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FAUSTUS: If we say that we have no sin,
We deceive ourselves, and there is no truth in us.
Why, then, belike we must sin
And so consequently die.
Ay, we must die an everlasting death.
— Christopher Marlowe, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus
Rachel Goldberg is not a person.
It has taken her an irrationally long time to accept this fact.
She’s sitting in Quinn’s office, on the couch. It’s familiar, this place, like the setting of a recurring nightmare. It does not induce her to panic; in these dreams, she never does. All she ever does is sit still and calm, counting the beats of her heart in her ears, and wait for a monster that never comes.
Dr. Simon might ask: why doesn’t the monster ever come, Rachel? And if it never does, what are you waiting for? What makes this a nightmare? Couldn’t you just wake up? Couldn’t you just—
Quinn is at her desk. Rachel can hear the muted rasp of her pen on the paper, the soft clicking of her computer keys. Occasionally, she takes a sip of coffee. Rachel does not look at her. She doesn’t do anything. Still and calm.
This could be familiar. This should be familiar. How many hours have they passed like this— in five, ten-minute increments, when the chaos outside becomes too much? Trading snappy comments, bitching about the contestants, but mostly working in a silence that was...not friendly, exactly, but something close. Camaraderie, maybe. When they do this, they are comfortable, in the hazy quiet that’s so different from the unreal world outside. When they do this, they can pretend that they are human. Just for five, ten minutes at a time. It’s sustaining. Like little gasps of oxygen when you’re drowning.
Rachel realizes that Quinn is staring at her.
“So you’re back,” says Quinn, with a trace of her normal sarcasm. Just a trace, though— the rest of her tone is...empty. Blank. “I have to say I’m surprised.”
Rachel turns, tries to keep her face as neutral as Quinn’s voice. “Why?”
“Simon told you to get out. I told you to get out. You wanted to get out. And you did.” Quinn stands, crosses the room, comes and sits down next to Rachel. Normally she’s got a full four inches on Rachel, with her heels; sitting, they’re almost the same height. Her expression is as empty as her voice. Guarded, Rachel would think, if she didn’t know Quinn— but she does, she does know Quinn, and this is not guarded. This is something else, something she’s never seen before. “So why are you back?”
Honesty. Be honest, Rachel , says the residual little voice in the back of her head. She wants to laugh at that; if she did, she knows it would be hysterical, decaying into a scream. She is not sure that she would be able to stop.
She does not laugh. Instead, she lies. “I guess—” her voice halts in her throat. “I guess I can’t stay away.”
Quinn looks at her evenly. “You’re lying.”
“I am.”
“Why?”
Quinn knows her. Quinn can tell. Of course she can. Rachel thinks that, to Quinn, she must be as an open book, that Quinn can flip through idly at will. Something she can use to get what she wants, that can tell her what she needs to know. She ought to feel...invaded, probably, at this lack of privacy. She really ought to. But there’s some comfort in it, in the understanding that someone knows her for what she is. That she does not have bother with the person-mask she normally wears. Does not have to lie.
Rachel takes a deep breath. “Because I wanted to come back. I knew I didn’t need to. I knew I could stay out there in the middle of nowhere forever, if I wanted, and never hurt anyone again. I knew I could keep people—” her voice catches in her throat and she thinks she might sob, but there is no sympathy on Quinn’s face, no anything— “safe. From me. If I wanted to.”
“But you didn’t want to,” Quinn says quietly.
Rachel is silent then.
Eventually, Quinn reaches out and pulls Rachel to her. Rachel doesn’t resist— lets Quinn wrap an arm around her shoulders and shift around her so that as much of her is touching Rachel as possible. Drawing Rachel in. Quinn’s hands are cold but the rest of her body is so warm , and Rachel is freezing in the air conditioning that’s trying to overcompensate for the searing, bone-dry Southern California summer. Rachel leans her head on Quinn’s shoulder, and Quinn strokes her hair.
This is not a thing that they do, normally. Historically. Quinn is not to be touched— but she isn’t the one being touched, really, is she? She’s the instigator. She decided to do this. Rachel is still and calm, quiet in her lap, and for a few minutes she tries to lose herself in the feeling of Quinn’s fingers idly playing with her hair. It doesn’t work. Quinn’s fingers are like ice, the rest of her a furnace. Rachel can’t get over the dichotomy.
“This is your fault,” Rachel says, after a while.
Quinn doesn’t stop with her hair. Doesn’t even react. “How so?” she asks, and Rachel feels the words more than hears them.
“You made me into this,” she says, testing the waters. Quinn’s fingers tighten near-imperceptibly, and Rachel is disproportionately gratified that she’s finally managed to get a reaction, however tiny, out of her. “When I came to you, I was...different. I had the potential to be like this, to manipulate people like I do, but I didn’t— it wasn’t natural, like it is now. You made it natural. You took me and you cut out the parts of me that made me a person so that I would be like you instead, and now I don’t—” she falters— “I don’t know what I am. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to live.”
Younger Rachel would have cried here. Now, her voice is perfectly steady, her body without reaction. Detached. Simon would have told her that she’s dissociating. She knows that she isn’t.
“Do you want me to apologize?” Quinn asks.
“No,” Rachel tells her. “But I wish you would have asked, first.”
“Noted.” Quinn’s hand finds the back of her neck, the tender skin where it merges with the base of her skull. Rachel shivers. “I wanted to tell your mom, when she called you those things. Said that you’d been manipulating people since you were little. Maybe you were, I don’t know. Like you said, you had the potential. But who you are now— that’s all me. I brought it to the surface.” Rachel can hear, feel the smile in her voice. Fond and familiar. Making sure that Rachel knows whose she is.
“But I always had it in me,” Rachel whispers.
“Of course you did.”
Rachel sits up, looks Quinn in the eye. “Why do I want this?” she asks, a note of desperation in her voice. “Why do I want to hurt people?”
Quinn shrugs. “Can’t answer that. It’s different for you than it is for me.” Her face hardens, and a sudden sharp edge enters her voice. “You might want to ask Simon about that one.”
“Quinn—”
“No, you’re right. That was out of line. Sorry.” She squeezes Rachel’s shoulder affectionately. “We’re rid of him now.”
Rid of him. Rid of Simon, that fragile lifeline to normalcy in the strange, dizzying world Rachel inhabits. This dream plane, where nothing is real. Maybe that’s why she can do it, in conscience— why she can ruin lives and manipulate emotions and kill, even, if she wants. Because not a moment of it, not a word she says, feels as though it is concrete. The contestants, the people around her are as illusions, poor paper facsimiles of human beings. They are not real. None of this is real.
Except Quinn.
Quinn is a monster. Rachel is also a monster. Everyone else— Jeremy-Madison-Chet-Jay-Simon-Coleman; their names are an indistinct, monolithic blur to Rachel— they are human. But they are not real, and she and Quinn, they are.
It is a terrifying realization to come to full terms with, but one that Rachel thinks she has known for a long time. Years. Since she met Quinn.
“Is this why?” she asks.
“Is what why?” Quinn cannot, Rachel remembers, actually read her mind. As much as that may seem to be the case.
“They’re not real. The people we hurt. And maybe we’re...not people, but we’re real. They’re like—”
“Like paper,” Quin finishes for her. “Yeah. I know.” She lets out a long breath. “I don’t know if that’s why, Rach. I think it’s definitely something to do with it. But, for me, what helped was realizing that I— can’t be kind. I can not do this, go and hide away in the middle of nowhere like you were planning to, but I’d be miserable. And if I’m real and they’re not, why should I waste my time prioritizing their lives over mine?” She leans in, reaches over and gently cups Rachel’s jaw. Her eyes are tender, in a way that Quinn’s eyes never are. “This makes me happy, Rach. It’s the only thing that can. And now you know that the same goes for you.” Quinn traces her thumb over Rachel’s lips. “Why make yourself miserable?”
“Because, I don’t—” and then Quinn closes her eyes, leans in further, and kisses her on the mouth.
Had this happened any other time, Rachel would have been shocked. Not because she’d never considered the possibility— she’d seen the way Quinn looked at her— but because she’d never expected Quinn to act on it. Why would she need sex to control Rachel, when she had so many more elegant methods at her disposal?
Something about this, though, is different. Less about control, more about...convincing, maybe, is the closest word for it. Certainly Quinn is still manipulating her, of course she is, and Rachel knows this. Just as she always has. And, as ever, she allows it to happen.
Quinn tilts Rachel’s head to the side, kisses her deeper. Rachel...doesn’t kiss back, but she opens her mouth wider, obedient, and lets Quinn pull her in closer. If Quinn were anyone else, Rachel would feel sick about this— it’s hard for her not to feel sick about such things, when she draws people in to her as easily as breathing, and then ruins them by instinct. What was it that Jeremy had called her? A black hole. Lies like gravity. But Quinn knows her, inside and out; Quinn is like her, and she is the one person whom Rachel is sure she can’t trick.
It takes a good long time for Quinn to let her up for air. When she does, her lipstick is still perfectly in place, her face utterly composed. She’s smiling. There is a satisfaction in it, but also a sort of gentleness, which Rachel has never seen on Quinn. It is strange, and incongruous with the rest of her, but there nonetheless.
“I’m glad you’re back,” murmurs Quinn, still so close that Rachel can feel her breath. Warm, like the rest of her. Except for her hands, which are so cold on Rachel’s neck that they send shivers down her spine. “I missed you, Rachel.”
“I missed you too,” says Rachel, and the words taste bitter as blood in her mouth.