ϟ BB#2: [FANFIC] Quinn - Words Like Stolen Poetry
Title: Words Like Stolen Poetry
Characters/Pairings: Quinn; Quinn/Finn, implied Quinn/Puck
Rating: PG
Word Count: 956
Summary: Quinn muses about love. Written for the Gleeverse Big Bang.
Spoilers: None. Takes place prior to Preggers, but non-specific as far as when before that.
Love to my Betas: shenanigans123 and kait_18. You two are fantastic. <3
Quinn sits in front of her vanity, absently brushing her ponytail. Her reflection is mirrored three times, and she can see each apparition of herself mocking her, showing her everything that’s wrong with her. To the right she can see her outer flaws; how her eyes are too small and her lips are too big. To the left she sees another distortion, how she must look to others, all made up and packaged like a doll. Then in the middle, there is the one she hates the most. Her own eyes, reflecting into her soul, and she sees all the things she hates about herself there. Her eyes are shallow and vain and selfish.
She thinks about Finn. Sometimes she thinks he is the anti-her. He is strong and careless. He might not be bright, but he knows who he is. Quinn, on the other hand, thinks she might be lost. Sometimes in the hallways of McKinley, she gets the strange sense that she has been standing solid on a beach, and then suddenly she is floating alone in a sea of faces with nothing to hold onto. It catches her off-guard, and she feels as though the sand has gone from beneath her feet and she is drifting, silently and undetectably away.
Usually at these moments, right before the panic grips her, she sees him. Finn is always there, her life vest, bobbing somewhere off the shoreline, waiting. He catches her and engulfs her with his warm arms, holding her to him so close she can hear his heartbeat quicken at the smell and feel of her. He’ll kiss her forehead and murmur he loves her, taking her out of the ocean and back onto dry land, where her feet become firmly planted on the ground once more. She is a part of something again, part of the school’s power couple.
She sighs, undoing her pony and brushing out the strands of hair that cascade to her shoulders. “Power couple.” Right. ‘By whose standards?’, she wonders. Everyone at school thinks they must be so in love, must be planning their wedding and naming their future children. In reality, they eat at Breadsticks once a week before going back to Quinn’s house to make out, always stopping before second base. Did that constitute a power couple? No. She is the head cheerleader, and he is the star quarterback. That’s their power. This is not love. She knows that. This is high school.
She wonders what it might be like, real love. Quinn is young, and she still believes in soul mates. She imagines it’s like finding a part of yourself you didn’t know was missing. Like when you were born there was a part of you that flew off somewhere, and since you never knew it, you didn’t notice it was gone. You would grow up missing this piece, and then randomly, one day, you find it. You see someone, and you just KNOW. Some part of you deep inside recognizes the part of yourself in them, and you’re suddenly pulled to them, irrationally.
The truth of it, she imagines, is when you kiss for the first time. She knows that feelings, no matter how irrevocable they may seem, can lie. The test of it must be like in all the movies; true loves first kiss. How else could you know for sure if he was the one for you? She thinks about this for a moment, wondering what that kiss might feel like. There would be the build up, of course, possibly an afternoon spent together or a perfect first date. There would be laughter, fading into a quiet joy and then a look exchanged, and in that look you could feel it coming. His head tips towards you, and you close your eyes, waiting. You feel his breath by your face and when your lips touch there’s an explosion, and suddenly everything that’s wrong is right again, and everything broken has been fixed. She can look in the mirror and her Cheerios uniform would look perfect instead of too tight, and her eyes would sparkle and at that moment she would understand she’s beautiful, not just to him, but to herself.
She sighs again, opening her eyes with the realization that in her pondering she has actually closed them. She swoops her hair up once more, fixing it tightly and firmly in place. She picks up a lip gloss and swipes it across her mouth, puckering her lips and watching the stain seep into the paleness of her natural color.
Her phone chimes; a text. She turns away to squint at the words on the small screen. “I miss u,” it reads. “Come over and c me.”
Quinn breathes out slowly, turning back to her mirror. The letters of his text are caught in her throat, the implications of it seeming to mock her. She raises her eyes to the reflections. Her ponytail seems wilted, her lashes droopy. Her stomach sticks out and her arms have some flab. She sets down the brush on the vanity, thinking. He is not hers, and she is not his. But Finn is off somewhere, probably playing video games and he hasn’t called her back. And Santana... well, Quinn is pretty sure she overheard her talking about going out with someone from another school tonight. That girl never had been one for monogamy. Quinn supposes this makes any of Santana’s “men” fair game.
And so she decides. She stands, smoothing her hands down her skirt, flicking her tongue across her teeth for stray gloss.
Maybe this isn’t love either, but maybe it could be.