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Rachel does not have a proper chance to speak to Quinn until some time after the big reveal (plotted, of course, by all of the returning alums on the rental car back, and later Santana will show her the little chart, the way that they mapped the whole thing out because all of them are still losers, really), until after they’ve performed that faux-impromptu flash mob in the cafeteria like it was still 2011, until the school day is over and Rachel is cleaning up the choir room (she still hasn’t figured out where Mr. Schue kept the costumes when they weren’t in use; currently she’s got a rack of neon-bright 1980s spandex shirts awkwardly hanging out in a corner) and she hears Quinn’s slow, deliberate gait.
“I think I left my purse in here,” she says, instead of hello, and they hugged in the auditorium already so that, too, is out of the question. Rachel just has to watch her, dressed inexplicably in a Cheerios uniform, hunting around the fake bleachers.
“Is it the brown one? I put it in the piano.” Rachel opens the lid, to demonstrate. “I wouldn’t put Sue above stealing something and pinning it on the Glee Club, so I figured this was the one place she wouldn’t look.”
Quinn turns from the bleachers, crosses the room, and the sound of her cane on the linoleum reverberates through the space. She’s not even that close to Rachel but for whatever terrible reason her heart heats up again.
“That’s it.” Quinn leans, reaches over, picks the bag out of the piano. Rachel did not snoop, even a little bit, because she is a changed person, but she does wonder what it contains, what this academic Quinn carries around with her. It’s easier to see the brown roots in her hair, from here.
“You changed your hair again.” Rachel flicks it, because she is still a visual person, because she doesn’t know what else to say to Quinn, who she hasn’t seen in months, who she was perhaps expecting never to see again.
But then they’re very close, and Rachel’s hand is hovering in the air, and Quinn isn’t moving, and this isn’t high school again (even if it literally is) and they aren’t the same people they once were, that much is more obvious than anything.
“I’m still getting used to it. But when in Rome, right? Or - at Yale.”
“It looks nice.” Rachel searches, in vain, for a way to keep this conversation going, because she is desperate to keep this conversation going, because reconvening with the rest of the Glee Club when they thought it was ending was one thing - all of them on an even playing field, all of them still in mourning - but now she is somebody in charge, now she is the person who had to call in all these favors, now she is carrying the torch of the club’s memory and the pressure would crush a lesser person. “But why the uniform?”
“I’m doing another number with Santana and Brittany later.” Quinn tugs, disdainfully, at the flared skirt. It’s like watching years crash into each other, it’s enough to make Rachel’s head hurt. “They insisted on these. I figured wearing it for fifteen minutes wouldn’t kill me.”
“Except it is killing you a little bit.”
“It’s not comfortable. You were the only girl in the Glee Club who never even tried to join the Cheerios, you don’t get to speak on this.”
“Do you honestly think that Coach Sylvester would’ve let me through the door? Also, Sugar Motta never tried to join the Cheerios either.”
“I meant from our year.” Quinn rifles through her bag - making sure that nothing was stolen, probably. “Anyway. It’s one number.”
“Sure, sure.” Rachel wonders if the days of unfettered honesty - of bathrooms, slaps, do you have any idea what you mean to me? - are gone for good, if perhaps they’ve been gone for years.
“Actually.” Quinn pulls out a laptop - Rachel belatedly notices that this thing isn’t really a purse so much as a canvas bag but, well, semantics are semantics - and sits down on the piano bench. “Could I stay here until they need me for that? I have some essays I need to work on - taking a week off isn’t really something people do at Ivy Leagues.”
“Sure.” Rachel would be annoyed at Quinn’s pretend-casual references to her status as a Yale student if she were not exactly the same way. Until it stopped mattering - until Fanny and every mess that came along with that - she would let NYADA roll off her tongue like her life depended on that, and she doesn’t necessarily plan to stop doing that, either.
Quinn flips open the laptop, sets herself up so that her back is supported by the piano, starts to type more or less immediately. Rachel’s impressed by the way her fingers fly across the keys and she thinks - unbidden - of their singular, brief, failed attempt to write a song together, the way that Quinn would play out a few minor-key notes and then wait.
“Do you ever still play the piano?” Rachel blurts out, because silence has never suited her, because this has not changed either.
“I don’t exactly have the time to, so. Not really.” Deleting a sentence, starting it again - Rachel catches flashes of the Word document, something about Laura Mulvey, about who is looking at who and why, but Quinn seems to not be precious about cutting out swathes of her own work.
“Oh.”
“We’re not all musical people, Rachel.” She types up another sentence, changes a word, changes it back. There’s a gravelly lilt to her voice when she says it, though, which defeats the purpose a little. We’re not all mus-i-cal peo-ple, Ra-chel, is how it would look on sheet music, something Rachel knows because she’s looked at nothing but sheet music for the past several days. “I don’t miss it.”
“You don’t need to, but it’s- well, it’s a good party trick, isn’t it?”
“Somehow I’m guessing you didn’t go to many parties.”
“For your information I did, they just happened to be theater-school parties. We had drinking games themed around Moulin Rouge!, it was great.”
“I don’t play the piano anymore, that’s all I’m saying. I could if I wanted to, but I don’t. So.”
Rachel knows better than to push, knows that Quinn has had enough of that for a lifetime, and so she just sits down next to her, back facing the piano, and peers at the screen.
“What’s the paper about?”
“Construction of the male gaze in early Hollywood.”
“Ah. Fancy.” Their thighs are touching and if Rachel says nothing of it, if Quinn does the same, then they can stay like this, and she hopes very dearly for this.
“It’s really not.”
“Soon enough I’ll see you published in…Vanity Fair, or wherever they put these sorts of things.”
“It’s for a class.”
“For now.”
“I’m not looking for stardom.” Quinn, the master multitasker, the girl who managed everything, keeps typing as she talks, hunched just a little bit, eyebrows pinched together. “I’m happy with this for now.”
And Rachel - well, how can she argue with that?
“Then talk me through it.”
So she listens, something she is still not particularly good at (she prefers to be listened to) and she nods intelligently at the right parts and she senses that Quinn’s mind is not here at McKinley at all, that she is still at Yale, that she should be at Yale, that she is better-adjusted than any of them here, and Rachel's got no clue at all what to do with that.
***
After “Home” - a fitting number, a nice number, and one that Quinn genuinely doesn’t hate - everyone kind of dissipates. Tina disappears back into the building with a few of the new kids, Mercedes explains that she has to finish up a demo, Artie goes home. Quinn and Santana take to the bleachers, perched on top of the world like they’re still sixteen and it hasn’t wrecked them yet.
“How much do you think Coach Sylvester spent on those?” Santana muses, watching the fireworks explode overhead.
“Knowing her? A thousand dollars, at least.”
“That’s lowballing it.”
“Maybe.” Quinn doesn’t know where Rachel is - she caught a glimpse of her on the golf cart with Kurt and Sam, singing, beaming, confident in a way she’d been afraid her friend had lost sometime in the past few years, but she’d disappeared into the fray.
“We should bribe Becky. Try and get the records.”
Brittany’s teaching a few of the younger Cheerios some dance Quinn remembers (but will never do again), simple, impressive anyway. It hurts her back just to watch.
“You’re not going to join them?” Quinn asks, nudging Santana’s shoulder.
“Nope. I got the freaky twins, I’m not gonna spend any more time in that cesspool than I have to.” She softens, though, at the sight of Brittany holding her arms out in a star pose, beaming.
“I’m glad you and Brittany are back together.” They’ve been back together for months, but the sentiment still holds. That’s the nature of people here - Quinn feels, sometimes, like if she looks away too long everything might just fall away. “You two are good for each other.”
“I’m thinking about asking her to marry me.”
Another firework goes off - one of the larger ones, the singular explosions, magnificent anyway. Quinn guesses that it could’ve funded an entire second choir room, but, well.
“Oh,” she finally manages.
“And don’t give me any of that you’re too young for marriage you don’t know what you want crap because I’ve seen the world and I’ve lived a life and I know it’s too short to waste waiting for things. We both dated other people. We both came back to each other. If I can spend the rest of my life with the lady I love, why wouldn’t I do that?”
“No, you’re right. Even though the last time someone tried to get teen-married-”
“You broke your spine, right. That - yeah, that wouldn’t make you a fan of teen marriage, huh. Except I’m not a teen anymore, and neither is Britt.” She pauses. “Neither are you. Right? I always forgot your birthday-”
“I’m older than both of you.”
“See, exactly, we’re all twenty. Totally different.” Santana rests her elbows on her knees, rests her chin on her hands, like she’s leaning closer to Brittany, even here. “I love her.”
“Have you picked out a ring?” Quinn Fabray: master of avoidance, of tucking her feelings tight, and she doesn’t know how to respond to I love her.
“I’m going to Lima Jeweler’s tomorrow. Can’t go to the one at the mall since they banned me from it because apparently my performance of ‘Santa Baby’ was ‘inappropriate’ and ‘drove away the customers’ even though I think it did the opposite and also I looked hot doing it, but there’s an outlet near Carmel High where they don’t know me. Then next week - I already extended my stay because these losers obviously need me for way more than three days - I’ll do a song with her, theme pending, and I’ll propose in the choir room.”
“That’s sweet.” Quinn would rather die than do anything important in that choir room but she does not say this.
“Ugh, who thought we’d be here? When I thought about the future I always figured I’d still be in the closet bearding for some like, secretly gay B-list movie star and cheering on a D-1 team. Now I’m a college dropout about to get lesbian married, sitting on the sidelines of my dinky high school’s even dinkier homecoming rally.” Then she stands up, gets a better view of the fireworks. They’re gearing up for the finale - popping and sparking faster and faster, bursts of color overlapping and overlapping and overlapping. “And I fucking love it.”
***
Rachel retreats to underneath the bleachers because she’s done her part, she needs to decompress, she thinks the door to the school might be blocked off by actual literal guard dogs so she can’t go back to the choir room but she’s seen enough of the fireworks for now.
Then she stops, because she isn’t alone, because there’s a figure there, illuminated only when the fireworks go off, which is less-than-frequently now that they’re dying down, more of an epilogue at this point, the last few they have left stuttering out into the sky alone.
It’s Quinn. It’s always Quinn.
“Quinn.” Rachel feels a dizzying sense of déja vu, and she has no idea if Quinn feels it - she’s usually above such things. She’s usually above them - she’s moved on, she’s well-adjusted in a way that makes it hurt Rachel to even see her in this place.
Never mind, of course, that she was the one to call her here, that she was the one who wanted this, to drag all these people back here.
“Santana and Brittany snuck off somewhere and they’re my ride back, so.” Quinn gestures around herself with one hand - she’s holding her cane in the other, and it sinks a little bit into the soft dirt, just a step away from being mud. “I figured I’d wait it out here.”
“I’m just looking for a break, honestly. I love the new Glee Club kids, I really do,” and she really does, she thinks they might actually carry on the legacy of the New Directions in the way that the terrible hodgepodge group of assimilationists who took her place immediately after she graduated never could have, “but they all look up to me as such a mentor that sometimes it just gets a little bit exhausting.”
“I’m sure.” Quinn raises her eyebrows, looks wry, Rachel didn’t even know that she could be wry.
Neither of them deign to bridge the gap all the way - neither of them, it seems, want to be the first to step closer, to make this anything more than it is, and besides there is a chance that Rachel could fall on her face in this mud.
“Don’t make fun of me,” she says, a beat too late, out of step, “I’ve had such little power ever since the That’s So Rachel fiasco that being impressive in the eyes of somebody - anybody - is like a balm to my soul.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
“Please tell me you didn’t see the pilot.”
“I didn’t.” And the thing about Quinn - the thing that makes no sense, given who she is generally - is that she’s never lied to Rachel. She’s never misdirected her about anything, even when maybe she should have. That’s why Rachel feels herself deflate with relief.
“I’ve tried to have it scrubbed from the Internet but unfortunately it’s gotten the network more traction than a successful pilot would so they’re hosting it as some kind of post-ironic thing and my energy is better spent training the next generation of musicians and rebuilding my Broadway career than trying to singlehandedly go against a megacorporation.”
“I hope this doesn’t last.” And there, Rachel thinks - this is how she expects to talk with Quinn, holds unbarred, the two of them unlike anybody else.
“It won’t. I have my proverbial mojo back, I’m in charge of the Glee Club, it’s good. I think that things are good, or they will be, and that’s why I don’t understand why you came back here, since all it ever does is make you miserable.”
“You asked me to.” Quinn shrugs. She’s peering through the slats of the bleachers. The fireworks flash on her face in bars, lines, and she’s a vision, she’s a woman in a music video, and Rachel wants to cry.
Quinn turns back to her.
***
Quinn is in love with her. She doesn’t know what to do with it.
The dirt’s a little softer than Quinn thought it was and she finds herself sliding forward - not enough to trip, just throwing off her balance slightly - and so she loops her arm around Rachel’s, just to steady herself, and then she keeps it there.
***
Rachel does not take her arm away, she leaves it like that. It’s October and it’s cold; she’s grateful for the warmth of another person, even if Quinn still runs cold and this could mean so much more than she wants it to.
It’s nice, though. The fireworks are picking up again (apparently the “finale” earlier was a false start, or a false ending) and they’re gorgeous and both of them, really, are content to stay here, to lose themselves in the lights for a few minutes. Who wouldn’t?
Neither of them speak. To speak, Rachel thinks, might be to limit it, to acknowledge what’s so clearly there, and she doesn’t want to do that, won’t put a solid lid on something so intangible, so remarkable as this, her and Quinn and the fireworks and home, because that’s the thing. Here they are: two girls displaced, and still it feels like home.
They stay like that for a while, and it feels like home.