Shiny, New Jazz Hearts
Title: Shiny, New Jazz Hearts [4 times Q sang her feelings and 1 time she spoke them]
Fandom: Glee
Pairing: Rachel Berry/Quinn Fabray
Word Count: 2,046
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: Preggers
Summary: Summertime and the livin' is easy
Disclaimer: I do not own. This did not happen. Also, un-betaed.
A/N: So I did that itune 5 song shuffle thing and was super stoked when all the songs happened to be wonderfully jazzy. Then I realized I was on my jazz playlist. Fail. Anyway, this has been sitting on my desktop so long I kind of forgot about it. Thus it was written way before the finale so it's sort of AUish.
Summertime - Ella Fitzgerald
Summertime and the livin’ is easy/Fish are jumpin’ and the cotton is high/Oh your Daddy’s rich and you ma is good looking/So hush little baby don’t you cry
The last day of the summer before freshman year Quinn sings to herself in the mirror. Not that she’d ever admit it. She’s a bundle of nerves and excitement; anticipation and dread.
She's Quinn Fabray.
Fabrays had a reputation to live up to. Fabrays rule.
High school means so much. (It will take a few years to realize truly how much and how much can go horribly awry.)
She’s equipped with everything she needs to rule.
Aryan good looks- thanks to her Ma; the intelligence needed to be the right sort of cunning, the vicious sort of cunning-thanks to her Daddy. She has the drive to reach the top- the desperation to reach the top really, the desperation to be accepted. Just enough abandonment issues to fuel a sadistic streak. That one’s thanks to the both of them.
Summer has a sugarcoated, bubblegum drop sort of comforting haze over it. Summer is a childhood blanket, carried with you everywhere you go. Quinn is ready to discard the useless garment.
She walks into school the next day with her held high and a fierce determination emanating from her very being.
She’s wearing shiny, new hairclips and she looks stunning.
Quinn Fabray has the legendary (and batshit insane) Sue Sylvester eating out of her hand by the end of the week.
She’s on the top of the pyramid by the end of the month.
Gloomy Sunday - Billie Holiday
Sunday is gloomy/My hours are slumberless/Dearest the shadows/I live with are numberless
The first Sunday after her parents kick her out of the house Quinn goes to church and sits in the front row. She suffers highly irritated glares from both of her parents and miserable, apologetic glances from her sister for half an hour before she cracks. She goes up for Eucharist with unshed tears threatening to spill over but leaves before service is over.
The second Sunday after her parents kick her out of the house Quinn goes to church and stands in the back the entire time. She doesn’t go up for Eucharist. Her parents don’t even see her.
The third Sunday after her parents kick her out of the house Quinn locks herself in Finn’s room and puts Billie Holiday on repeat. She blocks out Finn’s frustrated beating on the door and mumbles along to the song. She thinks about how the new life inside of her has her thinking about dying and cries.
The seventh Sunday after her parents kick her out of the house and the first Sunday after Finn kicks her out of his Quinn drives to the edge of town and rips the crucifix that has been burning heavily into the skin of her chest since she found out about the baby off. She hurls the cross out onto the open road in a surge of unfettered, almost primal anger. She walks back to the car without a single glance back and does not cry the entire way back to town.
It is months later and a Saturday when Rachel Berry presses a shiny, new cross on a shiny, new chain into the palm of Quinn’s hand hesitantly but painfully earnest.
It is the first time in years that Quinn feels fully and unashamedly loved by her lord and savior.
I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire - The Ink Spots
I don't want to set the world on fire/ I just want to start a flame in your heart
The day that it happens Quinn falls into bed belting out a tune that is really meant to be crooned soft and close. It doesn’t matter though.
It happens in the choir room.
Quinn kisses her because she's humming a song. There are many old, smooth jazz songs that are lining the slow-cracked, jagged edges of Quinn's heart. Rachel is pitch perfect and as far as they go, it's a rather obscure one.
So Quinn kisses Rachel.
She can feel her heart fluttering about wildly. She imagines it bouncing around her ribcage like a pinball, sounding out against the each crevice of bone with a telltale zip.
It's the shiny newness of it all that gets her.
She falls half in love on the spot.
Smile - Nat King Cole
Smile though your heart is aching/ Smile even when it's breaking/ When there are clouds in the sky, you'll get by
Seven years old and it was time for a change she had decided with a firm nod. Well okay, not so much she herself had decided as Momma had decided but whatever, it really didn’t make a difference to her. Giggling as her feet carried up the stairs, she took them two at a time. She was seven now and responsible so Momma had her cleaning out her own room, the little stuff at least.
They were gonna take all the old out of it and put in all the shiny and new.
As soon as Daddy got home he was gonna take her bed and stuff out and then they were gonna paint her walls all pretty like - just the two of them. She already had her painter’s overalls on and her glossy blonde hair in pigtails. She was all set.
Humming softly while she worked, she dug out her old music box she’d had ever since she could remember. Like anyone little girl aspiring to be a pretty ballerina she found herself twirling gracefully before knocking the softly tinkling box down -not so gracefully. She bends to pick up the fallen box and runs her fingertips over the familiar silver inlay. Her name. Turning it over in her hands delicately she notices not so familiar silver script running along the bottom edge.
Always loving you, Quinn Fabray.
“Quinn Fuh-bray,” she tests out the name on her tongue before bounding back down the stairs, music box in hand. She finds her mom in the kitchen. “Momma, who’s Quinn Fuh-bray?”
Her momma takes her hand and pulls her along until she hops onto a stool facing the kitchen counter. “Drizzy Lizzy,” she starts out affectionately while ruffling her daughter’s hair, “Come on, the cookies are freshly made.”
Lizzy munches on a cookie quietly before gently probing again, “Momma?”
“Shh, just a minute,” she disappears into another room briefly. Lizzy watches the end of her skirt swish around the corner before she hears light rummaging in her Daddy’s office.
“This is for you baby. We’ve been waiting a long time for you to ask.”
A locket dangles enticingly from her fingers. Her eyes light up in the way that little girls’ eyes only can and she opens it hastily. Inside a girl with pretty blonde hair and bright hazel eyes is staring down at a bundle of joy she just knows is herself.
The smaller version of her has a hand wrapped around one of the young woman’s fingers. The woman is gazing down at her with a look of absolute wonder and adoration.
“Baby girl, you know Daddy and I love you like Uncle Ronnie likes cake,” she pauses as Lizzy giggles expectedly and continues, “but we weren’t the first ones to love you. You’ve been loved from the day you were born. She loves you and we always wanted you to know it.”
Stella Johnson remembers the day she brought her baby home, all pink-faced and freshly scrubbed. She remembers watching as surreptitiously as possible as a beautifully brokenhearted young girl crooned soft jazz at little Lizzy and snapping a picture of the enamored girl. She remembers promising to let her shiny, new baby girl to know all the love in her world and buying both the locket and music box with the matching tune the very next day.
“She’s really pretty.”
Lizzy draws the intricate silver locket over her neck and fumbles with the clasp and smiles sweetly.
“But so are you.”
And later, when she presses her thumb into the barely dried walls of her room with horribly clashing paint in two dots and drags her thumb first down then up, she doesn’t even get in trouble.
At Last - Etta James
At last, my love has come along/My lonely days are over/And life is like a song
Quinn doesn’t get nervous. Well, not right away anyway. Really she gets through her entire day perfectly fine, goes to work and even manages to put the annoyingly fresh-faced yuppie upstart at her office in his place with a few well-placed barbs.
She stops by the florist on the way home and cooks dinner with no mishaps. The dining table is set perfectly by six o’ clock with not a single teaspoon out of place.
It's as she starts doing a few vocal warm ups that she begins to feel the first pricklings of butterflies. She was planning on serenading Rachel, the girl would eat it up she knows, it was how she originally how she got into her pants after all. (Fever, 'til you sizzle, what a lovely way to burn.) Quinn had hardly uttered the last word before Rachel was on her like Lauren Zizes on pre-packaged, chocolate covered anything. You can't live with someone for seven years and not pick up on quirks like a penchance for the over the top and dramatic- not that that particular one wasn't glaringly obvious to begin with.
But Quinn hasn't kept up with her singing apart from a drunken karaoke here and there, usually when Santana's in town.
Oh my God, what if her voice cracks? What is she forgets the words? What if it's awful and Rachel decides she simply cannot spend the rest of her life with someone so vocally inferior to herself? Fuck, she drank a latte today, that has milk in it right? That's bad for her voice isn't it?
By 6:30 the butterflies have turned into a heard of buffaloes stampeding through her stomach and there are lyrics scrawled across her palm and halfway up her arm.
When the door starts to creak open at 6:42 she panics and drops to one knee. She feels like a complete jackass because Rachel's just standing there in the doorway, dumbstruck; and the words to the song are all stuck in the back of her throat like a 12 car pileup.
Quinn fumbles for the ring in her coat pocket and flounders ineffectually for a moment before remembering that someone, somewhere, told her once that honesty is the best policy, Ms. Pillsbury probably, she thinks, and if she's going to pull something out of her ass anytime soon she might as well try that.
"Rachel," she begins, "you drive me crazy. Wait. I mean. I'm crazy about you. You drive me crazy and I'm crazy about you."
A furrowed brow and a deep breath.
"I love you. I love when you sing show tunes at the ass crack of dawn and I love how you only call me Q when you're angry or patronizing me. I love how you look when I visit you before a show, all standing on the empty stage and basking. I love how you laid siege to our peephole until you figured out it was crazy Mrs. Laubenstein from down the hall who'd been stealing our paper. I love how you bought thirty boxes of thin mints from her daughter a week later anyway. I've been in love with you since I was seventeen years old and I want to be in love with you until I'm seventy seven years old, older even. I'm pretty sure you might me certifiably insane but I'd be insane to not want to spend the rest of my life with you."
Rachel looks bewildered and slightly amused, especially when she links her fingers through Quinn's left hand and sees the words scribbled across pale skin and Quinn's shaking, literally shaking. She tugs Quinn up lightly and slides the ring, simple but beautiful, shiny and new, out of the box and onto her finger.
"You're being silly," she says, but her eyes are glistening and her smile is watery.
"Dinner smells wonderful, babe. I would love to eat with you."