Glee Fic: There's Nothing Ironic About Slaying (4/4)
Epilogue: Saturday
When Quinn finally worked up the courage to return to the tomb, she was expecting to find Santana and Brittany long gone, leaving nothing but dust and grave dirt behind them. There’d be a kind of poetry to it: the sire abandoned and left to die while her protégés went off and did their own thing without a second thought to her fate.
God, she hated her life.
Quinn pushed open the door with hands that shook from exhaustion. She hadn’t eaten. She hadn’t slept. She’d spent the whole night wandering Lima listlessly, not knowing who or what she was looking for but with a sense of looking for something. Direction, maybe. Without her sire or her brethren, there was nothing left for her. She might as well go back to turning children in a desperate attempt to wipe out what her parents had done to her. But, no, she’d been done with that a long time ago, before she’d even met Brittany, or Santana. Before the fights, before The Fight, before she’d left. Before her sire had died, and she hadn’t even known because she’d been off gallivanting around the world with her girls, drinking the finest blood and partying every night.
Just because she was totally, horribly alone was no reason to fall back on old habits.
Suddenly, her ears caught the tiniest sound of stirring from the next tomb over. Movement, and then quiet voices. The shuffling of feet. Then Brittany and Santana poked their heads into the door with matching looks on their faces, part sheepish and part defiant. And, in Brittany’s case, part crazy, but that was par for the course.
“Q? You okay?” Santana said, searching her face. “You don’t look so hot.”
Quinn smiled weakly, unable to help how it wobbled. “I thought -- I would have thought you’d have left by now.”
Santana scowled, crossing her arms. “Give us some credit, Quinn. Not all of us ditch our sires, you know. You’re just some kind of special.”
Quinn reeled back as if slapped, hurt and anger and pain burning through her. The feeble smile she’d been maintaining broke entirely, and with it the seal she’d been keeping on her emotions. She covered her mouth with one hand to keep silent, and cried like a little girl.
In an instant, Brittany and Santana were at her side, wrapping their arms around her and nuzzling at her hair comfortingly. Quinn felt Santana’s lips press to her temple, and then Santana was murmuring into her ear, “God, Quinn, I’m sorry, I don’t know why I say the crap I say sometimes --”
“I’m sorry too,” Quinn said brokenly, clutching them to her with all her strength.
Brittany stroked Quinn’s hair gently, combing through her destroyed ponytail with her fingertips. “I’m not sorry,” she said, “because I’m pretty sure I didn’t do anything wrong. But I’m super happy you guys are finally trying the whole emotional honesty thing. It’ll totally make you more zenith, you know?”
“Brittany,” Quinn sighed, rubbing her face into her shoulder, “I seriously have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“It’s like the tides,” Brittany said, like that explained everything. Quinn giggled helplessly, and the other two joined in.
For a solid minute, they stayed there, holding each other, then Santana broke away with a grin. “You know what you need, Q?” she said.
“Rachel Berry’s head on a pike?” Quinn said. She’d meant it, when she told Rachel they weren’t finished. Maybe Quinn’s sire was totally and completely out of her reach now, but revenge sure wasn’t. Quinn had some major scheming to do.
“No. Well, maybe,” Santana conceded with a smirk. “But I was thinking more instant gratification than that.”
Quinn rolled her eyes. “Santana, I swear to God, if you suggest a threesome one more time --”
“No, Q, not a threesome,” Santana said, with an answering eyeroll.
“Yeah, the last thing you need right now is a complicated dynamite shift between us,” Brittany agreed, utterly serious. “You’re in a fragile state, and we respect that and stuff.”
“Dynamic, Britt-Britt, not dynamite,” Santana said. She breezed on: “What you need is a manicure, a facial, a haircut, and a Dirty Dancing rewatch. We’ll catch a few winks now, and then tonight we’ll rob us a spa, break into whatever passes for a five-star motel in this dump of a town, and take an evening to just, you know, be girls for once.”
Quinn smiled helplessly, and squeezed her girls to her even tighter.
Meanwhile, halfway across the city of Lima, Rachel stood on her porch, staring out into the night sky. She shivered in the cold air, but she smiled slightly.
Suddenly, from behind her came the thud of heavy footsteps. She turned, wincing a little as it pulled at still-sore muscles, and dropped her defensive stance as soon as she identified her visitor.
“Hey, Rachel,” Finn said, with that dopey smile she loved so much. Rachel struggled to return it, but found she couldn’t. Kurt’s words from their conversation only a few days prior were burned in her brain, and now that the distraction that was Sue Sylvester’s potential rise from death was gone, and now that he was here, with his friendly grin and his unnatural (but incredibly attractive) height, she couldn’t seem to get them out of her head.
Finn’s smile faded a little, turned cold, and that still hurt despite her misgivings. She pulled a grin up, and though it was weak, it seemed to satisfy him. He grinned down at her with a twinkle in his eye, then bent down for a light, easy kiss. When he pulled back, he said, “You know, Rachel, I was pretty impressed with how you handled this whole thing. I know the clue I gave you wasn’t super obvious, so the way you put it all together, it was like Sherlock Holmes or something. Or like Inspector Gadget.”
She wanted to smile, to thank him, to take him by his mildly-scruffy chin and kiss him again, but she was stuck on his first sentence. “You were... you were impressed? But, no, wait --” she paused, shaking her head to clear it. Eventually, she grabbed him by the shoulders and held him as she said, enunciating each word slowly and clearly to show how important it was to her, “Finn, I want you to answer me one question, and to do it without lying or stalling or using sports metaphors, because you know very well that I can’t follow those.”
“Anything,” Finn said. He looked adorably bewildered, and Rachel almost chose not to ask him after all. But she refused to be made a fool of, and if her doubts were true then that would be true and just -- no. Rachel Berry was no fool, and if she was then that needed to be fixed.
“Finn, were you there last night? At the football field?”
Finn paused, then his shoulders slouched down. “Rachel --”
“Were you there, Finn?” Rachel demanded, eyes wide and hurt. She couldn’t believe it, she couldn’t believe it. “Did you -- did you stand by and watch while Quinn was threatening those people? While she was beating me into the ground. I mean, I beat her and I won, and of course I knew I was going to, but if you could stand there and watch that happen and do nothing, then clearly y-you don’t love me as much as you’ve always said you do.”
Finn glanced around awkwardly. “Come on, Rachel, it’s really not that big a deal. I do love you. Come on, don’t make this into some huge thing. This isn’t one of those soap operas you watch.”
“But it is a big deal, Finn! And the fact that you don’t understand that, it says a lot to me about you,” Rachel said.
“That’s ridiculous,” Finn said. “I’m not perfect, okay? Cut me a break, Rachel.”
Rachel sighed heavily, lowering her head to stare at her feet. “I thought you were, though, Finn.” She shivered. “I guess I was wrong.”
“No one is perfect, Rachel,” Finn snapped. “Not even you. So don’t try and make me feel guilty about this.”
Rachel knew she wasn’t perfect. She’d always known that. She was too mean and too honest and too selfish to be perfect. But at least she tried. So she lifted her head, forced a smile, and said, “I’m not going to. I’m going to -- to call my friends out here, and we’re going to celebrate the final and ultimate death of the most dangerous enemy I have ever fought. Then we’re going to go inside, and we’re going to sing and watch movies and I’m going to feel good about myself. Without you. And maybe tomorrow I’ll think about this, you, again, but not until then.” Wrapping her arms around herself, she turned away from him. “Good night, Finn.”
She didn’t hear him leave, but when she turned around a minute later he was gone. She hadn’t asked him about Blaine. She had a feeling she knew the answer.
Suddenly, there was a knock at the sliding door behind her. She spun, and her face broke into a weak smile when she saw Kurt and Mercedes. Mercedes had a canvas bag in one hand and a copy of Dirty Dancing in the other, and Kurt was waving at her cheerily. They pushed the door open and stepped out onto the porch to join her.
“Got tired of waiting inside?” Rachel said, and she stepped right up to them and wrapped her arms around both of them. They both hesitated for a moment, then wrapped their arms around her warmly.
“Good to see you too, Rachel,” Mercedes said into her hair. “Really, really good. I was a little worried out there last night, not gonna lie.”
“Me too,” Rachel confessed as she pulled away. She turned away, wiping at her eyes in as discreet a manner as possible. “Have you, uh, have you got the bones?”
“What’s left of them,” Kurt said. “You really smashed the hell out of them, Rachel. I’m impressed.”
Rachel giggled. Straightening herself out, she turned back to her friends and said, “So, shall we start, then?”
Mercedes up-ended the bag, and bone splinters and dust spilled to the floor. Then she moved back, and allowed Kurt to take the floor. He knelt down next to them, careful not to dirty his pants, and began to murmur, “Eam spiritus purgationis…”
Mercedes wrapped an arm around Rachel’s shoulders, and they stared into the fire that sprouted from Kurt’s fingers and fell to envelope all that was left of Sue Sylvester. It burned brightly -- almost too brightly, and in the flames there were hints of green and blue that shouldn’t have been there.
“Won’t the neighbors notice?” Mercedes asked Rachel.
“Don’t worry about it. They’ll just assume we’re doing another family re-enactment of Sweeney Todd.”
Kurt snickered, then admonished her, “Don’t make me laugh. I’ll forget my place. Then who knows what would happen? Maybe we’d end up with an army of re-animated Sue bones parading around.”
“Shutting up now,” Rachel said. Mercedes mimed zipping her lips with a cheeky grin.
“Good,” Kurt said, with a cautionary glare at both of them. “Purgare quod erat hic...”
He chanted for a good minute, then the fire hissed violently and vanished, leaving behind nothing but ash. The bone fragments and dust from the football field were gone.
“And that’s that,” Kurt said with a thin, satisfied smile.
“She is never, ever gonna bother you again,” Mercedes said. She wrapped an arm around Rachel’s shoulders. “So, now that we’ve fried her bacon, what say we head back inside, paint our toenails, sing a few songs on that sweet karaoke machine of yours, then pop some popcorn and throw in Dirty Dancing? We were talking to your dads a few minutes ago, and they’ve agreed to make tonight date night so we can have the house to ourselves.”
“I’m always down for Patrick Swayze’s hips,” Kurt said, and he and Mercedes high-fived.
Rachel giggled. Then, grinning mischievously, she teased, “I guess we could do that, but I really should review the tapes from last night --”
“Oh, come on, Rachel!” Mercedes said. “You worked your ass off this week, and you deserve a break. You can always watch the tape tomorrow. Dirty Dancing, on the other hand, waits for nothing and no one.”
“Or at least, we don’t,” Kurt said, linking his arm with hers.
“Oh, fine, I guess --”
Arm-in-arm and squabbling as always, they headed inside, leaving the ash to cool on the porch and drift away on the wind, no longer a threat to anyone or anything.