Sun Gone Lost

Will found Puck in the corner of the ER waiting room, sitting on the floor with his knees drawn up to his chest. "How long have you been here?" he asked, sitting in the nearest chair.

Puck only shrugged.

"Where's your sister?"

"I don't know," Puck said, studying the threads in his jeans. "My mom wouldn't let me go with her in the ambulance."

Will frowned. "How did you get here, then?"

"Walked."

Will's eyes widened slightly. He knew how far Puck's house was from the hospital. "You didn't call someone to drive you?"

"Like I told you, Finn wasn't there, and Santana hung up on me."

Will couldn't really say that he was surprised at that last bit. Glancing down, he noticed four long and narrow scratches down Puck's forearm that were now scabbed over, but didn't need to ask where they'd come from. "Well, what do you want to do?"

Puck sighed, still keeping his eyes on his knees. "I don't know." He closed his eyes and let his head fall back against the wall. "Child Services is either gonna take me or take Sarah."

"Puck, that would only happen if there was abuse involved."

Puck's eyes snapped open and he glared at his former teacher, making eye contact for the first time. "I threw her down the stairs," he spat, though Will could easily see that the anger wasn't meant for him.

"But that wasn't abuse," Will said. "You were just... having an episode." He honestly was not sure where a schizophrenic episode resulting in a seven year old girl getting beaten up fell on the abuse chart, but he needed Puck to calm down and try to see that it wasn't entirely his fault.

"So? That still leaves her in the house with a psycho." Puck choked a little on the last word.

"Do you remember why you did it, exactly?"

Puck looked back down at his knees and wordlessly shook his head.

After a while, Will left Puck in the waiting room and somehow managed to convince Ms. Puckerman to allow her son into Sarah's curtained-off section of the ER, so long as both she and Will were there and as long as Puck stayed at least an arm's length away. When Will guided Puck toward's Sarah's makeshift room, Puck suddenly stopped short. "I can't go in there," he said.

"Puck, it's okay," Will said, a hand on his shoulder.

Puck shook his head, his eyes a little wider than normal. "No, no, if I go in there, it's gonna happen again; I can't-" He turned to head back in the other direction, but Will stopped him.

"Puck, what's happening right now?" he asked as gently as he could. "Are you hearing anything? Seeing stuff?"

Puck wouldn't meet his eye and resorted to chewing the cuticle on his middle finger.

"You know that those things aren't real," Will said. "You can do this."

Puck's hands curled against his temples and he squeezed his eyes shut, shaking his head.

Will sighed. "Okay. Come on, I'll take you home."

For the duration of the car ride back to Lima, Puck was silent. He only leaned back in his seat and watched the streets go by outside the window, and Will kept his eyes on the road ahead, wanting to say so much but unable to put anything into words.

Kurt was shaken awake in the middle of the night, and jumped when he saw Finn's hulking form standing over him in the darkness. "Dude, wake up." Kurt groaned and dropped his face back into his pillow.

"Finn, if this is another one of your idiotic midnight mental tangents that you need my assistance with, go back to bed and I'll help you with it in the morning. Why some camels have two humps and some have one can wait until the morning."

Kurt knew something was wrong when Finn didn't give a comeback of any sort.

"I just got a call from Puck's mom," he said. "He's gone."

Immediately, Kurt was awake and upright. "Gone? Gone where?"

"I dunno," Finn said, and Kurt could hear the frantic undertone in his stepbrother's voice. "His mom thought he might be with me. Dude, we need to go look for him."

Kurt's train of thought was already past that boarding station and he was on his feet, pulling off his pajamas and yanking on a pair of sweatpants and a hoodie. He grabbed his car keys off his desk and together he and Finn scampered down the stairwell as quietly as possible, jumping into Kurt's Navigator and pulling out of the driveway within seconds.

"Call him," Kurt ordered as he watched the road. "Just to be sure."

"He doesn't have a phone anymore," Finn replied. "It was disconnected, remember?"

"Shit," Kurt said under his breath. "God, where would he go?"

Finn knew which places old Puck would go if he needed to get away, but he had no idea how new Puck's brain functioned, and he was pretty sure that with the disease messing up Puck's thought processes, it wouldn't be consistent either way. "Let's try the school first." Finn figured that any place that was familiar to Puck would be a likely location for him to be, but really he just was hoping that Puck was actually close by and in a place that wasn't potentially harmful.

The school turned up nothing - there were no cars in the parking lot, and all the doors were padlocked. It was the same for the gym, the 7-11, Puck's street, his temple, Quinn's house, Santana's house, and all the parks in town. The small glowing clock on the Navigator's dashboard was nearing two-thirty in the morning when Kurt and Finn had exhausted all the possibilities they could think of, and they were beginning to grow desperate.

After calling Puck's mom (again) just to be absolutely sure that Puck wasn't just taking a really really quiet bath or something, they finally began to just drive in circles around the outer Lima city limits, passing through Lima Heights Adjacent for the second time that evening and circling around through the nicer neighborhoods, then the shopping plaza, and eventually back to the Heights. Their hope that they would find Puck randomly walking some sidewalk was quickly diminishing by the minute, and they gradually widened their circle.

As they crossed the train tracks that ran by the Heights, Finn suddenly flailed in the passenger seat and yelled "Stop!", making Kurt yelp in surprise and slam on the breaks. Finn was squinting through the dim light of the streetlamps down the tracks to where they jumped onto a bridge spanning the width of the river that formed the edge of Lima Heights before heading towards Cincinnati. "Isn't that Puck's mom's truck?" Finn asked, pointing to a dark silhouette parked crookedly on the gravel near the mouth of the bridge.

Kurt actually didn't have a chance to answer before Finn jumped out of the car and began to run towards the vehicle, but he quickly followed suit and was running after Finn as fast as he could. Finn skidded on the gravel as he came to a stop next to the truck, which had clearly been abandoned several hours before (the metal of the hood was cold and Kurt couldn't smell the fresh exhaust that lingered after a car's engine had been shut off). His heart sunk as he looked toward the bridge. "Oh, no," he whispered, walking onto the wooden slats beneath the iron tracks.

Gripping the side rail, Kurt leaned out and looked down to the roiling waters below.