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They’re both totally fucked up.
Being in love with each other never changes that. Because being in love with someone as fucked up as you are doesn’t make you any less fucked up and it sure as hell doesn’t fix you; sometimes it actually makes you worse.
(And sometimes it feels like the only place you want to be.)
Rachel Goldberg and Quinn King know they’re fucked up.
What they pretend not to know is that they’re in love with each other.
Because here’s the thing: they see in each other all the things they hate in themselves.
Quinn sees Rachel attempting, over and over again, to get better; to be better, to grow, to let go. And she hates it because she’s never even tried to do the same.
Rachel sees all the callousnesses and cruelty that Quinn pretends is who she is but is really just armour to protect her vulnerabilities. And she hates it because her own cruelty isn’t armour; it runs too deep to be pretence.
What they refuse to see is that the inexplicable rope that ties them together, no matter how far they pull it, is the rawest of loves. It’s not that they’re blind to each other flaws; on the contrary they see them all too clearly - and yet they always come back.
Because no one’s as broken as they are and they can’t forgive themselves, so they forgive each other instead.
It’s love of the most dysfunctional kind - but it’s love.
The rope never frays.
(Even when it should.)
When Rachel started working for Everlasting it had felt like coming home.
Well. Not home because home is what she’d been running from in one way or another since she was twelve. But all the same, it was that feeling she’d heard other people describe but never truly understood, that discovery of a place where you felt like you belonged, where you could be exactly who you were.
The world of Everlasting made sense to her because it was a place where it was okay to weave the truth into what you needed it to be; it was okay to weave herself into something that was palatable for everyone else and yet still got her what she needed. It was okay that she wasn’t a real person but someone who simply pretended to be in order to walk through the world.
It was more than okay it was her goddamn job description and came with a title that people respected: producer.
Quinn was the first person to see it in her, the way she rearranged herself herself, ever so slightly, with each of the contestants to make them feel at ease enough to let their guard down.
The dragon was a nickname that came later; that first year Quinn referred to her as ‘my baby chameleon’ and she said it with that dazzling Quinn smile that made Rachel feel invincible.
She decided she didn’t need to be real so long as Quinn always looked at her like that.
Neither one of them have ever been willing to examine their feelings in detail. They exist in a tenuous balance of accepting themselves for the terrible people they are lest it destroy them to think too deeply about their sins.
(The truth of course is that they aren’t bad people. They’re a product of their traumas. It’s not an excuse, it’s just reality. They’re human and they make bad choices but the truth is also that they could be so much more but they choose not to be. That makes them a little less forgivable.)
If they cared to consider themselves critically this is what they might understand:
Quinn doesn’t want to be Rachel’s mother figure. She wouldn’t even know how; all she had for herself was an alcoholic father and silence where her mother’s name should be. She decided early on that she had nothing to give a child and it was helpful in some ways, the open affair with Chet, because it gave everyone a reason for her childlessness that she never had to justify.
Still, people insist waving about the absurd allusion that she sees Rachel as a daughter. The truth is Quinn just resents the damage mothers can do, whether by their absence or their presence. She’s seen firsthand the damage Rachel’s own mother has wrought so she leans into Rachel’s need for an alternate authority figure and though she’s hardly maternal, she doesn’t destroy Rachel the way her mother did. She tells herself that’s something good.
The thing about Rachel is that she craves approval but hates herself too much to ever accept it if offered with sincerity and affection. Quinn has to push her, make her work for her successes in order to give Rachel any sense of satisfaction. The problem is that Rachel’s success is contingent on doing the very things that make her hate herself. It’s a cycle Quinn doesn’t know how to break.
Rachel doesn’t want Quinn to fill the void her mother created, she just wants it gone. Obliterated. Eclipsed by anything else. So she takes what Quinn gives her and tries to turn it into what she needs.
And the last thing she needs is a mother.
The thing with Quinn is that she doesn’t pretend Rachel is anything she isn’t and she doesn’t ask Rachel to be anything else. There’s relief in that. She’s failed to live up to the expectations of every man who’s ever claimed to love her; but Quinn’s only expectation is that Rachel is Rachel.
That means a lot of things; it means Rachel is the shark who gets shit done on the set, it means she’s an unstable mess who falls apart on camera, who nearly runs away with a suitor, who sleeps in a set truck and doesn’t shower, who gets an absurd matching tattoo with Quinn just because.
And Quinn accepts it all as part of the package that is Rachel and season after season somehow remains convinced that Rachel is worth it.
That’s the part that fucks Rachel up the most.
Actually, the dichotomy between real and not real is what fucks Rachel up the most.
Everlasting isn’t real but it is honest about what it is. The rest of the world tries to pretend it’s real but it always seems to lie. The notion that her mother only treated her with her best interests at heart isn’t real. Jeremy and Adam and Coleman loving her wasn’t real. Healing through essential honesty wasn’t real.
She rewrites her reality over and over and over and over again until she has no idea what to believe.
Real is: she’s sick.
Real is: real is she’s a monster.
Real is: trauma made her this way.
Real is: Jeremy loved her.
Real is: she didn’t deserve it.
Real is: she can get better.
Real is: she doesn’t want to.
Real is: she’s perfect.
(Real is: Quinn.)
They’ve both dreamt about each other and woke up wet and wanting.
But they both know all too well that sex isn’t love so it doesn’t mean a damn thing.
And if sometimes Quinn dreams of Rachel simply lying in bed next to her and sometimes Rachel dreams of Quinn’s hand in hers - well, it’s just a product of all the time they spend producing carefully constructed, but altogether bullshit, images of love and romance.
Dreams are just the trash left floating around your consciousness after all.
(Getting matching tattoos doesn’t mean a damn thing either.
After all, they quite pointedly say dick in them so what more proof do you need?)
“You need to get over me,” Rachel had said one time, the closest she’s ever come to alluding to the depth of what’s really between them.
“No,” Quinn had replied. She’d waited for the rest of the words to come, the deflection or the hand wave or the cruel twisting around of Rachel’s words, but nothing else had.
Her brain had betrayed her in that moment, refusing to let her speak anything but the truth.
She didn't need to get over Rachel.
She didn’t want to.
She probably couldn’t even if she did.
The closest Quinn’s ever come to being totally honest about her feelings is crying the words ‘I love you, you’re fired’ at Rachel in pure desperation and there’s a part of her that wishes Rachel knew just how real that moment really was.
But it had been crisis time and when that was finally over, smoking wreckage and bodies in a ditch, it didn’t seem possible to go back to that.
She had lay on a pool chair with Jeremy and Chet literally between them and that was a chasm far too difficult to cross.
Season after season Rachel plays out the same scene on the set of Everlasting. She pours all the feelings she refuses to identify into some worthless man. Jeremy. Adam. Coleman. August.
It’s funny really how between seasons she can pour all that feeling into trying to heal herself (no matter how bullshit something like ‘essential honesty’ might be) because without Quinn there clouding her vision it’s easier to ignore. Or easier to let herself believe the bullshit recovery narratives without the brutal truth of Quinn in front of her face.
But when she’s on set it’s all right there, assaulting her senses in ways she hates but refuses to acknowledge. It’s the sick hollow fluttery feeling in her stomach when Quinn’s around, that gets worse when Quinn’s close, that rises to an absolute storm when Quinn’s fucked up and drunk and hiding sadness behind her anger.
It’s the way she can’t focus when Quinn’s voice reaches her ears from halfway across set and she tries not to turn her head to find her but she can’t help it. It’s that rope again, pulling her against her will.
It’s the way she straight up disassociates when she sees Quinn with whoever she happens to be fucking at the time.
So she focusses all that feeling on someone new and tells herself she’s trying to believe in love again.
(The truth of course is that it’s never love. Not Jeremy, or Adam or Coleman or August. And it never will be, no matter how many times she plays out this scene.)
So season after season Quinn sabotages it under the pretence that she’s protecting Rachel. The cynical part of her (which is most of her) knows it’s never going to be love under these circumstances and she’s tired of seeing Rachel broken and blindsided by it each time.
But the tiny part of her that cynicism hasn’t completely erased - the same tiny part that briefly thought she could get married and have kids and it would be her happily ever after - flinches each time she robs Rachel of yet another chance at love because what if it really could be.
Rachel deserves it and Quinn wants her to be happy.
But she still destroys it anyway and refuses to be honest about why.
They can’t let themselves love the way they actually do, both too afraid of destroying each other.
(She deserves better is a thought they’ve both had far too often to ignore.
That’s love too.)
Somehow, however many breakdowns later, Quinn remains the only person Rachel has ever felt remotely safe with. She knows exactly how fucked up that is because Quinn isn’t safe - not the way a person should be. Not with all the barbs and dismissals tossed at her, or the way Rachel’s fragile mental health is the punchline to so many of her jokes.
But she’s still the safest Rachel’s got because she’s like an anchor; no matter how far Rachel drifts she can’t get too lost - Quinn always pulls her back and tells her this is where she’s supposed to be.
So with her head in Quinn’s lap she wants so desperately to properly fall apart. She wants to just let it out; cry and rage and kick and thrash and feel Quinn hold her tightly until she’s spent.
She won’t though because she knows there’s a reason that Quinn is the safest person she’s got - it’s because she doesn’t deserve anything better and so she refuses to ask Quinn for anything more.
When Rachel curls up in Quinn’s lap, it hurts.
Quinn doesn’t know how to be soft.
She can’t remember when she decided that was something she couldn’t allow herself to be but it’s been a fucking long time and whatever softness she wishes she could bring out for Rachel, it’s hidden so deep she can’t even picture what it would look like anymore.
(That’s a lie. She knows what it would look like. Inside her that softness is desperate; screaming and clawing to get out, to run a gentle hand across Rachel’s hair until she sleeps so she can have a reprieve from whatever pain it is that’s brought her here.)
Quinn feels it like something physical that holds her captive, unable to move while Rachel lies in her lap, silent and still, held prisoner by something else entirely. The most that Quinn can give is to remain still with Rachel’s head heavy in her lap, ignoring the way her legs have gone to sleep and she’s struggling to control her breathing, until Rachel sits up, says ‘night Quinn’ with no explanation for the last forty minutes and walks away.
Quinn exhales and lets herself return to steel, relieved not to fight the unfamiliar pull anymore but she doesn’t feel free.
The discomfort just shifts to the knowledge that she always fails to be what Rachel needs.
It makes it just as hard to breath.
The notion that she and Rachel don’t touch each other is a lie but it’s a lie that Quinn needs. It’s true that their moments of deliberate affection or support are few and far between but Quinn’s got every single one burned into her brain and the only way she can convince herself that they mean nothing is to pretend they never even happen.
Rachel is acutely aware of every single moment that they touch but she pretends it’s completely meaningless to curl up in her boss’s lap with no explanation.
The truth is still too scary for them both.
Because the truth is, Rachel Goldberg and Quinn King are completely and dysfunctionally in love with each other and one day one of two things is going to happen.
Either one of them leaves and breaks the cycle.
Or one of them caves and they fuck each other up by being consciously in love.
Neither of them know which one they’re secretly hoping for.
(But maybe that’s how they know it’s really love.)