I Can Almost Believe (That I'm Almost Enough)
Title: I Can Almost Believe (That I'm Almost Enough)
Pairing: Quinn-centric, Rachel Berry/Quinn Fabray
Rating: PG-13; language
Spoilers: Season 1
Disclaimer: Nothing owned, no profit gained.
Summary: I spent all of my life empty of anthems, bracing for something that never did come.--Matt Nathanson, “Suspended”
A/N: Angsty Quinn is angsty. And I am displeased with the ending. Ah well.
Quinn hates that too-used movie cliché view of nightmares, the one that always culminates in people jerking out of sleep with heaving chests, sitting bolt upright in their beds. It makes her completely crazy, because no one does that. It’s too over-dramatic, and even the most dramatic people she’s ever known are too groggy with sleep and the dislocation that comes with vivid dreaming to indulge at four in the morning.
(She should know; in the span of one year, she bounced like a very pregnant pinball from Puck’s house to Mercedes’, and she now shares her bed nightly with one Rachel Barbra Berry. If anyone on earth did the bolt upright, screaming in a cold sweat thing, it would be one of those three lunatics.)
Still, there is one thing the movies get right: nightmares friggin’ suck. Quinn gets them a lot now-she has ever since getting booted from her parents’ home, but especially now that she’s free to come and go freely from her mother’s slightly-less impressive abode-and they make her absolutely crazy. It’s hard enough to be a newly-out lesbian in a relationship with the most high-maintenance girl in all of Ohio, and to be a senior in high school on top of that, not to mention a nationally-ranked cheerleader and a champion show choir enthusiast. To tack these sleep destroying grenades onto the whole load just seems like unnecessary punishment.
Quinn kind of hates her subconscious.
Sure, it has got its moments-the dreams she’s been having recently involving Rachel and the Santana-and-Brittany duo have been particularly lovely, even if Quinn couldn’t be less attracted to her best friends in the waking world-but for the most part, it serves mostly as a stubborn pain in her ass.
Really, it’s been two years. She had hoped with an ardent desperation the visions of taking stairs too fast, crashing cars, or even simply walking away over and over from a tiny pink bassinet would pass sooner than this. More than hoped; a year ago, she even took up praying again to banish the whole mess.
Yet here she is, 3:56 in the morning, eyes snapping open as she tries to scramble in panic away from the too-real image of dropping baby Beth at a daycare she’ll never have to deal with-and then promptly forgetting its location.
She doesn’t jerk upward as if struck by lightning, because people don’t do that in real life, but she does sit up after a moment. Both hands press to her forehead as she teaches herself again to breathe, lungs burning with thousands of unshed tears.
It’s just not fair, she thinks wildly. She did her part: bore the shame, the humiliation, the human life for eight months, then birthed the kid (no easy feat, not with Puck’s giant skull genetics) and handed her over to a loving (she hopes) mother who was neither sixteen nor full of repressed lesbian drama (again-she hopes). She did everything she possibly could, short of selling out her entire future (and, in all probability, Beth’s in the process). What more could God possibly ask of her?
She’s done regretting, and done accusing herself of doing the devil’s work unwittingly. Gone are the days of belittling her own actions and feelings, double-thinking decisions she can’t go back on now, play-acting her own needs away. She’s beyond all of that now-too old for it, too world-weary for a girl whose driver’s license barely reflects legality.
She believes all of that right up until the witching hour comes and goes, with Rachel snoring peacefully to her left, leaving Quinn curled uncomfortably around visions of the little girl she’s sure she’ll never see again.
Arms wrapped protectively around her knees, she tilts her head back and blinks away pointless tears. Things are so good in daylight; Sylvester has dragged the Cheerios kicking and bleeding through another two national wins, Schuester has coaxed New Directions to nationals and back again with his usual blinding smile, and most important of all, Quinn has Rachel. Has her. Not in that abstract “in my dreams” kind of way, not in some sadistic bear trap sense-actually has her. Actually loves her, as worrying as that is on bad days, and Rachel loves the shit out of her right back. It makes Finn nervous, makes Tina grin, makes Puck leer, makes Santana mime vomiting behind her hand, and it makes Quinn deliriously happy in a way she’d almost given up on feeling ever again after Babygate exploded in her face. And now they’re almost at graduation, almost out of this podunk town, hands on the doorknob marked New fuckin’ York. Things are better than good-they’re downright dreamlike.
Sometimes, Quinn actually pinches herself-hard-to make sure this really is her life. She has yet to wake up.
With everything going so brilliantly well, then, why the hell does she spend every single night sitting with her head cradled in shaking hands? It just isn’t fair.
A tiny sob breaks the dome of silence stretched tight over Rachel’s room. She thunks her head a little harder against her knees, trembling all over.
“Baby?”
And there it is-the moment she always feels guiltiest for. Rachel has rolled over, eyes lidded and blinking rapidly, looking for all the world like a sleepy toddler.
“Baby, what-“
She swipes violently at her eyes with the heel of her hand and lets up on a shaky breath. “Nothing. Go back to sleep.”
It never takes Rachel an especially long time to wake fully, sitting up and staring Quinn down with obvious concern. “Dreams again?” she asks knowingly, reaching across the bed to brush a lock of hair back into place. Quinn tosses her head, frustrated.
“It doesn’t matter,” she mumbles, feeling stupid and childish. She’s nearly out of high school, nearly an adult, has a child of her own out there in the world somewhere, and she’s still having nightmares. At times like these, she feels endlessly pathetic.
Rachel’s fingers envelop her own, pulling until Quinn has no choice but to look into sleep-darkened eyes. She sighs.
“I was at day care,” she whispers, allowing Rachel to tug her into a gentle embrace. “I dropped her off, and I walked away, and when I tried to go back for her…Rach, I swear, I was going to go back. But I just couldn’t do it.” She swallows hard, the egg in her throat expanding. “I couldn’t find her again.”
Rachel smooths her hair, fingers trailing lightly over one earlobe. “Quinn, she’s okay. You know she is. Shelby sends pictures, cards. She’s a very attentive mother, where Beth is concerned.”
Two years ago, those same words might be tinged with more than mild bitterness. Now, Rachel sounds nothing less than reassuring. Quinn burrows close, digging her nose into the skin of her girlfriend’s neck and inhaling.
“I abandoned her,” she says at last, barely strong enough to give voice to the words. “Sometimes, I think I’ll be damned for it. Maybe I already have been.”
One firm finger latches under her chin, jerking a little harder than Quinn expects. She finds Rachel glaring at her with all the force of her Gold Star Melodrama, forehead crinkled seriously.
“You’re not damned. Nor doomed, nor cursed. God is not punishing you. The only person whose forgiveness you need right now, Quinn, is your own.”
They’ve been through this several times a week for two years. Quinn knows Rachel is as tired of saying the words as Quinn is of hearing them, but they can’t seem to stop. It’s the only exchange that ever works; without it, Quinn wouldn’t be able to sleep for hours she can’t afford to lose.
She wants to believe that what Rachel is saying is true. On one level, she can see the logic of it; logic that is, in fact, pretty irrefutable. But Beth’s image, that one night spent holding her close, is engraved on some deep place Quinn can’t even reach, much less scrub clean, and that image is so much stronger than truth ever could be.
She sighs again, clutching at Rachel’s shoulders as warm hands move up and down her back. A soft voice murmurs that she is good, that she is brave, that she is loved-all things Quinn doesn’t believe, at this moment, she deserves to hear.
She feels Rachel start to drift off again, holding her tight against a small, deceptively strong chest, and Quinn forces her own eyes to close. She is warm, at least, lulled by the steady rhythm of her girlfriend's heartbeat. It isn't enough to change anything; two nights from now, or next week, she will wake again feeling just as bogged down by the same insistent memories, the same crystal-clear horrors. She will feel so much like lunging from this bed, throwing on a pair of shoes, and stomping all the way to Shelby Corcoran's home. She will feel so much like snatching that tiny pink bundle from her cradle and racing her home, here, back to Rachel and the life they could have had together.
But the thing is, that tiny pink bundle is no longer so tiny and pink. Beth is two now; she's likely walking--maybe running, even, maybe wrecking all kinds of havoc on Shelby's life because, honestly, she is part Puck--and forming words, and maybe even singing. She's developing dreams, and attachments, and loves, and none of that falls in the realm of what Quinn can shape with her own small, weak hands.
The thing is, she loves her daughter with a blind, chilling desperation, but the child will never know it, because Quinn doesn't have the first clue where Shelby even lives, and even if she did? She doesn't trust the things she might be unable to resist.
Life is good here, with Rachel, with Glee, with the future she once thought she'd lost forever. Life is good, and Quinn knows she can't--won't--do anything to jeopardize that now. She likes to think she is far smarter than that, and her inability to find her daughter stems more from that intelligence than from Ms. Corcoran's suprisingly (for Lima, Ohio, small-town USA, at least) well-concealed location.
But on nights like these, curled plaintively into Rachel's softly snoring body, fingers clutching the girl's t-shirt as sobs threaten to steal her breath away forever, she can't help but be infinitely glad of Shelby Corcoran's enigmatic lifestyle.
Because if Quinn knows one thing about herself, it is that resisting temptation has never been her strong suit.
She draws a deep breath, steadies herself. Inhales Rachel's scent. Tries to sink into a dreamless slumber.
For once, God seems willing to comply.
She only wishes it would last.
Pairing: Quinn-centric, Rachel Berry/Quinn Fabray
Rating: PG-13; language
Spoilers: Season 1
Disclaimer: Nothing owned, no profit gained.
Summary: I spent all of my life empty of anthems, bracing for something that never did come.--Matt Nathanson, “Suspended”
A/N: Angsty Quinn is angsty. And I am displeased with the ending. Ah well.
Quinn hates that too-used movie cliché view of nightmares, the one that always culminates in people jerking out of sleep with heaving chests, sitting bolt upright in their beds. It makes her completely crazy, because no one does that. It’s too over-dramatic, and even the most dramatic people she’s ever known are too groggy with sleep and the dislocation that comes with vivid dreaming to indulge at four in the morning.
(She should know; in the span of one year, she bounced like a very pregnant pinball from Puck’s house to Mercedes’, and she now shares her bed nightly with one Rachel Barbra Berry. If anyone on earth did the bolt upright, screaming in a cold sweat thing, it would be one of those three lunatics.)
Still, there is one thing the movies get right: nightmares friggin’ suck. Quinn gets them a lot now-she has ever since getting booted from her parents’ home, but especially now that she’s free to come and go freely from her mother’s slightly-less impressive abode-and they make her absolutely crazy. It’s hard enough to be a newly-out lesbian in a relationship with the most high-maintenance girl in all of Ohio, and to be a senior in high school on top of that, not to mention a nationally-ranked cheerleader and a champion show choir enthusiast. To tack these sleep destroying grenades onto the whole load just seems like unnecessary punishment.
Quinn kind of hates her subconscious.
Sure, it has got its moments-the dreams she’s been having recently involving Rachel and the Santana-and-Brittany duo have been particularly lovely, even if Quinn couldn’t be less attracted to her best friends in the waking world-but for the most part, it serves mostly as a stubborn pain in her ass.
Really, it’s been two years. She had hoped with an ardent desperation the visions of taking stairs too fast, crashing cars, or even simply walking away over and over from a tiny pink bassinet would pass sooner than this. More than hoped; a year ago, she even took up praying again to banish the whole mess.
Yet here she is, 3:56 in the morning, eyes snapping open as she tries to scramble in panic away from the too-real image of dropping baby Beth at a daycare she’ll never have to deal with-and then promptly forgetting its location.
She doesn’t jerk upward as if struck by lightning, because people don’t do that in real life, but she does sit up after a moment. Both hands press to her forehead as she teaches herself again to breathe, lungs burning with thousands of unshed tears.
It’s just not fair, she thinks wildly. She did her part: bore the shame, the humiliation, the human life for eight months, then birthed the kid (no easy feat, not with Puck’s giant skull genetics) and handed her over to a loving (she hopes) mother who was neither sixteen nor full of repressed lesbian drama (again-she hopes). She did everything she possibly could, short of selling out her entire future (and, in all probability, Beth’s in the process). What more could God possibly ask of her?
She’s done regretting, and done accusing herself of doing the devil’s work unwittingly. Gone are the days of belittling her own actions and feelings, double-thinking decisions she can’t go back on now, play-acting her own needs away. She’s beyond all of that now-too old for it, too world-weary for a girl whose driver’s license barely reflects legality.
She believes all of that right up until the witching hour comes and goes, with Rachel snoring peacefully to her left, leaving Quinn curled uncomfortably around visions of the little girl she’s sure she’ll never see again.
Arms wrapped protectively around her knees, she tilts her head back and blinks away pointless tears. Things are so good in daylight; Sylvester has dragged the Cheerios kicking and bleeding through another two national wins, Schuester has coaxed New Directions to nationals and back again with his usual blinding smile, and most important of all, Quinn has Rachel. Has her. Not in that abstract “in my dreams” kind of way, not in some sadistic bear trap sense-actually has her. Actually loves her, as worrying as that is on bad days, and Rachel loves the shit out of her right back. It makes Finn nervous, makes Tina grin, makes Puck leer, makes Santana mime vomiting behind her hand, and it makes Quinn deliriously happy in a way she’d almost given up on feeling ever again after Babygate exploded in her face. And now they’re almost at graduation, almost out of this podunk town, hands on the doorknob marked New fuckin’ York. Things are better than good-they’re downright dreamlike.
Sometimes, Quinn actually pinches herself-hard-to make sure this really is her life. She has yet to wake up.
With everything going so brilliantly well, then, why the hell does she spend every single night sitting with her head cradled in shaking hands? It just isn’t fair.
A tiny sob breaks the dome of silence stretched tight over Rachel’s room. She thunks her head a little harder against her knees, trembling all over.
“Baby?”
And there it is-the moment she always feels guiltiest for. Rachel has rolled over, eyes lidded and blinking rapidly, looking for all the world like a sleepy toddler.
“Baby, what-“
She swipes violently at her eyes with the heel of her hand and lets up on a shaky breath. “Nothing. Go back to sleep.”
It never takes Rachel an especially long time to wake fully, sitting up and staring Quinn down with obvious concern. “Dreams again?” she asks knowingly, reaching across the bed to brush a lock of hair back into place. Quinn tosses her head, frustrated.
“It doesn’t matter,” she mumbles, feeling stupid and childish. She’s nearly out of high school, nearly an adult, has a child of her own out there in the world somewhere, and she’s still having nightmares. At times like these, she feels endlessly pathetic.
Rachel’s fingers envelop her own, pulling until Quinn has no choice but to look into sleep-darkened eyes. She sighs.
“I was at day care,” she whispers, allowing Rachel to tug her into a gentle embrace. “I dropped her off, and I walked away, and when I tried to go back for her…Rach, I swear, I was going to go back. But I just couldn’t do it.” She swallows hard, the egg in her throat expanding. “I couldn’t find her again.”
Rachel smooths her hair, fingers trailing lightly over one earlobe. “Quinn, she’s okay. You know she is. Shelby sends pictures, cards. She’s a very attentive mother, where Beth is concerned.”
Two years ago, those same words might be tinged with more than mild bitterness. Now, Rachel sounds nothing less than reassuring. Quinn burrows close, digging her nose into the skin of her girlfriend’s neck and inhaling.
“I abandoned her,” she says at last, barely strong enough to give voice to the words. “Sometimes, I think I’ll be damned for it. Maybe I already have been.”
One firm finger latches under her chin, jerking a little harder than Quinn expects. She finds Rachel glaring at her with all the force of her Gold Star Melodrama, forehead crinkled seriously.
“You’re not damned. Nor doomed, nor cursed. God is not punishing you. The only person whose forgiveness you need right now, Quinn, is your own.”
They’ve been through this several times a week for two years. Quinn knows Rachel is as tired of saying the words as Quinn is of hearing them, but they can’t seem to stop. It’s the only exchange that ever works; without it, Quinn wouldn’t be able to sleep for hours she can’t afford to lose.
She wants to believe that what Rachel is saying is true. On one level, she can see the logic of it; logic that is, in fact, pretty irrefutable. But Beth’s image, that one night spent holding her close, is engraved on some deep place Quinn can’t even reach, much less scrub clean, and that image is so much stronger than truth ever could be.
She sighs again, clutching at Rachel’s shoulders as warm hands move up and down her back. A soft voice murmurs that she is good, that she is brave, that she is loved-all things Quinn doesn’t believe, at this moment, she deserves to hear.
She feels Rachel start to drift off again, holding her tight against a small, deceptively strong chest, and Quinn forces her own eyes to close. She is warm, at least, lulled by the steady rhythm of her girlfriend's heartbeat. It isn't enough to change anything; two nights from now, or next week, she will wake again feeling just as bogged down by the same insistent memories, the same crystal-clear horrors. She will feel so much like lunging from this bed, throwing on a pair of shoes, and stomping all the way to Shelby Corcoran's home. She will feel so much like snatching that tiny pink bundle from her cradle and racing her home, here, back to Rachel and the life they could have had together.
But the thing is, that tiny pink bundle is no longer so tiny and pink. Beth is two now; she's likely walking--maybe running, even, maybe wrecking all kinds of havoc on Shelby's life because, honestly, she is part Puck--and forming words, and maybe even singing. She's developing dreams, and attachments, and loves, and none of that falls in the realm of what Quinn can shape with her own small, weak hands.
The thing is, she loves her daughter with a blind, chilling desperation, but the child will never know it, because Quinn doesn't have the first clue where Shelby even lives, and even if she did? She doesn't trust the things she might be unable to resist.
Life is good here, with Rachel, with Glee, with the future she once thought she'd lost forever. Life is good, and Quinn knows she can't--won't--do anything to jeopardize that now. She likes to think she is far smarter than that, and her inability to find her daughter stems more from that intelligence than from Ms. Corcoran's suprisingly (for Lima, Ohio, small-town USA, at least) well-concealed location.
But on nights like these, curled plaintively into Rachel's softly snoring body, fingers clutching the girl's t-shirt as sobs threaten to steal her breath away forever, she can't help but be infinitely glad of Shelby Corcoran's enigmatic lifestyle.
Because if Quinn knows one thing about herself, it is that resisting temptation has never been her strong suit.
She draws a deep breath, steadies herself. Inhales Rachel's scent. Tries to sink into a dreamless slumber.
For once, God seems willing to comply.
She only wishes it would last.