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This is the thing: she has sharp fangs and she’s made a pact with herself never to sheathe them, at least not anymore. The command she had over people once upon a million years ago isn’t entirely gone just because of the teen pregnancy and the exile from the Cheerios and the punk phase and the current plot with Beth.
This is the thing: she knows Rachel could end her with a look, and Rachel knows it, too, and so the two of them circle each other like the snake eating its own tail. Ad infinitum, as Rachel would probably say, because that’s genuinely how she talks.
This is the thing: there’s a chore wheel in the choir room, and it’s her and Rachel’s turn to make the costumes and there’s still a fissure deep through the theater kids of William McKinley High School.
“I heard that they’re doing Adele for the mash-off,” Rachel says, lightly, without looking at Quinn. She’s been trying to sew the same jacket thing for the past hour. Quinn, for her part, isn’t doing much better, but a chore wheel is a chore wheel, as Rachel tells it.
“They’re going to blow us out of the water,” Quinn chortles, or approximates a chortle anyway. She’s not great at it - isn’t great at squaring her dry, dry view of the world with something approachable. It was easier when she had everything squashed down.
“Probably, yes, but honestly we needed a bit of healthy competition - the New Directions were getting too complacent, and we wouldn’t stand a chance at Nationals without the scrappy underdog spirit that put us on the map in the first place.”
“We won’t make it to Nationals without our two best singers, either.”
“You wound me.” Rachel pricks herself with the needle and wrings her hand out. “Ouch.”
“Are you okay?” Quinn resists the urge to go over to her, look closer.
“I’m fine, it’s a simple puncture.” Rachel takes a discarded scrap and wraps it tight around her finger until the tip turns a pulsating red. It doesn’t look comfortable, but she doesn’t seem to mind. “These things are bound to happen - you weren’t this concerned when I fell directly on my face during rehearsals.”
“I was.” Quinn tenses, a cat with its hackles raised, and she doesn’t know why. She does remember the sickening crack, bone on concrete or linoleum or whatever stage floors are made of. Rachel’s yelp. The music stopping abruptly. “Everyone surrounded you fast enough that I didn’t really need to do anything.”
“Oh. Well, in any case, it’s fine, I’m nearly done with this one.” She holds it up for emphasis - black and gold, embossed with a dragon or something. It’s tacky and Quinn knows that they don’t stand a chance against the Troubletones.
“It’s tacky,” she says, because she lies a lot, but she’s not in the mood to lie about this.
“It’s camp. That’s the point.”
“Sure. It still won’t beat Adele.”
“What could?” Rachel gives a shrug and pricks her finger again. “Ouch.”
“You’re being really calm about this.”
“This is actually a very good situation for me - like I said earlier, there’s more competition and higher stakes, plus with the two strongest singers - behind myself of course - in charge of their own Glee Club there’s really no competition for the solos.” She pauses. “Though, I’m not really…interested, in doing the lead woman’s solo for this one.”
“Oh.” Quinn focuses on the task, so as not to look too closely, so as not to feel the feelings that threaten to undo her from the inside. “Tina?”
“I was thinking of you, Quinn. I think that you should do it.”
“Oh,” she says, again, stupidly. But that’s what Rachel does to her - top marks in her English classes, an award-winning essay she wrote to win a couple hundred dollars in ninth grade, and her vocabulary is reduced to oh.
“Don’t get me wrong, Tina is talented, but you have a - a stage presence, something entirely your own, that I think could give this number the personality that it needs.”
It occurs to Quinn that part of why they’re friends is precisely this kind of thing: Rachel, wrapping insults in too many words. Something entirely your own. Who knows what that even means. If Rachel were truly the simple-minded waif Santana thought of her as, a pitiable, annoying, and altogether too-nice little cherub, then they wouldn’t spend time together like this and Quinn would actually feel kind of bad for her.
Rachel cares, with all of her, but she has standards, and that’s something Quinn’s never fully been able to understand, herself having been willing to lick Coach Sylvester’s artisan (read: arthritic) sneakers if she thought it’d give her a leg up.
She’s told all of this to Santana, who promptly told her to see a psychiatrist, which she promptly ignored. Now she’s here, thinking over her whole sense of self because Rachel said she’d be okay at a solo.
“You don’t have total authority over the club,” she says instead of any of that. “And Schuester hates me after the…” Trainwreck. “...because I quit the club at the start of the year.”
“Right, well, he’s been attempting to sabotage my career from the beginning, so it doesn’t matter what he does. The feud is between Finn and Santana, not Mr. Schuester and Shelby. I have the New Directions’ best interests at heart.”
***
Rachel hasn’t asked her about the Shelby thing, because that won’t help anyone. She’s been trying to ignore it herself and Quinn has never been in the mood to discuss anything, let alone anything personal.
If they’re going to return to that week or so, she remembers sitting in that awful waiting room and sort of staring.
A thing she’s doing now, also, except it’s to catalogue the tension in Quinn’s stitches, the faded tints of cotton-candy pink in the uneven ends of her hair, the slight furrow of her brow.
“I never learned how to sew,” Quinn says, breaking the silence, giving absolutely zero indication regarding whether or not she’s noticed Rachel staring.
“Oh, neither did I. I made it very clear from a young age that I wanted to be on the stage, not behind the scenes, and I’ve never been one for sitting still for extended periods of time anyway.” They’re friends now - this is what friends do, they tell each other things, and still Rachel feels this terrible thrill, like she’s trusting Quinn with a thing too precious for words. Except it’s not, because, you know, she’s saying it, in words.
There are many reasons why Rachel is a performer and not a wordsmith.
“I’m surprised this is your first time doing it.”
“We’re usually able to delegate these things more easily. This is just a - preventative measure, evening things out.” Rachel hates how tiny the holes in the needles are, and also she definitely knows there’s a name for the hole in the needle but she cannot remember it right now. “To stop anybody else from defecting.”
“Who else would? I’m not allowed in, and people are actually paying attention to Tina for once.” Quinn finishes her jacket, or Rachel’s jacket, considering how small it is. “Unless you’re-”
“No, never.” Rachel shakes her head fast enough to give herself whiplash, and unbidden she thinks about how it’s very rare but still possible to get a concussion from moving your head around too fast, or at least that was what she’d read on a website the last time she gave herself a headache.
Thankfully she’s never had one before, knock on wood, because if she did then she wouldn’t be allowed any stimulation and the thought of being alone in a dark room with just her thoughts is enough to make her head hurt more.
“It’s done.” Quinn throws the jacket at her, and Rachel catches it one-handed. If Quinn notices her reflexes she doesn’t say anything, but those, too, are necessary.
“Thank you.” She slips it on, and the sleeves droop over her hands in a way that’s almost comical. “I think that this is yours.”
“Maybe.” There’s a shared moment of - something - between them then, and far be it from Rachel to know what it means.
“If all else fails I don’t need one - especially if you’re doing the solo.”
“You’re still married to that idea?”
“It hasn’t changed in the past five minutes, no. I think that you’re a good singer, maybe not the best, but certainly very good and Santana has never taken me seriously so this is the best option that we have.”
“Oh.” There it is again - Rachel would ask if that was the kind of friendship they had, one where she could ask her things instead of just - being like this. But instead she just looks at her, in the light of the choir room, and she wonders.
“Of course, Tina would still have her moment to shine, and so would Finn - your voices go together well, I’ve never denied that - but still, you deserve some attention. Maybe this part?” Rachel slides over the paper.
***
Quinn imagines looking Shelby in the eye when she sings this.
“For the choreography,” Rachel continues, “I was thinking a sort of 1970s-inspired shuffle - if nothing else we still have Mike and he can work out the specific steps but something like this,” and then she demonstrates with her feet, and then she seems to realize that this is stupid and just stands up and starts to dance with her body.
With her body. How else would she dance? Quinn wonders if there are fumes in this closet. There probably are, knowing this place, knowing its propensity for not giving a shit.
Maybe she’s a hypocrite considering how much pain she caused, but it occurs to her like a stab between the ribs that the administration never did anything to help Rachel, or Kurt, or any of them.
“I’ve decided to give up on the jackets,” Rachel says, snapping her fingers in a rhythm. “I’ll just find some t-shirts for the boys and call it a day - our budget is running low anyhow so this just makes the most sense.”
“Especially since we don’t stand a chance anyway.” Quinn leans on her arm as she watches Rachel, knuckles brushing her own cheek like she’s cradling herself. Rachel doesn’t stop.
“There’s no actual prize - there aren’t any stakes, the only reason I want to win is because I’m stubborn, but why does it matter to you?”
Somehow Quinn imagines that I’m trying to steal back my infant daughter wouldn’t go over well, so she says nothing. Rachel keeps trying the dance.
“And then we’d do this sort of…ta-da-type thing, right here - do you have the demo track?”
“We made up the arrangement. There’s no demo track.”
“And you can play the piano. Go on.” Rachel kind of shoos her towards the piano, hands her the sheet music. “Finn’s part first - what I want!”
“You’ve got that love that’s hard to handle,” Quinn sings, fingers dancing across the keys, tempted to put it in a minor key just because. Rachel mutters more under her breath, things Quinn can’t hear.
“Like a flame that…something, something, candle- and then you and the rest of the club enters, with this arm thing.” Rachel demonstrates, and Quinn stops for a moment to look. “Keep going! Like a candle that - something!”
“Very articulate,” Quinn snarks, because she can.
“I don’t have it memorized because I’ve been working on these terrible jackets, and also because it isn’t the type of music that I prefer anyway.”
“But you’re still doing it,” Quinn exhales.
“I’d like to think I’ve changed since you met me. I still have my competitive edge, don’t get me wrong, but I’ve - I’m good. My crimes are more in favor of other people now, like if something happened to Kurt, maybe I’d stuff the ballots or something.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“I know you would, for Santana or Brittany.” Rachel doesn’t say it as a judgment. She’s stopped dancing, propping her elbows up on the piano now. Quinn looks at her, loves her. We’re kind of friends, huh?
Maybe she hasn’t said that yet.
“Quinn,” Rachel says, and oh…
***
Rachel wants, and that’s always defined her, and right now she wants Quinn, which is - it’s a lot, undoubtedly, but it’s the truth.
“What do you think of me, really?”
Of course, she doesn’t know what she’s expecting to hear in response-
***
Quinn would do whatever Rachel asked, and that scares her so, so much.
***
-but she doesn’t expect this, a cold and still silence, like someone dumped a bucket of water on Quinn’s head.
“I think you’re ambitious,” Quinn begins, starting and stopping like she’s trying to stop herself from - what, exactly? They’ve moved beyond bullying, beyond cruel words and all that. “And you know exactly what you want, which is just, God, Rachel, you don’t know how lucky you are to know exactly what you want.”
“I don’t know everything,” she refutes, because a bit of humbleness does help you be more approachable and also because she doesn’t, because if she did she’d know what to do with the thrumming in her heart whenever Quinn’s around, the ease with which she was able to rattle off that corsage order in junior year because when she’d let her mind wander just enough she’d occasionally stumble into the picture of herself and Quinn going to that prom together, arm in arm, dancing, their height difference perfect and comfortable, not at all like the way she practically needs to jump to slow-dance with Finn.
(That’s not fair, they get along fantastically and she does love him, but…)
“You know more than most people do at our age. How many of our classmates do you actually think are even going to college?”
This is another thing she likes about this friendship she has: they are both, in their own ways, a tad elitist, a tad too good to be Lima losers, and Rachel understands that she should probably work on this but she does appreciate being around somebody who at least understands what it is to want, to have that immense and unending hunger for more, more, always more than what she has.
If she didn’t have that hunger, if she was just trotting through this life getting slushied with no plan out, she imagines that her life would be a miserable one indeed. But then again, maybe that’s exactly what Quinn is doing and maybe that’s why she is the way that she is.
“The ones who want to,” Rachel says, though her heart isn’t in it.
“From the moment I met you, I knew you’d - I can’t do this.” Quinn exhales again, shaky, slumping over the piano keys and making a discordant noise with them as she does so, and Rachel wants to comfort her, Rachel wants to talk to her, Rachel wants…
Well, it’s a tired motif at this point and she doesn’t intend to wear it out, so you get the idea.
“Quinn?” she says instead, and Quinn shifts again, elbows playing a terrible little melody. “Is everything alright?”
“I’m going to get Beth back,” Quinn says, instead of yes or no or any other answer that wouldn’t be more concerning than that. “I am. I know I’m not - mature, and I’m still in high school, and I can’t support her the way Shelby can, but-”
“Okay.”
“What?”
“Okay. If you think that’s best.” Rachel personally thinks that it’s a terrible idea, but she’s a very good actress, as has been previously established. She’ll say what she needs to.
“You’re not going to fight me on it?” Quinn looks like she’s about to deflate - like she wanted an argument. Rachel wonders privately (always privately; she does have some sense of a filter contrary to what people like Santana say) if that’s just how her friend moves through the world, ready to fight, always.
It sounds exhausting. It sounds exactly like what Rachel dealt with until midway through sophomore year, when the ratio of slushies to school days suddenly decreased in such a drastic manner that there were really only two explanations:
1) There was some sort of unionization at the slushie factory, or wherever they make the red sludge that haunts her waking hours.
2) Somebody in their school, somebody with power, had put a stop to the act.
She’s never asked Santana for confirmation, can’t trust Brittany with anything, and simply can’t broach the subject with Quinn, so it’s all remained speculative (for all she knows it might’ve just been the Glee Club’s association with the football team that did it) but she’s never ceased to wonder.
But, well, there are certain things one just doesn’t talk about. When it comes to her and Quinn it’s mostly things one doesn’t talk about; not for lack of trying but simply because the alternative - to broach this thing between them - is much, much too scary.
No, this works just fine - the two of them, hemming tacky little vest-jackets.
They’re friends now, which is on one hand much easier because it means they don’t need pretenses to see each other, but is on the other hand impossibly difficult for much the same reason - Rachel has no reason, really, to like Quinn or even care that much about her, but she does.
She really, really does, and it could be because Quinn seems to understand on a bone-deep level what it is to be a girl too big for her britches (as the saying goes) and to strong-arm your way through the world regardless but it could also be for much more frightening reasons, the types that Rachel doesn’t have the time to consider. Not on top of keeping this mess of a Glee Club together and getting into college and getting her future on track, no, this simply isn’t something she could deal with.
This is easier.
***
It’s Rachel who suggests they go to Breadstix afterwards - it’s close enough, she says, and she needs to decompress after focusing so intently on a performance that’s going to be a 7.5/10 at best.
Quinn agrees. Rachel glances up at the sky like she can make something of it - it’s November, now, and it’s getting darker earlier but it’s not dark yet.
“Oh, you have a…” Rachel plucks a thread from Quinn’s cheek thoughtlessly, easily, too easily.
It reminds her of when they’d just lost Nationals, earlier that year (2011 has been impossibly long) and Schuester had still goaded them into taking a post-loss photo (not that he’d called it that, but that was what it felt like) and Rachel had sort of - reached her hand out, then drawn it back, right before.
“You have an eyelash right there,” she’d said, and Quinn had rubbed at her own cheek and not even tried to smile.
She thinks about it a lot, anyway. Rachel’s hand on her jaw. Rachel always being the one to initiate their hugs, which doesn’t feel fair - the only time Quinn ever kick-started any contact between them was when she slapped her.
In her dreams Rachel traces her hand down the slope of Quinn’s cheek with such tenderness that it makes her cry, and then she wakes up because she knows - even then - that Rachel would not be so gentle as that.
***
Rachel is not a writer but she has taken enough English classes to know that, as a rule of thumb, one isn’t supposed to identify their subjects in fiction by anything but their name if the reader already knows it, or it grows tedious quickly - the blonde, the brunette, the actor, the songstress. Just say their name and be done with it, so these advice-givers say, and she imagines that she will heed that advice when she pens her autobiography.
All of that being said, there is a certain rush in her heart, a swoopy sort of feeling, when she thinks about calling Quinn her friend, when she thinks about telling her dads that she went to Breadstix (always Breadstix!) with her friend.
Regardless of if they actually “finished the jackets” or “have a shot at the mash-off.” They didn’t and they don’t; it frightens her that she doesn’t mind that - at least it’s just a thing without stakes, no awards beyond pride and honor, and she does understand why Santana and Mercedes would want their own space, but, well, still, she’s never been somebody who’s fared well with distractions.
She knows that the kiss cost the New Directions their shot at the Nationals title and she still feels a kind of ugly, rotting shame in that, the sort of thing she would never vocalize aloud because to do so would be to admit a weakness and she already has enough of those to begin with.
(She knows that any one of the athletes could punt her like a football if they wanted to; she’s given them ample reason not to do that but the possibility still remains)
Anyway, she doesn’t need another distraction, doesn’t need more thoughts piling up on top of the ones she already has, no thank you.
Quinn’s just pushing her likely-reheated spaghetti around her plate, gaze dropped down, and Rachel is just looking at her, wondering, thinking, is this what friends do?
“I don’t know why we’re doing Hall & Oates,” Quinn finally exhales, and it’s such a flat non-sequitur that Rachel barks out a laugh in response.
“I don’t know either; it certainly wasn’t my idea.”
“Schuester?”
“Yep.” Rachel pops the p, trying too hard to sound casual, she knows. Maybe that’s another thing that draws her to Quinn (it always helps to make excuses), that this - performance - does not come easily to either of them, unlike, say, Santana, who simply exudes a coolness that most people would trade their lives for. “Apparently, ‘the Troubletones are going for something more modern, so we’ll really stand out looking back instead!’ It’s ridiculous. I enjoy a classical showtune as much as the next girl but there comes a limit, especially considering just the sheer amount of Journey and the like that we’ve performed in the club.” She takes another sip of her vaguely gross, somehow melted water. Eventually Breadstix is going to be sued and shut down for a health code violation and she will be the first to collect her dues, but for now she’s just sitting here.
“And I’m guessing Finn wasn’t any help?” Quinn’s tone is light - too light - and she kind of looks at Rachel as she says it, like she’s gauging her reaction. Talking with her like this feels like playing a version of chess, the rules of which neither of them are familiar with.
“Oh, of course not - I can’t entirely blame him, I think that he sees Mr. Schuester as this mentor figure and Mr. Schuester sees him as a second chance for himself in turn and for the most part I leave the two of them to figure that out for themselves. But, well, like I said earlier - this conflict isn’t between Santana and myself, it’s between her and Finn, and I’m not going to get in the middle of it.”
***
Quinn wonders just how much Rachel knows. It wasn’t like Santana and Brittany were particularly secretive in the club anymore, but, well. Knowing is different from seeing.
“And besides, like I’ve said, healthy competition is good - it’ll give us the swift kick in the metaphorical jugular that the New Directions need if they have a shot at Nationals this year - it’s just, well, Hall & Oates? It’s too late to change it, but…”
“Right.” Quinn bites her lip. Rachel isn’t talking about anything other than the performance. She’s not.
I’ll do anything that you want me to.
“What’s she like?” Rachel finally asks, once they’ve dropped back into silence. She’s never quiet, never still, and Quinn could watch her move forever.
“Who?”
“The- Beth. I never got to see her - I had to see what we were up against, sophomore year, so I just never…”
“She’s beautiful,” Quinn says, voice cracking a little. “Just…perfect, in the way that a thing shouldn’t be perfect, because then you’re so scared that something’s going to hurt it or mess it up somehow.”
“Oh,” Rachel says.
Quinn hasn’t thought beyond the immediate. This is how she’s always operated - never one with the five-year goal, never one with anything on her mind beyond making it past the next day. Start fresh if you need to, it’ll work this time. If it doesn’t - good luck. Those are the things she lives by - she’d never say it aloud but she doesn’t know what it’ll be like if she actually wins Beth back, if she has this good, good thing back in her life.
She won’t say anything about that.
***
The thing about Rachel is that many people would call her unfeeling, or narcissistic. One of those things is true, if only because she’s needed to be - if she were a sensitive, thin-skinned creature, a soft-spoken girl who just happened to have a powerhouse voice like the lead in those High School Musical movies (every conversation she’s had with any relative in the past two years has involved that movie; as soon as she mentions that she sings there’s always, always an “oh, like in High School Musical?” and she has to admit to those relatives that it’s not nearly as clean-cut as that) then people would take advantage of that, walk over her.
But she does feel, perhaps more deeply than she should, all things considered. Right now she’s looking at Quinn across this sticky table covered in a tablecloth that might be older than the both of them combined and she doesn’t know how they got here.
“She’s technically your sister,” Quinn says.
“I don’t like that,” Rachel says in response, very very quickly.
“Me neither.” Then she’s quiet again. Not for the first time Rachel wonders what Lucy Q. Fabray was like; if she was that soft-spoken waif everybody would prefer Rachel to be or if she was a force of nature, too, just in a different way - if her sharp edges pointed upwards instead of downwards.
There are things you don’t ask, though, and Rachel knows that what matters more than anything is the future - the immediate one, as in, this Hall & Oates performance doesn’t stand a chance against Adele, as well as the more distant one, the one that concerns colleges and a life beyond McKinley.
In any case Rachel thinks that Quinn has always been a quieter person than people think; always penny-pinching her words in the way that reminds her of editing an essay. Cutting it down to the quick, getting to the argument with no preamble. More or less everything that Rachel says is preamble, so she’s always struck by that directness.
“It’s getting late,” Rachel says, even though she could stay up for hours more. Breadstix is still hopping; that terrible accordion loop is still playing at full blast. She’s worried that her filter is ebbing, though, that if she does anything other than march right back to her house with these incredibly tacky vests in her environmentally sustainable tote bag she may say something she won’t be able to take back.
Quinn is, as always, unreadable, her expression shifting and changing in only the most miniscule ways, suited more closely to the screen than to the stage, where the slight tightening of her jaw would be the sort of thing to win her an Academy award. Rachel sees it anyway, does not know what to make of it or of her.
“They should pay us,” Quinn says, rolling back her shoulders - the beginnings of a speech, perhaps. “For making those - we’re doing that on our own time, not during the extracurricular.” But then she doesn’t say anything else, so apparently not.
“I’ll be sure to raise it at the next meeting,” Rachel says, as if they have meetings, as if the Glee Club is more than a glorified affinity group that sings sometimes, as if she is not one of only a few people actually serious about any of it.
In college, Rachel imagines that she’ll be surrounded by fellow thespians who understand, but for now two of their most talented singers have defected and the remains of the New Directions are barely being held together, and if it’s her responsibility to keep them that way then so be it.
She doesn’t know how to say goodbye, though, so she just sort of licks her lips and watches Quinn and wonders, wonders, wonders.