Work Text:
Give me a Quinn Fabray who grows.
Give me a Quinn who at 15 realises she’s gay, 16, hates herself for it, 17, cuts her hair short and dyes it pink - a screaming beacon of ‘notice this, not anything else, pleasepleaseplease’
At 18 she realises it’s not going away, starts to accept, sees the shining possibility of Yale in front of her - distant, but. Achievable. So she works - harder than she ever has.
Give me a Quinn who for all she fights with Santana, knows how it feels. Who sees Santana and Brittany, first in pain, then in love, more and more so, and thinks, ‘Yeah, they’ve earned it.’ Who lets Santana cry on her shoulder when she's hurting - almost says how much she understands, but. No, not yet. Decides, maybe her parents will never know.
Give me a Quinn who for years thinks she’ll never leave Lima. Who pushes Rachel Berry - who can’t bear to see such talent go to waste. Sees how Rachel could escape, even if Quinn never will.
Who knows she’ll never be able to love Rachel, not really - so she does the next best thing. Helps her get her dreams. So when Quinn sees Rachel standing in New York, she smiles - knows that's Rachel's destiny, and that that's good. That's how it's meant to be.
Give me a Quinn who eventually escapes to Yale. Lies down on her tiny single bed, in her tiny crappy room, barely enough room for her and a closet, and yet has more space than her luxury room in Lima ever did.
Give me a Quinn who kisses girls gently, at parties, at bars, music isolating them, and eventually in coffee shops, at museums.
The first girl Quinn dates - she doesn’t, really. It’s just smirking kisses and quiet orgasms and talking, the girl from Lima who’s never been kissed - not how it courts - and a girl from Chicago, who’s loved girls since she’s known how. When it ends, they’re friends, and that doesn’t stop; Quinn finds herself slowly finding a community, the loneliness that's always hung over her dissipating. Slowly.
Santana and Quinn fuck at the non-wedding. Quinn doesn’t admit that it’s not her first with a girl - it’s Lima. Lima still feels dangerous and scary and yeah, she’s not coming back here when she doesn’t have to.
But Santana is her best friend, and a good kisser, and surprisingly gentle. So it becomes a two time thing, and they relax afterwards, reminiscing about cheerleading and drama and everything that mattered and never will again, except in moments like these, memory as vitality.
The second girl Quinn dates, they break each other’s hearts. Everything happens too fast - they’ve barely met before it’s talking hours after they’ve finished their coffee, sharing their favourite films, blushing every time Quinn kisses her. And it ends, messily and horribly, and Quinn remembers that love comes with this, too.
She tells Tina that when they meet up, the start of her next year at Yale, Tina's first at Brown. Tina’s visiting, and Quinn tells her, 'Maybe that’s why I don’t date, not really. Giving someone your heart is just an invitation to have it crushed.’
And Tina frowns, stirs her tea lightly, 'But it’s an invitation to have it protected, too,’ and she falters, then tells Quinn about her tiny crush on Mercedes back in freshman year, how she and Sugar have been texting, just a bit - and it’s just doing lunch, but. It’s nice lunch. Really nice. And Sugar gets Tina, it feels like.
Quinn starts to realise that maybe she wasn’t so alone in Lima as she thought, but doesn’t blame them for keeping it hidden til they’d left. She’d done the same, of course.
She graduates eventually. She’s done well - her tutor, usually formidable, gives Quinn a smile, some standard platitudes, then 'You’re very different to how we all expected.’ Quinn thinks that’s perhaps a good thing. She leaves Yale, promises to stay in contact with her friends - thinks she actually well.
She doesn’t go home. Judy and Russell - not her parents, she doesn’t need parents - they've long since stopped contacting her.
She’d ditched the Fabray unofficially a year ago. Hasn’t decided on a new surname yet.
She talks to Blaine a bit - they’d understood each other, both lost souls at the same time, trying to find their place and their art. He talks about the New York Crew, about how everyone ended up there again, and she thinks it sounds sort of wonderful.
Before she knows it, she has a tiny place to herself in New York. It’s above a book store, and she helps out as much as she can, and it's lovely.
The invitations come quick. It’s not long before she’s wedged between Santana and Mercedes at a pot luck meal, drinking wine Elliott’s yoga friends made, or patting a beat on the table to Dani and Sam, laughing and singing old country songs on their beat up guitars.
Quinn hasn’t sung in a while - thought she’d hate it. Too much Keep Holding On and I Feel Pretty/Unpretty, unspoken hurt threatening to break through the thick barriers, ruining everything.
But Quinn finds here she maybe kind of loves it. All of it - the community she’s found, in Yale, in New York, with old friends and new.
She stops feeling like an intruder after a month, starts volunteering at a queer youth group, seeing kids like her, pressing books into their hands, 'They helped me,’ she promises, hoping they'll do the same. She starts writing as well - not the story of Quinn with no surname, but stories of people like her. Hoping someone, somewhere, connects. Knows if they do, it'll make everything worth it.
There’s fashion shows with Kurt and Mercedes, their running commentary delighting Quinn - she eventually joins in, remembers the sleepovers with Mercedes, looking through cheap fashion magazines for hours.
There’s art exhibitions with Blaine; which aren’t really for the art, and instead quiet 'Did you ever feel like this,’ and 'I’m sorry that happened to you too,’ and less seriously, 'Really, they were your gay awakening?’
There’s Tina bringing up Sugar one weekend, and saying 'Oh, we’re just close,’ but barely moving a centimetre away from one another; Brittany and Santana come round early and find them kissing, and yeah, they clearly knew how to kiss each other. Quinn finds it very sweet, remembers a Tina a little scared, sees her proudly holding her girlfriend's hand in her own.
And there’s Rachel.
Of course there’s Rachel.
It’s not as if Quinn didn’t know there would be. She did, from the start - in the same way she thought about Central Park. It was just a fixture of New York, beautiful, shining, out of her reach.
But when Quinn finds herself talking into the morning with Rachel, when they end up in tiny ice cream parlours, when they sit in a restaurant, gently holding hands, it’s both-
She’s remembering the Rachel she fell so, so in love with, all those years ago.
And she’s falling all over again for this Rachel, the here and now.
It'd hurt, if Rachel wasn't so lovely about it, and if Quinn didn't start to suspect maybe she's not the only one with feelings here.
Quinn thinks about her friends. Thinks about the queer kids who look up to her, the tiny bookstore she loves, the publisher who’s getting her poems out by the end of the month. She thinks about being drunk off wine, and giggly, she thinks about holding Rachel’s hand, thinks about all the people she’s somehow come to love - how she loved them before, but finally can admit it.
Thinks about the shroud of a bullying cheerleader and how free she feels without it.
When Quinn and Rachel kiss, gently, it’s full of possibility. And Quinn thinks that this time, she’s grown - enough to kiss back, to create her own future. With Rachel, if she'll have Quinn.
They kiss again, and… Yeah. It’s wonderful.