Work Text:
When Quinn was nine years old she buried her dog.
The house was on the jagged, decisive border of a national forest. Dirt road, a smattering of homes and broken-down outbuildings, the regular call of birds thrown across the blue sky above. Quinn lived in the house her great-grandfather built, bounded by old trees and lanky stalks of grass. There was a shed out back, crumbling and warped, that still housed multi-coloured jars of preserves and pickles that Quinn liked to tap and examine and pretend were much scarier things. In the blue bottles, guts like snakes wound round and round. In the amber bottles, Quinn believed she could see tentacles. In the red, the hearts of anyone who crossed her. Sometimes she imagined what her own heart would look like in there.
She found the dog by the river, his throat ripped out.
Coyotes were as common as deer around Quinn’s house, and she certainly didn’t wonder what had killed the dog, but it still made her feel like her bones were trying to jump out of her skin when she looked at it.
She took a shovel from the garden shed, the rough-hewn wood tough on her hands, and dug a hole at the edge of the forest. The shovel hit the ground with a heavy shuck, vibrating up the handle, and the sound reminded her of a cleaver being thrust into meat.
It took her three hours to dig something she felt was deep enough; deep enough for her small body to crouch in and feel surrounded by damp, breathing earth.
Quinn’s father showed no emotion about the dog when she told him, covered in dirt and hair, but she was already nine and had learned by now that no emotion was better than too much from him.
Randy Abbott wasn’t exactly cruel – not in a violent way, at least - he was just indifferent. His mother had left when he was young, then Quinn’s mother after Quinn was born. So he assumed, naturally, that his daughter would leave him too. He didn’t think for a moment that it might be worth him putting in the effort to try and keep her around. No, for Randy there were more important things; conspiracy theories, late-night television and what was in the bottom of a liquor bottle.
Quinn took a bath and washed the grit out from under her fingernails. Her father’s indifference had bred independence and fire in Quinn; a determination that she could look after herself and didn’t need anyone else, nor did anyone else need her. Burying her own dog without a single tear falling from her eyes had solidified that. It wasn’t an epiphany, exactly, more like the litany of things that had built up had finally given way to something Quinn felt very strongly: things were going to change.
That day had been her birthday.
When she finally left home Quinn had changed her last name – she never knew her mother but her maiden name had been King, and Quinn wore it almost as a weapon. A younger, more vulnerable Quinn was always looking for weapons, so her ending up as a producer on Everlasting wasn’t exactly a position she struggled to fit.
She’d never told anyone her real birthday, so when Rachel turns up one year on July 29, plunking a small red box onto her desk with a clever smile, Quinn doesn’t know what to say.
“Rachel, what…”
“When you broke your arm last year? You were too busy swearing at Chet about driving us to the hospital while high so they handed me the forms you didn’t finish filling out. I just happened to see it.”
Quinn looks at the box. “I don’t want anyone to know—”
“You don’t have to explain anything,” Rachel says, cutting Quinn off. “I just wanted to give you a gift on your actual birthday.”
She leaves the office without another word, and Quinn doesn’t quite know what to make of the straightforward, quiet way Rachel conducted that interaction. She sneaks another look at the box, like it isn’t trustworthy, and then ignores it for another half an hour.
Inside the box is a smaller box, and inside the smaller box is a necklace. The simple oval pendant has the word “bitch” stamped into it, and Quinn smiles.
Rachel doesn’t say another word about her real birthday – she sings with the others when Chet brings her out a cake on August 1st (someone spelled “birthday” wrong but Quinn decides not to say anything), and for every subsequent year since she let it slip, but she always gives Quinn a gift on July 29.
The day Tiffany and Chantal finally clear out of the mansion – leaving the crew to strike the sets completely until next season – Quinn finds her father’s will shoved under a pile of papers on her desk. It’s still in its envelope, entirely untouched, and Quinn wants to leave it that way.
“What’s that?” Rachel asks, sloping in and throwing herself into the chair opposite Quinn. “The trucks are almost packed up, Eddie’s just waiting for your okay to send them off.”
“Great.” Quinn stares at the envelope for another second. “It’s my dad’s will.”
She tosses it onto the desk and after a moment Rachel picks it up and slits it open with a nail.
“What are you doing?” Quinn asks, knowing perfectly well that Rachel has started doing things like this all the time, encroaching in on the little jar of space Quinn keeps herself preserved in. Like a partner, she’s thought more than once, and then chastised herself for thinking.
“Um, I wanna see if he’s left you anything cool, Quinn, keep up.”
Quinn watches Rachel read down the letter, but her face is completely impassive and Quinn can only guess what might be in it.
Until Rachel whistles. “He left you a house?”
Quinn thinks of rusty hinges and creaking floorboards. Blue, amber, red.
“Great, one more thing I have to try and offload,” she says, trying not to sound like it means anything to her. “Do landfills do house calls?”
“Wait, you aren’t even going to go out there? Shouldn’t you see if there’s anything worth, like, keeping? Memories? Cash?”
“Rachel, you know the kind of person my dad was, he gave me a shitty childhood in a shitty house and there’s nothing in there that I’d want. I’m going to get a valuation and then I’m calling the estate agent to push it off on the first yuppie idiots who want to convert it into a hipster commune. I’m done with anything else.”
But Rachel has a hard look on her face and doesn’t answer in agreement.
“What?” Quinn asks, hating the shrewd expression she’s being regarded with.
“I think we should go.”
Equally infuriated and touched by Rachel’s inclusion of herself in the trip, Quinn leans back in her chair and sighs. “No. No, Goldberg. I’m going to Peru in three days, I am not getting sidetracked by some psychotherapist confront-your-demons garbage just to satisfy your morbid curiosity.”
“Come on, Quinn,” Rachel says, and Quinn immediately recognizes the honeyed, flirty producer tone sliding through her voice. “You feel that way now but I think if you don’t see it again something’s gonna haunt you about it; don’t you wanna see it off on your terms?”
Not being able to argue her point, Quinn sits quietly for a while, glaring at Rachel.
“It’s only a couple of hours away,” Rachel presses, and Quinn finally relents.
“Fine, but you’re paying for gas.”
Rachel drives Quinn’s car, humming along to the radio, while Quinn looks at a map and tries to remember the roads that will lead them somewhere she hasn’t been since she was sixteen. The GPS has already led them wrong twice, and she firmly regrets agreeing to this idiotic idea.
When she does finally locate the right road, she can feel the grass and loose stones hitting the underside of her car as they rattle along it, finally pulling up to the dilapidated house that clearly hasn’t seen so much as the threat of a paintbrush since Quinn left. Dust settles behind them.
“Home sweet home,” Quinn says, barely managing to put irony into the joke.
“Yeah, no kidding,” Rachel replies, and when Quinn looks at her there’s a strange mixture of pity and fierce protectiveness on her face. She’s the first one out of the car, walking hesitantly up to the front door and picking up the envelope hidden under the front mat – left there on Quinn’s orders a couple of months ago.
Quinn watches her unlock the door and disappear inside, waiting another minute before getting out of the car and going in herself.
Not much has changed. The house smells musty and careworn, the carpets almost damp from a lack of air and sunlight. The blinds are shuttered, the same odd collection of knickknacks and crackpot conspiracy “devices” littered on every surface.
Rachel is quiet, just wandering about and looking in on the life Quinn used to be a part of. Quinn feels uncomfortably abrasive, like she has to defend it if Rachel asks even though she hates everything about it. But Rachel says nothing other than she’ll get the boxes she threw in the back seat before they left.
Quinn stands in the living room a little longer, then walks down the hall to her old bedroom. It’s as shabby and unremarkable as she left it, but it’s not sad so much as simply plain. There’s nothing to suggest she ever lived here – no posters on the wall, no books to point to a teen or even a kid having spent sixteen years within the walls, which might be the worst thing about it.
She feels Rachel come up behind her.
“Inspiring, isn’t it?” Quinn says, in the same tough voice that tries too hard to not have emotion.
“I never decorated my room either,” Rachel says, brushing past Quinn and flicking open the blinds to let the evening sun in. “When I left for Vassar my mom turned it into a meditation room she doesn’t use.”
Quinn suddenly feels impossibly, immeasurably glad for Rachel’s self-invitation on this trip; her ability to commiserate with a childhood that has left the kind of scars that still pull even so many years later. Rachel has become so much the last month, the last four years; bits of her have filtered through and stuck somewhere inside Quinn and she can’t get them out. They sound like her laugh and the way Rachel says her name, the rustle of her at Quinn’s shoulder and her taps at Quinn’s office door. She’s taken up space; her limbs and her dirty sweaters and the warmth of her prickles underneath Quinn’s skin and it makes her think that probably there was no one better to help her do this one thing she truly doesn’t want to do.
They stay in Quinn’s room a while longer, then Rachel goes back out to the kitchen and Quinn finds her packing plates into a box. Quinn tamps down another surge of affection and grabs a box herself, starting to pack up everything she can find in the living room.
For hours they do nothing but fill boxes and label them with “donate” or “storage”, not saying anything unless Rachel wants clarification on where something should go. Only one box says “keep” and inside it is an old book of Edgar Allan Poe stories, a jewelry box that had belonged to Quinn’s mother, and two unopened bottles of bourbon.
When she checks her phone and sees it’s almost ten, Quinn finds a couple of glasses that haven’t been packed yet and cracks the top on one of the bottles. She takes one of the glasses to Rachel, who’s in her room, and watches her tape up another box. That feeling brims again, full and hot, bringing colour to her cheeks from the fervent way it rolls and surges in her. The words get stuck for a moment but then she finally forces them out, worried that Rachel will come out of this thinking her presence hasn't been wanted.
“Thank you, Goldberg.”
Rachel just smiles and marks the box.
It’s late when Quinn comes back in, finding Rachel asleep on the far side of her old bed. She pulls a blanket from the end and climbs on too, throwing it over the both of them and almost immediately falling asleep herself.
Thankfully for all his faults, Randy was not a hoarder and it only takes a few hours in the morning for Quinn and Rachel to get the rest of his belongings in boxes.
There’s only one more thing Quinn has to do, and Rachel follows curiously after her as she heads out to the old shed.
She doesn’t say anything, simply watches as Quinn takes the shovel and starts digging a hole right next to the one she buried her dog in. Over his grave not much has grown, a few weeds and a couple of wildflowers, and as the sun moves it continues to cover the gentle mound in shadow.
“What’s buried in there?” Rachel asks. Quinn starts, having forgotten she was there.
“My dog,” she says gruffly. “July 29.”
Rachel either understands or doesn’t want to, and says nothing. However, she does manage to find an old garden hoe, doing her best to help dig until they’re both sweaty and covered in dirt and Quinn finally stands upright, satisfied with the depth of the hole.
She goes back to the shed and Rachel watches her as she takes out an armful of the old preserves, still on their same shelves and coated in decades of dust.
Quinn unceremoniously flings them into the hole they’ve dug and watches them smash: blue and amber and red all turning to glinting shards, their innards glugging out and leeching thickly into the earth. Rachel doesn’t help her; seems to know that Quinn wants to do it alone, and instead puts the only box they’re taking with them into the car and locks the house up behind her.
When she comes back out, Quinn is holding the last jar in her hand. Red, filled with grisly-looking peaches that float like eerie jellyfish in their tiny prison. With a sharp crack, it smashes heavily against all the other jars at the bottom of the hole. Together Quinn and Rachel cover the glittering mass loosely with dirt, and something inside Quinn finally settles.
Rachel stretches out a kink in her back. “I’m not meant for this kind of thing,” she says, wincing, then takes the garden hoe and the shovel back into the shed, prising the latter gently from Quinn’s grip. Quinn watches her go, her familiar form disappearing through the lopsided doorway.
Like from far away, Quinn registers that her palms are blistered, but something else is pulsing far more forcefully than her painful skin as she thinks about Rachel.
When Rachel comes back out Quinn makes up her mind and kisses her, tasting earth and salt and the small noise of surprise she lets out against Quinn's mouth. Quinn knows it’s not a kiss that’s going to start something – at least not yet, but she feels something else settle inside her once she pulls away, and Rachel doesn’t ask her why she did it.
“Shall we get out of here, then?” Rachel asks.
Quinn nods. “How do you feel about Peru?”