glee; the forty-four sunsets
Title: The Forty-Four Sunsets
Fandom: Glee
Rating: PG
Length: ~5900 words
Warnings: none
Characters/Pairings: Blaine and Quinn-centric, some Emma and Rachel; canon pairings
Summary: Some friendships aren't really epic. But sometimes, that's just fine. (Or; where Blaine and Quinn sit quietly and talk sometimes, but mostly they fold paper cranes.) Background fic; starts from 'Hold On To Sixteen'.
Notes: completed for the lovely Kris, or rather missgoalie75, and, more specifically, for project stay classy! Because she is lovely and awesome and talented, and writes wonderful fic that makes me feel things that I shouldn't feel because where I come from it's illegal to be anything other than angry. (Harrowing true life.) But seriously. Awesome person, awesome life, who probably deserves more than this. (It's OK. I wish I could write exciting things with explosions and melodrama too.)
Title taken from The Little Prince, for the interested.
Sometimes Quinn just likes to sit in Miss Pillsbury's empty office and breathe for a while.
It's not like her teachers will really notice or care if she skips a class every so often (a scarce pro to attending public school). Her GPA is perfect, her homework packets always completed in the neat cursive it had taken her the entirety of eighth grade to perfect (beautiful and elegant, like she'd always wanted to be), and usually the vague reminder of her sophomore year lets her off with more than she really should be. The only person who really notices is Rachel, and that's only because they share their AP Government class.
Quinn's never sure if that's worse or better than never being noticed at all. Rachel doesn't ever quite get it, but she pushes and pulls at Quinn and says when you're ready and I missed you and reminds her when assignments are due in her smiling voice, and those make Quinn's chest twist with something that never really fades. She doesn't - won't - understand it, but she carries it in her chest, a swelling of stones behind her ribcage blooming with her white girl problems.
She pulls her knees up towards her chest and rests her head on them, eyes fluttering shut. Yes. It's good to be alone, sometimes.
Rachel and Quinn are kind-of friends; her name is in Quinn's contact list, but she has never used it. Sometimes their chairs in glee club are next to each other, but they don't really speak. They sit next to each other in AP Government (usually, anyway; Rachel's suspension has left her seat uncomfortably empty), with Mike on Quinn's left - glee club solidarity, naturally - but it's never anything but a convenient partnership.
Convenient. It seems to be the defining rite of most of her relationships with people.
She doesn't want to talk about it.
Miss Pillsbury was unsettled by her at first, an angry girl in ruby pink and inkwell black sulking in her office for periods at a time, a ghastly apparition in smoky perfume. So Quinn learned her schedule (counselling sessions are never on Tuesday or Thursday afternoons) and plans her breakdowns around them, and now neither of them feel uncomfortable. It's easier, quieter, empty of tempered questions she doesn't want to answer today tomorrow ever.
Quinn's been breathing for five minutes and twenty-seven seconds when the door clicks open. She turns her head, wonders if Miss Pillsbury has decided to switch it up - hardly - but it's just a boy. A boy standing in the doorway, his big dark eyes staring at her in surprise.
“Oh,” Blaine says eventually, ever the master of eloquence. His eyebrows draw back down from their immediate surprise and his smile comes back, honey-sweet and gentle as he hovers in the door frame. “Hi, Quinn.”
Quinn doesn't know how to respond to him, because she has no idea what he's supposed to be. So she just nods her head and gives a weak imitation of a smile in response, it dropping back off her face as quickly as it had appeared. She turns her head back to face the prim line of pamphlets along the back wall, and pretends to study their garish titles. Why are there pamphlets about spinsters in a high school guidance counsellor's office? “Don't you have a class to go to?” she asks, eventually, when she realises that Blaine is still standing awkwardly between the office and the outside hall.
“Technically, yeah,” Blaine nods; he lets go of the door and lets it click shut on his swinging hinge, stepping carefully and turning to peruse the bookshelf as though she had given him an invitation to do so. Idly, Quinn watches the back of his head and wonders who on earth told him the gel was a good idea. (Certainly not Kurt. Surely.) “But if anyone asks, no.”
Quinn lets out a small puff of laughter. “That's rebellious of you.”
“Terribly so,” Blaine says, shrugging one shoulder with a steadily waning smile. His arm shifts and Quinn catches the slide of his thumb over the spines, tracing embossed letters with the curve of a fingernail. His face is quiet, mouth opening slightly in contemplation, the lines of his face smoothed away, no chips on a marble statue. He blinks once, slowly, before dipping his head and curling his hand back towards himself. “Did Miss Pillsbury tell you you can come here, too?”
“It was my own decision,” Quinn says, tipping her head slightly. “And it clearly isn't working as well for you, seeing as you just about tore Sam's face off yesterday.”
Blaine colours at that, his cheeks marbling pink as he turns around to regard her fully, leaning back against the bookshelf. But he's still looking at the floor, looking at her only with his posture, hands pressed back against the wood. “I didn't really... mean it, like that,” he says softly to the carpet. Like it has ears, quietly listening to all the words that don't make it.
“Did you tell Sam that?”
“No, I -” he looks up, away from Quinn, stares at some faded point on the walls and hardens his jaw. “I haven't had the chance to. It's, um, a little harder than I thought, I guess.”
Even from here, there's a certain bowing to Blaine's back, a little sagging to his shoulders under his jacket. Quinn sighs, and resigns herself to her apparent job as substitute counsellor. (Didn't boys know how to look after themselves?) “If it helps, I don't think Sam will hold it against you if you're going to be honest with him,” she says. She smiles ruefully. “Personal experience.”
Blaine looks up, nodding with a glint of knowledge in his eyes. “That's - that's good,” he says, giving a short sighing laugh that seems to make his body fold in on itself all the more, a tremulous tower of cards. His eyes flick up to look at Quinn after a moment, his head tipping slightly. “You dated him, right?”
There is hardly any use in lying. “Yeah. Did Kurt tell you?”
He grins at that. “Oh yeah, I got the full chart experience of the plethora of combinations the glee club has gone through. He ran out of colours about halfway through November junior year. It was a grade-A disaster.”
“And did it prepare you for us?” she asks, not because she wants to know or because she even cares. She smiles anyway, a small one she tries to shield with a curtain of blonde hair she no longer has.
“No, not really,” Blaine replies, a little wry smile quirking one corner of his lips in response. “You're all very fragmented.”
Quinn raises an eyebrow. “Evidently.”
To his credit, Blaine laughs, ducking his head. “It's not just that, although Santana's definitely the most obvious about it.”
“There are other reasons?” she encourages, for some reason. (The words are out of her mouth before she has the good sense to tell Blaine that she's not in the mood for this, even though the tight lurking burn in her head has loosened a little.)
“Well, think about it. This is the first time we've really spoken, right? We're - leads on a number for Sectionals, and we don't know anything about each other.”
Quinn doesn't really know what to say to that. It's not confusing, or anything, but - her forehead creases thoughtfully, and she pauses carefully before speaking. “That's not a very responsible reason for skipping class, you know,” she settles with.
“I take inter-club relations very seriously,” and Blaine's beaming again, in that strange way where she can't tell if he's joking or being entirely serious. So she frowns at him, with the disapproving stare she perfected in the mirror the summer before freshman year, until his mouth curls in again, unsure. Like the timed droop of a snowdrop in the first lights of spring. (She would almost feel bad, but she trained that out of herself, for the most part.)
“But no, honestly,” Blaine continues like he never left off, turning to look at the back wall instead of Quinn. She recognises the distraction technique, but doesn't bring it up. “I'd like to get to know you better, Quinn.”
He looks at her, then, and his expression is all wrong for the words he's saying. But Quinn supposes that he doesn't mean it that way. (Still.) “Okay. But I'm not playing Twenty Questions with you.”
“You think so little of my propositions,” Blaine says, pursing his lips with that little sparkle still in his eyes. His back has slid back up the chair, and he's sitting up straight with his usual bounce beginning to return. Or maybe that's just because he's tapping one foot against the floor and it's incredibly distracting. “I'm more creative than that.”
She laughs at that, a short sharp sound. “In what way, exactly?”
“Ah, that's the beauty of it,” Blaine grins, tapping the side of his nose. “You won't even know I'm doing it until you discover my well-organised LibreOffice document all about you.”
Quinn frowns, and Blaine's knee stops jiggling. “I don't even know what that is.”
“It's - it's a free word processing - that's not the point,” Blaine waves off, shaking his head as though it will remove the previous conversation from his brain entirely. “The point is that avoiding playing workplace ice-breaker games with me won't stop me from gathering intelligence.”
“Gathering intelligence,” Quinn repeats. Seriously? “Seriously?”
“I have my ways.” Blaine appears to be half a restrained millisecond from blowing a raspberry at her, the way his face is slightly scrunched. It's almost a little adorable.
“Okay, and good luck to you on that,” Quinn shrugs, deciding to break the moment before it runs away with her. She lets her back rest fully against the chair again, her head tipping back slightly. But she only holds it for a moment before it feels strange, a prickling vulnerability against her skin, and she rights herself again. “But if you don't mind, there's still twenty minutes of this period left. So.”
Blaine blinks at her for a long moment, before turning sharply away and mimicking her posture. “Oh. Sorry.”
They sit in a polite, restrained silence for a surprisingly long time. Quinn hadn't actually thought Blaine would be able to sit still for this long; he's never quite at rest, but it's not like Mike's minute rolling of his shoulders or Santana's subconscious physical expression of every thought that runs through her head. It's mostly his hands, clenching and unclenching, twining her fingers together and breaking it (here's the church and here's the steeple -) over and over. Sometimes Kurt takes one of his hands, rubs his thumbs over Blaine's knuckles, and they'll share secret smiles that Quinn can't quite make sense of.
Sometimes Kurt doesn't notice, though.
This time Blaine bends over and pulls out a small cardboard box in some ridiculous patchwork design, popping the lid open and picking out a sheet of square paper. It's pale blue with a fish design on it - Japanese koi, Quinn would guess - and he hunches over it, beginning to smooth over folds with the sure pressure of his thumb.
Quinn watches him with confusion pressing into her forehead, tipping her head. Eventually he looks up at her.
“It's stress relief, I guess,” he explains shortly, glancing at her almost shyly before lowering his head back to watch his hands.
She watches, too, a little bit. The harsh needling deep in the pit of her chest that she carries around with her fades, for some stupid reason. (What a weird boy.)
The bell rings and Quinn finds herself startling back into the real world - like a pothole in a road, heavy and sharp on her senses - away from Blaine's little progression of paper cranes lining Miss Pillsbury's desk in a rainbow fleet.
She leaves first, her bag bouncing lightly off her hip. She doesn't say anything, but she hears a quiet “Later, Quinn,” called behind her. She doesn't turn around.
- - -
Quinn finds that it is very hard to plan herself away from Blaine Anderson, even after they win Sectionals and his mission (of a sorts) is outdated. He doesn't follow her or even really speak to her outside of Miss Pillsbury's office, not really - this seems to be a recurring pattern with people who try to reach her - but after their first meeting, he comes almost every time.
“Hey, Quinn,” he'll say, clicking the door shut and slumping into the chair next to her, his usual tight posture suddenly all but bottomed out through his bones. It's almost like he's sulking, brooding about some dark and deep thought locked up in the spaces of his head that he never wants to visit; he always smiles, though, a tiny little quirk to the corners of his mouth that make her posture relax with his.
It's not a thing. Blaine is handsome, yes, looking at it objectively; his strong jawline, his gentle groomed mannerisms, and the deep genuine crinkling around his eyes when he laughs at something Kurt has whispered in his ears. But there's always been a difference between recognising attractiveness and being attracted, the slip between nouns and verbs complicating things somewhat.
But he's sweet, calm and personable in the way most men have never seemed to be. He listens to her, and he talks to her like she's helping. She doubts she is, but it's nice of him to not say so.
So Blaine sits in Miss Pillsbury's office with Quinn on Tuesdays and Thursdays and folds paper cranes in indigo and gold and pearl pink, and counts them in his head with no particular goal in mind. When the bell rings muffled through the walls, he scrawls the number he's laboriously counted underneath the bottom knuckle of his thumb. It differs on which hand, which day. Quinn supposes it brings some kind of spontaneity to such a tedious pastime.
“A thousand, I guess,” Blaine shrugs when she asks him what he's counting to, one Tuesday. “That's the general accepted format of the crane-folding game, right?”
Quinn wrinkles her nose. “How much spare time do you have?” And Blaine just looks at her, his face impassive save for a tiny crease in his forehead, like the question is ridiculous. But she continues anyway. “What do you do for fun?”
“What do you do for fun?”
Which is childish and ridiculous, volleying her question back like that, but Quinn can only frown and tip her head away from where he's staring evenly at her. It should be unsettling and on some level it is, prickling her skin, but his gaze doesn't smart like most peoples' do. “Why do you care?” she asks, picking at the seam of the seat cover and wondering if all of their conversations are going to be tennis matches full of questions never answered.
“It's good to have a hobby,” Blaine replies. He finishes the crane twisted between his fingers, holds it in the flat of his hand and smiles at it like it's made of sunlight. (But he usually smiles like that, Quinn has found recently.)
Quinn scoffs, sniffing and turning her head to watch the pale sunlight lighting the high windowsill. “I- I like running,” she tells him with a slight incline of her head, although she doesn't know why.
Track is stupid, but running through the twists of her suburban cage makes her feel a little less like screaming and punching everyone and being taken even less seriously than she usually is.
Blaine tips his head, pausing before he begins to fold the next crane (violet with white polka-dots). He doesn't look up. “Is it fun?”
Shrug. “Sometimes.” It's not a lie.
“Then it counts,” Blaine says sagely. The little serene nod he gives at that, like the bowing of a priest at the altar, makes her crack up laughing. Blaine frowns. “What?”
“It's - just,” she covers her mouth with her hand and stifles the giggles escaping, “you sound like a self-help book. All the time. It's funny.”
To her surprise Blaine just smiles, a tiny secret one. “My mom says that exact thing,” he says a little sheepishly. “Although mostly she's complaining that she just wants to vent at me and I keep offering her unsolicited advice.”
“Then you should probably stop doing that.”
“But helping people with my meaningful advice is deep in my soul,” Blaine sighs, grinning the entire time like this conversation is the most exciting he's had all day, placing his hand dramatically over his heart. “If this were Hyrule, I would be Link. But with more cucco sidequests and less Triforces.”
Quinn stares at him. She hasn't heard something so blatantly bizarre and nerdy since the last time she'd been forced to sit and watch Finn and Puck do an 'endurance run' of Ocarina of Time in sophomore year. It's not even remotely charming, so she's not sure why she's started smiling. (It's nice, she supposes, to have a person to speak to who hasn't judged you at your worst.) “Isn't there only one Triforce?”
“Ah, smart lady,” Blaine leans back, glancing at the clock and clicking his tongue; he pulls a pen out of his pocket and leaves the finished dotted crane on the desk, scrawling a number on his right hand that may or may not be somewhere in the two hundreds, not that she's interested. “Yeah, you're right. But you get the idea, right?”
“Sure I do,” Quinn says agreeably, raising her eyebrows. (Of course I don't.)
Blaine shrugs his shoulders helplessly, his smile falling from his face like a cherry blossom, and wrings the strap of his messenger bag in his hands, waiting for the bell. Quinn waits with him, brushing imaginary lint off the pleats of her skirt and straightening the lines of her cardigan.
They leave together, but they split off in opposite directions past the door.
- - -
Quinn opens her bag in AP Government the next day, Wednesday, and finds a crane, navy and red and isn't that predictable, perched at the edge of her binder.
“Oh, that's so cute!” Rachel exclaims when Quinn takes it out, setting it on the desk so she can take out the aforementioned binder without disrupting the little paper creation. (She doesn't know why she doesn't just crush it in her fingers; she gets an image of what she assumes Blaine's disappointed face would look like when he finds out, and her heart is no longer in it.) “Where did you get that?”
“Um.” Quinn considers telling the truth for about half a second. (It would be sort of weird.) “I don't know. It wasn't there last period.”
“Oh, then maybe it's a message from a secret admirer,” and Rachel beams like she's on to something, propping her elbows on the desk and resting her chin on her crossed hands. “Actually, I think it might be butterflies that mean love, so I guess that wouldn't really make sense if they did even a modicum of research. Cranes are a symbol of honour, so maybe someone in glee is challenging you. I wouldn't put it past Santana, she's the kind of person who would be fascinated by samurai culture and although, admittedly, she's never mentioned being threatened by your presence in the group in its primary function as a show choir -”
“It's not from Santana,” Quinn sighs eventually, because everyone is starting to look at Rachel in that way - well, the way in which most people regard Rachel, really.
Rachel stops, sits up and frowns slightly, her eyebrows knitting delicately together. “So you know who it's from?”
“I don't,” Quinn lies, prising open the centre fold to find a number and a short note neatly printed inside; 207 - good morning, quinn fabray! I hope today is a pleasant adventure(?). She replaces the fold and slips it back into her bag before responding, more than slightly bemused. Did he really put that question mark in brackets? (Does he think it might be offensive?) “But I really don't think Santana would be that subtle.”
Rachel considers this, tapping her pen against the desk. “That's true, I suppose.”
“Whatever,” Quinn says, waving her hand and turning back to face the front of the classroom. “It doesn't matter, anyway.”
Before Rachel can begin to formulate an in-depth argument complete with examples and citations as to why, precisely, it does in fact matter, Mr Lacey makes a half-hearted attempt to thump the desk in a manner that was probably startling about twenty years ago.
Yes. Good. (Quinn doesn't really want to have to explain.)
- - -
“Why did you do that?” she asks as soon as Blaine opens the door, watching his eyebrows furrow. It's an amusingly harsh movement, the light reflecting in his eyes almost disappearing entirely under the heavy black lines.
“Oh, well,” he starts, closing the door and pressing his back against the bookshelf, leaning back as though the movement is long-practised and comforting. “I don't know, I thought it would cheer you up.”
“Why would I need cheering up?”
Blaine shrugs, tilting his head with his expression curious. His shoulders are tight, though, boxing up together, suddenly anxious. “I'm sorry, I won't do things like that if you'd rather - it's just, sometimes you -”
“I'm not mad at you, you know,” Quinn says hastily. “You really don't have to apologise.”
“I didn't think you were,” he replies, folding his arms. “I can apologise without thinking you're going to bite my head off. In fact, most people who deserve apologies remain calm while receiving them, if personal experience means anything.”
Quinn isn't really sure what that's supposed to mean, but she decides not to press the issue. “Well, regardless, I'd appreciate it if you didn't do that again.”
“Why?”
“I just - I don't want you to,” Quinn says, sighing irritably at her sudden inability to fully explain herself. “It's kind of weird. I'm not your girlfriend.”
Blaine raises his eyebrows, since he appears incapable of only raising one. He looks ridiculous. “Well, yeah, I know that much.”
“Good, then, that's settled,” Quinn says, nodding her head definitively because she's had quite enough of this conversation already. “I'm assuming you're still doing your origami thing.”
Blaine settles into the seat next to her, sliding his messenger bag to his feet and clicking his fingers in mock upset. “Curses, you've found me out. However did you guess? I've been so careful.”
“You're a predictable man, Mister Anderson,” Quinn replies, arching an eyebrow. “Besides, you could have been doing something else. Practising a song for glee club, or something.”
For some reason this makes Blaine perk up, his hazel eyes bright in the lightblub glare. Please don't start singing, Quinn prays internally. She already feels like she's in the world's most boring musical half the time at this school, she does not need it from the one place nobody bursts into melodramatic song at the drop of a hat. “Well, now that you mention it, I have prepared a song for -”
Oh for God's sake. “If you start singing I'm going to walk out this door right now.”
Blaine opens his mouth, and closes it again. Yeah, you keep your '80s pop tunes to yourself, Quinn thinks uncharitably. She has had enough sing-your-feelings lessons to last eight lifetimes and then some, thank you very much.
“I wasn't actually going to do it here,” Blaine says, somewhat sulkily. “Bad acoustics.”
“Then I'm sure we'll get along very well today,” Quinn replies brightly, cocking her head and smiling. Blaine wrinkles his nose at her, childish, but underneath his mouth is curling up into his own little grin. “How many of those are you planning to do today, anyway?”
Blaine makes a non-committal shake of his head, his shoulders moving along with him. “I don't really plan these things? They just sort of happen. All of a sudden cranes, cranes everywhere.”
“That sounds rather distressing for an activity you use for stress relief.”
“The cranes pick you, Quinn.” There's a little pause in the conversation, as Blaine looks down at the sheaf of paper in his hands as though contemplating some deep mystery of the universe. Quinn's halfway to considering maybe actually starting her Physics homework because really, sitting here has been awfully unproductive recently - “Hey, you wanna try? I swear it's not as hardcore as I make it out to be.”
Quinn thinks about it, eyeing Blaine slightly suspiciously as though maybe it's some sort of incredibly long-winded and quite frankly stupid practical joke. (The Muckraker would probably still have a field day with it.) But no, all of his slightly self-deprecating banter aside. “Well, as long as there aren't any giant origami monstrosities that come bursting through the wall or anything.”
“I can't make any promises,” Blaine warns with a smile. This smile is a little different from his usual ones; a certain something else in the spread of his face that Quinn can't put her finger on.
Whatever. Blaine hands her a square of kami in a soft pastel polka dot design, spreads his own sheet swimming in calico koi on the desk, turns himself around to face her (crossing his legs incredibly awkwardly on the seat) and shows her how to fold.
The first four are a little crooked and they topple over on the desk when she places them there, but Blaine just laughs and makes her do it again, going over the steps with the one in his hand until the fold lines are worn soft with repeated movements, curving together like cloth. He doesn't touch her, and she's glad of it.
“Ah, yeah, that's more like it,” Blaine beams when Quinn finds herself holding a passable-looking crane after a solid fifteen minutes. The way he gets so excited over these things, his whole body crowding forward to peer at the little paper creation, is something Quinn doesn't think she'll ever quite get used to. “It's a good feeling, right?”
“Hmm.” The feeling is cool, like a splash of seawater on her legs in the middle of a blazing July, soft on the soles of her feet from the fiery sand. Tepid, lukewarm maybe, those sorts of words; she doesn't know quite what to make of it, other than that she supposes she wouldn't mind feeling it again.
- - -
Emma sometimes walks into her office on Wednesday and Friday mornings and finds delicate little paper creations highlighting the edges of her office, a scattered spectrum of flightless birds. The first time, it's just one rose-pink crane perched on her planner, the fine golden lines crossing through the paper gleaming in the shaft of sunlight spilling across the desk.
The next time they flood the stationery corner of her desk in a fleet of mismatched colours, sunset orange and sky blue, heather grey and forest green, like a kindergartner’s paintings. Some are a little crooked, a bent wing or the awkward fuzz of a torn fold here and there - it makes her twitch a little, a forgotten friend of a reaction - but she doesn't move them. Well. Not until she realises that she's going to have to regain the intended use of her pen holder if she wants to get anything useful accomplished today, anyway.
She can't make sense of it, but the little intrusion is strangely cheering.
- - -
Come Michael Jackson week, Quinn watches Kurt pick at his cuticles and sitting on the piano stool instead of next to anyone, and observes Santana's demands of proportionate retribution - which is funny, because Santana's usual awareness of Blaine is restricted to ranting about his and Rachel's monopoly on solos, an issue Quinn ceased caring about long ago - and tries to ignore Rachel and Finn's stupid mysterious (and then no longer mysterious) drama, and listens to endless arguments recordings and that irritatingly foul Dalton boy with the ridiculous hair.
She sits on her Yale acceptance letter until Mr Schuester asks her how her application is going, and she can't help herself because she is happy, for once in her life, and nobody can screw it up for her this time.
She doesn't have Blaine's phone number, so she doesn't call. (She wouldn't know what to say.)
- - -
It's okay, though.
“I got into Yale,” Quinn mentions the Tuesday after Blaine returns to school, while the sunlight strobes through the windows and glows across the planes of the wooden furniture. Cranes in autumn shades litter Miss Pillsbury's desk, ruby and pumpkin and earth, feathers of phoenixes. (Quinn wonders if sometimes Blaine lets Kurt pick the palette. She doesn't ask, and he never tells.)
Their routine hasn't changed. The notion is somewhat comforting.
Blaine pauses in his fold, a smile lighting up his face. “Congratulations!”
“Thank you.”
“It's all right.” Blaine pauses, chews his lip thoughtfully before speaking. “... Are you still going to come?”
It's not something she can answer easily. Both sides come to her tongue, but neither of them are quite right. It makes Quinn's stomach sink, just a little. “I don't know.”
“You don't have to, you know,” Blaine says, looking down at his half-folded crane like it holds the answer of the mysteries of strange friendships created within school counsellor's offices in the bend of a wing. His nose wrinkles for a second, but he brushes it off when he lifts his head and smiles at her again. But it's a cool smile, like the pale rays of dawn light on the horizon. “No, it's really great. You're... smiling, you know?”
Quinn cocks her head, frowning a little. “No, I don't.”
“When you came in,” Blaine clarifies, glancing down at his crane again, finishing it in a few deft folds before he continues, as though the words in his mouth need to prepare themselves, little witnesses to the stand. “It's like -” he pauses again, twisting his mouth in his teeth before straightening up and gesturing to his face “- you were smiling with your eyes, like this! You don't, always.”
“Was I smizing?” Quinn laughs, feeling her cheeks pinken at the attention.
Blaine laughs in a strange half-cackling sound that makes her jump a little. “Smizing all over the place! Watch out, Quinn, it could be infectious,” he warns, pouting and worrying at his lower lip before letting his face change and - oh dear - he looks ridiculous, and Quinn laughs harder and Blaine grins in tandem and lets his eyebrows flatten out again. “I'm offended by your mocking laughter.”
Quinn raises an eyebrow. “Like you didn't know that you looked like an idiot,” she chides, placing a lavender crane on the desk for Miss Pillsbury to find later (tucked behind her tissue boxes, like a winged infiltrator). “Tyra would be ashamed.”
“So would Kurt, probably.”
“Oh, definitely.”
They don't bring it up again.
- - -
Quinn starts going to her fourth period Tuesday and Thursday class, most of the time.
(Blaine is glad, but sometimes he still feels a little afraid to do the same. So he hums to himself, and folds, and sometimes actually attends sessions with Miss Pillsbury where he sits and doesn't talk about anything.)
- - -
After - after - after that, Rachel comes to visit Quinn alone, after the initial ruckus has quietened down a little. It takes a couple of days, but when she arrives she finds that she's already been beaten to it, apparently.
The table by Quinn's bedside is blooming with the little folds of several paper cranes, black and red and white; one peering between the stems of the carnations in the vase, spilling cautiously over to the bedstead, two or three tacked across the top edge of the wooden panelling. They'll almost certainly be imminently removed and the perpetrator chided for being so ridiculous, but it's aesthetically appealing and on some level she empathises with the person. Rachel smiles a little, a half-waning one, the motion almost alien to her as she settles as best she can on the quite frankly suspect plastic hospital chair.
She twists her fingers around each other and chews her lip, the smile fading quickly as her mind thumps with all the thoughts she's had trailing behind her every step since the day of the wedding-that-wasn't. Finn had come with her the first couple of times, but he gets anxious in hospital settings and she'd assured him that she'd be quite fine coming to visit by herself. They haven't talked about the wedding yet.
Before Rachel can trap herself too deeply in the rehashing of everything she could have possibly done differently that might have changed the outcome, there are footsteps outside. Immediately she feels for the rape whistle in her shoulder bag, although if she were being logical about it if she was a murderer she would probably pick slightly more challenging targets than a car crash victim and an emotionally in turmoil high school student -
It's only Blaine though, in a muted polo shirt and jeans ensemble, pinching the wing of a scarlet origami crane and looking just as surprised as Rachel is. And Kurt doesn't seem to be with him, apparently, which is very curious, although Kurt hates hospitals almost as much as Finn does. Something to do with the antiseptic smell, not that that's the main issue here. Rachel doesn't often see Blaine without Kurt in tow, come to think of it. How odd.
“Oh, uh, Rachel,” Blaine greets with a widening of his eyes, which isn't much of a greeting at all. He appears to have the same hesitations about this Kurt-less encounter that she does, which is a little comforting. “Hey.”
“Good morning, Blaine,” Rachel says, with a brightness she doesn't feel. “So, I'm assuming -” she waves a hand at the bedside table “- they're all yours?”
Blaine shrugs and smiles at the floor. “It's a thing I do. When I want to have something to occupy myself with, I guess.”
“That's -” Rachel pauses, not quite sure how to continue, “it's a really lovely thing for you to do, Blaine. It's sweet, even though I don't know if the nurses will appreciate your getting in the way of their equipment with your newly-discovered artistic leanings. … The woman visiting the boy in the next room said that - that Quinn was very lucky to have such a dedicated boyfriend.”
Neither of them laugh. Blaine shrugs one shoulder and glances away, and Rachel wrings her hands and doesn't really know what she's supposed to do. (It's her default setting, now, it seems.)
“It's not that great, really,” he says quietly, pressing his hands into his jean pockets. “I'm just finishing what I started. But I know what I'm going to wish for now, I think.”
“Oh, when you reach a thousand?” Blaine shrugs, nods agreeably in his tight box-like posture; Rachel feels the need to press, and the words are out of her mouth before she can really think about what she's saying. “Can I ask what?”
Blaine raises his eyebrows, and taps the side of his nose.
Rachel supposes that it's a silly question.
Fandom: Glee
Rating: PG
Length: ~5900 words
Warnings: none
Characters/Pairings: Blaine and Quinn-centric, some Emma and Rachel; canon pairings
Summary: Some friendships aren't really epic. But sometimes, that's just fine. (Or; where Blaine and Quinn sit quietly and talk sometimes, but mostly they fold paper cranes.) Background fic; starts from 'Hold On To Sixteen'.
Notes: completed for the lovely Kris, or rather missgoalie75, and, more specifically, for project stay classy! Because she is lovely and awesome and talented, and writes wonderful fic that makes me feel things that I shouldn't feel because where I come from it's illegal to be anything other than angry. (Harrowing true life.) But seriously. Awesome person, awesome life, who probably deserves more than this. (It's OK. I wish I could write exciting things with explosions and melodrama too.)
Title taken from The Little Prince, for the interested.
Sometimes Quinn just likes to sit in Miss Pillsbury's empty office and breathe for a while.
It's not like her teachers will really notice or care if she skips a class every so often (a scarce pro to attending public school). Her GPA is perfect, her homework packets always completed in the neat cursive it had taken her the entirety of eighth grade to perfect (beautiful and elegant, like she'd always wanted to be), and usually the vague reminder of her sophomore year lets her off with more than she really should be. The only person who really notices is Rachel, and that's only because they share their AP Government class.
Quinn's never sure if that's worse or better than never being noticed at all. Rachel doesn't ever quite get it, but she pushes and pulls at Quinn and says when you're ready and I missed you and reminds her when assignments are due in her smiling voice, and those make Quinn's chest twist with something that never really fades. She doesn't - won't - understand it, but she carries it in her chest, a swelling of stones behind her ribcage blooming with her white girl problems.
She pulls her knees up towards her chest and rests her head on them, eyes fluttering shut. Yes. It's good to be alone, sometimes.
Rachel and Quinn are kind-of friends; her name is in Quinn's contact list, but she has never used it. Sometimes their chairs in glee club are next to each other, but they don't really speak. They sit next to each other in AP Government (usually, anyway; Rachel's suspension has left her seat uncomfortably empty), with Mike on Quinn's left - glee club solidarity, naturally - but it's never anything but a convenient partnership.
Convenient. It seems to be the defining rite of most of her relationships with people.
She doesn't want to talk about it.
Miss Pillsbury was unsettled by her at first, an angry girl in ruby pink and inkwell black sulking in her office for periods at a time, a ghastly apparition in smoky perfume. So Quinn learned her schedule (counselling sessions are never on Tuesday or Thursday afternoons) and plans her breakdowns around them, and now neither of them feel uncomfortable. It's easier, quieter, empty of tempered questions she doesn't want to answer today tomorrow ever.
Quinn's been breathing for five minutes and twenty-seven seconds when the door clicks open. She turns her head, wonders if Miss Pillsbury has decided to switch it up - hardly - but it's just a boy. A boy standing in the doorway, his big dark eyes staring at her in surprise.
“Oh,” Blaine says eventually, ever the master of eloquence. His eyebrows draw back down from their immediate surprise and his smile comes back, honey-sweet and gentle as he hovers in the door frame. “Hi, Quinn.”
Quinn doesn't know how to respond to him, because she has no idea what he's supposed to be. So she just nods her head and gives a weak imitation of a smile in response, it dropping back off her face as quickly as it had appeared. She turns her head back to face the prim line of pamphlets along the back wall, and pretends to study their garish titles. Why are there pamphlets about spinsters in a high school guidance counsellor's office? “Don't you have a class to go to?” she asks, eventually, when she realises that Blaine is still standing awkwardly between the office and the outside hall.
“Technically, yeah,” Blaine nods; he lets go of the door and lets it click shut on his swinging hinge, stepping carefully and turning to peruse the bookshelf as though she had given him an invitation to do so. Idly, Quinn watches the back of his head and wonders who on earth told him the gel was a good idea. (Certainly not Kurt. Surely.) “But if anyone asks, no.”
Quinn lets out a small puff of laughter. “That's rebellious of you.”
“Terribly so,” Blaine says, shrugging one shoulder with a steadily waning smile. His arm shifts and Quinn catches the slide of his thumb over the spines, tracing embossed letters with the curve of a fingernail. His face is quiet, mouth opening slightly in contemplation, the lines of his face smoothed away, no chips on a marble statue. He blinks once, slowly, before dipping his head and curling his hand back towards himself. “Did Miss Pillsbury tell you you can come here, too?”
“It was my own decision,” Quinn says, tipping her head slightly. “And it clearly isn't working as well for you, seeing as you just about tore Sam's face off yesterday.”
Blaine colours at that, his cheeks marbling pink as he turns around to regard her fully, leaning back against the bookshelf. But he's still looking at the floor, looking at her only with his posture, hands pressed back against the wood. “I didn't really... mean it, like that,” he says softly to the carpet. Like it has ears, quietly listening to all the words that don't make it.
“Did you tell Sam that?”
“No, I -” he looks up, away from Quinn, stares at some faded point on the walls and hardens his jaw. “I haven't had the chance to. It's, um, a little harder than I thought, I guess.”
Even from here, there's a certain bowing to Blaine's back, a little sagging to his shoulders under his jacket. Quinn sighs, and resigns herself to her apparent job as substitute counsellor. (Didn't boys know how to look after themselves?) “If it helps, I don't think Sam will hold it against you if you're going to be honest with him,” she says. She smiles ruefully. “Personal experience.”
Blaine looks up, nodding with a glint of knowledge in his eyes. “That's - that's good,” he says, giving a short sighing laugh that seems to make his body fold in on itself all the more, a tremulous tower of cards. His eyes flick up to look at Quinn after a moment, his head tipping slightly. “You dated him, right?”
There is hardly any use in lying. “Yeah. Did Kurt tell you?”
He grins at that. “Oh yeah, I got the full chart experience of the plethora of combinations the glee club has gone through. He ran out of colours about halfway through November junior year. It was a grade-A disaster.”
“And did it prepare you for us?” she asks, not because she wants to know or because she even cares. She smiles anyway, a small one she tries to shield with a curtain of blonde hair she no longer has.
“No, not really,” Blaine replies, a little wry smile quirking one corner of his lips in response. “You're all very fragmented.”
Quinn raises an eyebrow. “Evidently.”
To his credit, Blaine laughs, ducking his head. “It's not just that, although Santana's definitely the most obvious about it.”
“There are other reasons?” she encourages, for some reason. (The words are out of her mouth before she has the good sense to tell Blaine that she's not in the mood for this, even though the tight lurking burn in her head has loosened a little.)
“Well, think about it. This is the first time we've really spoken, right? We're - leads on a number for Sectionals, and we don't know anything about each other.”
Quinn doesn't really know what to say to that. It's not confusing, or anything, but - her forehead creases thoughtfully, and she pauses carefully before speaking. “That's not a very responsible reason for skipping class, you know,” she settles with.
“I take inter-club relations very seriously,” and Blaine's beaming again, in that strange way where she can't tell if he's joking or being entirely serious. So she frowns at him, with the disapproving stare she perfected in the mirror the summer before freshman year, until his mouth curls in again, unsure. Like the timed droop of a snowdrop in the first lights of spring. (She would almost feel bad, but she trained that out of herself, for the most part.)
“But no, honestly,” Blaine continues like he never left off, turning to look at the back wall instead of Quinn. She recognises the distraction technique, but doesn't bring it up. “I'd like to get to know you better, Quinn.”
He looks at her, then, and his expression is all wrong for the words he's saying. But Quinn supposes that he doesn't mean it that way. (Still.) “Okay. But I'm not playing Twenty Questions with you.”
“You think so little of my propositions,” Blaine says, pursing his lips with that little sparkle still in his eyes. His back has slid back up the chair, and he's sitting up straight with his usual bounce beginning to return. Or maybe that's just because he's tapping one foot against the floor and it's incredibly distracting. “I'm more creative than that.”
She laughs at that, a short sharp sound. “In what way, exactly?”
“Ah, that's the beauty of it,” Blaine grins, tapping the side of his nose. “You won't even know I'm doing it until you discover my well-organised LibreOffice document all about you.”
Quinn frowns, and Blaine's knee stops jiggling. “I don't even know what that is.”
“It's - it's a free word processing - that's not the point,” Blaine waves off, shaking his head as though it will remove the previous conversation from his brain entirely. “The point is that avoiding playing workplace ice-breaker games with me won't stop me from gathering intelligence.”
“Gathering intelligence,” Quinn repeats. Seriously? “Seriously?”
“I have my ways.” Blaine appears to be half a restrained millisecond from blowing a raspberry at her, the way his face is slightly scrunched. It's almost a little adorable.
“Okay, and good luck to you on that,” Quinn shrugs, deciding to break the moment before it runs away with her. She lets her back rest fully against the chair again, her head tipping back slightly. But she only holds it for a moment before it feels strange, a prickling vulnerability against her skin, and she rights herself again. “But if you don't mind, there's still twenty minutes of this period left. So.”
Blaine blinks at her for a long moment, before turning sharply away and mimicking her posture. “Oh. Sorry.”
They sit in a polite, restrained silence for a surprisingly long time. Quinn hadn't actually thought Blaine would be able to sit still for this long; he's never quite at rest, but it's not like Mike's minute rolling of his shoulders or Santana's subconscious physical expression of every thought that runs through her head. It's mostly his hands, clenching and unclenching, twining her fingers together and breaking it (here's the church and here's the steeple -) over and over. Sometimes Kurt takes one of his hands, rubs his thumbs over Blaine's knuckles, and they'll share secret smiles that Quinn can't quite make sense of.
Sometimes Kurt doesn't notice, though.
This time Blaine bends over and pulls out a small cardboard box in some ridiculous patchwork design, popping the lid open and picking out a sheet of square paper. It's pale blue with a fish design on it - Japanese koi, Quinn would guess - and he hunches over it, beginning to smooth over folds with the sure pressure of his thumb.
Quinn watches him with confusion pressing into her forehead, tipping her head. Eventually he looks up at her.
“It's stress relief, I guess,” he explains shortly, glancing at her almost shyly before lowering his head back to watch his hands.
She watches, too, a little bit. The harsh needling deep in the pit of her chest that she carries around with her fades, for some stupid reason. (What a weird boy.)
The bell rings and Quinn finds herself startling back into the real world - like a pothole in a road, heavy and sharp on her senses - away from Blaine's little progression of paper cranes lining Miss Pillsbury's desk in a rainbow fleet.
She leaves first, her bag bouncing lightly off her hip. She doesn't say anything, but she hears a quiet “Later, Quinn,” called behind her. She doesn't turn around.
- - -
Quinn finds that it is very hard to plan herself away from Blaine Anderson, even after they win Sectionals and his mission (of a sorts) is outdated. He doesn't follow her or even really speak to her outside of Miss Pillsbury's office, not really - this seems to be a recurring pattern with people who try to reach her - but after their first meeting, he comes almost every time.
“Hey, Quinn,” he'll say, clicking the door shut and slumping into the chair next to her, his usual tight posture suddenly all but bottomed out through his bones. It's almost like he's sulking, brooding about some dark and deep thought locked up in the spaces of his head that he never wants to visit; he always smiles, though, a tiny little quirk to the corners of his mouth that make her posture relax with his.
It's not a thing. Blaine is handsome, yes, looking at it objectively; his strong jawline, his gentle groomed mannerisms, and the deep genuine crinkling around his eyes when he laughs at something Kurt has whispered in his ears. But there's always been a difference between recognising attractiveness and being attracted, the slip between nouns and verbs complicating things somewhat.
But he's sweet, calm and personable in the way most men have never seemed to be. He listens to her, and he talks to her like she's helping. She doubts she is, but it's nice of him to not say so.
So Blaine sits in Miss Pillsbury's office with Quinn on Tuesdays and Thursdays and folds paper cranes in indigo and gold and pearl pink, and counts them in his head with no particular goal in mind. When the bell rings muffled through the walls, he scrawls the number he's laboriously counted underneath the bottom knuckle of his thumb. It differs on which hand, which day. Quinn supposes it brings some kind of spontaneity to such a tedious pastime.
“A thousand, I guess,” Blaine shrugs when she asks him what he's counting to, one Tuesday. “That's the general accepted format of the crane-folding game, right?”
Quinn wrinkles her nose. “How much spare time do you have?” And Blaine just looks at her, his face impassive save for a tiny crease in his forehead, like the question is ridiculous. But she continues anyway. “What do you do for fun?”
“What do you do for fun?”
Which is childish and ridiculous, volleying her question back like that, but Quinn can only frown and tip her head away from where he's staring evenly at her. It should be unsettling and on some level it is, prickling her skin, but his gaze doesn't smart like most peoples' do. “Why do you care?” she asks, picking at the seam of the seat cover and wondering if all of their conversations are going to be tennis matches full of questions never answered.
“It's good to have a hobby,” Blaine replies. He finishes the crane twisted between his fingers, holds it in the flat of his hand and smiles at it like it's made of sunlight. (But he usually smiles like that, Quinn has found recently.)
Quinn scoffs, sniffing and turning her head to watch the pale sunlight lighting the high windowsill. “I- I like running,” she tells him with a slight incline of her head, although she doesn't know why.
Track is stupid, but running through the twists of her suburban cage makes her feel a little less like screaming and punching everyone and being taken even less seriously than she usually is.
Blaine tips his head, pausing before he begins to fold the next crane (violet with white polka-dots). He doesn't look up. “Is it fun?”
Shrug. “Sometimes.” It's not a lie.
“Then it counts,” Blaine says sagely. The little serene nod he gives at that, like the bowing of a priest at the altar, makes her crack up laughing. Blaine frowns. “What?”
“It's - just,” she covers her mouth with her hand and stifles the giggles escaping, “you sound like a self-help book. All the time. It's funny.”
To her surprise Blaine just smiles, a tiny secret one. “My mom says that exact thing,” he says a little sheepishly. “Although mostly she's complaining that she just wants to vent at me and I keep offering her unsolicited advice.”
“Then you should probably stop doing that.”
“But helping people with my meaningful advice is deep in my soul,” Blaine sighs, grinning the entire time like this conversation is the most exciting he's had all day, placing his hand dramatically over his heart. “If this were Hyrule, I would be Link. But with more cucco sidequests and less Triforces.”
Quinn stares at him. She hasn't heard something so blatantly bizarre and nerdy since the last time she'd been forced to sit and watch Finn and Puck do an 'endurance run' of Ocarina of Time in sophomore year. It's not even remotely charming, so she's not sure why she's started smiling. (It's nice, she supposes, to have a person to speak to who hasn't judged you at your worst.) “Isn't there only one Triforce?”
“Ah, smart lady,” Blaine leans back, glancing at the clock and clicking his tongue; he pulls a pen out of his pocket and leaves the finished dotted crane on the desk, scrawling a number on his right hand that may or may not be somewhere in the two hundreds, not that she's interested. “Yeah, you're right. But you get the idea, right?”
“Sure I do,” Quinn says agreeably, raising her eyebrows. (Of course I don't.)
Blaine shrugs his shoulders helplessly, his smile falling from his face like a cherry blossom, and wrings the strap of his messenger bag in his hands, waiting for the bell. Quinn waits with him, brushing imaginary lint off the pleats of her skirt and straightening the lines of her cardigan.
They leave together, but they split off in opposite directions past the door.
- - -
Quinn opens her bag in AP Government the next day, Wednesday, and finds a crane, navy and red and isn't that predictable, perched at the edge of her binder.
“Oh, that's so cute!” Rachel exclaims when Quinn takes it out, setting it on the desk so she can take out the aforementioned binder without disrupting the little paper creation. (She doesn't know why she doesn't just crush it in her fingers; she gets an image of what she assumes Blaine's disappointed face would look like when he finds out, and her heart is no longer in it.) “Where did you get that?”
“Um.” Quinn considers telling the truth for about half a second. (It would be sort of weird.) “I don't know. It wasn't there last period.”
“Oh, then maybe it's a message from a secret admirer,” and Rachel beams like she's on to something, propping her elbows on the desk and resting her chin on her crossed hands. “Actually, I think it might be butterflies that mean love, so I guess that wouldn't really make sense if they did even a modicum of research. Cranes are a symbol of honour, so maybe someone in glee is challenging you. I wouldn't put it past Santana, she's the kind of person who would be fascinated by samurai culture and although, admittedly, she's never mentioned being threatened by your presence in the group in its primary function as a show choir -”
“It's not from Santana,” Quinn sighs eventually, because everyone is starting to look at Rachel in that way - well, the way in which most people regard Rachel, really.
Rachel stops, sits up and frowns slightly, her eyebrows knitting delicately together. “So you know who it's from?”
“I don't,” Quinn lies, prising open the centre fold to find a number and a short note neatly printed inside; 207 - good morning, quinn fabray! I hope today is a pleasant adventure(?). She replaces the fold and slips it back into her bag before responding, more than slightly bemused. Did he really put that question mark in brackets? (Does he think it might be offensive?) “But I really don't think Santana would be that subtle.”
Rachel considers this, tapping her pen against the desk. “That's true, I suppose.”
“Whatever,” Quinn says, waving her hand and turning back to face the front of the classroom. “It doesn't matter, anyway.”
Before Rachel can begin to formulate an in-depth argument complete with examples and citations as to why, precisely, it does in fact matter, Mr Lacey makes a half-hearted attempt to thump the desk in a manner that was probably startling about twenty years ago.
Yes. Good. (Quinn doesn't really want to have to explain.)
- - -
“Why did you do that?” she asks as soon as Blaine opens the door, watching his eyebrows furrow. It's an amusingly harsh movement, the light reflecting in his eyes almost disappearing entirely under the heavy black lines.
“Oh, well,” he starts, closing the door and pressing his back against the bookshelf, leaning back as though the movement is long-practised and comforting. “I don't know, I thought it would cheer you up.”
“Why would I need cheering up?”
Blaine shrugs, tilting his head with his expression curious. His shoulders are tight, though, boxing up together, suddenly anxious. “I'm sorry, I won't do things like that if you'd rather - it's just, sometimes you -”
“I'm not mad at you, you know,” Quinn says hastily. “You really don't have to apologise.”
“I didn't think you were,” he replies, folding his arms. “I can apologise without thinking you're going to bite my head off. In fact, most people who deserve apologies remain calm while receiving them, if personal experience means anything.”
Quinn isn't really sure what that's supposed to mean, but she decides not to press the issue. “Well, regardless, I'd appreciate it if you didn't do that again.”
“Why?”
“I just - I don't want you to,” Quinn says, sighing irritably at her sudden inability to fully explain herself. “It's kind of weird. I'm not your girlfriend.”
Blaine raises his eyebrows, since he appears incapable of only raising one. He looks ridiculous. “Well, yeah, I know that much.”
“Good, then, that's settled,” Quinn says, nodding her head definitively because she's had quite enough of this conversation already. “I'm assuming you're still doing your origami thing.”
Blaine settles into the seat next to her, sliding his messenger bag to his feet and clicking his fingers in mock upset. “Curses, you've found me out. However did you guess? I've been so careful.”
“You're a predictable man, Mister Anderson,” Quinn replies, arching an eyebrow. “Besides, you could have been doing something else. Practising a song for glee club, or something.”
For some reason this makes Blaine perk up, his hazel eyes bright in the lightblub glare. Please don't start singing, Quinn prays internally. She already feels like she's in the world's most boring musical half the time at this school, she does not need it from the one place nobody bursts into melodramatic song at the drop of a hat. “Well, now that you mention it, I have prepared a song for -”
Oh for God's sake. “If you start singing I'm going to walk out this door right now.”
Blaine opens his mouth, and closes it again. Yeah, you keep your '80s pop tunes to yourself, Quinn thinks uncharitably. She has had enough sing-your-feelings lessons to last eight lifetimes and then some, thank you very much.
“I wasn't actually going to do it here,” Blaine says, somewhat sulkily. “Bad acoustics.”
“Then I'm sure we'll get along very well today,” Quinn replies brightly, cocking her head and smiling. Blaine wrinkles his nose at her, childish, but underneath his mouth is curling up into his own little grin. “How many of those are you planning to do today, anyway?”
Blaine makes a non-committal shake of his head, his shoulders moving along with him. “I don't really plan these things? They just sort of happen. All of a sudden cranes, cranes everywhere.”
“That sounds rather distressing for an activity you use for stress relief.”
“The cranes pick you, Quinn.” There's a little pause in the conversation, as Blaine looks down at the sheaf of paper in his hands as though contemplating some deep mystery of the universe. Quinn's halfway to considering maybe actually starting her Physics homework because really, sitting here has been awfully unproductive recently - “Hey, you wanna try? I swear it's not as hardcore as I make it out to be.”
Quinn thinks about it, eyeing Blaine slightly suspiciously as though maybe it's some sort of incredibly long-winded and quite frankly stupid practical joke. (The Muckraker would probably still have a field day with it.) But no, all of his slightly self-deprecating banter aside. “Well, as long as there aren't any giant origami monstrosities that come bursting through the wall or anything.”
“I can't make any promises,” Blaine warns with a smile. This smile is a little different from his usual ones; a certain something else in the spread of his face that Quinn can't put her finger on.
Whatever. Blaine hands her a square of kami in a soft pastel polka dot design, spreads his own sheet swimming in calico koi on the desk, turns himself around to face her (crossing his legs incredibly awkwardly on the seat) and shows her how to fold.
The first four are a little crooked and they topple over on the desk when she places them there, but Blaine just laughs and makes her do it again, going over the steps with the one in his hand until the fold lines are worn soft with repeated movements, curving together like cloth. He doesn't touch her, and she's glad of it.
“Ah, yeah, that's more like it,” Blaine beams when Quinn finds herself holding a passable-looking crane after a solid fifteen minutes. The way he gets so excited over these things, his whole body crowding forward to peer at the little paper creation, is something Quinn doesn't think she'll ever quite get used to. “It's a good feeling, right?”
“Hmm.” The feeling is cool, like a splash of seawater on her legs in the middle of a blazing July, soft on the soles of her feet from the fiery sand. Tepid, lukewarm maybe, those sorts of words; she doesn't know quite what to make of it, other than that she supposes she wouldn't mind feeling it again.
- - -
Emma sometimes walks into her office on Wednesday and Friday mornings and finds delicate little paper creations highlighting the edges of her office, a scattered spectrum of flightless birds. The first time, it's just one rose-pink crane perched on her planner, the fine golden lines crossing through the paper gleaming in the shaft of sunlight spilling across the desk.
The next time they flood the stationery corner of her desk in a fleet of mismatched colours, sunset orange and sky blue, heather grey and forest green, like a kindergartner’s paintings. Some are a little crooked, a bent wing or the awkward fuzz of a torn fold here and there - it makes her twitch a little, a forgotten friend of a reaction - but she doesn't move them. Well. Not until she realises that she's going to have to regain the intended use of her pen holder if she wants to get anything useful accomplished today, anyway.
She can't make sense of it, but the little intrusion is strangely cheering.
- - -
Come Michael Jackson week, Quinn watches Kurt pick at his cuticles and sitting on the piano stool instead of next to anyone, and observes Santana's demands of proportionate retribution - which is funny, because Santana's usual awareness of Blaine is restricted to ranting about his and Rachel's monopoly on solos, an issue Quinn ceased caring about long ago - and tries to ignore Rachel and Finn's stupid mysterious (and then no longer mysterious) drama, and listens to endless arguments recordings and that irritatingly foul Dalton boy with the ridiculous hair.
She sits on her Yale acceptance letter until Mr Schuester asks her how her application is going, and she can't help herself because she is happy, for once in her life, and nobody can screw it up for her this time.
She doesn't have Blaine's phone number, so she doesn't call. (She wouldn't know what to say.)
- - -
It's okay, though.
“I got into Yale,” Quinn mentions the Tuesday after Blaine returns to school, while the sunlight strobes through the windows and glows across the planes of the wooden furniture. Cranes in autumn shades litter Miss Pillsbury's desk, ruby and pumpkin and earth, feathers of phoenixes. (Quinn wonders if sometimes Blaine lets Kurt pick the palette. She doesn't ask, and he never tells.)
Their routine hasn't changed. The notion is somewhat comforting.
Blaine pauses in his fold, a smile lighting up his face. “Congratulations!”
“Thank you.”
“It's all right.” Blaine pauses, chews his lip thoughtfully before speaking. “... Are you still going to come?”
It's not something she can answer easily. Both sides come to her tongue, but neither of them are quite right. It makes Quinn's stomach sink, just a little. “I don't know.”
“You don't have to, you know,” Blaine says, looking down at his half-folded crane like it holds the answer of the mysteries of strange friendships created within school counsellor's offices in the bend of a wing. His nose wrinkles for a second, but he brushes it off when he lifts his head and smiles at her again. But it's a cool smile, like the pale rays of dawn light on the horizon. “No, it's really great. You're... smiling, you know?”
Quinn cocks her head, frowning a little. “No, I don't.”
“When you came in,” Blaine clarifies, glancing down at his crane again, finishing it in a few deft folds before he continues, as though the words in his mouth need to prepare themselves, little witnesses to the stand. “It's like -” he pauses again, twisting his mouth in his teeth before straightening up and gesturing to his face “- you were smiling with your eyes, like this! You don't, always.”
“Was I smizing?” Quinn laughs, feeling her cheeks pinken at the attention.
Blaine laughs in a strange half-cackling sound that makes her jump a little. “Smizing all over the place! Watch out, Quinn, it could be infectious,” he warns, pouting and worrying at his lower lip before letting his face change and - oh dear - he looks ridiculous, and Quinn laughs harder and Blaine grins in tandem and lets his eyebrows flatten out again. “I'm offended by your mocking laughter.”
Quinn raises an eyebrow. “Like you didn't know that you looked like an idiot,” she chides, placing a lavender crane on the desk for Miss Pillsbury to find later (tucked behind her tissue boxes, like a winged infiltrator). “Tyra would be ashamed.”
“So would Kurt, probably.”
“Oh, definitely.”
They don't bring it up again.
- - -
Quinn starts going to her fourth period Tuesday and Thursday class, most of the time.
(Blaine is glad, but sometimes he still feels a little afraid to do the same. So he hums to himself, and folds, and sometimes actually attends sessions with Miss Pillsbury where he sits and doesn't talk about anything.)
- - -
After - after - after that, Rachel comes to visit Quinn alone, after the initial ruckus has quietened down a little. It takes a couple of days, but when she arrives she finds that she's already been beaten to it, apparently.
The table by Quinn's bedside is blooming with the little folds of several paper cranes, black and red and white; one peering between the stems of the carnations in the vase, spilling cautiously over to the bedstead, two or three tacked across the top edge of the wooden panelling. They'll almost certainly be imminently removed and the perpetrator chided for being so ridiculous, but it's aesthetically appealing and on some level she empathises with the person. Rachel smiles a little, a half-waning one, the motion almost alien to her as she settles as best she can on the quite frankly suspect plastic hospital chair.
She twists her fingers around each other and chews her lip, the smile fading quickly as her mind thumps with all the thoughts she's had trailing behind her every step since the day of the wedding-that-wasn't. Finn had come with her the first couple of times, but he gets anxious in hospital settings and she'd assured him that she'd be quite fine coming to visit by herself. They haven't talked about the wedding yet.
Before Rachel can trap herself too deeply in the rehashing of everything she could have possibly done differently that might have changed the outcome, there are footsteps outside. Immediately she feels for the rape whistle in her shoulder bag, although if she were being logical about it if she was a murderer she would probably pick slightly more challenging targets than a car crash victim and an emotionally in turmoil high school student -
It's only Blaine though, in a muted polo shirt and jeans ensemble, pinching the wing of a scarlet origami crane and looking just as surprised as Rachel is. And Kurt doesn't seem to be with him, apparently, which is very curious, although Kurt hates hospitals almost as much as Finn does. Something to do with the antiseptic smell, not that that's the main issue here. Rachel doesn't often see Blaine without Kurt in tow, come to think of it. How odd.
“Oh, uh, Rachel,” Blaine greets with a widening of his eyes, which isn't much of a greeting at all. He appears to have the same hesitations about this Kurt-less encounter that she does, which is a little comforting. “Hey.”
“Good morning, Blaine,” Rachel says, with a brightness she doesn't feel. “So, I'm assuming -” she waves a hand at the bedside table “- they're all yours?”
Blaine shrugs and smiles at the floor. “It's a thing I do. When I want to have something to occupy myself with, I guess.”
“That's -” Rachel pauses, not quite sure how to continue, “it's a really lovely thing for you to do, Blaine. It's sweet, even though I don't know if the nurses will appreciate your getting in the way of their equipment with your newly-discovered artistic leanings. … The woman visiting the boy in the next room said that - that Quinn was very lucky to have such a dedicated boyfriend.”
Neither of them laugh. Blaine shrugs one shoulder and glances away, and Rachel wrings her hands and doesn't really know what she's supposed to do. (It's her default setting, now, it seems.)
“It's not that great, really,” he says quietly, pressing his hands into his jean pockets. “I'm just finishing what I started. But I know what I'm going to wish for now, I think.”
“Oh, when you reach a thousand?” Blaine shrugs, nods agreeably in his tight box-like posture; Rachel feels the need to press, and the words are out of her mouth before she can really think about what she's saying. “Can I ask what?”
Blaine raises his eyebrows, and taps the side of his nose.
Rachel supposes that it's a silly question.