Set Free; glee
For pyrodynamo, who I love lots and lots and lots. ♥♥♥
Title: Set Free
Pairing: Quinn/Rachel, past Puck/Quinn.
Summary: Beauty Pageant AU. Quinn is five questions away from being Miss Ohio.
SET FREE
1. If you could change one thing about the world, what would it be?
It was all wrong. The stuttering pace of their hips, the ugly bedspread wrinkled beneath them, his lips and hands and body smearing across hers: he was wrong.
She closed her eyes.
-
Quinn slipped it by her parents for three and a half months.
They never mentioned the barrier that sat between she and them at their wholesome dinner table facing bowls of plastic fruit, they never mentioned it even as she ballooned right before their eyes: not one word about the little girl sat next to them with a telltale bump beneath her dress and daisy-chain halo. The bump sat between them, growing and showing and stretching all the lovely skin she took from her mother, and then it hung from her cheerleading uniform, swollen, and hung from her frame, heavy enough to tip her over. Her body started to mar, then, in slow, thin pink tears - her hips, first, then her legs, her stomach, and her chest. She used to spread her hands over her new, torn, bulging tummy and wonder if there was any way out of this mess, any way at all.
After they decided pretending to themselves was too hard to continue (after she argued with them, pleaded with them, loved them and then just let them) they kicked her out with a bag of some of her things and a handful of cash. Not enough to rebuild a life on, and not enough for hospital bills and a baby, either. It’s a death sentence. Quinn is hurt by it - heartbroken and still tender - but she distinctly remembers having no surprise at them then, casting her off like a criminal and not a daughter. It had to end as terribly as it started.
She doesn’t go back.
*
Sue is her agent. Legally, Sue is her guardian, too - and Quinn is honestly glad, despite all of Sue’s coldness and spite.
Sue paid for her hospital bills, filled out the adoption papers for Quinn - and some for Quinn’s baby, the ones Quinn’s hand shook too badly for her to fill out herself - gave Quinn a place to live and a new, real family for Quinn’s baby to live with; but above it all, she gave her purpose. Sue is a beauty pageant connoissuer, and when she found Quinn, five-months pregnant and living on-and-off again homeless, what she took in before her pregnant stomach was her cheekbones, her complexion, her cold eyes. “You’re a tough one,” is what she told Quinn, almost softly.
Sue called their whole relationship a ‘business arrangement’, but to Quinn, although she’d never say it, Sue was the best family she could have ever asked for, then.
(Another.
Quinn is mindlessly paging through one of the magazines stacked across the waiting room tables when her eyes first land on Rachel Berry, perched delicately across the room with crossed legs that lead into the pointed arcs of her feet. Her face is caught in a blindingly enthusiastic grin, and she simply sits the entire time brushing carefully at the skirt of her dress, her hair. Quinn watches her over the top of her page with narrowed, darkened eyes.
In the end, it’s just the two of them left waiting for their interviews. Quinn turns the last page of the Cosmo she hasn’t read a word of, scanning over it convincingly enough. She can feel Rachel’s eyes on her.
“I’m Rachel Berry,” she informs Quinn brightly, as though she’d asked. She leans over the table between them and reaches her hand out for Quinn to shake.
After a pause, Quinn closes her magazine and sets it down next to her, leaning forward to meet Rachel halfway in a firm, warm handshake. Her hand feels little and frail under Quinn’s long fingers - it makes her want to squeeze. She smiles, carefully, enough to crinkle the corners of her eyes when she sits back. “Quinn Fabray,” she replies, easily enough. Rachel looks like she’s filing it away in her head when she nods, eyes unnervingly wary.
She grins again, a hundred-watts and absolutely terrifying. “Nice to meet you, Quinn Fabray,” she says, earnestly, and before Quinn can open her mouth to respond, Rachel gets called in to the panel-room, departing with a little wave and another electrically bright smile.)
2. What feature do you like most about yourself and why?
It’s the Rachel’s and Santana’s who are always first to go.
Birth in Lima Memorial Hospital and a lifetime without a toe outside outside the state of Ohio isn’t enough to convince the judges of any tangible stateside descent. They take in the olive-tan painting their skin, the unconventionality of their features and the harsh way they hit their consonants - too precise to be natural - and then they cross their names off the candidate lists and wait patiently for girls like Quinn to walk through the door: girls whose fair skin, bottle-blonde hair and all-American smile show real promise. Quinn knows it’s unfair; it gives her a leg up on the competition, though, something she’s been taught can never be a bad thing.
She doesn’t go into these auditions and interviews hoping the girl behind her gets the crown, after all. The reason she goes - can’t stop going, really - is for another chance at being beautiful, the second try few girls who’ve lived through the hell of her adolescence find at all.
*
(She hears Rachel singing from the waiting room and crushes the pages of her magazine into fists she didn’t know she was making.)
*
In her own audition - after an average gymnastics display and shooting everyone enough big smiles - one of the judges tells her, sweetly, “You’re made for this.”
3. Are looks important?
Quinn runs every morning, at least three times around the hotel compound - vast enough to make good exercise and bordered entirely by trimmed hedges. Rehearsals begin at seven, sharp, so she’ll wake up at five, run, and then get herself ready, again, punctually; a few times, she skipped it altogether, and her body felt restless and her muscles ached with disappointment, but she held her lies against Sue when she asked, knowingly,“What kept you so busy this morning, Q?” She doesn’t let it happen again after the second week in the hotel, after Santana tried on her swimsuit and made a point of showing her - and all the other girls, Quinn’s sure - showing her the smooth dips and flatness of her abs and the soft, evenness of her skin. Every other contestant has a nine-month head start on her.
She can’t let it happen again.
This morning Rachel Berry interrupts with her spritely grin, bounding from foot to foot on her star-decorated sneakers and asking, brightly, “You don’t mind if I join you today, Quinn?” in this presumptuous way that means she never expects anybody to say no in the first place.
The sound of her sickly sweet voice makes Quinn’s skin crawl, and she’d honestly like nothing less. Her mouth opens reflexively and starts, her words sharp, “In fact -” but that’s not playing the part right, so instead she curves her lips into a twisted smile and says, just as sweetly, “Not at all.”
Rachel smiles widely at her with her whitened teeth and dark eyes shining in a thank you.
Quinn alienates this memory like a tumor from the rest: she’s certain down to her bones that if she were to pinpoint it on a timeline from where she first caught sight of Rachel Berry in the contestant waiting room to the day she said goodbye to her, this is where they started to go wrong.
*
The contestants are lined up in the rehearsal hall in a sea of fresh, fitted dresses and blindingly white smiles. When Quinn turns her head to the right, she sees a row of plastic dolls, and when she turns her head to the left, she sees them all again, but this time Rachel Berry’s stood in the middle of them, grinning a lively grin and looking warm all over, as always.
Quinn faces forwards and disappears again.
*
Rachel shows up every morning. Quinn has a sneaking, dangerous suspicion that she thinks of them as friends.
The jogs aren’t entirely bad. Another person makes Quinn become impulsively competitive, and she can see the resolve in Rachel’s face sometimes, too. Mostly the only sound is their breathing, their footsteps, although on every other occasion Rachel fills the silences with overeager babbling. Sometimes, that isn’t entirely bad, either. She finds out that this is Rachel’s first pageant: after her parents realized she couldn’t make the three of their dreams come true in New York, this was their second option for her to shine, at home. It makes sense. She doesn’t fit in here like everyone else, and from what Quinn knows it’s not exactly what she’d expected, either.
Rachel’s definitely better than Santana, who sleeps in the room across the hall and only speaks to her when it’s to pass judgement, and the other girls who know Quinn is experienced enough to avoid her at all costs, because she isn’t known for being friendly, despite the bleached smile she makes sure to shoot at everyone. Rachel inserts herself into Quinn’s life, and it’s not what she wants but tagging around with her every once and a while like she’s mixing well can’t exactly look bad.
But there is something about Rachel she’s seen from the start that she can’t put her finger on, can’t comprehend and hates her for.
*
One of major sponsors for the pageant has its officials overlook rehearsals exactly a month before the show is set.
Quinn doesn’t hear them when they discuss Rachel, despite the rumour that they didn’t keep their voice particularly quiet for it. She doesn’t hear them, but she does hear the thousands of variations of what they said based on it that circulate the contestant hotel rooms like wildfire afterwards, most of which she’s betting came from a dark, vindictive recess of Santana Lopez’s mind.
She doesn’t see Rachel for the rest of the day. It seems to drag on endlessly, and for some reason it’s filled Quinn’s insides up with something cold and painful. As the hours pass it becomes heavier inside her like an anchor, dragging her half-reluctantly to Rachel’s hotel door.
It’s unlocked when she twists the knob, so she lets herself in, knowing she can’t endure the melodramatic scene Rachel would make in the doorway, telling Quinn to leave even if they both knew there wouldd be nothing she’d like less in the world. Rachel is still completely and utterly more than Quinn can handle, and maybe Quinn decides that it’s okay to forget that for tonight - not for the first time - even if she isn’t sure exactly what compels her to in the first place.
When she comes in, Rachel is sitting on the edge of her bed in the baggiest pair of pyjama’s she owns, her hair strung up in a messy bun, staring down at her hands, clasped and white-knuckled on her lap. She doesn’t look up at the sound of Quinn coming inside; she’s been waiting for it, expecting it, but when Quinn comes into her line of vision she still reaches up to make sure the last of her mascara is wiped from beneath her eyes, just in case.
Quinn looks down at her and sighs, heavily, irritatedly. After another moment she carefully sets herself down next to her on the mattress, wiping at the skirt of her dress even though she knows it’s fine.
She thinks about slipping their hands together. Another long beat; she tries to forget.
Another. Rachel opens her mouth to speak.
“Am I pretty?” she asks, and her voice is soft and frail from crying.
Quinn studies her knees intently. Thinks of long lashes on flushed cheeks and bright-eyed smiles, thinks of all the things Rachel deserves to hear from someone she deserves to have, thinks of the warmth of her skin when they touch. She can’t resent anything, can’t envy a thing about Rachel the way she does with other girls: everything about Rachel is hers alone and that’s admittedly something Quinn likes about her, obviously too much.
Beautiful, Quinn should say, and then she should leave. Instead she turns and looks at Rachel for a moment, leans in and kisses her.
4. What feature would you change about yourself and why?
Quinn’s skin is over-moisturised with product. An entire shelf in her bedroom is crowded with half-empty tubs of Cocoa Butter, Biotherm, Provedance, Bio-Oil - hundreds of labelled, ten-dollars-a-bottle placebos. She uses them down to the last drop and obediently passes the empty containers on to Sue, who files complaints and lawsuits to the companies that own them when Quinn shows her the marks still branding her skin, still branding her as something she’s never been. They fade at times, with every new product, and although her skin feels dewy and soft after every layer of cream and oil she pastes onto herself at night, by the morning, her wounds have reddened again: so vibrantly she wonders if they go right down to the bone.
She’s being moved into the hotel for the pageant, and Sue’s circled the date for her laser treatment in heavy black ink on her calendar, but she still packs all the little vials and tubs and bottles into their very own bag to take with her all the same, just in case the treatment doesn’t work, either.
*
They have most of today free, after a quick rehearsal in the morning. A lot of the girls group together to have lunch in town, and one of them even raps on Quinn’s door, smiling her practiced smile and invites her along. She says no, as always; Sue will make her practice, as always, which is nice to have for her to fall back on at times like this.
It’s Rachel who complicates things.
She stays behind too. She shows up at Quinn’s door in a tight-fitting dress that’s cut shorter and exposes far more than Rachel’s normally comfortable with. It’s zipped up at one side and backless - freckles on the skin there, Quinn notices, sparse, pretty little things mapped out like constellations - and the skirt sits high on her legs, flutters whenever she moves and shows another dangerous inch of tan skin. When Quinn watches her stride in, brazenly, her hands makes to reach out, to grab. She clenches them into a fists instead, hard and steady at her sides like twin anchors.
Rachel perches tentatively on the edge of her bed, shiny-faced and blushing with make-up. She looks - different. She looks like she knows it, too, shifting around on the bedspread for a while before regaining herself: leans back with her hands spread over the sheets, crosses her long legs and looks up at Quinn through her lashes, unable to hide the small trace of fear that lingers in her eyes.
“What are you doing,” Quinn says, but it’s much softer than she intends. She leans back against her vanity and squeezes the drawer handle behind her back, tight enough for the patterns of it to tattoo her palms.
Rachel looks startled, maybe embarrassed. Her glossy lips part, lashes shadowing her cheeks when she looks down to the floor instead of Quinn’s eyes. Quinn tries to look away, too, finds herself stuck and so, so lost for a long moment. The way Rachel breathes, softly but deeply, her chest pushing out to press her taut nipples against the thin fabric of her dress with every inhale - it makes Quinn’s heart race in this terrifyingly unsteady staccato beat.
“I thought maybe you wanted me,” Rachel answers. She’s always like this, always honest until the point of pain and with Quinn, always self-deprecating and a little miserable. Quinn doesn’t know why she keeps coming back.
She watches her hair sliding out of her ponytail with sharp eyes. After a moment, Rachel timidly raises her gaze and meets Quinn’s, and Quinn says in an instant, hoarsely, “Maybe.” But she shouldn’t. She shouldn’t be like this, and she spends as much of her time willing Rachel away to make believing otherwise easier as she does willing her closer. She breathes, one deep breath.
She takes her time walking over, in long, graceful steps, glancing briefly at the door to check it’s locked. When she reaches Rachel, she’s towering over her, and her hand finds itself slipped beneath Rachel’s jaw, angling her head to face her.
“Maybe,” she breathes again, and Rachel shivers beneath her and says, “Please.”
Quinn presses a steady hand to Rachel’s shoulder and pushes her down, down, down onto the bedsheets, crawling over her exposed thighs. She tries to calm her heart and lungs and her shaky fingers when they stutter over a soft expanse of skin beneath Rachel’s collarbone. They trail lower to pick at the hem of her dress where the zipper starts, just above her chest that heaves with every strenuous breath she puffs out. Quinn lets them linger there for a moment, tracing invisible lines with her fingertips, looking for something like a signal in Rachel’s face through an expressionless mask.
“Please,” Rachel says again, this time softer and pleadingly. Her hands reach up to tangle into Quinn’s hair and tug her down.
Quinn licks and bites into her mouth, desperately, dragging the zipper as slowly as she can stand to down over her ribcage, the curve of her hips, the first inches of her leg until it’s broken apart. The dress slides over Rachel’s bare skin for a moment and she whimpers into Quinn’s mouth at the feel, clenching fists into blonde hair that tighten and pull when Quinn’s hands slip the dress off of her, entirely.
Rachel is tiny with softly arched curves, warm and soft all over from head to toe. She’s embarrassed when Quinn pulls away to look down at her, her cheeks flushed red and hands still caught in Quinn’s hair, thumbs stroking timidly over her scalp. Quinn’s hands move of their own volition to spread over Rachel’s breasts, palms grazing over her nipples so she cries out - this breathy, intense thing.
Rachel gasps again and bucks her bare hips into nothing, panting. She looks up at Quinn, half-lidded, presses a wet kiss to the side of her mouth and murmurs, “Let me see you.”
She kisses Quinn insistently, hands cupping the sides of her face and reeling her lower, and Quinn lets her while she thinks: of her body and how scarred it is, how ugly it is with the childbirth Rachel can never know of.
“You’re beautiful,” Quinn says against Rachel’s bottom lip, and then she pulls back to undo the buttons of her dress and lets Rachel see her.
5. How far can you push yourself?
The closer they come to the real contest, the less enthused Rachel becomes.
In every rehearsal Quinn sees her smile dull a little more, her shiny eyes blackened and emptied beneath a fringe of fake-lashes. When she practices singing, her voice is the same steady pitch, still haunting and maybe still intimidating, but there’s nothing behind it anymore. There’s nothing here for her anymore.
They spend time off in Quinn’s locked hotel room, curtains drawn and the pager Sue gave her defiantly switched off. It’s a silly thing, and Quinn knows it, too - that playing games in her bedroom with a pretty girl isn’t enough for her, that after the pageant that’s the end of Rachel as far as she concerned. Or she used to know it, at least.
Rachel spends an entire hour the of the Saturday they have off rehearsing pressing her dry lips to every individual mark on Quinn’s body, smiling into the skin, an almost unfamiliarly bright smile. She hums under her breath, and it tickles the scarred skin on the inside of Quinn’s thigh so she shudders beneath her, noticably.
Rachel’s smile quirks into something playful. “I like days like this best.” Her hands tighten over Quinn’s waist, fingers digging in almost enough to hurt.
Quinn huffs out a sigh, impatiently, and pushes Rachel’s head back down.
*
After the morning jog today, Rachel follows her back to her room in an odd silence, for once, eyes cast downwards the whole time. She sits on the bed while Quinn fumbles her hair into a sweaty ponytail in the bathroom and shrugs off her hoodie, unaffected, then moves to sit beside her, stiffly.
Rachel continues to be unnervingly quiet for a few long, tense moments, and Quinn spends the time making a fist in her bedsheets with the hand she can’t see, thinking about how warmly they slid down her bare back the last time she was here, about Rachel’s hair spread across them later, sweat-slick and messy.
“Please don’t do it,” Rachel says without looking at her. She has her dainty little hands clutched together in her lap, paler than usual, and her mouth is making a strange, thin line from where Quinn can see it. She’s shiny with sweat, the sheen of it on her skin when she crosses her legs making something in the pit of Quinn’s stomach burn.
She drags the tips of her fingers over where Rachel’s thighs are exposed and along the material of her shorts to dip her hand beneath them and revel in the way her breath hitches, eyes falling shut.
This time tomorrow she’ll be in the clinic, watching her scars fade away back into the person she used to be. This time next week, they’ll be standing on national television together like they’re nothing but beautiful, plastic strangers.
*
The officials give her two days off afterwards, while the skin is puffy and red and healing, slowly. “I told you not to get your hopes up, Q,” Sue tells her, tapping the lightened, still visible marks over her calves. She shrugs, says they’ll manage. “You’ll manage,” she adds, glancing disapprovingly at the drawer topped with all of her bottles and lotions that never do her any good. Then she goes, whistling out the door.
Quinn gets out of bed and slips her robe off to land around her feet in a puddle. She looks into the mirror and nothing has changed. (She still had sex with the wrong person, still had a baby at sixteen, still has hickeys on her collarbone from Rachel’s fierce, adoring kisses, still doesn’t know what the fuck she can do to be normal again if this didn’t work.)
*
They use a can of spray on foundation to even out her skin tone for practice now. Some girls are sympathetic, some of them jeer, some of them continue disregarding everyone else entirely.
Rachel stands next to her while they form a line and curls her fingers around Quinn’s pinky for a brief moment. Quinn wants to hate her and hit her for being right but instead she closes her eyes and lets out a gust of heavy, relieving breath instead.
They can’t keep doing this.
*
The night before the pageant, Rachel knocks on her door for the first time in the past week and Quinn reluctantly lets her inside when she sees she has puffy, red eyes from crying.
Rachel holds herself and stands in front of Quinn more hunched over than usual, her jaw tense with determination but the rest of her decidedly despairing and hopeless looking.
Quinn crosses her arms and watches her for a moment, clicking her tongue and growing steadily angrier. “What is it, Rachel? What’s so important that you had to pull me out of bed the night before the pageant to tell me about?” She wasn’t sleeping, really. She tried for hours but couldn’t, and when Rachel knocked she’d just been flicking through the dresses in her closet with a frown, the ones she’d be wearing onstage tomorrow.
“You hate it here,” Rachel says. She shakes her head and when she looks at Quinn her eyes are frighteningly sad. Her voice rises. “You don’t tell me anything but I know you hate it here just as much as me.”
Quinn watches her through narrowed eyes and doesn’t falter, not once.
“This is it for me.” Something hurts inside of her when she admits it, something smashes and the illusion is gone: an image of a faceless husband and faceless children and blindingly white house flashes in her mind and then burns out like a light. “This is all I have. This is it.” Her voice breaks. The backs of her eyes sear with pain.
Again, Rachel shakes her head, eyebrows knitting together. “You are the best thing that’s happened to me in so long,” she breathes out. She’s still clutching herself tightly, hands balling into fists in the crooks of her elbows. She stares right at Quinn, unwaveringly, searchingly.
They can’t keep doing this.
Title: Set Free
Pairing: Quinn/Rachel, past Puck/Quinn.
Summary: Beauty Pageant AU. Quinn is five questions away from being Miss Ohio.
SET FREE
1. If you could change one thing about the world, what would it be?
It was all wrong. The stuttering pace of their hips, the ugly bedspread wrinkled beneath them, his lips and hands and body smearing across hers: he was wrong.
She closed her eyes.
-
Quinn slipped it by her parents for three and a half months.
They never mentioned the barrier that sat between she and them at their wholesome dinner table facing bowls of plastic fruit, they never mentioned it even as she ballooned right before their eyes: not one word about the little girl sat next to them with a telltale bump beneath her dress and daisy-chain halo. The bump sat between them, growing and showing and stretching all the lovely skin she took from her mother, and then it hung from her cheerleading uniform, swollen, and hung from her frame, heavy enough to tip her over. Her body started to mar, then, in slow, thin pink tears - her hips, first, then her legs, her stomach, and her chest. She used to spread her hands over her new, torn, bulging tummy and wonder if there was any way out of this mess, any way at all.
After they decided pretending to themselves was too hard to continue (after she argued with them, pleaded with them, loved them and then just let them) they kicked her out with a bag of some of her things and a handful of cash. Not enough to rebuild a life on, and not enough for hospital bills and a baby, either. It’s a death sentence. Quinn is hurt by it - heartbroken and still tender - but she distinctly remembers having no surprise at them then, casting her off like a criminal and not a daughter. It had to end as terribly as it started.
She doesn’t go back.
*
Sue is her agent. Legally, Sue is her guardian, too - and Quinn is honestly glad, despite all of Sue’s coldness and spite.
Sue paid for her hospital bills, filled out the adoption papers for Quinn - and some for Quinn’s baby, the ones Quinn’s hand shook too badly for her to fill out herself - gave Quinn a place to live and a new, real family for Quinn’s baby to live with; but above it all, she gave her purpose. Sue is a beauty pageant connoissuer, and when she found Quinn, five-months pregnant and living on-and-off again homeless, what she took in before her pregnant stomach was her cheekbones, her complexion, her cold eyes. “You’re a tough one,” is what she told Quinn, almost softly.
Sue called their whole relationship a ‘business arrangement’, but to Quinn, although she’d never say it, Sue was the best family she could have ever asked for, then.
(Another.
Quinn is mindlessly paging through one of the magazines stacked across the waiting room tables when her eyes first land on Rachel Berry, perched delicately across the room with crossed legs that lead into the pointed arcs of her feet. Her face is caught in a blindingly enthusiastic grin, and she simply sits the entire time brushing carefully at the skirt of her dress, her hair. Quinn watches her over the top of her page with narrowed, darkened eyes.
In the end, it’s just the two of them left waiting for their interviews. Quinn turns the last page of the Cosmo she hasn’t read a word of, scanning over it convincingly enough. She can feel Rachel’s eyes on her.
“I’m Rachel Berry,” she informs Quinn brightly, as though she’d asked. She leans over the table between them and reaches her hand out for Quinn to shake.
After a pause, Quinn closes her magazine and sets it down next to her, leaning forward to meet Rachel halfway in a firm, warm handshake. Her hand feels little and frail under Quinn’s long fingers - it makes her want to squeeze. She smiles, carefully, enough to crinkle the corners of her eyes when she sits back. “Quinn Fabray,” she replies, easily enough. Rachel looks like she’s filing it away in her head when she nods, eyes unnervingly wary.
She grins again, a hundred-watts and absolutely terrifying. “Nice to meet you, Quinn Fabray,” she says, earnestly, and before Quinn can open her mouth to respond, Rachel gets called in to the panel-room, departing with a little wave and another electrically bright smile.)
2. What feature do you like most about yourself and why?
It’s the Rachel’s and Santana’s who are always first to go.
Birth in Lima Memorial Hospital and a lifetime without a toe outside outside the state of Ohio isn’t enough to convince the judges of any tangible stateside descent. They take in the olive-tan painting their skin, the unconventionality of their features and the harsh way they hit their consonants - too precise to be natural - and then they cross their names off the candidate lists and wait patiently for girls like Quinn to walk through the door: girls whose fair skin, bottle-blonde hair and all-American smile show real promise. Quinn knows it’s unfair; it gives her a leg up on the competition, though, something she’s been taught can never be a bad thing.
She doesn’t go into these auditions and interviews hoping the girl behind her gets the crown, after all. The reason she goes - can’t stop going, really - is for another chance at being beautiful, the second try few girls who’ve lived through the hell of her adolescence find at all.
*
(She hears Rachel singing from the waiting room and crushes the pages of her magazine into fists she didn’t know she was making.)
*
In her own audition - after an average gymnastics display and shooting everyone enough big smiles - one of the judges tells her, sweetly, “You’re made for this.”
3. Are looks important?
Quinn runs every morning, at least three times around the hotel compound - vast enough to make good exercise and bordered entirely by trimmed hedges. Rehearsals begin at seven, sharp, so she’ll wake up at five, run, and then get herself ready, again, punctually; a few times, she skipped it altogether, and her body felt restless and her muscles ached with disappointment, but she held her lies against Sue when she asked, knowingly,“What kept you so busy this morning, Q?” She doesn’t let it happen again after the second week in the hotel, after Santana tried on her swimsuit and made a point of showing her - and all the other girls, Quinn’s sure - showing her the smooth dips and flatness of her abs and the soft, evenness of her skin. Every other contestant has a nine-month head start on her.
She can’t let it happen again.
This morning Rachel Berry interrupts with her spritely grin, bounding from foot to foot on her star-decorated sneakers and asking, brightly, “You don’t mind if I join you today, Quinn?” in this presumptuous way that means she never expects anybody to say no in the first place.
The sound of her sickly sweet voice makes Quinn’s skin crawl, and she’d honestly like nothing less. Her mouth opens reflexively and starts, her words sharp, “In fact -” but that’s not playing the part right, so instead she curves her lips into a twisted smile and says, just as sweetly, “Not at all.”
Rachel smiles widely at her with her whitened teeth and dark eyes shining in a thank you.
Quinn alienates this memory like a tumor from the rest: she’s certain down to her bones that if she were to pinpoint it on a timeline from where she first caught sight of Rachel Berry in the contestant waiting room to the day she said goodbye to her, this is where they started to go wrong.
*
The contestants are lined up in the rehearsal hall in a sea of fresh, fitted dresses and blindingly white smiles. When Quinn turns her head to the right, she sees a row of plastic dolls, and when she turns her head to the left, she sees them all again, but this time Rachel Berry’s stood in the middle of them, grinning a lively grin and looking warm all over, as always.
Quinn faces forwards and disappears again.
*
Rachel shows up every morning. Quinn has a sneaking, dangerous suspicion that she thinks of them as friends.
The jogs aren’t entirely bad. Another person makes Quinn become impulsively competitive, and she can see the resolve in Rachel’s face sometimes, too. Mostly the only sound is their breathing, their footsteps, although on every other occasion Rachel fills the silences with overeager babbling. Sometimes, that isn’t entirely bad, either. She finds out that this is Rachel’s first pageant: after her parents realized she couldn’t make the three of their dreams come true in New York, this was their second option for her to shine, at home. It makes sense. She doesn’t fit in here like everyone else, and from what Quinn knows it’s not exactly what she’d expected, either.
Rachel’s definitely better than Santana, who sleeps in the room across the hall and only speaks to her when it’s to pass judgement, and the other girls who know Quinn is experienced enough to avoid her at all costs, because she isn’t known for being friendly, despite the bleached smile she makes sure to shoot at everyone. Rachel inserts herself into Quinn’s life, and it’s not what she wants but tagging around with her every once and a while like she’s mixing well can’t exactly look bad.
But there is something about Rachel she’s seen from the start that she can’t put her finger on, can’t comprehend and hates her for.
*
One of major sponsors for the pageant has its officials overlook rehearsals exactly a month before the show is set.
Quinn doesn’t hear them when they discuss Rachel, despite the rumour that they didn’t keep their voice particularly quiet for it. She doesn’t hear them, but she does hear the thousands of variations of what they said based on it that circulate the contestant hotel rooms like wildfire afterwards, most of which she’s betting came from a dark, vindictive recess of Santana Lopez’s mind.
She doesn’t see Rachel for the rest of the day. It seems to drag on endlessly, and for some reason it’s filled Quinn’s insides up with something cold and painful. As the hours pass it becomes heavier inside her like an anchor, dragging her half-reluctantly to Rachel’s hotel door.
It’s unlocked when she twists the knob, so she lets herself in, knowing she can’t endure the melodramatic scene Rachel would make in the doorway, telling Quinn to leave even if they both knew there wouldd be nothing she’d like less in the world. Rachel is still completely and utterly more than Quinn can handle, and maybe Quinn decides that it’s okay to forget that for tonight - not for the first time - even if she isn’t sure exactly what compels her to in the first place.
When she comes in, Rachel is sitting on the edge of her bed in the baggiest pair of pyjama’s she owns, her hair strung up in a messy bun, staring down at her hands, clasped and white-knuckled on her lap. She doesn’t look up at the sound of Quinn coming inside; she’s been waiting for it, expecting it, but when Quinn comes into her line of vision she still reaches up to make sure the last of her mascara is wiped from beneath her eyes, just in case.
Quinn looks down at her and sighs, heavily, irritatedly. After another moment she carefully sets herself down next to her on the mattress, wiping at the skirt of her dress even though she knows it’s fine.
She thinks about slipping their hands together. Another long beat; she tries to forget.
Another. Rachel opens her mouth to speak.
“Am I pretty?” she asks, and her voice is soft and frail from crying.
Quinn studies her knees intently. Thinks of long lashes on flushed cheeks and bright-eyed smiles, thinks of all the things Rachel deserves to hear from someone she deserves to have, thinks of the warmth of her skin when they touch. She can’t resent anything, can’t envy a thing about Rachel the way she does with other girls: everything about Rachel is hers alone and that’s admittedly something Quinn likes about her, obviously too much.
Beautiful, Quinn should say, and then she should leave. Instead she turns and looks at Rachel for a moment, leans in and kisses her.
4. What feature would you change about yourself and why?
Quinn’s skin is over-moisturised with product. An entire shelf in her bedroom is crowded with half-empty tubs of Cocoa Butter, Biotherm, Provedance, Bio-Oil - hundreds of labelled, ten-dollars-a-bottle placebos. She uses them down to the last drop and obediently passes the empty containers on to Sue, who files complaints and lawsuits to the companies that own them when Quinn shows her the marks still branding her skin, still branding her as something she’s never been. They fade at times, with every new product, and although her skin feels dewy and soft after every layer of cream and oil she pastes onto herself at night, by the morning, her wounds have reddened again: so vibrantly she wonders if they go right down to the bone.
She’s being moved into the hotel for the pageant, and Sue’s circled the date for her laser treatment in heavy black ink on her calendar, but she still packs all the little vials and tubs and bottles into their very own bag to take with her all the same, just in case the treatment doesn’t work, either.
*
They have most of today free, after a quick rehearsal in the morning. A lot of the girls group together to have lunch in town, and one of them even raps on Quinn’s door, smiling her practiced smile and invites her along. She says no, as always; Sue will make her practice, as always, which is nice to have for her to fall back on at times like this.
It’s Rachel who complicates things.
She stays behind too. She shows up at Quinn’s door in a tight-fitting dress that’s cut shorter and exposes far more than Rachel’s normally comfortable with. It’s zipped up at one side and backless - freckles on the skin there, Quinn notices, sparse, pretty little things mapped out like constellations - and the skirt sits high on her legs, flutters whenever she moves and shows another dangerous inch of tan skin. When Quinn watches her stride in, brazenly, her hands makes to reach out, to grab. She clenches them into a fists instead, hard and steady at her sides like twin anchors.
Rachel perches tentatively on the edge of her bed, shiny-faced and blushing with make-up. She looks - different. She looks like she knows it, too, shifting around on the bedspread for a while before regaining herself: leans back with her hands spread over the sheets, crosses her long legs and looks up at Quinn through her lashes, unable to hide the small trace of fear that lingers in her eyes.
“What are you doing,” Quinn says, but it’s much softer than she intends. She leans back against her vanity and squeezes the drawer handle behind her back, tight enough for the patterns of it to tattoo her palms.
Rachel looks startled, maybe embarrassed. Her glossy lips part, lashes shadowing her cheeks when she looks down to the floor instead of Quinn’s eyes. Quinn tries to look away, too, finds herself stuck and so, so lost for a long moment. The way Rachel breathes, softly but deeply, her chest pushing out to press her taut nipples against the thin fabric of her dress with every inhale - it makes Quinn’s heart race in this terrifyingly unsteady staccato beat.
“I thought maybe you wanted me,” Rachel answers. She’s always like this, always honest until the point of pain and with Quinn, always self-deprecating and a little miserable. Quinn doesn’t know why she keeps coming back.
She watches her hair sliding out of her ponytail with sharp eyes. After a moment, Rachel timidly raises her gaze and meets Quinn’s, and Quinn says in an instant, hoarsely, “Maybe.” But she shouldn’t. She shouldn’t be like this, and she spends as much of her time willing Rachel away to make believing otherwise easier as she does willing her closer. She breathes, one deep breath.
She takes her time walking over, in long, graceful steps, glancing briefly at the door to check it’s locked. When she reaches Rachel, she’s towering over her, and her hand finds itself slipped beneath Rachel’s jaw, angling her head to face her.
“Maybe,” she breathes again, and Rachel shivers beneath her and says, “Please.”
Quinn presses a steady hand to Rachel’s shoulder and pushes her down, down, down onto the bedsheets, crawling over her exposed thighs. She tries to calm her heart and lungs and her shaky fingers when they stutter over a soft expanse of skin beneath Rachel’s collarbone. They trail lower to pick at the hem of her dress where the zipper starts, just above her chest that heaves with every strenuous breath she puffs out. Quinn lets them linger there for a moment, tracing invisible lines with her fingertips, looking for something like a signal in Rachel’s face through an expressionless mask.
“Please,” Rachel says again, this time softer and pleadingly. Her hands reach up to tangle into Quinn’s hair and tug her down.
Quinn licks and bites into her mouth, desperately, dragging the zipper as slowly as she can stand to down over her ribcage, the curve of her hips, the first inches of her leg until it’s broken apart. The dress slides over Rachel’s bare skin for a moment and she whimpers into Quinn’s mouth at the feel, clenching fists into blonde hair that tighten and pull when Quinn’s hands slip the dress off of her, entirely.
Rachel is tiny with softly arched curves, warm and soft all over from head to toe. She’s embarrassed when Quinn pulls away to look down at her, her cheeks flushed red and hands still caught in Quinn’s hair, thumbs stroking timidly over her scalp. Quinn’s hands move of their own volition to spread over Rachel’s breasts, palms grazing over her nipples so she cries out - this breathy, intense thing.
Rachel gasps again and bucks her bare hips into nothing, panting. She looks up at Quinn, half-lidded, presses a wet kiss to the side of her mouth and murmurs, “Let me see you.”
She kisses Quinn insistently, hands cupping the sides of her face and reeling her lower, and Quinn lets her while she thinks: of her body and how scarred it is, how ugly it is with the childbirth Rachel can never know of.
“You’re beautiful,” Quinn says against Rachel’s bottom lip, and then she pulls back to undo the buttons of her dress and lets Rachel see her.
5. How far can you push yourself?
The closer they come to the real contest, the less enthused Rachel becomes.
In every rehearsal Quinn sees her smile dull a little more, her shiny eyes blackened and emptied beneath a fringe of fake-lashes. When she practices singing, her voice is the same steady pitch, still haunting and maybe still intimidating, but there’s nothing behind it anymore. There’s nothing here for her anymore.
They spend time off in Quinn’s locked hotel room, curtains drawn and the pager Sue gave her defiantly switched off. It’s a silly thing, and Quinn knows it, too - that playing games in her bedroom with a pretty girl isn’t enough for her, that after the pageant that’s the end of Rachel as far as she concerned. Or she used to know it, at least.
Rachel spends an entire hour the of the Saturday they have off rehearsing pressing her dry lips to every individual mark on Quinn’s body, smiling into the skin, an almost unfamiliarly bright smile. She hums under her breath, and it tickles the scarred skin on the inside of Quinn’s thigh so she shudders beneath her, noticably.
Rachel’s smile quirks into something playful. “I like days like this best.” Her hands tighten over Quinn’s waist, fingers digging in almost enough to hurt.
Quinn huffs out a sigh, impatiently, and pushes Rachel’s head back down.
*
After the morning jog today, Rachel follows her back to her room in an odd silence, for once, eyes cast downwards the whole time. She sits on the bed while Quinn fumbles her hair into a sweaty ponytail in the bathroom and shrugs off her hoodie, unaffected, then moves to sit beside her, stiffly.
Rachel continues to be unnervingly quiet for a few long, tense moments, and Quinn spends the time making a fist in her bedsheets with the hand she can’t see, thinking about how warmly they slid down her bare back the last time she was here, about Rachel’s hair spread across them later, sweat-slick and messy.
“Please don’t do it,” Rachel says without looking at her. She has her dainty little hands clutched together in her lap, paler than usual, and her mouth is making a strange, thin line from where Quinn can see it. She’s shiny with sweat, the sheen of it on her skin when she crosses her legs making something in the pit of Quinn’s stomach burn.
She drags the tips of her fingers over where Rachel’s thighs are exposed and along the material of her shorts to dip her hand beneath them and revel in the way her breath hitches, eyes falling shut.
This time tomorrow she’ll be in the clinic, watching her scars fade away back into the person she used to be. This time next week, they’ll be standing on national television together like they’re nothing but beautiful, plastic strangers.
*
The officials give her two days off afterwards, while the skin is puffy and red and healing, slowly. “I told you not to get your hopes up, Q,” Sue tells her, tapping the lightened, still visible marks over her calves. She shrugs, says they’ll manage. “You’ll manage,” she adds, glancing disapprovingly at the drawer topped with all of her bottles and lotions that never do her any good. Then she goes, whistling out the door.
Quinn gets out of bed and slips her robe off to land around her feet in a puddle. She looks into the mirror and nothing has changed. (She still had sex with the wrong person, still had a baby at sixteen, still has hickeys on her collarbone from Rachel’s fierce, adoring kisses, still doesn’t know what the fuck she can do to be normal again if this didn’t work.)
*
They use a can of spray on foundation to even out her skin tone for practice now. Some girls are sympathetic, some of them jeer, some of them continue disregarding everyone else entirely.
Rachel stands next to her while they form a line and curls her fingers around Quinn’s pinky for a brief moment. Quinn wants to hate her and hit her for being right but instead she closes her eyes and lets out a gust of heavy, relieving breath instead.
They can’t keep doing this.
*
The night before the pageant, Rachel knocks on her door for the first time in the past week and Quinn reluctantly lets her inside when she sees she has puffy, red eyes from crying.
Rachel holds herself and stands in front of Quinn more hunched over than usual, her jaw tense with determination but the rest of her decidedly despairing and hopeless looking.
Quinn crosses her arms and watches her for a moment, clicking her tongue and growing steadily angrier. “What is it, Rachel? What’s so important that you had to pull me out of bed the night before the pageant to tell me about?” She wasn’t sleeping, really. She tried for hours but couldn’t, and when Rachel knocked she’d just been flicking through the dresses in her closet with a frown, the ones she’d be wearing onstage tomorrow.
“You hate it here,” Rachel says. She shakes her head and when she looks at Quinn her eyes are frighteningly sad. Her voice rises. “You don’t tell me anything but I know you hate it here just as much as me.”
Quinn watches her through narrowed eyes and doesn’t falter, not once.
“This is it for me.” Something hurts inside of her when she admits it, something smashes and the illusion is gone: an image of a faceless husband and faceless children and blindingly white house flashes in her mind and then burns out like a light. “This is all I have. This is it.” Her voice breaks. The backs of her eyes sear with pain.
Again, Rachel shakes her head, eyebrows knitting together. “You are the best thing that’s happened to me in so long,” she breathes out. She’s still clutching herself tightly, hands balling into fists in the crooks of her elbows. She stares right at Quinn, unwaveringly, searchingly.
They can’t keep doing this.