Funny, in a certain light, how we all look the same, ensemble, PG (1/4)
Title: Funny, in a certain light, how we all look the same
Chapter: (1/4) I love the rain the most, when it stops or Day One
Fandom: Glee
Characters/Pairings: ensemble, pairings include [deep breath]: Puck/Quinn, Finn/Rachel, Tina/Artie, Brittany/Santana, Will/Emma, Mercedes/Matt (squint and you'll see Will/Rachel, Puck/Rachel, and canon-references to Finn/Quinn, Matt/Santana, Will/Terri, etcetera.)
Genre: angst/romance/friendship/campfire fun
Rating: PG
Warnings/Spoilers: If you're up-to-date with Glee, you're golden.
Word Count: 5950, approx.
Summary: Bags are shrugged onto shoulders, faces dropped as they realise that no, Mr Schue really wasn’t joking when he said the words team-building weekend.
In which Sectionals leave Glee Club broken, and looking to be fixed.
Disclaimer: All television shows, movies, books, and other copyrighted material referred to in this work, and the characters, settings, and events thereof, are the properties of their respective owners. As this work is an interpretation of the original material and not for-profit, it constitutes fair use. Reference to real persons, places, or events are made in a fictional context, and are not intended to be libellous, defamatory, or in any way factual. All song-lyrics mentioned belong to their respective owners, not to me.
Author’s Note: written for the wonderful _takemeaway_ who bought me for help_haiti, and only abused her power a little, but then it turned out I kind of liked it, so there we go. Beta’d by the splendid waltzmatidah and yesssirrr, who I am fairly indebted to. Please, read and review, but be gentle. I bruise like bad fruit.
I love the rain the most, when it stops
or Day One
“I’m over this already.”
Everyone silently agrees without bothering to ask who said it.
Bags are shrugged onto shoulders, faces dropped as they realise that no, Mr Schue really wasn’t joking when he said the words team-building weekend. Faces drop in further when it dawns on them that every other subsequent word including but not limited to ‘Campfire Fun’ was in fact not ironic like maybe they’d all hoped it was- that they are in fact semi-deserted in the woods with actual tents and actual ground to sleep on and actual campfires to build themselves.
Finn’s off the bus before he’s even told to, face tense, hands fumbling on the strap of his rucksack. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. Maybe spending the weekend with your ex-girlfriend who’s not carrying your child after all, and the guy who it turns out she is, and the whole group of people who knew before you did was not the best idea. He wonders why he didn’t mention these things to his mother while she signed the permission slip, and why he didn’t say anything to Mr. Schue when he handed it in.
He sticks his head around the door. “There’s a pretty big puddle out here.”
“Thanks, Finn.” Will turns back to face the groups and clocks the expression on Emma’s face. He takes a hold of her hand, pulling her up out of her seat, and jumps out of the coach. He holds his hands around her waist and lifts her over. When she tucks her feet up, he smiles. “There you go.”
“Thank you.”
“I’ll get the rest of your things,” he winks and disappears back into the van.
Emma smiles as she hears him talk from inside. “Yes, everyone, this is where we’re staying. No TV, no microwave, just you and the great outdoors-- What? No, Brittany, you can’t. Just trust me, holding appliances up to the sun is not exactly what solar power means.” He laughs, he sighs, he starts again. “If you want a bed by dark, you might want to think about getting out. Tents, sleeping bags, the whole deal. You’re doing it.” She imagines his smile, all cocky and hopeful, “We’ll work out whose staying where in a minute.”
There’s a rustle of movement on the bus. “Oh, we’d better--” She goes to take a step, looks down and sees the splash of mud on her flats. She makes this weird hum, murmuring “What am I doing here?” under her breath.
“You need a hand, Ms. Pillsbury?” and then Finn offers his. She stares, imagines the fluff and dirt collected on his palm. “Oh, yeah, right--” He wipes his hand on his jeans and holds it out again, she takes it semi-reluctantly and he walks her over to a dry patch.
Mercedes jumps off the bus, followed by Mike and Brittany and the whirr of Artie’s chair lift somewhere on the other side. Tina’s Converse hit the ground with a light thud and she squints at the sunshine and waits for someone whose really trying to pretend she doesn’t exist. She gives up, eventually going to stand alongside another group of people who won’t talk to her and aren’t talking to each other and she’s right there with Finn in the thinking that maybe this was not the most fun way to spend a weekend.
Quinn attempts to get up, legs wide and hand steadied on her stomach, but Santana pushes past, “Excuse you,” and she finds herself wedged between the armrest and the seat in front. She groans, Kurt looks around, raises an eyebrow before holding out his (she’s pretty sure manicured) hand and pulling her up. She whispers ‘thank you’ to his back. She follows him out and stands beside the group awkwardly, her feet shuffling in one of the few patches of grass.
Rachel’s the last off. She steps out of the mini-bus and takes a deep breath of the kind of outdoors you find in a box of washing detergent. Her cheeks flush slightly with the breeze, she sniffs, she smiles.
She slips. (Not the kind of dramatic entrance she was hoping for.)
Mercedes grins, Tina bites her lip, and no one else really does much of anything. Finn sighs, and walks over, past the group and the weird way they follow him with their eyes lately because they’re kind of worried he’s going to throw a Christian Bale in Glee practice.
He bends down, “You okay, Rach?”
“Yeah… Just-- sometimes my dance training and--”
“Rachel, you don’t have to do that.”
She laughs nervously, nods and holds onto his arm while he pulls her up. The mud sloshes around her, sticking to her bare legs, and she tries really hard to forget about the group just watching her and stifling laughs. “You must be pretty used to that,” Santana says. “You know, living under a bridge and all.”
“Hey,” Mr. Schue interjects. “Go get the camping stuff out of the trunk.” He turns to look at her, “Are you hurt?”
“No, just embarrassed.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he smiles. “Place like this- you won’t be the only one to fall this weekend.”
She’s still gripping onto Finn’s arms, her fingers pressed against his blue sleeves, his face drops, “We’d… better go help.”
“Yeah,” she clears her throat. “Sure.” He lets go and she straightens out her skirt, the mud dries in the wind and cracks.
Regionals or not, she wants to go home.
---
“Look, I know you guys have better things to do on your weekend, but I really think this would be a great opportunity for glee. Come on.”
(No.)
“Some time away from everything to… reconnect.”
(No.)
“It’s a four-day weekend?”
(Maybe.)
---
“I’m not sharing with Little Miss Planned Parenthood over here.” Santana points, as if people didn’t know who that was and Quinn feels her cheeks flush under the spotlight. “I’ll go with Brittany.”
“Yes!”
“That’s not really-- You guys are friends already.”
She shrugs, “So we take Mercedes too.”
“And I don’t get a say in this?”
“Actually-- I think that’s a great idea. The three of you--”
“No. Sorry, Mr. Schue. But that is not happening,” Mercedes raises her finger. “If I wanted to know how to curl my eyelashes-”
“She’d be in my tent,” Kurt smiles, shrugs one shoulder. “And you’ve already said we’re not co-ed. I’ll go with Artie. He’s the lesser of many evils.”
Artie nods, “Fine.”
The subject of Quinn comes up again, everyone falls silent. Tina puts her hand up, “I don’t mind.” She makes awkward eye contact with Quinn that makes her think of trays being tipped out of hands that were hers and a blurred version of a ponytail that‘s since been let out. “I mean… I don’t care where I sleep.”
“Okay,” Emma makes a mark on her clipboard. “You two can be over there,” she whispers, “closer to the porta-potty.” Quinn nods once, and her and Tina take their bags over to their tent. They sit cross-legged, two separate heaps of round tummy and black and blue hair in between bags.
“Since when were porta-potties a part of the ‘great outdoors’?” Mike laughs.
“Hey, you guys want to use the woods at night, be my guest,” Mr. Schue smirks. “That reminds me… There is a shower-block about five minutes away and we got the morning slot. So-- 7:30-9:30.”
(You don’t have to be Rachel Berry with her sixth sense to know that Emma is calculating how much time she has to spend here until she can go and disinfect it. Her lips mime the times on a clock, her fingers tap the clipboard with every passing second. She thinks of the grime and the people and her eyes keep flicking to the bus because that’s her only escape.)
When the subject of where Puck and Finn are going to sleep comes up, they both take one of the football players left and don’t say anything else. Don’t even look at each other. This version has more awkward pauses and fewer black eyes.
“So that leaves… Rachel and Mercedes. Great. Now everyone choose a tent and start setting up. And talk to each other. Benefit from other people’s experience.” Mr. Schue draws the last word out for effect, “Learn.”
“Come on, Mercedes.” Rachel smiles, smear of mud on her cheek from before. “Maybe we can work on your lower register while we do this.”
She raises an eyebrow, mutters under her breath, “Yeah, we’re gonna work on something”
“It’s just a weekend, Mercedes.” Kurt’s collecting his Louis Vuitton luggage and placing it in the (tender) crook of his elbow. “Monday, you’ll be back in school, bringing your chocolate thunder.” He flutters his fingers past her face, “And this will all be a distant memory.”
This is when Rachel decides to call out Mercedes’ name in a high C.
She rolls her eyes at Kurt, who places his hands square between her shoulders and pushes. “Go.”
---
No prizes for guessing that the football players’ tents are up and done first.
Brittany stops doing cartwheels for a second to balance in a perfect handstand, “Are you smiling or frowning?”
Santana’s arm are folded, she shifts onto her other hip. “You aren’t even trying, Britt. You keep doing flips and we’ll be sleeping on the ground tonight.” She locks her hands around Brittany’s ankles, pushes her the other way and sighs just as her shoes make marks in the dust. “Now what do you know about building a tent?”
“Uh, just what I learned from my brothers.” Brittany kneels down, starts connecting the frame and then sits and pounds the peg into the ground with her foot. She passes Santana one half of the canvas without talking, pinning it around the bottom and then taking it back.
When she leans forward again, Santana can see the red grooves in her thighs where her shoes were pressed. There’s a faint glow around her hair where the sun is right behind her and everyone looks a little better than they normally do- tanned, blurred, half-lit smiles. She watches Brittany’s nimble hands with ‘what the hell’ etched across her own forehead that she can‘t seem to wipe off, her mouth open like she’s hoping some words will find their way out. Santana crouches down next to her, “And you didn’t say this before because?”
“It didn’t seem important.” Brittany’s voice is unwavering, her eyes focussed, and she actually means it.
Santana bites her tongue and holds back the sigh just behind her lips. She’d tell Brittany she’s an idiot if she thought it might make a difference, and if she actually thought it. But she likes the way she sticks her tongue out the side of her mouth and how she keeps making this ‘uhh’ sound while she thinks of the next thing to do so instead she forgoes making her feel bad for: “I don’t know how I’m going to survive without my straighteners.”
Brittany doesn’t take her eyes off of the task at hand (a lifetime of being easily distracted has taught her that this is probably for the best), “But you look pretty with your hair all curly.”
“…Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Her eyes flick down to her hands a final time, she actually means it again.
Brittany smiles, one final bash into the ground with the palm of her hand. “When do we do the thing with the marshmallows?”
---
Quinn returns from her third trip to the bathroom in the past ten minutes to find her tent set up.
“Tina, you did this?”
“…Not exactly…”
Puck crawls out from inside the canvas, keeps his eyes on the floor when he’s out and dusts his hands on his jeans because even when a baby’s bouncing on her bladder she still might be the cleanest and classiest person he knows.
“I just didn’t think you should be doing this kind of stuff in your condition,” he says, right out of a textbook.
“I’m pregnant. Not disabled.”
“I get it, I just-- Look, I can take it down if it’s weird.”
Post-traumatic flashbacks of her and Tina wrestling with a tent come back. “I’m sorry, I’m being-- Thanks.”
She doesn’t say his name anymore, because she’s afraid she’ll say it differently than how she wants to. All she can think of is saying it close to his skin and how he’d say it back.
And how it would look on a birth certificate under the heading ‘father’.
“You need anything else?” he breathes out.
“No, I’m fine.”
“Are you su--”
“I wasn’t kidding when I said I wanted to do this by myself.”
“I know, I--”
“That means everything. I don’t want to run to people as soon as things get hard. I don’t want you to be there for me to run to.”
“Fine.”
“I need to look out for myself. And things like this just make things… difficult.”
“What-- Difficult?”
“I know… that you cleaned Mrs. Goldfarb’s pool last weekend,” she says through a weak smile, one that’s made up of morning sickness and the knowledge that some things don’t change.
His eyebrows stay low and he’s pretty sure if he keeps his cool he can make it seem like that doesn‘t bother him as much as it does. “So what if I did? You’ve made it pretty clear that you don’t want anything to do with me.”
“I--I--” she sounds kind of like Tina pre-confession. “You’re right. It’s none of my business.” She shakes her head, rolls her eyes and does everything she can not to burst into tears at this moment, “Okay.”
He wants to crack his knuckles and walk off, ‘screw this’ muttered close to her face before he does. He wants to tell her that she makes him a Lima Loser when he could be something more, that it‘s her fault. But he doesn’t, the main reason being because none of it is true. “Look, you sure there’s nothing else?”
“I’m sorry,” falls out of her mouth.
“I don’t-- Whatever.”
She looks down at her feet, “There’s-- There’s nothing else.”
He thinks about telling her she doesn’t have to keep apologising around him, he thinks about holding her hand, about brushing the hair off of her face; and then he remembers that he’s Puck, and she’s Quinn and she’ll tell him no all over again, and he’s sick of it. And no matter what movies tell you, the bad boy doesn’t always get the good girl (even when he knocks her up first).
“See you around then.”
---
Artie swipes his wrist across his forehead, the beads of sweat glisten in the low sun. “Kurt, you’re not even trying.”
“I never said I was good at manual labour.”
They kind of both decide to ignore Artie’s wheelchair for the purpose of this conversation, Artie doesn’t want to be the guy that keeps bringing it up and Kurt doesn’t want to be the guy who looks like he doesn’t care. Kurt watches Finn grip his football with two hands and strum his fingers over the surface of the leather, he smiles and throws it back to Matt. Who throws it back. And then catches it again. And then throws and--
“What is the point of that anyway?” slips out of Kurt’s mouth.
“What?”
“I just don’t get some men’s fascinations with balls.”
Artie raises his eyebrows. Kurt blushes. That’s another thing they both ignore.
Artie uses a rock to pound the peg into the ground like he saw Mike Chang do earlier (apparently he can do more than just pop and lock). He watches Kurt’s face fall. Mercedes walks over, tucks a piece of hair behind her ear with one hand then slides it into her back pocket. She passes Matt the football that‘s just rolled against her feet. She smiles, she laughs, he’s pretty sure she mentions her weave and she walks away with a little more sway just in case Matt’s looking. He is.
“Everything’s so much easier.” Kurt mutters under his breath, moving the hair out of his eyes and taking one last look.
“Tell me about it.”
He remembers Artie’s there, he sighs and rolls his sleeves up (because vintage Dior isn’t about to get ruined just because Mr. Schuester turned out to be some kind of sadist), and says, “Okay, so how does this work?”
---
Quinn opens the plastic door and comes face-to-face with Finn, “Oh.”
“I…”
“I’m finished. You can--”
“Thanks, I’ll just--”
They work like this now. She backs against the unstable wall, too scared to let her stomach brush against him. She smells exactly the same, the perfume she’s been wearing for years, the hand cream she applies every morning and night, the lip gloss she keeps putting on even though no one‘s kissing it off anymore.
“Hey, Finn?” He turns to look at her, doesn’t answer. “You think we’ll ever be able to finish a sentence around each other again?”
He half-smiles, looks vaguely like the old Finn and not this ghost that’s been lurking in his place lately before it goes again. He shrugs, she nods, he turns away.
Okay, so they don’t really work anymore.
---
Mr. Schuester turns the food over, the quiet sizzling fills the silence. The sun’s ducked behind a cloud now. Ms. Pillsbury hovers by his side with her big smile and bigger eyes that look kind of demonic in the campfire light. Thoughts of hell and brimstone and being poked in the arse by someone red linger in the heads of all of them. And then there’s the obvious question of which situation is worse.
Will slips a sausage into a bun (and it’s so much less fun when it isn’t a euphemism) and loads up the plate, a bulging pile of carbs and meat and Brittany pounces on it like she hasn’t been fed in years. “It’s good.” She smiles, one cheek filled and the faintest dusting of flour from the bread in the corners of her mouth. She covers her face with one hand, “Oh my God, it‘s so good.”
Santana stands next to her, her skirt fluttering in the breeze before she tucks it over her knees and holds the hotdog up close to her face. She keeps turning it one way and then the other and her fingers of their own accord forget taking off the bread and dumping it and instead bring it to her mouth.
“Please, don’t tell Sue.” She gets a laugh from everyone and then plates (and mouths and stomachs) are filled and no one talks.
---
Artie’s a few feet from Tina, she knows because the shadow of his wheelchair is long and stretched over her sneakers, her pigeon-toed feet resting one on the other. She picks the fluff from her striped socks, examines her chipped blue nails, until Mr. Schuester comes over with a bun and says, “I know you’re a vegetarian, Tina.” She smiles and takes the plate, balancing it on her knees.
Kurt’s all weird around her, and Tina’s conversations with Mercedes are limited to ‘hi’s and ‘goodbye’s, the occasional ‘mmhm’ when she has to and she’s not entirely sure when their friendship became so close that Mercedes is allowed to be disappointed in her. But there’s no one at home to talk to and she spent enough time practising her mother’s signature to know that she must kind of want to be here.
Even if it’s just because the alternative is so dull.
Out of the corner of her eyes, she tries to make out how he looks (and if he’s looking at her) but all she sees is the way he keeps rolling away from her and the mention of her name like he does every time he leaves Glee early just so they won’t have to walk the few feet down the halls together.
(When everyone shifts their gaze to her direction, she just clears her throat and pretends that she wasn’t singing to him the whole time.)
---
Rachel’s voice has the ability to cut through crowds, for better or for worse, “Noah, you’re Jewish.”
He replies through a mouthful, “And?”
“And you’re eating a hotdog.”
He swallows, mimics his grandfather, “Oy Vey!” She puts her hands on her waist, looks anything but amused and he smirks because it seems to get easier and easier to do that the longer he knows her. He rolls his eyes, “Rachel, just eat.”
“Heritage is important, Noah.”
He opens his mouth to say, “to you-- and to my mom, but I don’t care” and instead gets cut off by, “Uh, Rachel?”
“Yes, Mr. Schue?”
“They’re kosher. I made sure.”
Puck smiles through another bite, something resembling an ‘I told you so, now just eat’ stretched thin across his lips. And he likes Mr. Schue’s answer so much more than his own because it makes her clench her jaw and turn on her heel and he thinks that’s kind of funny. She collects two plates and grabs two hotdogs. He loses interest round about when she walks past the campfire, instead running his middle finger on the edge of his disposable plate and licking ketchup off of it.
Rachel flicks her hair over her shoulder, and warily sits next to Quinn. She’s picking at her water bottle’s label until it’s shredded, till the mountain scene on the front of it is gone and the list of potential benefits are scattered and instead there’s just clear plastic to look through.
“You should eat, Quinn.”
She looks up through her long eyelashes, and Rachel still finds herself flinching (still fighting the urge to cover her nose) whenever they make eye contact. But Quinn looks too tired to be afraid of right now, too pale and too weak and more like she’s going to faint than punch. “I’m not hungry.”
“I know you hate me. But you’re eating for two and you really shouldn’t have your baby suffer just to spite me.”
“I’m just having an… aversion to meat right now.”
“Oh…” She glances down, “You want the bun?”
She raises her palm, stops the plate from coming anywhere near her, “I’m pretty much having an aversion to everything right now.”
“Oh.”
Rachel picks at her bun. “Do you mind if I eat?”
“You don’t have to sit with me, Rachel.”
Her bottom lip pouts subconsciously. “Do you want me to leave you alone?”
“…I don’t know.”
“Oh.” Their shoulders rub together, she nods like one of those dogs on a dashboard. “I’ll just-- I’ll stay here until you make your decision.”
---
“Why are we here anyway? No one’s mad at us.”
“I don’t know, maybe we’re meant to be mad at them or something.”
“You think?”
Mike shrugs, “I don’t know, man-- what, should we just… pick someone?”
---
They’ve both got headphones on and Puck knocks into Finn’s shoulder by accident after he misjudges the distance between them. “Sorry…” He clears his throat, “Dude.”
He doesn’t say anything, just carries on walking, ignores Puck saying his name the first few times. “What?!”
“I’m… really sorry.”
“Yeah, well, you should’ve thought of that before.”
“You can forgive her but you can’t forgive me? What happened to the bro code?”
“Bro code?” He scoffs. “Bro code meant nothing the second you slept with my girlfriend. And I haven’t forgiven her. I haven’t-- I just-- Just leave me the hell alone, Puck.”
With arms outstretched, “So this is it?”
“I told you I was done with you.”
---
“Okay,” Ms. Pillsbury lets out a light nervous laugh and pushes back her perfectly groomed ginger hair. “The idea is to really listen. So you can only talk when you’re-- when you’re holding the stick.” Her hands are firmly clasped around a long tube- sparkly and in the school colours. “It’s a… talking stick.”
Brittany’s head shoots up, “The stick can talk?”
“No, sweetie.”
“Oh.” Her blonde hair falls in front of her face again.
“Mr. Schue, I--”
He raises a finger to his lips, grabs the stick. “Rachel, you’ve already missed the point.”
She folds one arm across her stomach and then holds out the other hand. “Sir, I really don’t see how some childish game is going to get us ready for Regionals. No offence, Miss. Pillsbury, but some… bedazzled baton isn’t going to do us any good.”
“You’re meant to just find a stick, but they--”
He takes it back, “Rachel, without you-- with nobody talking, we don’t stand a chance.” She goes to talk, takes the breath in and everything, and he pulls the stick out of her reach. “Now with Vocal Adrenaline being such amazing dancers, we need something else. And what we had was chemistry. You were friends. You loved singing together, that’s something that you can’t choreograph.” He smiles, “Now I agree with Ms. Pillsbury. You guys aren’t listening to each other.”
Emma reaches forward. “Uh, Will? This is for you too.”
“What?”
“You’re a part of this club too. I think you have some things to say. And hear.”
He sits down next to her, nods to himself and smiles, “Fine. You’re right.”
He lets go of the stick, Rachel’s the first to take hold of it. Of course. “There’s a lot of residual tension from sectionals. I know people blame me for everything that happened but I--”
“You didn’t have to tell.” Kurt raises his hand; she looks at Mr. Schue who gestures for her to pass it on, and when she does, she knows she’s going to regret it. “As far as I’m concerned it wasn’t our business. It wasn’t our place.”
She places her hands on the stick, doesn’t take it from him. “I already apologised--”
“You said sorry to Quinn. And I’m sure you meant it,” Mercedes breaks the rules and Kurt holds the stick and pulls Rachel’s arm gently with it to let her touch it. “But you have a habit of selling out people and their secrets when it suits you. Forgive me if I don’t trust you.”
“I know, but I--”
He clears his throat, his nose tilted up, “Rachel Berry will always be number one.”
Mercedes nods, “And it’s really hard to know where you stand with someone like that.”
And here is one of those rare moments in Rachel Berry’s life where she doesn’t know what to say. She’s grateful for Emma’s pale hand as it ducks into view and clasps around the stick. “That’s good-- That’s really good, guys. Anyone else want to talk?”
Artie coughs. “Sometimes I feel like Mr. Schue puts too much pressure on us. Not necessarily to win, but to be, I don’t know, perfect?”
“What?”
Santana nods. “Yeah. Like with that whole vitamin D thing-- I felt more ashamed than the time my parents caught me and Puck on their waterbed. And I was actually wearing a bra this time.”
Will’s eyebrows stay somewhere near his hairline. “Wow… I had-- I guess I thought that was my job.”
Mike Chang says his one line of the evening. “It is, but… Sometimes it’s just a little too much.”
He nods, “… Okay. Thank you.”
Puck mentally logs away all the apologies he owes to everyone here. He and Quinn are kind of similar like that; a catalogue of faces they should take by the hand and say ‘sorry’ all sincere and quiet, a list of sins to repent for. Neither of them is choosing to do that tonight.
“I’ll go.” Finn sniffs, sticks his hand up and waits for her to walk over, he seems to take in the object with more detail than everyone else. “You all want to talk about who you can trust? About how hard it is to know where you stand? Everybody lied to me. Every single one of you. And you’re all so busy blaming Rachel that you don’t even look at yourselves. But the way I see it, none of you are my friends. I don’t care why she told me, the point is that she did.”
No one talks, no one has an answer. Fade to black. Tune in next time.
---
“You know, I really thought this weekend would be about Kurt’s makeovers and Spin the Bottle.”
---
Rachel’s pouring bottled water over her toothbrush and standing with her back to Finn. She concentrates on the gentle circular strokes and not how near he is and how he’ll be sleeping in relatively close proximity to her.
She may be in love with someone who doesn’t love her back, but oral hygiene is important.
“So… I guess you’ll be… turning in pretty soon?”
Spit, “Yeah, there isn’t really much to do around here. Just… trees and stuff.”
“Right, you’re right. I was--” She goes back to scrubbing, shakes her head, covers her mouth when she spits. He’s screwing the cap on his bottle and pretending he didn’t just work out what she was getting at.
“I guess I’ll see you tomorrow then.”
“Yeah.”
“…Nice pyjamas, Rach.”
---
“I really think this was a mistake,” Will breathes out, zipping the tent up and turning back to face Emma. “I mean, they all hate each other. What made me think bringing them all to the same place- no privacy, no places to hide-- how is that a good idea?”
“Will, you-- You’re trying. They’re talking- some of them are talking, and that’s good. That’s really good. Most people would have given up. Now- Now Glee Club is just a little broken. But that’s alright, you’ll fix it. Or it’ll fix itself.”
She shrugs, and with the quiet rustle of fabric it occurs to him that (with the exception of this one time she wore a Hazmat suit because there was a leak in her apartment and she had to get her things and ‘have you heard about water diseases because they can be really, really… well, gross.’) he doesn’t think he’s ever seen her more covered up. She’s got these pyjamas made out of stiff white cotton- just hands and feet and face on show- and she keeps moving her fingers just a few inches out of his reach. “Emma, are you okay? You look… nervous. More than usual.”
“No, I’m- I’m okay. I’m fine.”
Her eyelashes are wet and her cheeks red where she‘s scrubbed them raw with make-up wipes and tissue and she‘s probably been like this the whole time but he was too wrapped up in his own stuff to notice. “Emma.”
“This is--” She runs her teeth over her bottom lip. “I mean, this is the first time we’ve slept… together.” Her eyes widen, “Not like that. Not like--”
He sits up. “I… know what you mean, Em.”
“Of course you-- And it’s dirty. It’s very dirty.”
“It’s--?”
“The place, not the-- the place is dirty, it’s messy.” He pulls his knees up to his chest and watches her small hands flap, twirl in the air and then come back down to pat gently on her thighs. “Will, you have to understand that I have… I mean, I have thought about this for a long- a long, long time. And when I thought about it, there were… Oh, hot showers and Purell and clean sheets and not dirt and… bugs. And I came here because I wanted to be with you, and support you, but I don’t… Know if I can.”
Her mouth opens and closes a few more times and she’s getting to that stage where her eyes itch and she’ll blow up into her fringe soon. He takes her face in both hands, “Emma, if I have learnt anything from my marriage it’s that things aren’t always exactly like you pictured it.” He ducks his head down to meet her eyes, “There may not be Purell, but I’m here and I’m really happy that I’m with you.” She hesitantly clasps one hand around his, he feels her short nails scrape against his skin. “And until you’re ready… This tent is pretty big. We’ll just stay on either side.”
She lets out a breath against his face, her fingertips trace the back of his hand until he lets her go. “Okay. I’m… Sor--”
“Don’t even think it.”
She doesn’t smile but her shallow dimples tell him she’s considering doing so. She reaches down and clutches her sleeping bag, pulls it close to herself like the blanket she had when she was younger (until that whole dairy farm incident and then suddenly all she could think about was bacteria and washing it just made it lose its smell, so now it’s curled up in a box somewhere like the rest of her), and crawls over to the other side of the tent. He smiles and turns away, switches off his lantern. As he does so, she watches the shape of him fade into something from the black as her eyes grow accustomed to the dark.
“Night, Will.”
He smiles to nothing, “Night, Emma.”
---
Puck rolls onto his back, “Can you sleep, Chang?”
“With you asking me every five minutes? No, Puckerman.”
“Right-- Sorry, dude.”
“It’s okay.”
“Maybe I need to… go for a walk or something.”
“No leaving tents.”
“What?”
“Schue’s rules.” He yawns. “Why don’t you just, I don’t know, stick your head out?”
He rolls his eyes in the dark because that’s pretty stupid but he’s still unzipping his tent and turning onto his stomach five minutes later after he’s sure Mike’s asleep. His eyes adjust to the faint glow of the campfire about fifteen feet away, he makes out the faint shapes of khaki tents circled around it.
Camping when he was younger consisted of him and Finn in his backyard wearing Mr. Hudson’s army helmets and swearing they could hear bears even though they live in the suburbs. They used to freak each other out just enough that they’d go sleep inside; they’d call each other chicken and cluck their way back into the house- each time silently promising to be the one who says it next time.
It’s not a bear (or a bird, or a plane) he sees now. In fact he’s not entirely sure how he missed her in the first place.
Quinn’s arms crossed against her chest and then stretched out in a V above her head. She puts one hand on her waist and moves her hips in a circle, the other fist pumped in the air. She cups her mouth with her hands, no sound comes out. She claps without her hands ever touching. She pulls her t-shirt down over her round stomach- the one that’s in the way of her kicks- and goes back to her spot. An imaginary X on the ground that doesn’t mark the treasure, but an old version of her. A version that does cartwheels and somersaults. She doesn’t hold her stomach or vomit back her lunch. Her crucifix pendant doesn’t burn a hole in her skin, she can still hold a bible. She lives at home with her parents who haven’t thrown her out and who don’t intend to.
She goes to step forward on the count of eight, hands on her hips again but instead of going back to her imaginary crowds, the make-believe football team, the character she used to play, she just places both hands on her belly, sways back and forth and watches the dying fire. He swears he can make out her lips moving, he’s not close enough to hear what she’s singing (if he was, he’d hear a lullaby). Her fingers move in small circles over where her bellybutton is. Her mouth pulls up into a smile.
Puck falls asleep with her and her (their) baby in his head.
---
“Did you know that you swallow eight spiders a year? I bet they’re not even counting camping incidents.”
“No, my mom told me that’s just a rumour.”
“Really?”
“Yeah… I bet someone has though.”
---
I am damaged at best, like you’ve already figured out or Day Two
Chapter: (1/4) I love the rain the most, when it stops or Day One
Fandom: Glee
Characters/Pairings: ensemble, pairings include [deep breath]: Puck/Quinn, Finn/Rachel, Tina/Artie, Brittany/Santana, Will/Emma, Mercedes/Matt (squint and you'll see Will/Rachel, Puck/Rachel, and canon-references to Finn/Quinn, Matt/Santana, Will/Terri, etcetera.)
Genre: angst/romance/friendship/campfire fun
Rating: PG
Warnings/Spoilers: If you're up-to-date with Glee, you're golden.
Word Count: 5950, approx.
Summary: Bags are shrugged onto shoulders, faces dropped as they realise that no, Mr Schue really wasn’t joking when he said the words team-building weekend.
In which Sectionals leave Glee Club broken, and looking to be fixed.
Disclaimer: All television shows, movies, books, and other copyrighted material referred to in this work, and the characters, settings, and events thereof, are the properties of their respective owners. As this work is an interpretation of the original material and not for-profit, it constitutes fair use. Reference to real persons, places, or events are made in a fictional context, and are not intended to be libellous, defamatory, or in any way factual. All song-lyrics mentioned belong to their respective owners, not to me.
Author’s Note: written for the wonderful _takemeaway_ who bought me for help_haiti, and only abused her power a little, but then it turned out I kind of liked it, so there we go. Beta’d by the splendid waltzmatidah and yesssirrr, who I am fairly indebted to. Please, read and review, but be gentle. I bruise like bad fruit.
I love the rain the most, when it stops
or Day One
“I’m over this already.”
Everyone silently agrees without bothering to ask who said it.
Bags are shrugged onto shoulders, faces dropped as they realise that no, Mr Schue really wasn’t joking when he said the words team-building weekend. Faces drop in further when it dawns on them that every other subsequent word including but not limited to ‘Campfire Fun’ was in fact not ironic like maybe they’d all hoped it was- that they are in fact semi-deserted in the woods with actual tents and actual ground to sleep on and actual campfires to build themselves.
Finn’s off the bus before he’s even told to, face tense, hands fumbling on the strap of his rucksack. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. Maybe spending the weekend with your ex-girlfriend who’s not carrying your child after all, and the guy who it turns out she is, and the whole group of people who knew before you did was not the best idea. He wonders why he didn’t mention these things to his mother while she signed the permission slip, and why he didn’t say anything to Mr. Schue when he handed it in.
He sticks his head around the door. “There’s a pretty big puddle out here.”
“Thanks, Finn.” Will turns back to face the groups and clocks the expression on Emma’s face. He takes a hold of her hand, pulling her up out of her seat, and jumps out of the coach. He holds his hands around her waist and lifts her over. When she tucks her feet up, he smiles. “There you go.”
“Thank you.”
“I’ll get the rest of your things,” he winks and disappears back into the van.
Emma smiles as she hears him talk from inside. “Yes, everyone, this is where we’re staying. No TV, no microwave, just you and the great outdoors-- What? No, Brittany, you can’t. Just trust me, holding appliances up to the sun is not exactly what solar power means.” He laughs, he sighs, he starts again. “If you want a bed by dark, you might want to think about getting out. Tents, sleeping bags, the whole deal. You’re doing it.” She imagines his smile, all cocky and hopeful, “We’ll work out whose staying where in a minute.”
There’s a rustle of movement on the bus. “Oh, we’d better--” She goes to take a step, looks down and sees the splash of mud on her flats. She makes this weird hum, murmuring “What am I doing here?” under her breath.
“You need a hand, Ms. Pillsbury?” and then Finn offers his. She stares, imagines the fluff and dirt collected on his palm. “Oh, yeah, right--” He wipes his hand on his jeans and holds it out again, she takes it semi-reluctantly and he walks her over to a dry patch.
Mercedes jumps off the bus, followed by Mike and Brittany and the whirr of Artie’s chair lift somewhere on the other side. Tina’s Converse hit the ground with a light thud and she squints at the sunshine and waits for someone whose really trying to pretend she doesn’t exist. She gives up, eventually going to stand alongside another group of people who won’t talk to her and aren’t talking to each other and she’s right there with Finn in the thinking that maybe this was not the most fun way to spend a weekend.
Quinn attempts to get up, legs wide and hand steadied on her stomach, but Santana pushes past, “Excuse you,” and she finds herself wedged between the armrest and the seat in front. She groans, Kurt looks around, raises an eyebrow before holding out his (she’s pretty sure manicured) hand and pulling her up. She whispers ‘thank you’ to his back. She follows him out and stands beside the group awkwardly, her feet shuffling in one of the few patches of grass.
Rachel’s the last off. She steps out of the mini-bus and takes a deep breath of the kind of outdoors you find in a box of washing detergent. Her cheeks flush slightly with the breeze, she sniffs, she smiles.
She slips. (Not the kind of dramatic entrance she was hoping for.)
Mercedes grins, Tina bites her lip, and no one else really does much of anything. Finn sighs, and walks over, past the group and the weird way they follow him with their eyes lately because they’re kind of worried he’s going to throw a Christian Bale in Glee practice.
He bends down, “You okay, Rach?”
“Yeah… Just-- sometimes my dance training and--”
“Rachel, you don’t have to do that.”
She laughs nervously, nods and holds onto his arm while he pulls her up. The mud sloshes around her, sticking to her bare legs, and she tries really hard to forget about the group just watching her and stifling laughs. “You must be pretty used to that,” Santana says. “You know, living under a bridge and all.”
“Hey,” Mr. Schue interjects. “Go get the camping stuff out of the trunk.” He turns to look at her, “Are you hurt?”
“No, just embarrassed.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he smiles. “Place like this- you won’t be the only one to fall this weekend.”
She’s still gripping onto Finn’s arms, her fingers pressed against his blue sleeves, his face drops, “We’d… better go help.”
“Yeah,” she clears her throat. “Sure.” He lets go and she straightens out her skirt, the mud dries in the wind and cracks.
Regionals or not, she wants to go home.
---
“Look, I know you guys have better things to do on your weekend, but I really think this would be a great opportunity for glee. Come on.”
(No.)
“Some time away from everything to… reconnect.”
(No.)
“It’s a four-day weekend?”
(Maybe.)
---
“I’m not sharing with Little Miss Planned Parenthood over here.” Santana points, as if people didn’t know who that was and Quinn feels her cheeks flush under the spotlight. “I’ll go with Brittany.”
“Yes!”
“That’s not really-- You guys are friends already.”
She shrugs, “So we take Mercedes too.”
“And I don’t get a say in this?”
“Actually-- I think that’s a great idea. The three of you--”
“No. Sorry, Mr. Schue. But that is not happening,” Mercedes raises her finger. “If I wanted to know how to curl my eyelashes-”
“She’d be in my tent,” Kurt smiles, shrugs one shoulder. “And you’ve already said we’re not co-ed. I’ll go with Artie. He’s the lesser of many evils.”
Artie nods, “Fine.”
The subject of Quinn comes up again, everyone falls silent. Tina puts her hand up, “I don’t mind.” She makes awkward eye contact with Quinn that makes her think of trays being tipped out of hands that were hers and a blurred version of a ponytail that‘s since been let out. “I mean… I don’t care where I sleep.”
“Okay,” Emma makes a mark on her clipboard. “You two can be over there,” she whispers, “closer to the porta-potty.” Quinn nods once, and her and Tina take their bags over to their tent. They sit cross-legged, two separate heaps of round tummy and black and blue hair in between bags.
“Since when were porta-potties a part of the ‘great outdoors’?” Mike laughs.
“Hey, you guys want to use the woods at night, be my guest,” Mr. Schue smirks. “That reminds me… There is a shower-block about five minutes away and we got the morning slot. So-- 7:30-9:30.”
(You don’t have to be Rachel Berry with her sixth sense to know that Emma is calculating how much time she has to spend here until she can go and disinfect it. Her lips mime the times on a clock, her fingers tap the clipboard with every passing second. She thinks of the grime and the people and her eyes keep flicking to the bus because that’s her only escape.)
When the subject of where Puck and Finn are going to sleep comes up, they both take one of the football players left and don’t say anything else. Don’t even look at each other. This version has more awkward pauses and fewer black eyes.
“So that leaves… Rachel and Mercedes. Great. Now everyone choose a tent and start setting up. And talk to each other. Benefit from other people’s experience.” Mr. Schue draws the last word out for effect, “Learn.”
“Come on, Mercedes.” Rachel smiles, smear of mud on her cheek from before. “Maybe we can work on your lower register while we do this.”
She raises an eyebrow, mutters under her breath, “Yeah, we’re gonna work on something”
“It’s just a weekend, Mercedes.” Kurt’s collecting his Louis Vuitton luggage and placing it in the (tender) crook of his elbow. “Monday, you’ll be back in school, bringing your chocolate thunder.” He flutters his fingers past her face, “And this will all be a distant memory.”
This is when Rachel decides to call out Mercedes’ name in a high C.
She rolls her eyes at Kurt, who places his hands square between her shoulders and pushes. “Go.”
---
No prizes for guessing that the football players’ tents are up and done first.
Brittany stops doing cartwheels for a second to balance in a perfect handstand, “Are you smiling or frowning?”
Santana’s arm are folded, she shifts onto her other hip. “You aren’t even trying, Britt. You keep doing flips and we’ll be sleeping on the ground tonight.” She locks her hands around Brittany’s ankles, pushes her the other way and sighs just as her shoes make marks in the dust. “Now what do you know about building a tent?”
“Uh, just what I learned from my brothers.” Brittany kneels down, starts connecting the frame and then sits and pounds the peg into the ground with her foot. She passes Santana one half of the canvas without talking, pinning it around the bottom and then taking it back.
When she leans forward again, Santana can see the red grooves in her thighs where her shoes were pressed. There’s a faint glow around her hair where the sun is right behind her and everyone looks a little better than they normally do- tanned, blurred, half-lit smiles. She watches Brittany’s nimble hands with ‘what the hell’ etched across her own forehead that she can‘t seem to wipe off, her mouth open like she’s hoping some words will find their way out. Santana crouches down next to her, “And you didn’t say this before because?”
“It didn’t seem important.” Brittany’s voice is unwavering, her eyes focussed, and she actually means it.
Santana bites her tongue and holds back the sigh just behind her lips. She’d tell Brittany she’s an idiot if she thought it might make a difference, and if she actually thought it. But she likes the way she sticks her tongue out the side of her mouth and how she keeps making this ‘uhh’ sound while she thinks of the next thing to do so instead she forgoes making her feel bad for: “I don’t know how I’m going to survive without my straighteners.”
Brittany doesn’t take her eyes off of the task at hand (a lifetime of being easily distracted has taught her that this is probably for the best), “But you look pretty with your hair all curly.”
“…Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Her eyes flick down to her hands a final time, she actually means it again.
Brittany smiles, one final bash into the ground with the palm of her hand. “When do we do the thing with the marshmallows?”
---
Quinn returns from her third trip to the bathroom in the past ten minutes to find her tent set up.
“Tina, you did this?”
“…Not exactly…”
Puck crawls out from inside the canvas, keeps his eyes on the floor when he’s out and dusts his hands on his jeans because even when a baby’s bouncing on her bladder she still might be the cleanest and classiest person he knows.
“I just didn’t think you should be doing this kind of stuff in your condition,” he says, right out of a textbook.
“I’m pregnant. Not disabled.”
“I get it, I just-- Look, I can take it down if it’s weird.”
Post-traumatic flashbacks of her and Tina wrestling with a tent come back. “I’m sorry, I’m being-- Thanks.”
She doesn’t say his name anymore, because she’s afraid she’ll say it differently than how she wants to. All she can think of is saying it close to his skin and how he’d say it back.
And how it would look on a birth certificate under the heading ‘father’.
“You need anything else?” he breathes out.
“No, I’m fine.”
“Are you su--”
“I wasn’t kidding when I said I wanted to do this by myself.”
“I know, I--”
“That means everything. I don’t want to run to people as soon as things get hard. I don’t want you to be there for me to run to.”
“Fine.”
“I need to look out for myself. And things like this just make things… difficult.”
“What-- Difficult?”
“I know… that you cleaned Mrs. Goldfarb’s pool last weekend,” she says through a weak smile, one that’s made up of morning sickness and the knowledge that some things don’t change.
His eyebrows stay low and he’s pretty sure if he keeps his cool he can make it seem like that doesn‘t bother him as much as it does. “So what if I did? You’ve made it pretty clear that you don’t want anything to do with me.”
“I--I--” she sounds kind of like Tina pre-confession. “You’re right. It’s none of my business.” She shakes her head, rolls her eyes and does everything she can not to burst into tears at this moment, “Okay.”
He wants to crack his knuckles and walk off, ‘screw this’ muttered close to her face before he does. He wants to tell her that she makes him a Lima Loser when he could be something more, that it‘s her fault. But he doesn’t, the main reason being because none of it is true. “Look, you sure there’s nothing else?”
“I’m sorry,” falls out of her mouth.
“I don’t-- Whatever.”
She looks down at her feet, “There’s-- There’s nothing else.”
He thinks about telling her she doesn’t have to keep apologising around him, he thinks about holding her hand, about brushing the hair off of her face; and then he remembers that he’s Puck, and she’s Quinn and she’ll tell him no all over again, and he’s sick of it. And no matter what movies tell you, the bad boy doesn’t always get the good girl (even when he knocks her up first).
“See you around then.”
---
Artie swipes his wrist across his forehead, the beads of sweat glisten in the low sun. “Kurt, you’re not even trying.”
“I never said I was good at manual labour.”
They kind of both decide to ignore Artie’s wheelchair for the purpose of this conversation, Artie doesn’t want to be the guy that keeps bringing it up and Kurt doesn’t want to be the guy who looks like he doesn’t care. Kurt watches Finn grip his football with two hands and strum his fingers over the surface of the leather, he smiles and throws it back to Matt. Who throws it back. And then catches it again. And then throws and--
“What is the point of that anyway?” slips out of Kurt’s mouth.
“What?”
“I just don’t get some men’s fascinations with balls.”
Artie raises his eyebrows. Kurt blushes. That’s another thing they both ignore.
Artie uses a rock to pound the peg into the ground like he saw Mike Chang do earlier (apparently he can do more than just pop and lock). He watches Kurt’s face fall. Mercedes walks over, tucks a piece of hair behind her ear with one hand then slides it into her back pocket. She passes Matt the football that‘s just rolled against her feet. She smiles, she laughs, he’s pretty sure she mentions her weave and she walks away with a little more sway just in case Matt’s looking. He is.
“Everything’s so much easier.” Kurt mutters under his breath, moving the hair out of his eyes and taking one last look.
“Tell me about it.”
He remembers Artie’s there, he sighs and rolls his sleeves up (because vintage Dior isn’t about to get ruined just because Mr. Schuester turned out to be some kind of sadist), and says, “Okay, so how does this work?”
---
Quinn opens the plastic door and comes face-to-face with Finn, “Oh.”
“I…”
“I’m finished. You can--”
“Thanks, I’ll just--”
They work like this now. She backs against the unstable wall, too scared to let her stomach brush against him. She smells exactly the same, the perfume she’s been wearing for years, the hand cream she applies every morning and night, the lip gloss she keeps putting on even though no one‘s kissing it off anymore.
“Hey, Finn?” He turns to look at her, doesn’t answer. “You think we’ll ever be able to finish a sentence around each other again?”
He half-smiles, looks vaguely like the old Finn and not this ghost that’s been lurking in his place lately before it goes again. He shrugs, she nods, he turns away.
Okay, so they don’t really work anymore.
---
Mr. Schuester turns the food over, the quiet sizzling fills the silence. The sun’s ducked behind a cloud now. Ms. Pillsbury hovers by his side with her big smile and bigger eyes that look kind of demonic in the campfire light. Thoughts of hell and brimstone and being poked in the arse by someone red linger in the heads of all of them. And then there’s the obvious question of which situation is worse.
Will slips a sausage into a bun (and it’s so much less fun when it isn’t a euphemism) and loads up the plate, a bulging pile of carbs and meat and Brittany pounces on it like she hasn’t been fed in years. “It’s good.” She smiles, one cheek filled and the faintest dusting of flour from the bread in the corners of her mouth. She covers her face with one hand, “Oh my God, it‘s so good.”
Santana stands next to her, her skirt fluttering in the breeze before she tucks it over her knees and holds the hotdog up close to her face. She keeps turning it one way and then the other and her fingers of their own accord forget taking off the bread and dumping it and instead bring it to her mouth.
“Please, don’t tell Sue.” She gets a laugh from everyone and then plates (and mouths and stomachs) are filled and no one talks.
---
Artie’s a few feet from Tina, she knows because the shadow of his wheelchair is long and stretched over her sneakers, her pigeon-toed feet resting one on the other. She picks the fluff from her striped socks, examines her chipped blue nails, until Mr. Schuester comes over with a bun and says, “I know you’re a vegetarian, Tina.” She smiles and takes the plate, balancing it on her knees.
Kurt’s all weird around her, and Tina’s conversations with Mercedes are limited to ‘hi’s and ‘goodbye’s, the occasional ‘mmhm’ when she has to and she’s not entirely sure when their friendship became so close that Mercedes is allowed to be disappointed in her. But there’s no one at home to talk to and she spent enough time practising her mother’s signature to know that she must kind of want to be here.
Even if it’s just because the alternative is so dull.
Out of the corner of her eyes, she tries to make out how he looks (and if he’s looking at her) but all she sees is the way he keeps rolling away from her and the mention of her name like he does every time he leaves Glee early just so they won’t have to walk the few feet down the halls together.
(When everyone shifts their gaze to her direction, she just clears her throat and pretends that she wasn’t singing to him the whole time.)
---
Rachel’s voice has the ability to cut through crowds, for better or for worse, “Noah, you’re Jewish.”
He replies through a mouthful, “And?”
“And you’re eating a hotdog.”
He swallows, mimics his grandfather, “Oy Vey!” She puts her hands on her waist, looks anything but amused and he smirks because it seems to get easier and easier to do that the longer he knows her. He rolls his eyes, “Rachel, just eat.”
“Heritage is important, Noah.”
He opens his mouth to say, “to you-- and to my mom, but I don’t care” and instead gets cut off by, “Uh, Rachel?”
“Yes, Mr. Schue?”
“They’re kosher. I made sure.”
Puck smiles through another bite, something resembling an ‘I told you so, now just eat’ stretched thin across his lips. And he likes Mr. Schue’s answer so much more than his own because it makes her clench her jaw and turn on her heel and he thinks that’s kind of funny. She collects two plates and grabs two hotdogs. He loses interest round about when she walks past the campfire, instead running his middle finger on the edge of his disposable plate and licking ketchup off of it.
Rachel flicks her hair over her shoulder, and warily sits next to Quinn. She’s picking at her water bottle’s label until it’s shredded, till the mountain scene on the front of it is gone and the list of potential benefits are scattered and instead there’s just clear plastic to look through.
“You should eat, Quinn.”
She looks up through her long eyelashes, and Rachel still finds herself flinching (still fighting the urge to cover her nose) whenever they make eye contact. But Quinn looks too tired to be afraid of right now, too pale and too weak and more like she’s going to faint than punch. “I’m not hungry.”
“I know you hate me. But you’re eating for two and you really shouldn’t have your baby suffer just to spite me.”
“I’m just having an… aversion to meat right now.”
“Oh…” She glances down, “You want the bun?”
She raises her palm, stops the plate from coming anywhere near her, “I’m pretty much having an aversion to everything right now.”
“Oh.”
Rachel picks at her bun. “Do you mind if I eat?”
“You don’t have to sit with me, Rachel.”
Her bottom lip pouts subconsciously. “Do you want me to leave you alone?”
“…I don’t know.”
“Oh.” Their shoulders rub together, she nods like one of those dogs on a dashboard. “I’ll just-- I’ll stay here until you make your decision.”
---
“Why are we here anyway? No one’s mad at us.”
“I don’t know, maybe we’re meant to be mad at them or something.”
“You think?”
Mike shrugs, “I don’t know, man-- what, should we just… pick someone?”
---
They’ve both got headphones on and Puck knocks into Finn’s shoulder by accident after he misjudges the distance between them. “Sorry…” He clears his throat, “Dude.”
He doesn’t say anything, just carries on walking, ignores Puck saying his name the first few times. “What?!”
“I’m… really sorry.”
“Yeah, well, you should’ve thought of that before.”
“You can forgive her but you can’t forgive me? What happened to the bro code?”
“Bro code?” He scoffs. “Bro code meant nothing the second you slept with my girlfriend. And I haven’t forgiven her. I haven’t-- I just-- Just leave me the hell alone, Puck.”
With arms outstretched, “So this is it?”
“I told you I was done with you.”
---
“Okay,” Ms. Pillsbury lets out a light nervous laugh and pushes back her perfectly groomed ginger hair. “The idea is to really listen. So you can only talk when you’re-- when you’re holding the stick.” Her hands are firmly clasped around a long tube- sparkly and in the school colours. “It’s a… talking stick.”
Brittany’s head shoots up, “The stick can talk?”
“No, sweetie.”
“Oh.” Her blonde hair falls in front of her face again.
“Mr. Schue, I--”
He raises a finger to his lips, grabs the stick. “Rachel, you’ve already missed the point.”
She folds one arm across her stomach and then holds out the other hand. “Sir, I really don’t see how some childish game is going to get us ready for Regionals. No offence, Miss. Pillsbury, but some… bedazzled baton isn’t going to do us any good.”
“You’re meant to just find a stick, but they--”
He takes it back, “Rachel, without you-- with nobody talking, we don’t stand a chance.” She goes to talk, takes the breath in and everything, and he pulls the stick out of her reach. “Now with Vocal Adrenaline being such amazing dancers, we need something else. And what we had was chemistry. You were friends. You loved singing together, that’s something that you can’t choreograph.” He smiles, “Now I agree with Ms. Pillsbury. You guys aren’t listening to each other.”
Emma reaches forward. “Uh, Will? This is for you too.”
“What?”
“You’re a part of this club too. I think you have some things to say. And hear.”
He sits down next to her, nods to himself and smiles, “Fine. You’re right.”
He lets go of the stick, Rachel’s the first to take hold of it. Of course. “There’s a lot of residual tension from sectionals. I know people blame me for everything that happened but I--”
“You didn’t have to tell.” Kurt raises his hand; she looks at Mr. Schue who gestures for her to pass it on, and when she does, she knows she’s going to regret it. “As far as I’m concerned it wasn’t our business. It wasn’t our place.”
She places her hands on the stick, doesn’t take it from him. “I already apologised--”
“You said sorry to Quinn. And I’m sure you meant it,” Mercedes breaks the rules and Kurt holds the stick and pulls Rachel’s arm gently with it to let her touch it. “But you have a habit of selling out people and their secrets when it suits you. Forgive me if I don’t trust you.”
“I know, but I--”
He clears his throat, his nose tilted up, “Rachel Berry will always be number one.”
Mercedes nods, “And it’s really hard to know where you stand with someone like that.”
And here is one of those rare moments in Rachel Berry’s life where she doesn’t know what to say. She’s grateful for Emma’s pale hand as it ducks into view and clasps around the stick. “That’s good-- That’s really good, guys. Anyone else want to talk?”
Artie coughs. “Sometimes I feel like Mr. Schue puts too much pressure on us. Not necessarily to win, but to be, I don’t know, perfect?”
“What?”
Santana nods. “Yeah. Like with that whole vitamin D thing-- I felt more ashamed than the time my parents caught me and Puck on their waterbed. And I was actually wearing a bra this time.”
Will’s eyebrows stay somewhere near his hairline. “Wow… I had-- I guess I thought that was my job.”
Mike Chang says his one line of the evening. “It is, but… Sometimes it’s just a little too much.”
He nods, “… Okay. Thank you.”
Puck mentally logs away all the apologies he owes to everyone here. He and Quinn are kind of similar like that; a catalogue of faces they should take by the hand and say ‘sorry’ all sincere and quiet, a list of sins to repent for. Neither of them is choosing to do that tonight.
“I’ll go.” Finn sniffs, sticks his hand up and waits for her to walk over, he seems to take in the object with more detail than everyone else. “You all want to talk about who you can trust? About how hard it is to know where you stand? Everybody lied to me. Every single one of you. And you’re all so busy blaming Rachel that you don’t even look at yourselves. But the way I see it, none of you are my friends. I don’t care why she told me, the point is that she did.”
No one talks, no one has an answer. Fade to black. Tune in next time.
---
“You know, I really thought this weekend would be about Kurt’s makeovers and Spin the Bottle.”
---
Rachel’s pouring bottled water over her toothbrush and standing with her back to Finn. She concentrates on the gentle circular strokes and not how near he is and how he’ll be sleeping in relatively close proximity to her.
She may be in love with someone who doesn’t love her back, but oral hygiene is important.
“So… I guess you’ll be… turning in pretty soon?”
Spit, “Yeah, there isn’t really much to do around here. Just… trees and stuff.”
“Right, you’re right. I was--” She goes back to scrubbing, shakes her head, covers her mouth when she spits. He’s screwing the cap on his bottle and pretending he didn’t just work out what she was getting at.
“I guess I’ll see you tomorrow then.”
“Yeah.”
“…Nice pyjamas, Rach.”
---
“I really think this was a mistake,” Will breathes out, zipping the tent up and turning back to face Emma. “I mean, they all hate each other. What made me think bringing them all to the same place- no privacy, no places to hide-- how is that a good idea?”
“Will, you-- You’re trying. They’re talking- some of them are talking, and that’s good. That’s really good. Most people would have given up. Now- Now Glee Club is just a little broken. But that’s alright, you’ll fix it. Or it’ll fix itself.”
She shrugs, and with the quiet rustle of fabric it occurs to him that (with the exception of this one time she wore a Hazmat suit because there was a leak in her apartment and she had to get her things and ‘have you heard about water diseases because they can be really, really… well, gross.’) he doesn’t think he’s ever seen her more covered up. She’s got these pyjamas made out of stiff white cotton- just hands and feet and face on show- and she keeps moving her fingers just a few inches out of his reach. “Emma, are you okay? You look… nervous. More than usual.”
“No, I’m- I’m okay. I’m fine.”
Her eyelashes are wet and her cheeks red where she‘s scrubbed them raw with make-up wipes and tissue and she‘s probably been like this the whole time but he was too wrapped up in his own stuff to notice. “Emma.”
“This is--” She runs her teeth over her bottom lip. “I mean, this is the first time we’ve slept… together.” Her eyes widen, “Not like that. Not like--”
He sits up. “I… know what you mean, Em.”
“Of course you-- And it’s dirty. It’s very dirty.”
“It’s--?”
“The place, not the-- the place is dirty, it’s messy.” He pulls his knees up to his chest and watches her small hands flap, twirl in the air and then come back down to pat gently on her thighs. “Will, you have to understand that I have… I mean, I have thought about this for a long- a long, long time. And when I thought about it, there were… Oh, hot showers and Purell and clean sheets and not dirt and… bugs. And I came here because I wanted to be with you, and support you, but I don’t… Know if I can.”
Her mouth opens and closes a few more times and she’s getting to that stage where her eyes itch and she’ll blow up into her fringe soon. He takes her face in both hands, “Emma, if I have learnt anything from my marriage it’s that things aren’t always exactly like you pictured it.” He ducks his head down to meet her eyes, “There may not be Purell, but I’m here and I’m really happy that I’m with you.” She hesitantly clasps one hand around his, he feels her short nails scrape against his skin. “And until you’re ready… This tent is pretty big. We’ll just stay on either side.”
She lets out a breath against his face, her fingertips trace the back of his hand until he lets her go. “Okay. I’m… Sor--”
“Don’t even think it.”
She doesn’t smile but her shallow dimples tell him she’s considering doing so. She reaches down and clutches her sleeping bag, pulls it close to herself like the blanket she had when she was younger (until that whole dairy farm incident and then suddenly all she could think about was bacteria and washing it just made it lose its smell, so now it’s curled up in a box somewhere like the rest of her), and crawls over to the other side of the tent. He smiles and turns away, switches off his lantern. As he does so, she watches the shape of him fade into something from the black as her eyes grow accustomed to the dark.
“Night, Will.”
He smiles to nothing, “Night, Emma.”
---
Puck rolls onto his back, “Can you sleep, Chang?”
“With you asking me every five minutes? No, Puckerman.”
“Right-- Sorry, dude.”
“It’s okay.”
“Maybe I need to… go for a walk or something.”
“No leaving tents.”
“What?”
“Schue’s rules.” He yawns. “Why don’t you just, I don’t know, stick your head out?”
He rolls his eyes in the dark because that’s pretty stupid but he’s still unzipping his tent and turning onto his stomach five minutes later after he’s sure Mike’s asleep. His eyes adjust to the faint glow of the campfire about fifteen feet away, he makes out the faint shapes of khaki tents circled around it.
Camping when he was younger consisted of him and Finn in his backyard wearing Mr. Hudson’s army helmets and swearing they could hear bears even though they live in the suburbs. They used to freak each other out just enough that they’d go sleep inside; they’d call each other chicken and cluck their way back into the house- each time silently promising to be the one who says it next time.
It’s not a bear (or a bird, or a plane) he sees now. In fact he’s not entirely sure how he missed her in the first place.
Quinn’s arms crossed against her chest and then stretched out in a V above her head. She puts one hand on her waist and moves her hips in a circle, the other fist pumped in the air. She cups her mouth with her hands, no sound comes out. She claps without her hands ever touching. She pulls her t-shirt down over her round stomach- the one that’s in the way of her kicks- and goes back to her spot. An imaginary X on the ground that doesn’t mark the treasure, but an old version of her. A version that does cartwheels and somersaults. She doesn’t hold her stomach or vomit back her lunch. Her crucifix pendant doesn’t burn a hole in her skin, she can still hold a bible. She lives at home with her parents who haven’t thrown her out and who don’t intend to.
She goes to step forward on the count of eight, hands on her hips again but instead of going back to her imaginary crowds, the make-believe football team, the character she used to play, she just places both hands on her belly, sways back and forth and watches the dying fire. He swears he can make out her lips moving, he’s not close enough to hear what she’s singing (if he was, he’d hear a lullaby). Her fingers move in small circles over where her bellybutton is. Her mouth pulls up into a smile.
Puck falls asleep with her and her (their) baby in his head.
---
“Did you know that you swallow eight spiders a year? I bet they’re not even counting camping incidents.”
“No, my mom told me that’s just a rumour.”
“Really?”
“Yeah… I bet someone has though.”
---
I am damaged at best, like you’ve already figured out or Day Two