He'd known what they were going to do. Why hadn't he stopped Harvey and Co. before they'd gotten to Artie?

"Mike?"

"Yeah, man." Mike scurried to his feet. Okay, he winced his way to his feet, because even with his pretty awesome reflexes he couldn't avoid a couple of bumps and bruises on the way down thirty stairs. "You okay?" He blinked in the semi-darkness, the room becoming more and more clear each second. There were bells ringing. Huh. He thought that only happened in movies when people hit their heads.

"Can't really move."

Mike knelt next to the Artie-shaped shadow on the floor and didn't know what to do. He'd seen enough TV to know that touching people who might have bad injuries was a no-no. But he needed to get them both back up the stairs… "Anything feel broken?"

"Well," Artie deadpanned, "I can't feel my legs."

Mike did laugh at that, then put a hand to his forehead because damn laughing made his head hurt like the dickens. "Look man, we gotta get back up the stairs before I can check you out. I'm going to have to carry you."

"Okay." Something throbbed in Artie's arm, or maybe it was his shoulder, or his chest. It all felt very detached, things that weren't actually a part of his body. And he was so tired…he felt warm, too warm, like sitting outside on a summer's day and not even being able to stop the urge to fall asleep. His ears were ringing, too, and it muted when he passed from the blackness of the basement into the blackness of unconsciousness.

"Artie!" A hard shake, and Artie wasn't against the hard cement ground anymore but was being held awkwardly in Mike Chang's arms. "Don't fall asleep, man. This is creepy enough with two of us. Talk to me. What are you thinking about right now?"

"This reminds me of the accident."

"You mean that car accident when you got paralyzed?" Mike hobbled up one step, nearly slipped, nearly dropped Artie. His knee throbbed, and he knew that there would be a whacking great bruise on it. "Not exactly a happy thought."

"Not really. They had to cut me out of the wreck. It took hours. And I felt numb, like this. I couldn't feel my legs."

"Damn Harvey." Two steps, three, and Mike was panting, wobbling. How was he supposed to make it up the rest of the flight? If only the ringing in his ears would stop… "Why would he do this?"

"Easy target? I dunno. I haven't been pushed down a flight of stairs since Freshman year, though. Last year Puck was scary enough to drive people away." Artie realized it was getting difficult to breathe and stopped talking. He coughed. If the basement had had more light the boys would have been able to see the blood he spat out. Artie wasn't bleeding internally, though. He'd just knocked a couple of teeth loose. "Come to think of it, it was Puck who pushed me down the stairs Freshman year."

"That sucks man." Mike's lips twitched. "I was about to say that you have to stand up for yourself."

"Very funny."

"I thought so." They were near the top now. "How is the ringing getting louder?"

"You hear that, too?" Artie asked in surprise. Then they both squinted through the semi-darkness up at the door.

They realized it at the same time, "A fire alarm?"

"Sounds like." What an awful time for a fire drill. Artie needed to be checked out at a hospital, and Mike could have done without going back down the stairs for a wheelchair. If there'd been people in the hallway, he would have begged a favor off of one of them.

It was only when they got near enough to the door that they could hear the round. There's a reason it's called a "roaring" fire. Mike didn't have to lean against the door to know it was hot outside. "Oh my God. The school is actually on fire!"

What could he do, though? There was no way a wooden door would hold up to the flames, and Mike didn't exactly relish the thought of being trapped as well as burned alive. He leaned against the mercifully not-quite-closed door and opened it enough to realize that the floor wasn't on fire, not yet.

Artie looked even worse in the flickering light of the fire. Cuts, bruises, and there was blood dripping from his lip, another cut open his eye. One arm was broken, but he didn't feel that yet. Didn't feel the broken rib yet, either. Of course, Mike had to notice all this in a split second. He was already heading back down the stairs.

"Where are you going?" Artie asked, terrified. He couldn't move. There was fire raging all around him, over him, down the walls, down the halls, and he was lucky to be on ground that wasn't covered by flames. And Mike was leaving him.

"I can't carry you." Mike said, panting. They didn't have time for this… "I need the wheelchair. I'll be quick, I promise."

Artie couldn't even argue, because Mike had already plunged through the flames into the basement. He just hoped Mike would get back up before the flames that were licking at the tiled floor had time to get to him…

"Artie!" Mike shouted when he'd made his way up the stairs with the wheelchair (fire did a lot to helping out the adrenal glands – he couldn't feel his own injuries. He just wanted to live…) "Artie!"

There was a lot of smoke now, and Mike started coughing almost immediately. He put down the chair, opened it, looked for the guy who belonged in it. "Artie!" He yelled again, blinking furiously. The fire was so bright, the smoke getting so thick, that it was hard to see even a short distance in front of him.

And Artie, somewhere in that minute, two, that it had taken Mike to get up and down the basement stairs, had swallowed so much smoke that he was on his stomach, coughing, turning red, inhaling and not being able to get past that damn broken rib, coughing more. He heard Mike calling to him and reached up a hand that was immediately burned by nearby flames. He didn't care anymore. He was so disconnected from his body that he could have been burned everywhere and not felt a thing.

A strong hand grabbed his and Artie was hauled up, his useless legs just dead weight as Mike pulled him onto the chair. Halfway through he dropped Artie back onto the ground, and Artie couldn't help it, this time he screamed. He'd landed on a piece of burning ceiling, and now his back was on fire.

"Sorry!" Mike said, pulling on the arm with all his might, and Artie's arm slipped out of the socket but he was too dazed to care about that.

"Mike, your hair!" He tried to shout, really did, but the smoke was in his throat, in his lungs, and what should have been a yell was a small whisper. Still, Mike got the message and patted the back of his neck, yelling when he felt the fire.

"Quickest way out?" Mike yelled to Artie. He felt so disoriented –he couldn't see, and his head was throbbing from the fall or maybe all the smoke and he just wanted to lay down, because he was too hot, because moving was too hard, but Artie was screaming, then coughing, and they really to get out now or else he didn't know what would happen, but Artie had been coughing up blood and that was never good, right?

"There's a door right around here. Maybe a hundred feet? End of the corridor. That way." Artie pointed, slumped over in the chair, he couldn't even try to help Mike to move it, could only cradle his arm and cough. He felt like he was drowning on air…

Mike started moving, cringing at one noise or another. And then he hit a wall of fire. "Artie…"

"Run for it, man."

"It could be thick. We could get stuck in the fire." Mike's greatest fear was burning to death, although at this rate it looked like he would suffocate first. It was so hard to breathe…

"You have to. The door's right on the other side."

And so Mike ran for it.

.***.

"I can't believe Artie and Mike are the only ones missing."

"Keep your voice down, Blaine. If Tina hears you say Mike's name she's going to start crying again."

"They've been gone for a really long time."

"Five minutes."

"You can totally burn to death in five minutes, Kurt."

"Blaine! Optimism!"

Blaine stared at the burning school, stared at it. So he was the first one to see the door open, the first one to see Mike and Artie stagger out of the school, the first to see them collapse.

But everyone saw the spurt of flames come out the door, like an explosion fabricated for television, engulfing the two boys who'd just fought so hard for their lives in hellfire.

.***.

"Thank you, Mike."

"Jesus, Artie. You're the one that nearly died." It was late, and Mike and Artie were still in the hospital after the television cameras and their parents and the Glee club left. Smoke inhalation, concussions, and burns were reasons enough for an overnight stay.

Artie had borne the brunt of the injuries, though – Mike could at least sit up in his bed, and was flipping idly through the channels for something decent to watch, even though the pounding headache made him want to sleep. Artie had broken a rib, his wrist, dislocated his shoulder, had burns over 16% of his body to Mike's 7%. He'd also lost a couple of teeth, which had made Mike smile in relief. He'd thought Artie was going to die on him…

"And you're the one who saved me," Artie murmured sleepily. "Really. Thank you."

"No prob." Mike muttered, settling on a showing of Back to the Future and leaning back against the thin pillows.

"You took on the jocks," Artie continued. "Not everyone would have done that."

Right. "Remind me to tell Puck about Harvey. He's better at the whole intimidating thing than I am."

"You mean he's better at punching people."

"Harvey deserves it. You shouldn't throw people down staircases. Especially if they can't walk back up them themselves."

Artie let out a weak laugh, then coughed. God, he was already sick of coughing. "You're, like, Asian Superman."

Mike smiled at that, and was about to say something about wanting to be a firefighter instead when he realized Artie had already fallen asleep.

He watched the television without really seeing the pictures, and realized he wasn't nearly as upset about being caught in a fire, about the school burning down, as he was at the fact that anyone could be so awful as to push a cripple down the stairs.

.***.

somebody asked us for some artie bashing, and mike somehow wormed his way in here, too. okay, so schools probably wouldn't go up like a house of straw, but this is what would happen if the worst happened. willing suspension of disbelief...