fic: deus ex machina

[lifeawakening]

Title: Deus Ex Machina [god in the machine]
Chapter: Ten
Author:  lifeawakening 
Words: 7,875
Rating: R (For future scary images, language, and sexual references)
Summary: Rachel Berry always knew that she was a little bit psychic. In fact, Rachel Berry thought she knew just about everything. That is, until a spirit that refused to die entered her life like a train-

Comments

[nat365]

Ok, so I'm a fan of this ending. I particularly liked the suggestion that Rachel *was* supposed to die, but because of the technology available nowadays she made it back (though I will say that being dead for 7 minutes tends to cause serious brain damage, due to lack of oxygen, so magic/god/something else probably had to be involved for her to not suffer from that).

The only issue I have is that, if the Ombra/an Ombra was there when Rachel died, I would expect them/it to have immediately snatched her soul, and for that to be it (because if they had her soul it wouldn't be able to come back). In fact, once Rachel was 'dead' my first worry was that she'd been spirited off to hell (or wherever) for all eternity (and I figured Quinn would be worried about that too). I mean, if the Ombra were initially trying to take Quinn away, their goal can't simply be to cause death, because for all intents and purposes Quinn *was* dead.

If you write some kind of epilogue, maybe Rachel's potential memories of that could be explored, because the only reason I can think of that they wouldn't have been able to snatch Rachel away immediately would be someone/something stepping in.

Quinn also has some difficulties ahead, because she has no birth certificate or any form of identification, no record of school attendance, nothing. That's a lot of forged documents to buy... or she could simply show up at some hospital one day claiming amnesia. There must be some procedure for giving someone in that situation an identity.

Finally - that last line is beautifully poignant. I can deal with my questions about why the Ombra was/were unable to simply take Rachel (though as I said before I do hope it's addressed if you do an epilogue) because of that last line. It made me well up a tiny bit.

[lifeawakening]

I'm really happy about the fact that you were a fan of this ending despite the loose-end questions about it that you seem to have. Quinn does have difficulties ahead but she definitely had Puck's help with getting a lot of forged documents :) The last line took me a few hours to get right, and I'm glad that it had the same impact on you that it did on me. Thank you so much for reading and reviewing.