Work Text:
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now i get my fortune told for free
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The first Halloween that Mason is old enough to trick-or-treat without necessarily needing to ride in a stroller the whole time, Kurt and Blaine have a party with their coworkers that they need to attend.
They end up sticking Rachel and Quinn with the job of taking him around and somehow bribe Santana and Brittany into passing out candy on their porch so that their house doesn’t get TP’d.
After all, they’ve only been living in it for a few months—since they decided that New York City was not a great place to raise a baby and that the suburbs just outside would have to suffice. They didn’t want to ruin it before they’d even completely unpacked.
“Haven’t we done enough already?” Quinn asks Rachel when they’re sitting in their living room the night before. “I mean, the kid is technically ours as it is.”
Rachel stops sewing whatever it is she’s sewing onto her costume and frowns. “But trick-or-treating is fun.”
That’s when Rachel finds out that Quinn has actually never gone.
“What do you mean you’ve never gone trick-or-treating?” she demands, looking more outraged than seems absolutely necessary.
Quinn shrugs. “My parents were pretty religious when I was a kid. I wasn’t allowed.”
And that’s how Quinn ends up getting stuck dressing up in the same theme as Rachel and Mason.
.
“Are you supposed to be a pirate?” Santana asks the next night when she sees Quinn’s costume.
Quinn frowns. “I’m supposed to be…” She trails off, though, because she can’t remember his name.
“Raoul,” Rachel cuts in. “She is Raoul from The Phantom of the Opera.”
Mason, who is sitting on the porch by Brittany’s feet, is banging his jack-o-lantern candy caddy on the wooden porch floor and saying, “Purple people eater, purple people eater, purple people eater,” over and over again.
“I think she looks handsome, by the way,” Rachel says, eyes on Quinn.
“Handsome?” Quinn asks. “Am I a character in a Jane Austen novel?”
“Well, what are you then?” Santana asks, eyeing Rachel’s costume. “A fortune teller?”
Rachel, enraged, stomps her foot. “I will have you know that this is Christine Daae’s costume from ‘Think of Me’.”
Mason stops his banging, his half-mask sliding down his face a little. Fortunately, no grotesque scars are exposed like the actual Phantom.
He stares at Rachel.
“And on that note,” Quinn cuts in. “We should really get going.”
The neighborhood is already filling up with miniature, masked creatures of the night heading out in search of candy.
She’s not really sure how this thing works, but she’s pretty sure they don’t wanna be the last people to go to some of these houses.
Mason squeals happily when she picks him up.
“Be good, you guys,” she says to Brittany and Santana and leads Rachel down the walk to the sidewalk.
.
Rachel had begun work on her costume two weeks before, researching patterns and printing out pictures and, generally, taking over their living room to do it.
“Don’t you have anything better to do?” Quinn had asked when she’d come home after work, inspecting the mess of fabric on the couch, coffee table, and armchair.
“This is important!” Rachel had said, pulling out her pinking shears with a serious look in her eye.
So Quinn had eaten her dinner at the counter in the kitchen and, when she’d gone to bed that night, Rachel was still awake, slaving away at her costume.
She’d be confused by it, but the image of Rachel working just as hard on costumes for glee club in high school leaves her feeling somewhat warmer than she’d like.
.
“A fortune teller?” Rachel says when they’re walking away from their third house. “Really?”
Quinn squints at Rachel in the dim evening light. “I mean, I guess I can kind of see that.”
That only makes Rachel look even more angry.
.
Quinn’s costume hadn’t taken nearly as much time and, when she’d come home after her last class of the day, it had been sitting on her bed for her.
“What’s this?” she’d asked, holding the shirt up to her torso and walking into Rachel’s bedroom.
Rachel had looked up from the door where her dress was hanging and flashed a blinding smile. “That, Miss Fabray, is your costume for tonight.”
“Am I going as a pirate?”
Rachel had just huffed.
.
“And I worked so hard on this, too.”
This comment comes a little later, and Rachel fingers Quinn’s billowy button-down shirt.
Quinn blushes when the other woman’s finger accidentally brushes against her collarbone and pulls away.
“Come on!” Mason yells, tugging Quinn down the street.
Quinn has no choice but to follow and Rachel comes too, arms crossed sullenly and grumbling.
.
Before last month, Quinn hadn’t even known how seriously Rachel took Halloween.
Well, okay. Rachel had always come to school on their dress-up days in elaborate costumes, only responding to her character’s name for the entirety of the day.
But she hadn’t even celebrated it the past few years—hadn’t even dressed up.
Quinn wonders if that’s because of Jesse—if maybe he didn’t like it and, because of that, Rachel just stopped celebrating.
Now that she’s been divorced and single for almost a year, it’s almost like she’s beginning to break free and this is the starting point.
.
“How do you like it so far?” Rachel asks.
Mason’s first tote is full and in Rachel’s hand and now he just has a plastic shopping bag that is also filling up with candy more quickly than Quinn is comfortable with.
Quinn frowns. “I’m not sure. It’s definitely weird.”
“What do you mean ‘it’s weird’?” Rachel asks. “Trick-or-treating is an American institution.”
“Maybe, but walking up to a stranger’s house in a costume and getting paid in candy for doing it?” Quinn fakes a shiver. “Weird.”
She gets a slap in the arm for that.
.
Originally, it was just going to be Rachel taking Mason around, but then Quinn’s plans to go to her girlfriend-of-six-months, Jenny’s, party fell through when they broke up.
“What happened?” Rachel had asked when Quinn had told her and Quinn had shrugged.
“We just weren’t right for each other,” she’d offered, but that wasn’t all.
She thinks that it has to do with the fact that things have changed since Rachel moved in right after she left Jesse.
It’s hard to forget all those looks they’ve shared over the years, all those things she used to feel for Rachel, when she has to eat, sleep, shower, and basically exist in the same place as the other woman.
And she thinks she’d been doing well before that—that maybe she should never have offered for Rachel to move in after all.
But then she remembers how Rachel will make non-vegan pancakes for Quinn and bacon, too, sometimes on the weekends. Or how they’ll curl up together on the couch on rainy days and watch too many rom coms, too much reality TV.
Maybe it’s not convenient or an especially advantageous decision when it comes to her romantic life, but Quinn has spent so much time loving Rachel Berry that it hasn’t been like she’s had to go out of her way to fall back in love with her.
.
One of the houses gives Mason a large, white bouncy ball in lieu of candy.
He drops it a few times trying to hold it in his tiny hands and says things like, “Drat,” and, “Oh no,” until Quinn had finally scooped it up and dropped it into Rachel’s hands.
“Aunt Rachel’s gonna hold that for you, kid,” she says, expecting a fight.
But Mason is already distracted by the decorations at the next house—the large, inflatable Dracula head, the fake coffins and fog machines.
“Now you really look like a fortune teller,” Quinn says, nodding to the bouncy ball. “Care to read me my fortune? Look in your crystal ball?”
Rachel rolls her eyes, but plays along good-naturedly.
“I see…a thrilling…” She pauses, like she’s searching for the word, twirling her hand in front of the bouncy ball. “Romance in your near future.”
Quinn shakes her head, smiling sadly. “I do not,” she says. “Sorry to burst your bubble.”
“Out of the two of us, which can see the future?” Rachel jokes.
“Definitely not you, if you see me being with someone anytime soon,” Quinn says.
She’s being dragged up the street by Mason, though, so she doesn’t catch the sad look that crosses Rachel’s features when she says this.
.
There had been a brief period of time when Rachel had returned to New York during Quinn’s junior year at Yale that Quinn thought, maybe, her feelings may have never been completely one-sided.
There was a lot of handholding once they’d rekindled their friendship—or, rather, become real friends for the first time—a lot of cuddling and texting, visiting each other.
During visits, they shared the same bed and would wake up tangled together.
Even more couple-y things like having dinner with one another’s parents when they would visit Lima or their parents would visit them.
Going grocery shopping.
Or that time, in the grocery store just down the street from Quinn’s New Haven apartment, the spring after Rachel had returned and she’d spotted all of the bouquets of flowers in the produce section.
“Oooh,” she’d sighed, clapping her hands together and Quinn had rolled her eyes.
“I need milk, Rachel,” she’d reminded her. “That’s literally all we came here for.”
“Why can’t I buy flowers?” Rachel asked, already perusing the selection.
Quinn had rolled her eyes. “Because you’ll have to carry them on the train back with you.”
“Not if I buy them for you.” Rachel had looked particularly pleased with her idea when she’d said this and Quinn had just shook her head.
“Don’t buy them for me,” she’d said. “No one has before.”
She hadn’t said it to receive Rachel’s pity, but to close the conversation.
Rachel hadn’t taken it that way.
“No one has bought you flowers? I find that hard to believe. Not even your own mother?”
“My mother has, yeah,” Quinn said. “But no one I was interested in romantically.”
Rachel had seemingly taken this as an invitation, as confusing as that was.
Quinn’s ear had turned red out of embarrasment and her palms became clammy—surely Rachel didn’t mean she was romantically interested in her.
While Rachel searched for the “perfect” bouquet, Quinn had gotten her milk and stood in line, staring at Rachel, still searching about twenty feet from the self-checkout station.
“Are you buying her flowers?” the man behind her had asked, smiling a little.
He didn’t seem accusatory, just curious.
Still, Quinn had said, “I am not getting her anything. I’m buying milk.” She shook the milk a little to show him.
“Is she buying you flowers?” he had pressed and she had wondered, briefly, how boring his Saturday night was that he was buying Doritos, alone, and questioning a stranger about her personal interactions.
“I don’t know what she’s doing.”
But Rachel had bought the flowers, bouncing a bit as she paid for them.
“M’lady,” she’d said when she reached where Quinn was waiting for her by the door and Quinn had rolled her eyes, gripping the bouquet tightly so that it wouldn’t slip out of her sweaty hands.
Her hand that was shaking a bit.
The guy from behind her passed by them, then, smirking and saying, “Good luck,” which had only made Quinn’s situation worse.
When she’d told Rachel about her exchange with him, she’d seemed fascinated and excited that he’d, apparently, thought they were dating and asked Quinn to repeat the conversation three times on their way back to Quinn’s apartment.
.
“Have you talked to Jenny?” Rachel asks at the next house, while they’re waiting for Mason to grab his candy.
Quinn shakes her head. “Why would I?”
“I’m just curious. I mean, it’s only been, what? Ten days?”
Quinn shrugs—she honestly doesn’t know.
Jenny had been nice, but there hadn’t been much of a click. The fact that she’d known Rachel was waiting for her in their apartment when she’d get home from her dates was a bit of a mood-killer.
At least as far as Jenny was concerned.
Rachel seems to have forgotten that Quinn was the one to break things off—that she shouldn’t be contacting Jenny, period.
Especially not because she’d said, “There’s someone else,” and Jenny had said, “Rachel,” in a cool voice that raised goosebumps on Quinn’s arms.
The conversation—and relationship—had ended pretty quickly when Quinn had simply nodded.
“Something like that,” Quinn mumbles. “That’s not the romance you meant, right?”
Rachel looks upset and shivers in the cool, October breeze. “No. I mean…You broke up with her. Maybe there’s…You’ll find someone else.”
The way she says it leaves Quinn feeling cold, too.
.
Whatever Quinn had, briefly, entertained might happen between her and Rachel after the grocery store thing never happened.
There were no dramatic declarations of undying love, no long kisses in the rain, no spontaneous train rides in the middle of the night because they needed to see each other right then.
Instead, Jesse St. James swooped back into Rachel’s life sometime while Quinn was busy with finals and, by the time she’d had time for Rachel to visit again, they were dating.
It had nearly broken Quinn’s heart. She might have been able to handle it a year prior, when there was no hope that Rachel might return her feelings, but after nearly convincing herself that Rachel might just feel the same way, it crushed her.
“I told you to drop the midget,” had been Santana’s advice.
Brittany had been a little more helpful and supportive with her, “She’ll come around, Q,” and tight hug.
Except Rachel hadn’t come around and, two years of dating Jesse led to an engagement and a wedding that Quinn had attended as the Maid of Honour.
Her speech had been stilted, awkward, but Rachel had cried and hugged her.
By that point, Quinn was working at her first real job and living in the city with Brittany and Santana, in their spare room.
Jesse and Rachel had only been married for a month when Rachel, Kurt, and Blaine had approached her with an offer Quinn hadn’t had the heart to turn down.
Except, maybe she should have because, if watching Rachel be married to someone else had crushed her, it was about a hundred times worse when Rachel also happened to be carrying Quinn’s child.
Well, Quinn and Kurt’s.
She’d been supportive, of course, because she’d been unable to revoke her offer.
She’d gone on late-night runs for strange things like honey mustard and strawberry ice cream. She’d rubbed Rachel’s feet so many times that she could now do it mindlessly if she wanted to.
And maybe that was lucky because Quinn had been the one Rachel had come to when she’d left Jesse for no other reason than—“It was a mistake.” Quinn had been the one who’s hand had nearly broken from the force of Rachel’s grip in the delivery room, and it was to Quinn’s apartment that Rachel returned when she was released three days later.
It was almost like time machines were real, the way things went back to Pre-Jesse once Rachel was living with her.
It was just enough to give her hope again.
Enough to crush her completely next time, she thinks. For sure.
.
“How, um…How is Jesse?” Quinn asks.
It’s no secret that Rachel and Jesse had, for the most part, ended on friendly terms and now kept in touch somewhat.
Rachel turns her head to look at Quinn around Mason, who is draped in her arms tiredly. “He’s okay. Mady’s good, too.”
Quinn bobs her head up and down twice, turning up Kurt and Blaine’s driveway. “That’s good.”
There’s no animosity in Rachel’s voice at the mention of Jesse’s girlfriend.
Quinn hates the way it makes her feel lighter when she notices that.
“Yeah. He says I should get back out in the dating world,” Rachel says.
“Are you going to?”
Santana and Brittany aren’t on the porch anymore, but the lights in the house are on.
Quinn maneuvers Mason’s bags of candy into her left hand so she can open the door for Rachel with her right.
Rachel shrugs, which wakes Mason up a bit and he sits up, rubbing at his eyes.
“Hey, buddy,” Quinn says, smiling at his messy, blond hair. “Let’s get you to bed.”
He goes without protest, unlike he has in the past, and Quinn thinks that it’s probably her favorite part of trick-or-treating.
When he’s out of his little tuxedo, in his pajamas, and tucked into his bed, Rachel turns off the light and stands in the door with Quinn, looking at him.
“Poor little guy,” Quinn whispers and Rachel nods.
“The beauty of Halloween,” she says, smiling at Quinn. “Can’t wait for it when I have kids of my own to tucker out.”
Quinn clears her throat a bit at this. “You just shrugged when I asked you if you were thinking about getting into dating again, and now you’re thinking about having kids?”
Rachel just laughs.
“Seems a little fast.”
Rachel doesn’t disagree, even though it’s a joke.
.
“It was something I’d been thinking about doing for a while,” Rachel had said, when she was sitting on Quinn’s couch with boxes of her things all over the room.
Quinn, unsure of what to say, had just nodded.
“We’d been having problems for months, you know? Never had time anymore. I mean, it’s not as if he can direct every one of my shows.”
She’d sighed.
“I guess I…I think he just reminded me of a time in my life when everything was simple, if that make sense.”
It had.
Quinn had nodded again.
“Why didn’t you ever talk to him about it?” Quinn had asked, and she’d almost wondered why—why she would push Rachel to talk to the man she was leaving, the man Quinn, herself, been envying for over four years (not including the time he’d dated Rachel their sophomore year).
“I didn’t know what he’d say to that, I guess,” Rachel admits. “And he’s so busy with his new show. I didn’t want to bother him.”
“Right,” Quinn had muttered angrily, because why bother your spouse with your concerns, your feelings?
“It’s fine,” Rachel had said and maybe it should have been a sign when she’d only cried for two days after ending the longest relationship she’d ever been in.
.
Santana and Brittany are curled up in the living room, watching Halloween in the dark.
Quinn thinks they might be asleep—though she wonders how that’s possible with Jamie Lee Curtis screaming the way she is—so she whispers, “Come here,” to Rachel and leads the other woman outside to the porch.
“It’s a pretty night,” Rachel says when they’re sitting on the steps, looking out at the quiet neighborhood.
Even as she says it, she’s shivering.
Quinn, against her better judgment, pulls off the jacket Rachel had made for her, fashioned after Raoul’s Masquerade costume—whatever that means—and places it around Rachel’s shoulders.
Rachel smiles at her in thanks, tugging the coat more tightly around herself.
“You kind of do look like a pirate,” she says, giggling a little and Quinn smiles.
“But a sexy one, right?” She winks and wonders if her heart is going to burst.
It’s almost like being a teenager again—how unsure, on edge, nervous she feels just from winking at Rachel.
It’s sort of pathetic, she thinks.
“A very sexy one,” Rachel agrees. Her eyes linger and Quinn has to look away, for fear that the blush on her cheeks will be noticed.
“Care to read my future again, then, Miss Fortune Teller?” Quinn asks without looking at her. “Tell me what storms may soon hit me sails.”
The last sentence is said in a weird, pirate-y drawl that makes Rachel laugh.
“I don’t have my crystal bouncy ball anymore.” She juts out her lower lip, pouting.
“Here,” Quinn says, offering Rachel her hand. “Just read my palms then. That’s a thing, right?”
She’s smirking and Rachel is too, but she takes Quinn’s palm into her lap and stares down at it avidly.
“Well, this little freckle right here means that you’re going to be stung by a bee tomorrow,” she says and Quinn swats her knee with her free hand.
Rachel laughs. “Sorry, sorry.” She looks back down at Quinn’s palm. “Well, this line here is really long, so that means that you’re a bit of a blind idiot. And that one right under it means that you haven’t noticed all the hints I’ve been laying down for years.”
Quinn is certain that she’s heard that wrong—Rachel is never that bold.
But she hasn’t, apparently, because Rachel smiles at her shyly when they lock eyes.
“W-wha—?”
“Too blunt?” Rachel asks, looking bashful. “I thought I might have to be, since my buying you flowers that one time didn’t work.”
Quinn can’t speak or feel her legs, feet, the hand in Rachel’s lap. All of it feels numb.
“I meant me, earlier, you know,” Rachel is saying and Quinn is sure her eyes are as big and round as the full moon above them. “The ‘near future romance’ thing? I meant me and…hopefully I haven’t broken you.”
She reaches out and waves one hand in front of Quinn’s face.
Quinn shakes her head, blinking a few times. “Why...?” She swallows thickly. “Why didn’t you just say so?”
Rachel shakes her head. “Because you, Quinn Fabray, have always made me incredibly, nauseatingly nervous.”
Quinn smiles at this, though she’s still dazed. “Why…Why now?”
“You have a lot of questions,” Rachel points out. She shrugs again. “Why not? I mean…This is where we were always heading, weren't we?”
Quinn can’t really find the words to argue with that.
She’s not sure she’d want to even if she could.
Rachel, who’s brief spurt of game has not yet run out, looks back down at Quinn’s hand and runs the tip of her finger over Quinn’s love line, making Quinn shudder a bit and bite her lip.
“This line right here,” Rachel says, “means you should kiss me.”
And it’s been about fifteen years that Quinn has wanted to hear those words, wanted to do what they said, so she does.
She leans in, slowly, with her hand still in Rachel’s lap and kisses Rachel in the hazy porch light.
Rachel surges forward when their lips meet, gripping Quinn’s jaw with her hand and pulling her closer.
It’s too much at once, after so much time, so they don’t kiss for long—content to just wrap up into each other, knowing that there will be plenty of time to resume whenever they can get their breathing, their heartbeats, back under control.
That’s how Kurt and Blaine find them when they get home an hour later—Quinn and Rachel sitting on the porch steps, Rachel’s head on Quinn’s shoulder as she softly sings At Last under her breath.
Kurt grins and bounces his last few steps when he sees them like that, resisting the urge to sing along with Rachel.
“Finally,” he whispers to Blaine before they’re noticed and Blaine looks just as happy as he does.
They half expect the girls to pull apart the moment they realize they’re being watched, but that doesn’t happen—even if Quinn does look a bit anxious at the sight of their friends.
Rachel doesn’t let go of her hand.
On the way inside, Kurt mouths the word, “Finally!” to her and she just smiles and mouths back, “I know!”
“So, Quinn,” Kurt says a little later, when they’re in the living room. He’s sorting through his son’s candy, pulling out the ones he wants and eating them happily.
Santana and Brittany are drowsily pressed into each other on other side of the couch and, if they’re shocked by the way Rachel’s sitting in Quinn’s lap in the chair beside them—with Quinn’s arms around Rachel’s waist—they don’t say anything.
“How was yours and Mason’s first real Halloween?”
Rachel twists her head down to look at Quinn, who smiles up at her before shaking her head a little in disbelief.
After a moment, her answer is, “Terrifying.”
…