Ladies And Gentlemen, Listen Up Please (I Don’t Want To Be Your Hero) (13/29)
Title: Ladies And Gentlemen, Listen Up Please (I Don’t Want To Be Your Hero) (13/29)
Pairing: Rachel Berry/Quinn Fabray, Santana Lopez/Brittany Pierce, minor Artie Abrams/Tina Cohen-Chang
Rating: R
Disclaimer: Nothing owned, no profit gained.
Spoilers: AU
Summary: “Sometimes, people are born a little different.”
She can feel them. They are roaming inside the intimate boundaries of her skull, traversing a land untouched by mankind. They are careful, but not careful enough; no one could ever be careful enough for a thing like this.
She can feel them, and her whole consciousness wishes to rebel.
She screams in silence as they probe, treading cautiously on hallowed ground, drifting through her innermost self. She roars and rages against them, forgetting for a moment, a year, a lifetime that she even recognizes their faces. They are unimportant. Their selves are nothing. All that counts for anything at all is what they are doing to her.
She pounds her fists against iron-cast bars, shouting and keening until the blood runs dry in her throat, and still they crash on. The smaller one is trying to keep her calm; she can feel the reins being pulled taut, the semblance of control being wrested gently and slowly from her grasp. Her body calms, but her mind shrieks more loudly than ever.
The larger one is doing the real dirty work, damaging her beyond repair. As she watches, helpless, crying out into nothing, he takes something from himself and deposits it where it has never belonged. He gasps as it-shining, silver, sterling in worth and in frailty-slithers from him and sinks deep into the furthest corner of her. He gasps, and weeps, and she bangs her whole body against the prison.
This hurts. They don’t seem to realize it-the smaller one thinks, clearly, she is holding back such agony, but it hurts in a way nothing ever has before. Even when her mind was not her own a week or a century ago, when the little one was working her magic for the first time, it did not feel like this. Then, it was almost warm, peaceful. Now, it is killing her.
She screams, and screams, and the images he has given her-forced upon her-rise up to consume everything. She sees without fathoming, blind-eyed and sobbing with fury. Her arms quiver with every shake she gives the bars.
Get out, she bids them desperately, searching for the words that will make this end. Get out, get out of me, leave this place now.
And suddenly, without a moment of preparation or warning, they go.
When she comes to, Quinn is on all fours, wheezing around the urge to vomit. It feels like that first night, when she suffered her strange panic attack; her legs are nothing more than jelly, her arms knocking against her body as they struggle to hold her up. Someone is making concerned noises, but she is having trouble focusing enough to establish who it is.
“Quinn?” someone asks nervously-a different someone, she thinks, but the whole world is bleeding together into one massive fog. She can’t make sense of anything outside her own body. And her own body hates her.
“Quinn, can you hear me?”
She can. She wishes her lips and tongue would cooperate with her desire to form sound, but she can still feel those bars around her, locking her in tight. She focuses as best she can on breathing. And on the images.
They pound through her brain relentlessly, too fast to make rational sense of. She can neither rid herself of them, nor slow them down enough to figure out what she’s seeing to begin with; they’re coming in bullet-rapid fragments, sporadic snapshots with almost no detail. She thinks she sees the diner. She thinks she sees herself. She thinks she hears screaming.
That last part is less a thought than a certainty.
“Oh shit,” a voice gasps. “Oh shit, look at her eyes. What’s wrong with her eyes?”
“Step back,” another instructs firmly. A pair of hands clamp down on Quinn’s shoulders. She manages to raise her head just enough to stare coldly into a pair of deep brown eyes.
“Quinn. I need you to listen to me, okay? I need you to remember my name.”
She can’t. She can’t do anything. Something is welling inside her, that same something from a week ago, pulsing and pulling at every thread of her identity. The images keep coming, smashing like bodies against sharp rocks, crushed against the inner walls of her skull. The screaming won’t stop, no matter how desperately she wishes it would. She can’t breathe, let alone follow instructions.
“Quinn. Listen to me. Remember. I need you to do this, okay? Right now. What is my name?”
She doesn’t know. How stupid is it, that this person can only think of their own self? Can’t they see she is dying, that her heart is thundering agonizingly hard against her breastbone, that her lungs aren’t working anymore? She’s going to be sick. She’s going to be gone. What could a name do to prevent that?
“Quinn. Now. Right now, tell me. What is my name?”
It comes to her. It collides with the rampaging stream, brutal and heavy, and she clenches her teeth around to prevent it from escaping again. The hands on her shoulders squeeze tight.
“What is my name?”
“Rachel,” she pants, half-shrieking the word. “Rachel.”
Instantly, the world comes rushing back, too bright and too vivid. She closes her eyes and all but collapses into Rachel’s arms, dizzier than she has ever been in her life. Her cheeks damp, sweat and tears mingling unapologetically, she buries her face in Rachel’s worn t-shirt.
“What…the fuck…”
“Shh.” Hands smooth everywhere, over her hair, down her back, leaving tiny tingles in their wake. “Breathe, Quinn. Focus on breathing.”
She does what she’s told, knuckles white around fabric, trying not to think about the situation. Lying in a fetal curl on the floor, with eleven pairs of eyes drinking her in, she exerts every inch of control not to weep like a child.
When she’s able to do so without bursting into tears, she forces herself to sit up and look Rachel in the eye. The brunette is obviously troubled and just as obviously trying not to show it; Quinn inhales shakily.
“What,” she says haltingly, her voice trembling violently, “did you do to me?”
Rachel’s gaze does not waver, although she does retract her hands. A chill sweeps mercilessly through Quinn’s bones at the loss.
“It was the only way,” Rachel says softly. “The only way to be truly certain that you were the one. Are the one. And you are.”
“That doesn’t answer my question.” Quinn can hear the rage boiling under her own words. From the way Rachel flinches, she figures it isn’t lost on the brunette either.
The response, surprisingly, comes from the other side of the room. Kurt, bundled between Puck and Finn on the couch, is sitting with his head in his hands. When he lifts his eyes to her, she is shocked to find his face dead-pale, his gaze blank and empty.
“I had to,” he rasps hoarsely, “show you what I saw. I couldn’t just tell-it doesn’t work that way. Not with a prophecy that big, not with something so crucial. I had to show you, but I couldn’t do it alone, and I couldn’t warn you first. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, but if you had known, your defenses would have been impenetrable. We couldn’t risk…”
“Couldn’t risk warning me that dumping your little vision in my head would tear my fucking mind apart?” Quinn interrupts furiously. He shakes his head hard, dislodging a few locks of meticulously-coiffed hair; it’s almost funny, how Finn reaches up and tries to repair the damage.
“It didn’t tear anything,” Kurt insists roughly. “It didn’t...if I’d tried to do it alone, maybe it would have, but with Rachel there…Rachel kept you in one piece. She held you together. And she gave me time to be certain, and now…”
“Now you are,” Quinn finishes for him. Her stomach churns. “Why didn’t you do all that before, the first night I was here?”
“It’s not that easy to probe into someone’s mind, Quinn,” Rachel informs her gently. “To poke around and exercise a little of my own will doesn’t take much, but to do something like this-a transfer of such hazardous proportions, especially including a third party…trust is key. I had to wait until you were ready, until you wanted to know badly enough to ask. Until you trusted that we weren’t going to harm you.”
“But you did,” Quinn growls. “You harmed me pretty fucking badly, I’d say. Do you have any idea how that felt?”
“Unimaginable torment,” Rachel replies, eyes dark with what Quinn needs a moment to recognize as shame. “I’m aware, Quinn, and you have no idea how sorry I am. But it had to be done. Sometimes, sacrifice is unavoidable.”
The blonde glares in return, unable to put a name to the icy sensation coiled against her heart. She thinks it feels a little like betrayal.
“Uh, guys?” Santana raises the hand not wrapped protectively around Brittany’s waist. “Can we take a moment out of this little lovefest to talk about Blondie’s Satan-eyes? ‘Cuz I’ll be honest: that’s the part raking nails down my spine.”
“And not in a good way,” Brittany adds, brushing her cheek against the other woman’s head. Her face is nearly as pale as Kurt’s, her eyes far away. She looks worse than she did in the aftermath of Kurt’s last vision, which makes zero sense to Quinn; why should something so distanced from the other blonde strike her so forcefully?
And then, a more important question:
“What Satan eyes?” she blurts. Even in his chair, Artie manages to shuffle uncomfortably; Tina grips his hand and looks away. Mercedes, now kneeling before Kurt with a warm washcloth, seems to shiver.
“You looked bad, girl,” she mumbles, dabbing the young man’s cheeks and avoiding Quinn’s worried gaze. “Black as hell, devil eyes. You looked like death.”
“With a capital fuckin’ D,” Puck agrees, brow knitted. Quinn rounds back on Rachel.
“What the hell are they talking about?”
The brunette presses her hands into her thighs, knees digging into the floorboards. Quinn raises an eyebrow in warning.
“Rachel, do not lie to me tonight. What. Happened.”
“It’s the power,” Kurt grinds out, pushing aside Finn and Mercedes and stumbling to his feet.
“My power?” Quinn asks uneasily, still discomfited by the idea of having an ability in the first place. He barks out a cold laugh.
“It isn’t yours. It’s never yours. One thing about these abilities no one likes to mention: we don’t have them. They have us.”
“Kurt,” Rachel warns, eyes narrowing. He shakes his head, palming one temple viciously.
“This isn’t the time for your undying optimism, Berry. She needs to know the score. More than anyone.” He pauses, sucking in a breath and forcing it back out again, eyes boring into Quinn’s. “Powers are tricky things, you know. They can help us do great things. And awful ones. But no matter how they are used, they are not tools. They are entities in their own right. Not sentient, and not able to exist without someone to manipulate them, but real in a way most don’t bother acknowledging.” He fires another glare at Rachel. “They are fully capable of wresting control from the hands of their hosts.”
“Which means what for me?” Quinn demands, uninterested in another pissing match between the two.
Kurt leans his weight against a table, shuddering with the effort. “The thing residing within you is more powerful than anything we’ve come across before. More powerful than Rachel’s, even, and-with the right honing-more powerful than Rayne’s. It is big, and like most big things, it is deadly. Unflinchingly so. If you do not learn to control it quickly, it has the potential to destroy without preamble or question. You. Me. Rayne. Everything.”
He takes a step and nearly collapses; Mercedes tucks an arm around his middle, holding him steady. Doing her best to keep calm, Quinn clenches her fingers into fists.
“The prophecy,” he grinds out, “speaks of one called The Silencer. Someone with power so great and so terrible that they might rend the very fabric of humanity itself if left unchecked. That someone, Quinn Fabray, happens to be you, and I’ll be damned if I see the world come down thanks to a little lack in preparation. We are going to train you, and we are going to keep you away from Rayne, and you are not going to destroy the world. Sound good to you?”
She gapes at him, her head still pounding, blood roaring vibrantly through her body with all the predictability of a toy train set. “What-“
“You don’t have to worry,” Rachel cuts in, climbing to her feet. “Kurt is correct. We will guide you, teach you how to handle it. I promise you, it’s going to be fine.”
“But what is it?” Quinn cries, jerkily standing and flinging her hands heavenward. “Rachel, what am I? ‘The Silencer’? What the fuck does that mean? You can’t just tell me I’m all kinds of powerful and then just…wave it off. He said I could destroy the world. How?”
“We don’t know,” Kurt says, too calmly. Quinn suddenly wants to hit him. She turns to Rachel, who maddeningly shrugs her shoulders.
“He’s right about that too. Prophecies aren’t historically appreciated for their attention to detail.”
“Well that’s just fucking swell,” Santana snaps, sneaking the words right out of Quinn’s mouth. “We’ve got the goddamn nightmare of the century in our laps, and all we know about her is that she could destroy each and every one of us. Just fucking awesome.”
“And that her eyes get really scary when you play in her head,” Brittany adds. The color is slowly draining back into her cheeks, her eyes growing steadily brighter. Santana gives her arm an affectionate stroke.
“Thanks a fuckton, braintrusts.”
Rachel’s eyes flash; Quinn is sure she’s seeing the girl’s patience finally snapping with a visible shudder. It’s enough to jerk her out of her own turmoil for a moment.
“Santana,” she hisses, nervous beyond reason. “Don’t.”
Because even if she is the most dangerous thing any of them have ever come across, Rachel is always going to be scarier.
The Latina narrows her eyes. “I wouldn’t tell me what to do, Fabray. You’re a time bomb, not a warlord. Keep that in mind.”
“I’ll file it away,” she mutters. Something akin to compassion slinks for just a moment into dark eyes.
“Good. Well, if we’ve got no other apocalyptic omens to impart, I think it’s time Brittany and I headed to bed.” Tilting her chin up regally, she catches Rachel’s eye. “Remember to knock this time, Berry.”
Rachel nods silently, moving to stare out the window. Slowly, two by two, the others shuffle off towards their own beds. Quinn watches Mercedes support Kurt down the hall, feeling annoyingly guilty all the while. She doesn’t know why; it’s his own fault, and it isn’t as though he tramped into the situation blindly (not, she thinks with renewed anger, the way she was made to). All the same, his weakness stems directly from contact with her, and that seems unforgivable.
When they are alone in the living room-save, of course, for Puck and Finn, neither of whom look interested in starting a conversation after such a brutal display-Quinn steps as closely to Rachel’s back as she dares. She feels like a complete mess, so angry and so confused-and so afraid-but Rachel looks just as bad. The woman’s face is stony, her posture ramrod straight, her fingers curled against her sides. She looks regretful, and guilty, and just as desperately lonely as Quinn feels.
Without meaning to, she lays a hand upon Rachel’s shoulder. The woman does not jump, or even glance backwards. If anything, her spine goes all the more taut.
“I’m sorry,” she says, almost too softly for Quinn to hear. “I know this wasn’t what you were expecting.”
“No,” Quinn agrees, jaw tight. “Not exactly.”
“You have to understand, it was the only way. We had to be sure.” Rachel blows out a breath. “Though I don’t imagine hearing that a hundred times will help.”
“No,” Quinn says again, closing her eyes. Rachel’s shirt is soft beneath her palm, skin radiating heat through the cotton. It’s a far easier thing to focus upon than thinking of how she must have looked, rocked with pain, eyes coal-black as her lips cracked open in a silent scream. It’s a far easier thing to focus upon than wondering what sort of destruction she is truly capable of.
She has a hundred questions, but she knows Rachel doesn’t have the answers. Rachel, for all her confidence and pizazz, doesn’t seem to have much of anything tonight. Perhaps her trip into Quinn’s mind has worn her out as thoroughly as it did Kurt-or, just as likely, perhaps this act she keeps up, this role of fearless leader, is growing too heavy for her slim shoulders. Quinn isn’t sure telling the difference would matter. It certainly wouldn’t make her any less terrified, nor Rachel any less alone.
“Am I going to kill people?” she asks without intending to, feeling light-headed at the very thought. The silence trembles around them, enveloping their twosome in a suffocating blanket. “Rachel. Do you think-is that going to be me?”
The brunette says nothing, but Quinn can hear her clear as day.
Yes.
Closing her eyes, clutching to Rachel despite the other woman’s detachment, Quinn’s entire body shakes.
Rachel was right; this was not her expectation.
Pairing: Rachel Berry/Quinn Fabray, Santana Lopez/Brittany Pierce, minor Artie Abrams/Tina Cohen-Chang
Rating: R
Disclaimer: Nothing owned, no profit gained.
Spoilers: AU
Summary: “Sometimes, people are born a little different.”
She can feel them. They are roaming inside the intimate boundaries of her skull, traversing a land untouched by mankind. They are careful, but not careful enough; no one could ever be careful enough for a thing like this.
She can feel them, and her whole consciousness wishes to rebel.
She screams in silence as they probe, treading cautiously on hallowed ground, drifting through her innermost self. She roars and rages against them, forgetting for a moment, a year, a lifetime that she even recognizes their faces. They are unimportant. Their selves are nothing. All that counts for anything at all is what they are doing to her.
She pounds her fists against iron-cast bars, shouting and keening until the blood runs dry in her throat, and still they crash on. The smaller one is trying to keep her calm; she can feel the reins being pulled taut, the semblance of control being wrested gently and slowly from her grasp. Her body calms, but her mind shrieks more loudly than ever.
The larger one is doing the real dirty work, damaging her beyond repair. As she watches, helpless, crying out into nothing, he takes something from himself and deposits it where it has never belonged. He gasps as it-shining, silver, sterling in worth and in frailty-slithers from him and sinks deep into the furthest corner of her. He gasps, and weeps, and she bangs her whole body against the prison.
This hurts. They don’t seem to realize it-the smaller one thinks, clearly, she is holding back such agony, but it hurts in a way nothing ever has before. Even when her mind was not her own a week or a century ago, when the little one was working her magic for the first time, it did not feel like this. Then, it was almost warm, peaceful. Now, it is killing her.
She screams, and screams, and the images he has given her-forced upon her-rise up to consume everything. She sees without fathoming, blind-eyed and sobbing with fury. Her arms quiver with every shake she gives the bars.
Get out, she bids them desperately, searching for the words that will make this end. Get out, get out of me, leave this place now.
And suddenly, without a moment of preparation or warning, they go.
When she comes to, Quinn is on all fours, wheezing around the urge to vomit. It feels like that first night, when she suffered her strange panic attack; her legs are nothing more than jelly, her arms knocking against her body as they struggle to hold her up. Someone is making concerned noises, but she is having trouble focusing enough to establish who it is.
“Quinn?” someone asks nervously-a different someone, she thinks, but the whole world is bleeding together into one massive fog. She can’t make sense of anything outside her own body. And her own body hates her.
“Quinn, can you hear me?”
She can. She wishes her lips and tongue would cooperate with her desire to form sound, but she can still feel those bars around her, locking her in tight. She focuses as best she can on breathing. And on the images.
They pound through her brain relentlessly, too fast to make rational sense of. She can neither rid herself of them, nor slow them down enough to figure out what she’s seeing to begin with; they’re coming in bullet-rapid fragments, sporadic snapshots with almost no detail. She thinks she sees the diner. She thinks she sees herself. She thinks she hears screaming.
That last part is less a thought than a certainty.
“Oh shit,” a voice gasps. “Oh shit, look at her eyes. What’s wrong with her eyes?”
“Step back,” another instructs firmly. A pair of hands clamp down on Quinn’s shoulders. She manages to raise her head just enough to stare coldly into a pair of deep brown eyes.
“Quinn. I need you to listen to me, okay? I need you to remember my name.”
She can’t. She can’t do anything. Something is welling inside her, that same something from a week ago, pulsing and pulling at every thread of her identity. The images keep coming, smashing like bodies against sharp rocks, crushed against the inner walls of her skull. The screaming won’t stop, no matter how desperately she wishes it would. She can’t breathe, let alone follow instructions.
“Quinn. Listen to me. Remember. I need you to do this, okay? Right now. What is my name?”
She doesn’t know. How stupid is it, that this person can only think of their own self? Can’t they see she is dying, that her heart is thundering agonizingly hard against her breastbone, that her lungs aren’t working anymore? She’s going to be sick. She’s going to be gone. What could a name do to prevent that?
“Quinn. Now. Right now, tell me. What is my name?”
It comes to her. It collides with the rampaging stream, brutal and heavy, and she clenches her teeth around to prevent it from escaping again. The hands on her shoulders squeeze tight.
“What is my name?”
“Rachel,” she pants, half-shrieking the word. “Rachel.”
Instantly, the world comes rushing back, too bright and too vivid. She closes her eyes and all but collapses into Rachel’s arms, dizzier than she has ever been in her life. Her cheeks damp, sweat and tears mingling unapologetically, she buries her face in Rachel’s worn t-shirt.
“What…the fuck…”
“Shh.” Hands smooth everywhere, over her hair, down her back, leaving tiny tingles in their wake. “Breathe, Quinn. Focus on breathing.”
She does what she’s told, knuckles white around fabric, trying not to think about the situation. Lying in a fetal curl on the floor, with eleven pairs of eyes drinking her in, she exerts every inch of control not to weep like a child.
When she’s able to do so without bursting into tears, she forces herself to sit up and look Rachel in the eye. The brunette is obviously troubled and just as obviously trying not to show it; Quinn inhales shakily.
“What,” she says haltingly, her voice trembling violently, “did you do to me?”
Rachel’s gaze does not waver, although she does retract her hands. A chill sweeps mercilessly through Quinn’s bones at the loss.
“It was the only way,” Rachel says softly. “The only way to be truly certain that you were the one. Are the one. And you are.”
“That doesn’t answer my question.” Quinn can hear the rage boiling under her own words. From the way Rachel flinches, she figures it isn’t lost on the brunette either.
The response, surprisingly, comes from the other side of the room. Kurt, bundled between Puck and Finn on the couch, is sitting with his head in his hands. When he lifts his eyes to her, she is shocked to find his face dead-pale, his gaze blank and empty.
“I had to,” he rasps hoarsely, “show you what I saw. I couldn’t just tell-it doesn’t work that way. Not with a prophecy that big, not with something so crucial. I had to show you, but I couldn’t do it alone, and I couldn’t warn you first. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, but if you had known, your defenses would have been impenetrable. We couldn’t risk…”
“Couldn’t risk warning me that dumping your little vision in my head would tear my fucking mind apart?” Quinn interrupts furiously. He shakes his head hard, dislodging a few locks of meticulously-coiffed hair; it’s almost funny, how Finn reaches up and tries to repair the damage.
“It didn’t tear anything,” Kurt insists roughly. “It didn’t...if I’d tried to do it alone, maybe it would have, but with Rachel there…Rachel kept you in one piece. She held you together. And she gave me time to be certain, and now…”
“Now you are,” Quinn finishes for him. Her stomach churns. “Why didn’t you do all that before, the first night I was here?”
“It’s not that easy to probe into someone’s mind, Quinn,” Rachel informs her gently. “To poke around and exercise a little of my own will doesn’t take much, but to do something like this-a transfer of such hazardous proportions, especially including a third party…trust is key. I had to wait until you were ready, until you wanted to know badly enough to ask. Until you trusted that we weren’t going to harm you.”
“But you did,” Quinn growls. “You harmed me pretty fucking badly, I’d say. Do you have any idea how that felt?”
“Unimaginable torment,” Rachel replies, eyes dark with what Quinn needs a moment to recognize as shame. “I’m aware, Quinn, and you have no idea how sorry I am. But it had to be done. Sometimes, sacrifice is unavoidable.”
The blonde glares in return, unable to put a name to the icy sensation coiled against her heart. She thinks it feels a little like betrayal.
“Uh, guys?” Santana raises the hand not wrapped protectively around Brittany’s waist. “Can we take a moment out of this little lovefest to talk about Blondie’s Satan-eyes? ‘Cuz I’ll be honest: that’s the part raking nails down my spine.”
“And not in a good way,” Brittany adds, brushing her cheek against the other woman’s head. Her face is nearly as pale as Kurt’s, her eyes far away. She looks worse than she did in the aftermath of Kurt’s last vision, which makes zero sense to Quinn; why should something so distanced from the other blonde strike her so forcefully?
And then, a more important question:
“What Satan eyes?” she blurts. Even in his chair, Artie manages to shuffle uncomfortably; Tina grips his hand and looks away. Mercedes, now kneeling before Kurt with a warm washcloth, seems to shiver.
“You looked bad, girl,” she mumbles, dabbing the young man’s cheeks and avoiding Quinn’s worried gaze. “Black as hell, devil eyes. You looked like death.”
“With a capital fuckin’ D,” Puck agrees, brow knitted. Quinn rounds back on Rachel.
“What the hell are they talking about?”
The brunette presses her hands into her thighs, knees digging into the floorboards. Quinn raises an eyebrow in warning.
“Rachel, do not lie to me tonight. What. Happened.”
“It’s the power,” Kurt grinds out, pushing aside Finn and Mercedes and stumbling to his feet.
“My power?” Quinn asks uneasily, still discomfited by the idea of having an ability in the first place. He barks out a cold laugh.
“It isn’t yours. It’s never yours. One thing about these abilities no one likes to mention: we don’t have them. They have us.”
“Kurt,” Rachel warns, eyes narrowing. He shakes his head, palming one temple viciously.
“This isn’t the time for your undying optimism, Berry. She needs to know the score. More than anyone.” He pauses, sucking in a breath and forcing it back out again, eyes boring into Quinn’s. “Powers are tricky things, you know. They can help us do great things. And awful ones. But no matter how they are used, they are not tools. They are entities in their own right. Not sentient, and not able to exist without someone to manipulate them, but real in a way most don’t bother acknowledging.” He fires another glare at Rachel. “They are fully capable of wresting control from the hands of their hosts.”
“Which means what for me?” Quinn demands, uninterested in another pissing match between the two.
Kurt leans his weight against a table, shuddering with the effort. “The thing residing within you is more powerful than anything we’ve come across before. More powerful than Rachel’s, even, and-with the right honing-more powerful than Rayne’s. It is big, and like most big things, it is deadly. Unflinchingly so. If you do not learn to control it quickly, it has the potential to destroy without preamble or question. You. Me. Rayne. Everything.”
He takes a step and nearly collapses; Mercedes tucks an arm around his middle, holding him steady. Doing her best to keep calm, Quinn clenches her fingers into fists.
“The prophecy,” he grinds out, “speaks of one called The Silencer. Someone with power so great and so terrible that they might rend the very fabric of humanity itself if left unchecked. That someone, Quinn Fabray, happens to be you, and I’ll be damned if I see the world come down thanks to a little lack in preparation. We are going to train you, and we are going to keep you away from Rayne, and you are not going to destroy the world. Sound good to you?”
She gapes at him, her head still pounding, blood roaring vibrantly through her body with all the predictability of a toy train set. “What-“
“You don’t have to worry,” Rachel cuts in, climbing to her feet. “Kurt is correct. We will guide you, teach you how to handle it. I promise you, it’s going to be fine.”
“But what is it?” Quinn cries, jerkily standing and flinging her hands heavenward. “Rachel, what am I? ‘The Silencer’? What the fuck does that mean? You can’t just tell me I’m all kinds of powerful and then just…wave it off. He said I could destroy the world. How?”
“We don’t know,” Kurt says, too calmly. Quinn suddenly wants to hit him. She turns to Rachel, who maddeningly shrugs her shoulders.
“He’s right about that too. Prophecies aren’t historically appreciated for their attention to detail.”
“Well that’s just fucking swell,” Santana snaps, sneaking the words right out of Quinn’s mouth. “We’ve got the goddamn nightmare of the century in our laps, and all we know about her is that she could destroy each and every one of us. Just fucking awesome.”
“And that her eyes get really scary when you play in her head,” Brittany adds. The color is slowly draining back into her cheeks, her eyes growing steadily brighter. Santana gives her arm an affectionate stroke.
“Thanks a fuckton, braintrusts.”
Rachel’s eyes flash; Quinn is sure she’s seeing the girl’s patience finally snapping with a visible shudder. It’s enough to jerk her out of her own turmoil for a moment.
“Santana,” she hisses, nervous beyond reason. “Don’t.”
Because even if she is the most dangerous thing any of them have ever come across, Rachel is always going to be scarier.
The Latina narrows her eyes. “I wouldn’t tell me what to do, Fabray. You’re a time bomb, not a warlord. Keep that in mind.”
“I’ll file it away,” she mutters. Something akin to compassion slinks for just a moment into dark eyes.
“Good. Well, if we’ve got no other apocalyptic omens to impart, I think it’s time Brittany and I headed to bed.” Tilting her chin up regally, she catches Rachel’s eye. “Remember to knock this time, Berry.”
Rachel nods silently, moving to stare out the window. Slowly, two by two, the others shuffle off towards their own beds. Quinn watches Mercedes support Kurt down the hall, feeling annoyingly guilty all the while. She doesn’t know why; it’s his own fault, and it isn’t as though he tramped into the situation blindly (not, she thinks with renewed anger, the way she was made to). All the same, his weakness stems directly from contact with her, and that seems unforgivable.
When they are alone in the living room-save, of course, for Puck and Finn, neither of whom look interested in starting a conversation after such a brutal display-Quinn steps as closely to Rachel’s back as she dares. She feels like a complete mess, so angry and so confused-and so afraid-but Rachel looks just as bad. The woman’s face is stony, her posture ramrod straight, her fingers curled against her sides. She looks regretful, and guilty, and just as desperately lonely as Quinn feels.
Without meaning to, she lays a hand upon Rachel’s shoulder. The woman does not jump, or even glance backwards. If anything, her spine goes all the more taut.
“I’m sorry,” she says, almost too softly for Quinn to hear. “I know this wasn’t what you were expecting.”
“No,” Quinn agrees, jaw tight. “Not exactly.”
“You have to understand, it was the only way. We had to be sure.” Rachel blows out a breath. “Though I don’t imagine hearing that a hundred times will help.”
“No,” Quinn says again, closing her eyes. Rachel’s shirt is soft beneath her palm, skin radiating heat through the cotton. It’s a far easier thing to focus upon than thinking of how she must have looked, rocked with pain, eyes coal-black as her lips cracked open in a silent scream. It’s a far easier thing to focus upon than wondering what sort of destruction she is truly capable of.
She has a hundred questions, but she knows Rachel doesn’t have the answers. Rachel, for all her confidence and pizazz, doesn’t seem to have much of anything tonight. Perhaps her trip into Quinn’s mind has worn her out as thoroughly as it did Kurt-or, just as likely, perhaps this act she keeps up, this role of fearless leader, is growing too heavy for her slim shoulders. Quinn isn’t sure telling the difference would matter. It certainly wouldn’t make her any less terrified, nor Rachel any less alone.
“Am I going to kill people?” she asks without intending to, feeling light-headed at the very thought. The silence trembles around them, enveloping their twosome in a suffocating blanket. “Rachel. Do you think-is that going to be me?”
The brunette says nothing, but Quinn can hear her clear as day.
Yes.
Closing her eyes, clutching to Rachel despite the other woman’s detachment, Quinn’s entire body shakes.
Rachel was right; this was not her expectation.