(Author's note: Puck's song here might sound familiar if you happened to listen to a certain singer's solo release in spring 2016.

Get your tissues ready; it's gonna be a bumpy ride from here on out. -amy)

It was strangely easier to be at camp once the other boys had departed. Puck woke up the next morning and came out to the kitchen, half-expecting it to be empty, but Juan Pablo was there, stirring the polenta.

"Quiero ayudar," Puck said awkwardly.

Juan Pablo nodded, handing him the spoon, and started on the eggs. They worked in companionable silence until the tattooed Banana Boat delivery guy arrived at the back door.

"Just the one box today," he called, then stopped when he saw Puck. "Oh. I thought everybody went home already."

"I'm sticking around for a while," said Puck.

The guy took a step backward, looking uncertain. Puck wondered if he should go get Cy, but the guy seemed harmless, regardless of the size of his forearms.

"Really, it's okay," Puck said, trying to be as reassuring as he could be, given the circumstances. "I talked to my dad today. He's okay with it too."

Puck wanted to invite Juan Pablo to sit down and eat some breakfast, too. It seemed only fair, since he'd been the one who'd made most of it, but he disappeared when Hunter and Cy showed up.

The three of them sat together at the table by the window, looking out over the trees by the ridge as they ate.

"We'll start your therapy by talking," said Cy. "The more you can bring to the surface now, the easier it'll be later. You'll have plenty of breaks and time to be outside, and regular mealtimes. Later we'll adjust that schedule as needed."

Puck nodded, taking another bite of eggs. "That doesn't sound so bad."

Cy nodded. "I imagine Hunter already told you that this therapy won't be easy. You have to be willing to go through a lot to get to where you want. There might be setbacks, but we're going to get through it. When we're done, all those things you're trying to let go will be much easier to walk away from."

It was the look on Hunter's face that caught Puck's eye. Puck didn't say anything at the table, but he asked Hunter about it later, before bed, when he was playing his guitar.

They sang together sometimes. Hunter mostly knew stuff with religious overtones, which weren't always much fun to sing, but his voice was strong and clear, and luckily their tastes overlapped when it came to Bob Marley.

One love, one heart
Let's get together and feel all right
Hear the children crying, hear the children crying
Saying give thanks and praise to the Lord and I will feel all right

Let them all pass all their dirty remarks
There is one question I'd really love to ask
Is there a place for the hopeless sinner
Who has hurt all mankind just to save his own beliefs?

"When Cy was talking earlier." Puck strummed through the chords he'd written that afternoon, a minor progression: B-flat minor, F minor, F sharp, over and over. It made him think about Kurt's chord progression, the one that had ended up as the descant in their song.

"Yeah?"

"You were kind of… I don't know. You looked like you thought I shouldn't do this."

"No!" said Hunter, clearly surprised. "No, that's not what I was thinking. I think I was reacting to what you said, that it didn't sound so bad."

"Okay?" He modified the progression so the B-flat minor went to E-flat minor.

Hunter wrapped his arms around his knees, resting his chin on them.

"It's bad," he said. "I mean — I haven't gone through it. I've done the talking part, but not the other stuff. Cy won't give me the full thing until I'm seventeen. It doesn't stick so well with younger kids; I guess our brains are too malleable or something. But I've watched a bunch of guys go through it." He looked right into Puck's eyes. "It's bad."

"I know," said Puck. "I think I do, anyway. I can imagine."

"They're going to make you talk about everything. All the stuff you're ashamed of. Dig up all the things you never thought you could be free of, and make you tell them."

"Hey, whatever. They can bring it." Puck set the guitar down, looking more closely at Hunter. "You know just how this goes. But you want it anyway?"

Hunter nodded. Puck watched his face for any sign of expression, but he was just calm.

"Why?"

"Because I deserve it," said Hunter. "Kids like me, we want something we shouldn't. We need… training. Rehabilitation. We need help not wanting it."

Puck was pretty sure Hunter wouldn't understand the kind of help he got from Adam and Finn and Kurt, but he nodded. "You think it's bad for you."

"You know the Goo Goo Dolls?" said Hunter, surprising him.

Puck picked through the chords for "Sympathy" while Hunter sang:

And I wished for things that I don't need
And what I chase won't set me free
And I get scared but I'm not crawling on my knees
Oh, yeah, everything's all wrong, yeah
Where the hell did I think I was?

The part about "All the empty things disguised as me" made Puck grimace. He paused, flexing his fingers.

"Hurts," he said.

"Your hands hurt?"

"No, inside." Puck rubbed his chest. "It's hard. Hard to say how your own thoughts can hurt you."

Hunter's eyes softened. "That's good. You should write that down."

"I guess."

But he did, after Hunter went to his own room. He wrote for a long time. Trying to make the words say the things he wanted them to say without them sounding completely stupid was hard, a lot harder than writing music. The music fell into place quickly, but he could tell the lyrics were going to take a while. Eventually he shut the notebook and returned it to his backpack.

He opened the window to listen to the sounds outside. The frogs and bugs didn't sound the same as home. He lay there in the dark feeling homesick for fucking Lima.

"Hope I dream about you, baby girl," he said to the window. It was easy to pray for that. She'd never been anything but good.

Puck decided, for breakfast the next day, he was going to use up some of those bananas in the kitchen. He found the waffle iron and made it through two iterations of batter before Juan Pablo or Felipe arrived. They looked at one another uneasily as Puck served them each a banana waffle with butter and a sprinkling of crushed peanuts and powdered sugar.

"Come on, try them," he urged. "I don't make anything bad."

They ate every bite, exclaiming and smiling, and watched carefully as Puck made another batch. Cy and Hunter showed up later and loved them just as much, praising their moistness and texture. They didn't even comment on the fact that Felipe and Juan Pablo were sitting with them at the table, reaching out and stealing Puck's waffles from his plate, like they'd always been friends. It made Puck smile.

That might have been the last time he smiled all day. As much as Puck had challenged Hunter to bring it the night before, actually being confronted with probing questions about things he barely remembered from his youth made him feel uneasy. "I don't know" was apparently not an acceptable answer. Cy just asked the questions again, telling Puck to close his eyes and put himself back into his memories of being four or seven or ten. By the time lunch rolled around, his mind was full of distressing and violent snapshots.

"I'm not really hungry," he told Juan Pablo, who frowned, but brought him some plain toast with a half a banana.

The thing was, he wasn't even sure if what he remembered was accurate. He had clear memories of his brother telling him about things his dad had done to him, but Puck didn't remember any of them happening to him. It made it hard for him to feel attached to any of them in the way Cy was asking him to be.

Cy asked him a fuckton of questions, and they got progressively more invasive and unpleasant. He got Puck to talk about his sexual fantasies one minute, and then the next he was back to childhood memories of his father. Sometimes Cy had him shout at the memory-figure of his father, stuff he'd never said but maybe had wanted to say. Collectively, it had the effect of getting him all worked up with no particular outlet for how he felt.

No sex, he thought, leaning his head against the wall during a break. It was cold and gritty against his skin. What's it been, two weeks now? And no spanking, for longer than that. At least I get to help make breakfast and do the dinner dishes.

When Cy sat down across from him in the dim room again, he could feel his patience slipping away.

"Tell me more about your experiences with Blaine," he said. His voice was neutral, as always.

He shrugged dully. "What do you want to know?"

"He seems to be of particular interest to you. What do you think was special about him?"

"I don't know." Before Cy could give him the standard follow-up, he held up a weary hand and added, "Okay, fine. I'll tell you anything. I'll tell you everything. All right?"

It took a while. There were so many memories of Blaine to share: little things, about the way his hair curled, or how he looked up at Puck, so trusting. Cy just listened and wrote notes, but eventually his pencil stopped, too.

"You want to know about all the stuff we did?" Puck pressed. "How about last summer, me and Kurt and him, the three of us in the king-sized bed on the third floor?"

Cy wasn't asking questions anymore, but Puck wasn't stopping. He was just getting started.

"How about after Finn joined us? I can give you all the details about the four of us. Blaine always said I was the best fuck he'd ever had."

Cy turned pages in his notebook, looking away. "Noah…"

"How about my seventeenth birthday, the first time I did him bare? Kurt ordered me to do it — just reached between his legs and put his dick right inside me."

He closed the notebook. "I think we're done for tonight."

Somehow Puck had risen to his feet. "Hey, come on. Don't walk away now. I'm putting myself on display for you. What do I care if you don't like what you see? Everybody thinks they know who I am. They say, that Noah Puckerman, he's a piece of work, but they don't know the half of it. I've been hiding who I am my whole life. And now you wanna know how does it feel? Welcome to my fucking life. Go ahead, stare all you want. Welcome to the show." He was shouting now, at Cy's back, turned away from him.

Cy opened the door and went into the hallway, casting him a cryptic look. "Good night, Noah. We'll try again tomorrow."

"Fuck you!"

"I'll pray for you."

Puck spent the next hour fuming in his room, pacing back and forth. For the first half, he was kicking the legs of the furniture, and for the second he was feeling more than a little embarrassed. He sat down on his bed and stared at the sticker on his guitar case declaring Hello, My Name is Mr. Lucis. The scrawled i ran into the c, making it look like Lugs.

Finally he went to knock on Cy's office door. Puck didn't have much hope Cy would still be up, but he was. He raised an eyebrow at Puck, adjusting his glasses.

"May I help you?"

"I'm sorry," he told Cy. "I didn't mean to talk to you like that. I know you're only trying to help."

Cy nodded. "I accept your apology, Noah. I want you to know, I don't blame you for these outbursts. You've been living a life of sin for so long, it's frankly amazing to me that you can recognize you even have a way out."

Puck took a detour on the way back to his own room and stood outside in the parking lot for a while. It was too dark to take a walk, but he appreciated being able to see the stars for a few minutes, at least.

When he looked over, Hunter was standing beside him. He gave Puck a sympathetic smile.

"You were pretty mad," he said. "I heard you yelling down the hallway."

"Not mad, exactly. I was —" Puck scuffed his shoe through the gravel. "Yeah, I was sick of being judged, but… not by him. By everybody out there, everybody who thinks they know me. And all I could think was, this is what you judge me for? You don't even have a tiny piece of the information here. If they knew…" He laughed. "I mean, I haven't told him anything about getting chained up and whipped."

Hunter laughed, too, like it was a joke. "Yeah."

He gazed up at the sky. "And at the same time, it's good to say everything. All the shit that's been in my head for all these years. The — stuff I'm remembering."

Hunter put a hand on his shoulder. "You want me to pray with you?"

Puck went ahead and did it. Asking God for forgiveness still felt pretty useless, but doing it out there in the mountains, surrounded by the brightest stars he'd ever seen, while holding Hunter's hand, was calming.

He spent a good chunk of the rest of the night scribbling lyrics in his notebook and crying. When he was finally able to sleep, he dreamed of his seventeenth birthday, of the rainbow cake Carole and Sarah had made for him, of being chained to Carl's St. Andrews cross, and Blane receiving him afterward in his arms. He'd never felt so rich as he had in that moment. Waking up from that dream made him wonder what exactly it was he thought he'd been doing wrong — what, after all, had made him want to come here in the first place.

The days began to blur together. He hadn't yet gotten tired of banana waffles by the time they ran out of the bananas in the crate, but he managed to craft a pretty good alternative with finely-ground oatmeal, applesauce and raisins. Hunter showed up every morning for breakfast to eat whatever Puck made. Sometimes Juan Pablo and Felipe would join them. They made a show of stealing Puck's waffles, but Puck didn't feel all that playful anymore, and from their uneasy expressions, he could tell they were worried about him.

He spent most mornings talking with Cy. The questions continued to be very personal. Cy wasn't upset at him when he supplied details, but he made it clear that most of what Puck had done in the past were things he should be seeking to stop doing. Themes like "Just for today, I'm not going to think about touching another boy" ran through their discussions and activities — although Puck wasn't sure how he was supposed to keep from thinking about something.

His outdoor time each day was slowly being reduced, until one day when he asked if he could go for a walk, Cy told him no.

"Discipline sometimes requires sacrifice," he said, sounding regretful.

The first time Puck realized Cy was actually using aversion therapy was probably not the first time he'd done it. In the middle of a graphic explanation of a particular act, Puck paused, wrinkling his nose.

"What is that smell?" he said. He had to actively suppress his gag reflex.

"Just go on talking, Noah," said Cy. He did not seem to be bothered by the odor, which to Puck was reminiscent of rotting meat.

The smell came back several times that day, accompanied by others, sharp and pungent and nauseating. They followed him throughout the day, killing his appetite.

That night he woke up with the smell strong in his memory, and almost vomited over the side of the bed. He had to sit there for several minutes, taking long, slow breaths, while trying to remember what he'd been dreaming about. It was a while until his stomach and his mind were calm again.

Another morning they got him up while it was still dark out. He already wasn't sleeping very well, even worse than usual. Sometimes he fell asleep in the middle of therapy, or woke up in the middle of conversations he couldn't remember beginning.

One time they put him in a room with nothing but a chair, a mattress and a stack of soft-core porn magazines. They were mainstream female models, which wasn't Puck's usual preference when it came to porn, but looking at them made him hard, so he jerked off anyway. Nobody came in to stop him.

Later in the week — he thought it had been about a week, but he wasn't exactly sure — they sat him down in front of a large screen and taped wires to sensitive parts of his body. The pictures and video clips on the screen were pleasant, but the jolts of electricity were not. Nothing felt bad enough for him to call it pain, but it was hard to tell sometimes. He remembered fighting them when they took out his nipple ring, which had been sore before they'd even hooked up the electrodes.

Puck was vaguely aware of Hunter's presence between sessions in the room, but he seldom had a chance to interact with him now. He wasn't sure if he'd talked to anybody other than Cy in days. He'd stopped having regular mealtimes. When they gave him food, he ate it, and he wasn't really aware of what it tasted like. Sometimes they let him lie down, and sometimes he slept and sometimes he didn't. Between the constant intrusive questions, the unpleasant stimulation, and the disruptions to his schedule, it was getting to be hard to recognize the difference between memories and things that were happening right now.

At one point Hunter came into his room and sat with him on his bed. He wasn't smiling, and in fact looked a little uncomfortable.

"How're you doing?" he asked.

Puck snorted, and Hunter nodded.

"Yeah. I figured. I'm, uh…"

He fell silent. Puck could see Hunter looking at him out of the corner of his eye.

"You're bait," said Puck.

Hunter cringed a little, but after a moment, he nodded.

Puck suppressed the angry laugh that threatened to erupt from his throat. "I wasn't going to fuck you last week. Why would I want to do it now?"

"Pretty sure they're not expecting you to do that now either. I wouldn't let you, anyway."

"But they want me to want you."

"To not want me," Hunter clarified.

"Fuck that. They want me to want you, so they can shoot me down and make me hate myself."

Hunter wasn't denying any of it. He just sat there looking miserable.

"Well, come on," said Puck, feeling aggravated. "What are you supposed to do?"

"I've never —" Hunter let out a frustrated sigh, squeezing his hands into fists and releasing them. "Of course I care about the program. I want it to succeed. But I've never felt —" He looked up at Puck, then quickly away. Puck rolled his eyes.

"Yeah, sorry, not really in a mood to talk you through your first crush."

It took Puck five seconds to feel shitty about saying it, but he sat there another minute and a half before he actually did anything about it. He reached out and touched Hunter's knee. Hunter took his hand, squeezing it, and he didn't let it go.

"Sorry. You don't need me to treat you like a jerk."

"I'm not going to blame you if you do," Hunter said quietly. "You've got a lot to lose by being here."

"Yeah, and I asked for it, right? I deserve everything I'm getting."

Hunter didn't deny that either. He let Puck put an arm around him, then pull him into a hug. Puck could feel him shaking.

"I'm not making it up," Hunter whispered. "How I feel. I'm just — I wish things were different."

Puck sat there and waited while Hunter slowly took off his shirt and moved in close, kissing him. It wasn't until Puck kissed him back that he felt the revulsion roll through him, like a wave of noxious poison. His skin become clammy. Seconds later, he gagged, and Hunter stood up quickly. He was crying.

"I'm sorry," he said, with force. "I wish it hadn't worked."

Then he ran out the door, leaving Puck sitting on the bed holding Hunter's shirt, the taste of bile thick in the back of his throat.

It got worse before it got better. There were a couple days when Puck didn't make it through a session without getting sick. Cy let him go outside and sit on the porch when his headaches were particularly bad, which made him feel relieved and depressed at the same time. Playing guitar and singing was still fine, so he did a lot of that when he wasn't in a session, but it was upsetting in its own way to be immersed in nothing good but music. The scenery continued to be beautiful and the weather continued to be brisk and clear, but he was starting to feel desperately lonely.

Eventually, he seemed to reach a kind of equilibrium. The electric stimulation didn't change his state much anymore, even if it was still really unpleasant. He was at the point where he automatically turned away every time he was shown a naked picture of a guy, without thinking about doing it. Nobody punished him for masturbating to pictures of girls, so he took advantage of that whenever he was given them. He still wasn't sure if anybody was watching or listening to him doing it, but he figured it didn't matter much either way.

One night, Hunter came into his room again and sat on the bed beside him. Neither of them made a move toward one another this time. Puck didn't attempt small talk, either.

"You're going home tomorrow," Hunter said at last.

Puck stared at him in disbelief. He wasn't sure how to say I forgot I was going home without it sounding ridiculous. He just nodded.

Hunter nodded too. "I'm not supposed to give you my contact information."

"Yeah, that would probably suck for both of us."

"I'm just telling you," he went on doggedly, "because I didn't want you to think I didn't want to."

Puck had all kinds of responses to that, but at the moment he just felt too tired to say any of them. He nodded again, trying to think of something positive he could say, anything at all.

"You have a good voice," he said.

"Thanks," Hunter said. "You do, too. You're really —"

"Don't." Puck held up a hand, and Hunter fell silent. "Just… don't."

Hunter nodded. After another moment he got up and left.

On the last morning, Puck brought his guitar with him to breakfast. Cy's Hello, My Name is Mr. Lucis sticker was still stuck to the side of his case. He couldn't quite bring himself to rip it off.

Felipe was there, although Juan Pablo had disappeared a week ago and Puck hadn't been able to get anything out of Felipe about where he'd gone. He made eggs and listened while Puck sang him Neil Diamond songs.

"Gracias por cocinar conmigo," Puck told him. Felipe smiled, revealing pleasantly crooked bottom teeth.

"You made the kitchen beautiful," Felipe said.

It made Puck blush, even though he was pretty sure Felipe didn't mean it in any intimate way. Hunter didn't show up for breakfast. Neither did Cy. Puck and Felipe ate the eggs alone together.

It was while he was washing the dishes that he realized there was a commotion brewing outside. Puck glanced over at Felipe, who looked as surprised as he was.

"Are there more boys coming? Campamento?"

Felipe shook his head. He opened the back door, holding it wide for Puck to see the police cruiser parked out front. He could also see the Banana Boat truck sticking out behind it. It looked like the battered truck had been in an accident; the sign on the truck, with its cheerfully painted figure, had been broken in half, so that it now read NANA OAT. The tattooed delivery guy was standing there, talking quietly to the guy in uniform.

"Oh, fuck," Puck whispered. "This isn't going to be good."

It wasn't long before Cy arrived in the parking lot. He shook the officer's hand and stood there listening and talking, maintaining his placid smile for longer than Puck expected.

"I should go," Puck told Felipe, who nodded, looking worried. He handed Puck a dish towel to dry his hands, then his guitar case, and hurried him out the back hallway toward Puck's room.

He managed to get his clothes and his few belongings packed into his dad's duffel before there was a knock on the door. It was the uniformed officer.

"Noah Puckerman?" the man asked.

"That's me," said Puck.

"Son, I'm Officer Dewey from the Terrebonne sheriff's department. We're going to ask you to come with us to the station."

"What, so I'm in trouble for going to camp?" he asked, as calmly as he could.

"You're not in trouble at all, son. We just want to ask you some questions. Do you have contact information for your mom or dad?"

"My ma died last year, but my dad's phone number is on my bag."

The officer escorted him out to his cruiser, past Cy and the NANA OAT truck and the Banana Boat guy, who looked both embarrassed and relieved to see Puck. He didn't say anything, though. Neither did Cy, who wasn't smiling anymore. Hunter was nowhere to be seen.

Before they drove away, Puck spotted Felipe standing in the door to the kitchen. He gave Puck a brief wave, almost a salute. Puck hoped he wasn't involved in this in any way, because he would have hated to see Felipe lose his job, even a crappy job cooking for a camp like this.

"How'd you guys figure out where I was?" he asked Officer Dewey.

"I'm not at liberty to disclose that."

"Was it the Banana Boat dude? I bet it was."

Officer Dewey glanced at him sympathetically over the edge of the seat. "Sorry, son. I really can't tell you."

There wasn't even a protective screen between the driver and Puck. He totally could have taken him, if he'd wanted to. For a brief, crazy moment, he considered it.

Tess wouldn't approve, he finally decided. No matter who else was going to want him around when he got back to Lima, he suspected Tess probably would insist on him minding his manners.

Officer Dewey and a couple other people at the station, including a lady who reminded him a little of Ms. Pillsbury, did indeed ask him a bazillion questions. He answered them as best as he could. There wasn't really anything he could say in his defense, other than I asked for it and my dad knew and it really sucked. The lady listened very carefully and took a lot of notes.

He waited for another two and a half hours before his dad showed up at the Terrebonne sheriff's station. When his tried to hug him, Puck jerked away, glaring.

"At least you don't smell like booze," he muttered.

"Look, I got here as fast as I could," his dad protested. He glanced over at the desk clerk. "Can I take him home now? We have a long drive back to Ohio."

It turned out to be more complicated than that. Puck refused to talk to his dad while they were waiting. Officer Dewey called his dad into his office and talked to him instead, while Puck continued to sit in the office. Eventually he took his guitar out of his case and worked on the chord progression for the song he'd written while he'd been at camp, humming under his breath.

"Can I get you something to eat?" the desk clerk asked. "You've been here a long time."

Puck didn't really want to eat crappy vending machine food, or really any food at all, but he drank the bottle of water she gave him.

It was dark by the time his dad finally signed the last paper and beckoned for Puck to follow. He looked a lot more like the angry father Puck remembered from much of his youth, which wasn't exactly comforting. They loaded Puck's things into the back of the truck.

"Stupid fucking bureaucracy. You'd think in Oregon it would be different." He let out a long sigh as he settled behind the wheel, looking Puck over. "So? How was the second part of camp?"

"Lonely," said Puck. "Boring. Confusing." He shrugged, staring at the floor. "I guess it did what it was supposed to do, though."

His dad nodded solemnly. "You've done a hard thing, Noah, but it was the right thing."

Puck decided he wasn't going to cry in front of his dad. With an effort, he managed to wait until they stopped at a gas station to use the bathroom. He locked the door of the single grimy stall and settled on the edge of the toilet seat, squeezing his eyes shut and wrapping his arms around his head before letting out the screams that racked his throat. It wasn't nearly as satisfying as it would have been if someone had been spanking him into release, but it was something.

When they pulled into a motel for the night, his dad opened the glove box and handed Puck his phone. Puck stared at it. He had no idea what he should do with it.

"You might want to at least let your sister know you're okay," his dad said.

"You could have told her yourself," Puck growled.

"Look, Noah, you can hate me all you want. I'm not looking for forgiveness. I know I've been a crappy father. This?" His dad pointed out the back window of the truck at the dark western horizon. "This was for you. Whatever chance you've got to make it in the next life, it's on you to keep it going."

Puck had no idea if he would end up with any control about where he went in the afterlife or not. He did decide he would make a reasonable attempt to check his messages, but by the time he charged his phone enough that it would start up again, he was on the fence again. When he saw the 78 new voice mails notification, he thumbed it off and tossed it on the floor next to the bed.

And I was in love with things I tried to make believe I was
And I wouldn't be the one to kneel before the dreams I wanted
And all the talk and all the lies were all the empty things disguised as me

- The Goo Goo Dolls, "Sympathy"