Archive of Our Own

In, out.

Rachel could tell you a hundred breathing exercises offhand, could tell you a hundred more if she had a list in front of her. She knows just how to modulate her voice, just how to calm herself down. These are all things that have served her incredibly well, over the course of her storied and complex and often rocky career, one which she intends to turn into a one-woman show once Anne Hathaway has finished her star turn and an appropriate amount of time has passed such that it won’t seem gauche or derivative.

(She’s thinking about either calling it The Storied and Complex and Often Rocky Career of One Rachel Barbra Berry or Glee, and the friends she’s polled on it have all pointed her towards the first one)

In, out.

Rachel has actually started writing it, with Jesse’s help – just a few songs, just a few individual scenes cobbled together into something that will eventually be cohesive, but after Jane Austen Sings! she’s looking into doing something non-IP-related, so that works.

In, out.

The point of this roundabout recollection - her brain ricocheting around and around like a pinball on steroids - is that even now, even when everything is going her way, even after years and years of therapy and no small amount of closure on several pertinent elements of her life, even with every grounding technique known to man at her fingertips, when she’s faced with Quinn Fabray she has to remind herself how to breathe.

***

Quinn wishes Santana - or at least one of the other Cheerios - was in first-period chemistry. Instead, her friend starts the day with a history class taught by a whackjob with an agenda who doesn’t care how much you talk in class as long as you turn in a paper where America did everything right. Brittany’s in the class below them both and Finn made the mistake of taking physics “because you get to race little cars and stuff.” So Quinn is stuck with strangers who all mostly went to the same middle school, who’ve known each other since birth. And the teacher’s partnered her off with Rachel Berry, who she can’t stand.

“I understand that this isn’t ideal for either of us,” Rachel says in that clipped, stupid voice of hers, like she thinks she’s Katharine Hepburn. Her posture is ramrod-straight, her shoulders are rolled back, her hands are laid out primly on the table as she scans through the worksheet. “But I’m aware that you’re a very intelligent person and so I hope that we can put aside our differences in order to get a good grade.”

“Fine,” Quinn sneers, and swipes the paper from her, and ignores the white-hot tingling on the back of her hand from when she’d grazed Rachel’s. “You’ll gather the - stuff. I’ll get this set up.” At least she can boss her around. At least this is the one instance where Rachel Berry isn’t a wild card. Rachel gets up off the rickety stool (her feet dangle) and hops to the ground and heads to the crowded back counter.

Quinn’s scalp aches, her skirt catches weirdly around the part where the stool was welded together probably sometime in, like, the 1970s. She has a pounding headache and Rachel Berry isn’t making things any better.

“Done,” she says, arms full of supplies, nearly startling Quinn off the stool. “We’re testing Alka-Seltzer reaction rates, which for the less sophisticated of us really just means making the beakers explode.”

“I’m not stupid.”

“Did I say that you were? I was talking about them.” Rachel jabs a finger in the direction of a trio of hockey players who’ve already somehow gotten Alka-Seltzer fluid everywhere. “Whereas we are actually going to record our findings.”

“There’s no we.”

“Of course there isn’t.” Rachel Berry looks at her and the collar of her shirt flops with the motion. “We aren’t friends. But for the next thirty-seven minutes we’re allied in testing this poor man’s volcano.”

Quinn holds her gaze for a moment - intimidation; it usually works around the bottom-feeders of the school - but Rachel just nods towards the setup.

“We really should get started.”

“I’ll hold the beaker.”

“Careful not to let your hands shake.”

***

Quinn Fabray is a liar.

She’s lied to her friends and to herself about how often she’ll come back to this school (never), she told herself the auditorium dedication was the last time (how could she say no to that, after she missed the funeral, after she missed the memorial), she lied because here she is at her eleven-year high school reunion with a hand in her pocket and the other one - she doesn’t remember how the song goes, it probably doesn’t go gripping the helm of her cane hard enough to nearly break it.

The Lyft driver pokes his head out the window.

“You going in?” he asks. “I can drive you back if-”

“No,” she says. No use flying all the way to Lima just to fly back. “No. I’m fine.” And she is. Will be. It’s the same thing. Right? Right.

She catches a glimpse of somebody in the window, but they’re gone before she can get a closer look.

McKinley’s changed since she went there, probably (hopefully) for the better – it’s an arts school now, half the Cheerios are interpretive dancers, or so the website says. Quinn still can’t help the way her bones feel like they’re freezing up as she approaches the building. It’s the summer, it’s hot. There’s a massive WELCOME BACK CLASS OF 2012 banner.

Only this school would have eleven-year high school reunions. Only this place, and Will Schuester so determined to milk the hell out of his most successful two classes. It was a mistake coming here, Quinn thinks, and she turns around to tell her Lyft driver as much but he’s gone and she’s stranded here, now.

She lays her hand on the hot metal of the door and walks in anyway.

***

“Themes. We ought to have themes.” Rachel paces back and forth, trying - and admittedly failing somewhat - to scale the tremendous cliff that is writing original music.

It doesn’t help that she’s in Quinn’s bedroom, which is full of Jesus memorabilia and has a gigantic three-pronged mirror pushed to the side, and she keeps on catching glimpses of herself in it.

“Themes?”

“Themes - like, what should the song be about? And we can develop it from there.” Rachel keeps pacing and keeps categorizing Quinn’s room. The only reason they hadn’t gone to her house was because her dads were having some friends over and Rachel knows that Quinn isn’t a bigot, she isn’t even a monster, she’s just a girl who’s been trying (unevenly) to make amends, but there’s a difference between getting along with Kurt in the choir room and working on music in a house where seven to ten gay men are loudly playing charades downstairs.

Easier, anyway, to keep home and school separate – she’s learned that lesson well enough from the house party.

“Breakups. Lost love.” Quinn ticks them off on her fingers. “Heartbreak. All the things people usually sing about.”

“You know there are songs that aren’t depressing, don’t you?” Rachel scrutinizes Quinn, now - out of Cheerios garb (though who’s to say if this latest defection will stick) and looking exhausted. Rachel isn’t actually sure if she’s ever seen Quinn not exhausted. There’s an air of malaise that clings to her - friend? Whatever she is to Rachel, it clings to her.

“I know everyone loves a tearjerker.”

“You’re cynical.”

“You’re pacing a hole in my carpet.”

“Ah.” Rachel stops, then, “sorry.”

“I’m surprised you haven’t tried to write anything yourself.” Then, a potshot, too easy, “since that way you get to control everything.”

“Contrary to whatever perception you still have of me despite the fact that we’ve been together in this Glee Club for a year and a half, I actually enjoy direction, assuming it’s from somebody who knows what they’re doing. Unfortunately that just doesn’t apply to anybody at McKinley. Give me a competent director and I’ll follow every step to the letter.”

“Okay.” Quinn scribbles something on the notepad, scratches it out.

“Wait, wait. What was that?”

“Nothing-”

“Quinn, we’ve had ‘nothing’ for the past three hours and we’re meant to present our original songs in a matter of days. Even if it’s one line-”

“Fine. Here.” Quinn shoves the notepad in Rachel’s face. The lyrics aren’t great. They need work, and Rachel says as much.

“But it’s a start,” she adds, and sits down next to Quinn, and she’s grateful that it isn’t summer, that she’s wearing a long skirt and warm stockings and Quinn is wearing pants and so their thighs aren’t pressed together, there are layers between their bare skin and each other. “Have you considered making this part the opening? We could begin with heartbreak. Tell a story - somebody who’s lost the love of their life, finding it again, maybe.”

“It’s one line, Rachel.”

“And it won’t be anything more than that if we just keep sitting here talking in circles. People like to be cheered up. They don’t go to show choir competitions to learn about how nothing ever turns out the way you want – at the very least you have to give the sense that they’re trying. Maybe you could fudge that. But honestly I haven’t yet experienced enough heartbreak to successfully pull that off and everything you’ve written is just plain depressing so if we put those together then just maybe we can have a half-decent song by Thursday.”

***

It’s a lie, what people say – that when you return to your old haunts everything seems smaller. Maybe it’s because she’s small (as everybody has a habit of reminding her, because they’re hilarious) but the halls of William McKinley High School still feel just as daunting as they did when she was a student.

Quinn was out there, Rachel ran away from her because she won’t scare her away, she won’t. They’ll meet up later. It’s not the end of the world.

It’s mostly empty - Rachel is always punctual, always either on time or a little bit early, and that clashes starkly with her fashionably-late peers.

“Is that our resident Hobbit or do I need my eyes checked?”

Except for one, it seems.

“Hello, Santana!” Rachel waves, big and showy, like an inflatable car salesman tube, and sweeps her friend into her arms.

“I missed you, you weird little freak,” Santana murmurs into her hair, then pulls back and looks Rachel up and down in a way that’d seem judgy or mean coming from anyone else, but coming from Santana it’s still judgy and mean but it’s done with love, also. “And look at you! Broadway looks good on you.”

“And the judicial system looks good on you! Santana Lopez the lawyer.” They’re friends. It’s remarkable that they’re friends. Santana has crow’s feet around her eyes, a big wedding ring around her finger. “How’s Brittany?”

“Hands full with the dance studio, as usual.” Santana plays with her wedding ring, smiles so big it might split her face open. Rachel might cry from the joy of it. “And she adopted another fucking kitten.”

“Who’s this one?”

“Duchess Tubbington the Third.” Santana rolls her eyes. She’s still smiling. “It’s an ugly thing, too. Like if someone drew a kitten but they didn’t know what a kitten looked like and also hated me, personally.”

“Oh, I’m sure.” Rachel bows, faux-gallant, at this thought. If you’d asked her, thirteen years ago, what she thought her high school reunion would look like, she’d have gotten some things right. She’d note that she’d be coming back as one of the most famous alumni, gracing the school with her presence as a courtesy, a pity-favor. Most of that has remained, even if the place still cows her more than she’d like.

But then if you’d asked her after that if she ever thought that she’d be friends with Santana Lopez, that she would have spent a reasonable amount of her time on the train over actually excited to see Santana Lopez, she would have laughed in your face.

“McKinley looks the same.” Santana looks around the hallway, apparently just as weirded out by this fact as Rachel is. This is the thing: their relationship expanded beyond these walls. They lived in New York together, they stayed friends long after Santana (against all odds) decided to stay in Ohio, albeit in Columbus, both the biggest and gay-friendliest city in the state. When asked, she says it’s because someone’s got to look out for the community here, but Rachel suspects that her friend is more sentimental than she lets on.

“It’ll be so wonderful to see everybody again – of course I’ve seen you, but Kurt, Quinn, Mercedes, Sam, Mr. Schuester-”

“Wait, have you heard the thing about him?” Santana leans in close, conspiratorial.

“What thing?”

“Ms. Pillsbury left him for a therapist.”

“Her own therapist?”

“No, some other therapist. It’d be unethical if it was her own therapist. I think she met her at the office of her actual therapist? Anyway, took her long enough.” Santana smirks, and Rachel loves her. “God knows she deserved better than what Mr. Schue could give her.”

“That’s going to be a disaster if they’re both here.”

“I know.” Santana isn’t troubled by this in the slightest.

“Hey.”

“What?”

“I’m glad that you’re here.”

If you’d asked Rachel - now getting into overwhelmingly specific hypotheticals, really, and Rachel was not a particularly trusting fourteen-year-old and so she’d probably be backing away and decrying stranger danger - what she thought Santana Lopez’s response to such an open admission would be, coming from the school laughingstock of all people, she’d probably think, because she would never admit to it aloud, that it would be a razor-sharp blow at her height, her nose, her ridiculous sweaters or the click-clack of her shiny Mary Janes or her singing voice or any one of the uncountable things she has made herself love through no small amount of adversity.

She’d be wrong. She was young once, and she was stupid once, and she was right about some things but she’d be so very very wrong about this.

“You too.”

***

A two-day retreat in the Ohio woods – or, really, a shitty hotel near the Ohio woods. It wasn’t a good idea on paper and it’s an even worse idea in practice.

Schuester had bid them goodnight with a crow of “be responsible, guys!” before disappearing to…have sex with his girlfriend, or something. Because he’s so responsible. Because he’s such a great teacher. Quinn hates him.

Still, they’re all unsupervised, and they’re all young, and most of them are pretty stupid, so they’ve deigned to have a party in Artie’s room, all the beds pushed to one side, dancing to the tinny bleat of Ke$ha through Sugar’s phone speakers.

“Britt smuggled vodka in her bra,” Santana says, in the way of a greeting. Quinn’s been swaying back and forth for the past hour, letting conversation drift to her. She still has traces of power, she still has magnetism, or so she hopes. “If you want any.”

“I…think I’m good.”

“Your loss.” Santana takes a sip of what Quinn assumes is Brittany’s bra-vodka, held in a Styrofoam hotel bathroom cup.

Rachel’s trying to show Finn how to do some kind of simple jazz square. It’s not working. Tina, Mercedes, and Brittany cheer them on from the sides, dancing themselves.

“You might be better off just clapping while I do it,” Rachel says to Finn, kissing him on the cheek, holding him by the arm, and then she releases him and a new song starts, slower this time, still just as lively.

She can’t look at Rachel. She’s not allowed, that’s not what she’s supposed to do. Quinn tries to focus on Mike and Sam, on Brittany’s new position dancing top of a chair (perfectly balanced and in no danger of falling; unbelievably sure of herself), but Quinn's traitorous gaze keeps sliding off them. She’s like a homing beacon for Rachel Berry.

Because that’s the thing: Rachel is a better dancer than she’s given credit for. She’s unabashed, loose, probably more than a little inebriated. She’s so beautiful Quinn could cry.

“You’re staring,” Santana whispers in her ear, breath hot and helpful, grounding her, pulling her down from the heady feeling that’s starting to sink in.

“I’m not,” Quinn retorts anyway. Heart against her ribs, all that. Rachel, dancing. Quinn couldn’t stretch out a hand and ask Rachel to lay her own in it. She can’t even look at her right.

Rachel’s swept a reluctant Kurt up into her arms, spinning him around in a drunken, shitty waltz that ends (predictably) with her letting him go and him crashing into the television.

The party goes silent for a minute (even with the music still playing - life isn’t a TV show, the world doesn’t stop spinning just for the sake of drama) and then Kurt stands up, dusts himself off.

“Remind me not to partner with you for Nationals this year,” he says.

“Can’t be any worse than Finn,” Mercedes quips, inviting a row of laughter from everyone in the room, including Finn himself.

Quinn just keeps staring. Not staring. Looking. In what happens to be Rachel’s direction. Because it’s a small hotel room. There’s nowhere else to look.

There’s nothing else to see.

***

Quinn weaves through a handful of people she doesn’t know, pretends she’s not looking for anyone. Just. You know. She’d like a familiar face.

“As I live and fucking breathe, is that Quinn Fabray?” Santana waves. Speak of the devil. Speak of the angel, too. She hasn’t seen Santana in years. “I thought you might be dead.”

And then – oh.

Rachel turns to her, Rachel still has that perfect posture, Rachel is wearing a cable-knit sweater and she hasn’t aged a day and Quinn has to white-knuckle her cane to keep from falling.

“Quinn,” she breathes. Quinn hates that her own eyes prick with tears; this is Rachel. Married Rachel, Tony-winning Rachel, Rachel who she could have visited with those Metro-North passes that haven’t expired and that she keeps for sentiment. Rachel who should be a passing Facebook connection and nothing else. Rachel who she can’t still be in love with.

This isn’t how Quinn thought it would go. Rachel isn’t looking right at her. They’re in a hallway; other alums mill around and she doesn’t care about any of them. Was the school always this big? Were there always this many strangers in her class? She had a life outside the Glee Club, unlike a lot of the others. She had the Cheerios and when she ditched them she still had the club and through it all she knew people. Everyone knew her. That’s what she thought. Everyone knew her.

Nobody but Rachel and Santana have said anything to her. She can’t figure out if she’s glad for this or not.

“Great to see you too, Santana,” she says, after what must be a way-too-long pause. Rachel and Santana close the gap to greet her, and she doesn’t miss the uneasy way they hug her when her cane clatters to the floor. Rachel’s the first person to pick it up, to hand it to her once the three of them have broken apart.

“You look like you’re knighting her,” Santana snorts. Rachel’s still crouched, Quinn is standing above her. It doesn’t feel good, and she offers her a hand to stand with the one that hasn’t taken back the cane.

Quinn remembers rebuilding her strength after the crash, how she had to relearn each part of her body, how things that had been as instinctive as breathing became complicated, how she realized for the first time that the human body is a disgustingly complex organ.

She feels like that now. Too many limbs, too much to do with them. She’s standing apart from Rachel; she wonders if she smells the same. She realizes with a start then that she still remembers what Rachel smells like. This is all stupid, ridiculous.

“Where’s Brittany?” There. Easy. The Unholy Trinity, nostalgia nostalgia, hooray. Not that Quinn would be caught dead in those skirts anymore - she’s a grown woman, she barely liked the things to begin with. But maybe they’ll do a group number for old time’s sake, since that’s all any of this is – old times.

“Dropping the twins off with my mom.” Santana’s blasé when she says it. Quinn tries to bite down her surprise. She must linger too long on Rachel’s lack of a wedding ring, because she covers one hand with the other and then looks up, bright.

“Oh, that?”

“Here we go,” Santana sighs. Rachel ignores her, starts to lead them down the hallway.

“Jesse and I divorced amicably about a year ago. It wasn’t anything bad on either one of our parts - we simply realized that we didn’t particularly love each other and, both being hopeless romantics, didn’t want to settle for less.” Rachel glances behind her shoulder - probably to make sure Quinn and Santana are still a captive audience. Santana’s looking at her phone (she must’ve heard this story before, they still talk to each other) but Quinn could never look away. “We actually tried to spin it as less than amicable in hopes that the gossip mags would pick it up and help both of our careers but it turns out that People, despite having the very same title as the most famous Funny Girl song, doesn’t care very much about Broadway at all.”

“She’s telling you she’s single,” Santana translates, and Rachel shoves her hard in the ribs.

“I’ve gotten out there! I’ve gone on dates.”

“Right, yeah, with who, the Orpheus understudy’s understudy?” Santana spins around, starts walking backwards maybe just because she can. “Don’t listen to a word she’s saying. Her main romantic interest right now is the vibrator I bought her last Hanukkah.”

“Not so loud!” and Rachel elbows her again but there’s a smile on her face, and Quinn can’t help but smile too. “I’m going to make sure that everything’s set up in the choir room - you know what they say, if you want something done right you’d best do it yourself.”

Then she walks away and it’s just Quinn and Santana again.

“You look well,” Quinn says, once the silence has stretched into awkward territory. And she does - relaxed, open, herself.

“You too.” Santana’s exactly her height. It’s not hard at all to look her right in the eye. “Monochrome pantsuit, like you’re going to a newspaper-themed Met Gala.”

“And?”

“Nothing.” They haven’t hugged yet. Quinn hasn’t seen her for nearly three years, and it’s not like she stuck around to socialize after the dedication. All she did was go doo-doo-doo in the background of a group number, hug Mercedes, pick confetti out of her own hair for hours afterwards. “I mean it. I’m happy for you. Living your life.” Santana leans against a row of lockers. These, too, are new - the locks aren’t so thick, the doors aren’t so rusty.

The old sports trophy case - an artifact, now, since the school hasn’t actually had a football team in nearly a decade - reflects their faces. They both look older. Quinn’s new apartment (which she thinks of, still, as new even though she’s lived there for like two years now) only has one mirror, in the bathroom, which is how she likes it. No three-pronged vanities for her anymore.

She still cares about her appearance, insofar as she likes to look nice, even if what that means now is leagues different from what that meant in these hallways. But it doesn’t eat her whole; she no longer lives her life at a distance. It’s felt, wholly. It’s staying in New Haven because she liked Yale too much, because she’s grown comfortable and no longer finds running away so appealing anymore. It’s graduate school, then professorship. It’s a string of girlfriends so as to make her a serial monogamist; relationships that last a few months or even a year or two, even if they don’t last, even if she still longs for someone to wake up next to and know they won’t leave.

God, she likes herself. She likes her face, the cut of her suit, the roll of her shoulders. She never could have expected that.

“Do they even still have sports here?”

“Yeah. But just, like, gay sports. Volleyball. Fencing. The kind of thing where you can’t actually get hurt.”

“Oh.” It’s like they’re in a personal bubble here. Some guy walks past them, doesn’t even notice. Why would he? Nothing about Quinn was shocking in any context other than high school. She’s probably an anecdote if anything - yeah, this cheerleader had a baby when she was a sophomore, then she went all crazy and goth and then I never saw her again. A curiosity. Not something you attach a face to, and besides she doesn’t match the photo on the wall either.

“You should find Rachel.” Not Berry. Not RuPaul or Man Hands or any of the other nasty nicknames they came up with for her, a million years ago, just Rachel, said with fondness, said like she loves her.

“If she wanted to talk to me she’d have stuck around.”

“You can’t be this dense. She missed you. Like, every time I saw her, she’d be like, ‘oh, have you heard from Quinn?’ as if I was still talking to you, as if you didn’t drop off the face of the fucking planet.”

“What was I supposed to do, Santana? I hated it here. I joined the Glee Club so she wouldn’t steal my boyfriend, and then she did anyway, and then I got kicked out of my house and thrown off the Cheerios and he-" Quinn stops, starts again. "I didn’t start living until I got to college. I didn’t start-”

“You donated your egg.”

“It’s not like I was using it for anything.”

“That’s still a weird thing to do if you don’t actually care.”

“Of course I still care.” Quinn is watching the conversation play out in the glass. Quinn spent most of high school watching herself in the same way. She doesn’t like that. "I made a promise, Kurt and Blaine seem happy with their kid, that's it."

McKinley, overall, is like a scab she spent years picking at, a thing that bled until it stopped raising above her skin, became a smooth spot she couldn’t scratch anymore, a mark barely noticeable, except in the summers, except when she’s warm.

Three years is good for her - God knows it would’ve been longer if not for that dedication. The Finn Hudson Memorial Auditorium. That’s where they’re going to have the toasts, later, once everyone’s suitably drunk enough to drop down into those chairs and listen to Principal Schuester (two words that never should’ve gone together) talk about how it’s so great to have you guys back, as if he doesn’t know more than, like, ten of them.

“Just talk to her. Okay? I’m off to make fun of Mr. Schue for fumbling the bag with his wife.”

“Don’t have too much fun without me,” Quinn drawls, and Santana flips her off before heading for the gym, where everyone else is headed, where she should be headed. Gym for everyone, then choir room for a 2012 New Directions mini-reunion, then to the auditorium. That’s what it said on the schedule.

“Oh, son of a bitch!”

Rachel struggles with the chairs. Quinn waits at the lip of the door for a minute, leans on the frame.

“Need help?” Quinn asks. Rachel turns around, arms full of chairs. The new choir room - though it’s not new, Quinn has to remind herself, it’s looked like this for like nine years - seems colder than the old one. Too many chairs, for one. They got rid of the bleachers. And Finn and Lillian must still be in the auditorium; the walls are bare of their pictures, instead plastered over with photos of competition winners. Nationals 2015. Nationals 2016. Nationals 2017. Regionals 2018 - the novelty must’ve worn off by then. Nationals 2020, the year they dedicated the auditorium. Quinn doesn’t recognize a single student. Sam’s in all of them, flashing a huge thumbs-up in front of his pimply, beaming protegés.

“It’s all revisionist history, anyways,” Rachel continues on some monologue, shaking Quinn out of her head again. This place isn’t good for her. “The school hated us and now they want to pretend they were always behind the club.”

“Thought you’d love the attention.”

“Of course I do - I’m still the top name on the ‘Famous Alumni’ Wikipedia page, if only because it’s alphabetical by last name and Jones goes after Berry - if you went by album sales alone Mercedes would have me surpassed by legions and legions.”

“Apples and oranges.”

“I’m surprised you aren’t on there, truthfully.”

“For what, getting my PhD early? There’s no shortage of professors.” Quinn, staying. Quinn, settling not for but down. Being here throws all that into relief. “I’m not exactly famous.”

“Didn’t you win that award? For your dissertation.” Rachel hands off just one chair to Quinn, points her to the other side of the room. Quinn sets her cane down, pulls the chair across, and it scrapes, ugly, on the floor.

“It’s not the kind of thing you get a Wikipedia page for.”

“It should be.” Rachel sets down all the chairs she’s been carrying and they clatter. There’s padding on the walls, now - it’s as acoustically sound a choir room can be - but the sound still reverberates.

“I don’t mind.”

“Sometimes I forget that not everybody wants an exciting life.”

“They really don’t.” Quinn can see herself getting old in New Haven, becoming a staple at Yale, Dr. Fabray, everyone knows her. Crotchety and gray-haired and stately. Of course she’d like someone to share that with.

“Can you move that one a little closer to the door?”

“Sure.” Quinn pushes the chair, watches as Rachel collects the next batch. “You know there aren’t that many people actually coming, right?”

“I know. But it’s better to have too many chairs than not enough.”

“Fair.” Quinn sits down in one of them, and Rachel sits down across from her.

“It’s weird, isn’t it?” Rachel asks, softer than usual.

“Weird doesn’t begin to describe it.” Quinn lets herself laugh, lets herself pretend (even if it’s just for a few seconds, even if it’s a lie) that this is normal, that they’re just uncomplicated high school friends reminiscing. “Why did they even have an eleven-year reunion?”

“For us? The Glee Club that saved the school from the brink of irrelevance? They’ll probably have one every year.”

“Awful.” Quinn shudders at the thought.

“And yet you came.”

Quinn stays quiet. The chair’s starting to hurt her back - she misses the bleachers, again.

“I should get to the gym,” she finally says. “If you’re done with the chairs.”

“I’ll meet you there later?”

Quinn doesn’t have an answer for her.

***

“Is this how you thought that you’d end up?” Rachel knows that she has limited time with Quinn — that she wouldn’t have come down here at all had it not been for the pregnancy scare, for Rachel sitting shaken afterwards and Santana phoning her up, even though it had been resolved, it was a false alarm and it kicked her into gear, but, well.

Quinn is here, and it’s almost cold enough to snow outside, and Rachel has taken her to the very best vegan restaurant in Bushwick (of which there are a surprising amount, with a new one seeming to pop up every day) and they have moved past pleasantries into the things that matter.

“I don’t know.” Quinn’s phone buzzes and she glances at it for a moment, then turns back to Rachel. Her eyes are so bright, so sharp. Rachel has heard the phrase “getting lost in someone’s eyes” but she doesn’t think she could ever get lost in Quinn’s, she thinks Quinn is someone who knows exactly where she is. “Depends on where you start, because I never could’ve predicted the baby, and then everything else…” She waves a hand to indicate this “everything else.”

“That’s fair.”

“What about you?”

“Well, I thought that I’d be more successful by now.”

“You’ve been in college for like five months.”

“And yet! The full extent of my professional acting experience is still limited to a botched stint on a student film.”

“You’re welcome for that.” It’s rare, nowadays, that Quinn is still smug, and she lifts her milkless drink to her lips and keeps those eyes on Rachel as she sips it. “Seriously, Rachel, I don’t think you have to worry yet.”

“I just thought that it would be easier than it is.” This place is usually bustling - millennial hipsters just a few years older than Rachel, draping themselves across chairs and talking and spending inordinate amounts of money on the meals here. Beatnik poets decrying the place as pretentious. It’s cold out, though, and most other people are probably at home, where Rachel should be, working on her latest assignment for Cassandra July, scouring Backstage for open auditions, but instead she’s here with Quinn Fabray, because she can’t picture herself anywhere else.

“I honestly thought it’d be harder.”

“Yale fits you like a glove.”

“You haven’t even seen the campus.”

“I know from the way you talk about it.” Rachel tries not to sound accusatory, lands somewhere in the land between jealousy and fondness. “It’s like you’ve lifted this weight. It’s how I always thought college would be - leaving Lima for good, growing into myself, except it turns out I was a gigantic fish in a tiny pond and now I’m in the ocean.”

“Poetic.”

“It’s just the truth.” Rachel twists a Splenda packet between her fingers but does not open it, thinking only of how ironic it is that this place which prides itself upon being so organic nevertheless has fake sugar anyway. She isn’t thinking about Quinn, about her eyes, about the ease with which she holds herself, about how she’s the most intelligent person Rachel has ever met and how even if it doesn’t make very much sense she wants to stay in touch, she wants her in her life.

She wants proof – of what, exactly, she isn’t yet sure.

The waitress (older, handsome in a girl way, winking at Quinn and then holding a hand to her chest when Quinn winks back) hands over the check.

“It’s an even split,” Quinn says, reading it over, reaching into her purse for a credit card. Rachel only brought cash and cash is what she puts on the table, crumpled, a bit coffee-stained.

“How’s the dining hall food at Yale?” Rachel asks, because it’s easy conversation, because she does want to know, truly. She wants to visualize it - Quinn with her new friends, who are all probably very clever and sophisticated academics from very clever and sophisticated places, laughing over something in a heap at a table somewhere in New Haven.

“Fine, I guess. NYADA?”

“Kurt cooks most nights so I don’t actually go to the dining halls all that often – only for lunch when I’ve forgotten to pack something and don’t have time to take the train all the way back to Bushwick.”

“That’s nice.”

“It is.” Rachel lets herself imagine Quinn moving in, sleeping on the couch or maybe in an air mattress they’ll pull from the street, dappled with sweat and dirt and likely disgusting, but Quinn’s taller than she is and her limbs would drape off Rachel’s bed. Dinners with four people instead of three, Quinn sleeping in while Rachel heads out because she’s always more tired than the two of them, Quinn having a spot next to the door where she always sets down her cane.

It’s not a plausible scenario, sure, it’s not even a particularly desirable one given how cramped the apartment already is with Santana there, but it’s one that Rachel can’t shake out, doesn’t particularly want to shake out.

The cute waitress takes the bill, looks at them again, like she knows something, and Rachel keeps her eyes on Quinn.

“You’re heading back after this?”

“I am. Have to prepare for exams - there’s a reason Yale’s seen as one of the hardest colleges.”

“You can be very snooty when you want to be, Quinn Fabray.”

“Sometimes.” Quinn stands up, shrugs on her coat. Rachel scoots out from her side of the booth and does not offer to help her up, but she keeps an eye on her, just to check, just to make sure she doesn’t fall.

They leave the restaurant, step into the cold outside. And it is cold, even though it’s nearing March, even though it ought to be springtime by now. Punxsutawney Phil was a liar and Rachel slips on her gloves so her hands don’t freeze off and/or get chapped enough to bleed.

“It’s colder down here than in New Haven.”

“Is it? It must be the wind tunnels - all the gigantic buildings,” ignoring for the time being that they’re in Brooklyn, that the buildings aren’t actually that much taller than they were in Lima; they’re just busier, packed tighter together, “and the forecast said that it’d be warmer.”

“So it does.” Quinn waits for Rachel to lead - a novelty to be sure - and Rachel starts to walk, notes Quinn’s right hand holding her cane, exposed, bare.

“Wait,” Rachel says, and she holds out her glove. “You can’t keep your hands in your pockets-” and she skips over the innuendo quickly enough “-and I can, and I run warm anyways.”

Rachel expects Quinn to turn down the offer, to brush her off. The silent martyr, the girl made of glass, which is why she’s surprised when Quinn does take the glove, when she does slip it on.

“Thanks.”

“Of course.” New York, in the wintertime. If Rachel squints she can almost imagine this becoming a regular thing between them. Broadway shows and blizzards and ice skating and busking in the park, some old movie playing on the TV on repeat–

“Which way to the station?”

“Oh.” Rachel points with her free hand. If they were different people she’d ask Quinn to switch her cane to the other hand, to let her hold the other one, to warm it. She doesn’t do this; she knows that there are limits and that she and Quinn have never been the sort of friends with whom touch is uncomplicated, easy, the way that it is for herself and Kurt, the way that it is for Quinn and Santana. Certain dynamics– they just aren’t like that.

“You don’t have to walk me all the way.”

“I know.” Rachel exhales, but it’s not cold enough for the air to crystallize, for her breath to be tangible. “But anything to put off dealing with Professor July’s homework is a welcome distraction in my book.”

“I’ll be a distraction, then.”

***

Their class is so very fucking big, and all of them are crowded into this gymnasium. Ex-footballers complaining that the program’s defunct, businessmen discussing McKinley’s value, attention-seekers saying they had biology with Mercedes Jones, yes, they were practically best friends, she signed my yearbook and everything, it’s probably worth a thousand bucks on eBay now. Rachel shouldn’t be able to find anyone here, let alone Quinn, who may well have decided that none of this was worth it, may well have left and gone home (which is New Haven now, which has not been Lima in over a decade), but life and love have a bizarre way of pushing against the odds. Not defying them. Not throwing the entire world off its axis.

But, you know, nudging, which is how she sees her again, chatting with a few women who Rachel vaguely recognizes as former Cheerios.

They had their moment. They had something private, they spent it talking about chairs. If Rachel was a reasonable person she would leave it at that.

But she’s not, so.

She sings. They had a microphone set up and the “DJ” is just a computer auto-playing a playlist, so it’s not that weird, at all, in any capacity, that she cued up "Defying Gravity," that she’s got her hand wrapped around the microphone and her eyes on Quinn, and a couple of students (ex-students, even if they look the same, even if from here she can almost imagine that it’s 2011 and she’ll wake up to see Finn beaming up at her, graduation still impending, real life still a few years away) glance towards the spectacle, Broadway star and two-time Tony winner Rachel Berry crowing her heart out in her alma mater.

***

Quinn pushes through the crowd, and looks at her, and her heart’s breaking open. Rachel takes the microphone off its stand, but she doesn’t move, doesn’t dance around the stage, and the lights are too bright. The sun must’ve gone down at some point, there’s no way she’s looking at her.

***

Rachel is looking right at her.

***

Quinn feels like an interloper here — she doesn’t belong at this school and she definitely doesn’t belong at Rachel’s house.

But there’s an afterparty. For the farewell to the Glee Club. And she’d be a dick not to show up.

(Even if some awful part of her thinks good riddance to that, even then)

So she’s here, and the sun’s gone down (it’s always cloudy here, though, so there’s not much of a difference, plus it's been raining all afternoon) and all the former members of the Glee Club are milling around Rachel’s living room. Current members, too, which strikes Quinn as kind of weird.

“Are you a friend of Rachel’s?” a girl asks, and Quinn has no idea who she is.

“You could say that.”

“Wait, I remember you now. You were one of the alums who came for Thanksgiving, right?”

“I- yeah, that feels like a million years ago.”

“A lot’s happened since then.” The girl glances into her cup, full of fruit punch because Rachel “has a reputation to uphold and these are children,” never mind that they’re like, two years younger than her.

“I know.”

“I’m Unique.”

“Quinn. I graduated last year.” Quinn sticks out a hand to shake. Unique takes it.

“Finn talked about you sometimes.”

“He did?”

“Just that you were happy at Yale. I don’t know - he talked about all of you a lot.” Unique chuckles, soft, to herself. Quinn knows that she’s only like three years older than this girl at the most, that she shouldn’t feel so protective, that she’s more than proven she has little to no maternal instinct.

And yet.

“I’m transferring out. My best friend - she’s around here somewhere, she hates these kinds of parties but I convinced her to come to the last Glee Club thing ‘cause we met there - she decided to transfer even before the club shut down, and it’s the only reason I even came to McKinley-”

Quinn can’t help it - she spits out her drink.

“You came to this school because of the Glee Club?”

“Yeah.”

“Willingly."

"Yes."

"That’s…wow.” Quinn is starting to wish there was alcohol in her cup - that she could drink this concoction mixed with her own saliva, let this conversation grow fuzzy. Instead it’s all too sharp, and Unique is just a kid, she’s barely younger than Quinn, she’s so young. “Good on you for transferring, though.”

“Thank you?” Unique squints for a moment, like she’s trying to pin down something about Quinn, like she’s trying to read her. “I’m really excited to be at this new school with her - Marley - it’ll be nice to have a friend to start out, and she’s really great.” Unique’s hand tightens around her cup, her gaze drops down, and the pieces start to slot together in Quinn’s head.

“You like her?”

“Should you be asking that?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re, like, an adult.”

It’s true. It’s also not. Quinn is twenty and seventeen and fourteen all at once, she could’ve gone to school with Unique if she’d come to McKinley as a freshman instead of the better-in-every-way Carmel.

“You don’t have to answer,” Quinn says, instead.

“No, I mean…I do.” Now she’s closer, whispering, as if you could actually hear anything over Rachel’s endless showtune playlist anyway. “It’s just - she’s my best friend. Actually my only friend here, so why would I mess that up?”

It’s a practical concern. Unique seems like a practical person; Quinn figures she’d have to be.

“Because you’re young, and however bad you think it could go, it won’t be as bad as you think.” Quinn almost makes a self-deprecating sort of joke - look at me, I was pregnant at sixteen and still turned out fine - but there are limits. “Maybe she won’t feel the same way. But she might.”

A scrawny girl in a stupid hat (probably Marley, Quinn thinks she remembers Marley) waves across the room, and Unique waves back.

“And you’ll never know unless you ask her.” Quinn’s a hypocrite, definitely, but who cares? It’s not like Unique knows her life.

“Thanks, Quinn.” Unique flashes her a million-watt smile and then walks across the room in the highest heels Quinn has ever seen, flagging Marley down, asking if they can talk.

Quinn deflates a little, lets herself lean on the couch. She’d sit down, but if she did that she’d probably stay there forever.

“I’d at least consider this more successful than my first attempt at a party.” Then Rachel is in front of her; Rachel in a party dress, Rachel with a set of jingling bracelets around her wrist, Rachel with her own cup which Quinn heavily suspects isn’t just filled with punch.

“Ugh, that one was awful.”

“But everybody seems to be having a nice time.”

“They do.” Then, instead of anything else, “Unique’s a nice kid.”

“Who?”

“The. Uh. Over there. In the heels.” And currently holding hands with Marley(?) like a middle schooler.

“Oh! Yes, her, we’ve spoken once or twice.”

“I’m glad she’s getting out of here.”

“You know it wasn’t all bad, Quinn.”

“I know it was bad for me.”

“But there were - well. Your contralto was able to carry a great deal of our songs and for my part I’m still glad that things worked out the way that they did so we could meet, and become friends.” Rachel means it. She never says anything she doesn’t mean - she’s an amazing actress but a shit liar. It breaks Quinn’s heart because she’s promised herself, now they’ve said goodbye, now this is the end.

It has to be.

“All I’m saying is, it’s weird she went here for the Glee Club when the only reason kept existing was so outcasts-”

“I know you’re biting down the word ‘loser,’ Quinn-”

“-could have a place to hide from the rest of the school. That’s the only reason Santana and Brittany stuck around. Choosing to leave behind a place where you’re loved…”

“What can I say? The New Directions were a sight to behold in 2012.” Rachel says this as if 2012 was not just last year, as if just a year ago Finn wasn’t alive, as if just a year ago they weren’t still high schoolers.

“It’s just weird,” Quinn repeats, and runs a hand through her hair, and snags it on a knot, and lets out a grunt of frustration. “I need a haircut.”

“You’re being an asshole.”

“It didn’t make everything better for all of us, Rachel. I’m here as a courtesy. That’s it.”

“See, I don’t believe that.”

“Why not?” She’s not going to make a scene here. She’s going to leave and pretend - as she’s gotten so good at pretending - that things are completely fine between herself and Rachel, that there’s nothing unspoken, unsaid, that matters here.

Never mind the fact that they’re in the middle of like thirty people, either.

“Because you keep on saying that but your actions aren’t reflecting it at all – you’re still here. And you didn’t become a real estate agent-” and it sends a shock through Quinn that Rachel remembers that “-and you didn’t do anything that the rest of the world was expecting of you. Where could you have learned that, but at the Glee Club?”

“I had a baby at sixteen, I nearly died because of the Glee Club-”

“And yet you’re here.” Rachel is obstinate; Quinn knows that winning arguments with her is technically possible (she’s done it before, she’s struck her at the knees and come out standing on top, you don’t belong here, Rachel), but she’s not that person anymore and never will be again and it’s not worth it.

“My car’s here,” Quinn lies. Their relationship’s fraying, they might not come back from this. She wants to feel better, cleaner, about this than she does.

Instead she just leaves, into the rain, and takes only one look back to see if Rachel is watching her.

***

Because of course she’s here. Because of course they keep ending up in the same place like this; call it fate or call it something worse but they can’t seem to stay away from each other.

Quinn’s about to cross the room to go to her (because she really can’t just stay away; no, that would be too easy) but then Will Schuester, who looks like a shell of a man, runs onstage with a microphone in hand.

“Hey, guys!” he crows, and none of the other teachers try to stop him for some reason. Rachel stands off to the side, grimaces. “It’s so great to see you all here!”

He must’ve been the principal for like a decade. Quinn hasn’t kept up.

“Great to see everyone here - can’t believe it’s been eleven years since the class of 2012 left McKinley to make it in the world.” Schuester glances at a notecard in his hand, and his voice softens. “And make it they did. Mercedes Jones, currently on her second sold-out world tour.” So that’s why Mercedes isn’t here. “John Gosling, doing groundbreaking research at NIH.” Quinn has no idea who this is. “And Rachel Berry. Tony winner, Broadway star, household name, and the former captain of the New Directions. Come on up here, Rachel.” Schuester looks around in the audience until Rachel enters from her spot on the stage. “Oh. You’re here.”

Rachel mouths something in response that Quinn can’t parse out.

“Alright, everyone, give it up for Rachel Berry!” Schuester bows out, sort of skitters to the side.

“Hello,” Rachel begins, and she breathes in deep. “It’s wonderful to see you all again - though I’m obviously a huge star-” she pauses for titters from the audience “-it’s important to me that I take periodic trips back to the place that began my career trajectory. And I had no idea that Mr. Schue was going to put me on the spot like this, but that’s what he always did best - spontaneity. We wouldn’t know the subject of the week until we walked into that choir room, and neither would he.” Rachel looks at their old teacher with a fondness that Quinn doesn’t share. “Nothing was predictable back then, and nothing was easy, either. That’s what it’s like, to grow up. You have no clue what you’re doing, and everybody else says they know what it’s like, but the fact of the matter is, they don’t.”

Santana and Brittany hold hands towards the back, and Santana’s looking at Rachel and watching, watching.

“It’s a terrible time for anybody who isn’t a jock at the very top of their game, and even then - even then, it’s hard. For a Jewish girl with a big nose and a bigger voice - not to mention an atrocious fashion sense - it was nothing short of a nightmare.”

Quinn’s hand grips her own arm.

“But there were bright spots. And when your life is as incredible as mine-” another pause for titters, she’s good at this “-it’s, well. When the spotlight’s shining down on you every single night it’s easy to let them all blend into each other, right? But when it’s hard, all the time, when most of the school hates you and everybody else is getting the solos-”

“You got like all of them!” Santana jeers back, and Rachel winks at her.

“-and your dreams feel like they’re a lifetime away from where you are right now and you’re in love with somebody who couldn’t possibly feel the same way, well, those bright spots stand out more than anything. And I’m not going to stand here and pretend that this place was perfect, or that the administration did everything right or even tried their best, because a lot of the time they didn’t. But the Glee Club was one of those bright spots.”

Rachel looks down, now. Quinn has to blink back tears.

“You were one of those bright spots.”

***

“Oh, you can see me.” Rachel waves, tries to commit each of Quinn’s pixelated features to memory. She isn’t actually sure if this is any better than a phone call.

“I can see you.”

“Fantastic. And I can see myself.” Rachel pauses, because she has no idea how to move the conversation forward. Not for the first time she wishes that Kurt and Blaine would meddle just a little bit more, that they might insist on doing this call with her, but no, of course not, "these two need their privacy.” It’s ridiculous.

“We should talk through how this is going to work.”

“Yes! Yes, of course, absolutely - I’ll draft up a contract, even.”

“I don’t want to be involved in - raising it. I don’t even want to know it. My role starts and ends with giving you the egg.”

“‘No…contact…’ I think that’ll do nicely.” Rachel has a Google Doc open in another tab, she has it pulled aside so that she can see Quinn’s face fully. “Personally I plan to be somewhat involved in the little one’s life as a very cool aunt but that’s also because we live in the same city and I’m still very close friends with Kurt and Blaine. It won’t be a problem, for you - not to see them.”

Rachel pauses after that - and she hates pausing, she’d like nothing more than to steamroll over the implications of what she’s just said, but she owes Quinn just a few seconds of silence - and Quinn looks at her, through the screen, across hundreds (thousands?) of miles, and it makes her want to cry.

“That sounds good,” Quinn finally says, voice thick. “Maybe Kurt and Blaine can just tell the kid that they came from your egg, too. Take me out of the equation.”

“Quinn.” Rachel is so rarely the more mature one; it feels odd to round and soften her voice like this. “Do you actually want to do this?”

“I do.”

“Because you-”

“I agreed to it already. And I have healthy genes.” Quinn’s face is a warped mess of pixels. Rachel can’t read her from here – it’s getting harder and harder for her to tell if she ever could read her. And that shouldn’t matter, really, if one girl she knew in high school (whose egg she will be carrying for the next nine months) is still legible to her, when she is the lead in a show filled to the brim with Tony buzz, when she has a husband who loves her.

Because he does. And he’s wonderful, truly – Jesse is warm, and funny, and he makes her breakfast every morning (and sometimes it’s eggs, and she’ll swat him with a towel until he pushes the eggs aside and reveals an array of vegan pancakes) and he understands her musical references and he’s very good at sex and his voice matches hers well enough, they have great duets. They’re twin souls, mirrors of each other, and he didn’t put up a fight when she insisted upon keeping her last name, because he thought Rachel St. James would be silly anyway and, conversely, Jesse Berry sounded like a Disney Channel character.

He loves her, and he’s kind, and she likes to come home to him but the lovelorn emotion she plays out each night in Jane Austen Sings! is just that: an act, and she feels much the same with him. None of that depth-scraping passion, that feeling of love like a magnetic pull, love like a force stronger than gravity. Jesse keeps her feet on the ground and she doesn’t mind it, really, it’s about the best she could hope for given the fact that she lost the love of her life at nineteen and almost rotted away in Ohio herself.

Jesse loves her, and she loves him, but it isn’t the way that Kurt and Blaine love each other, where they’re attached at the hip, where they’re still - nearly a decade on - finding new ways to fall in love with each other. Some people might call it codependence but Rachel calls it romance and she is terribly, terribly jealous of them.

“If you’re sure,” Rachel finally says, because she’s been quiet for a while, and there’s only so much that you can blame on poor connection.

Quinn just nods her assent.

“We’re adults,” she says, as if she is trying to convince herself, as if she is not pushing thirty and nearly finished with her dissertation (something about the performative nature of gender, about how “all the world’s a stage” can mean you’re the understudy in your own life, and it’s all very lofty and involves lots of theory and it is something Rachel is no longer in a position to ask about) and looking, even on the piss-poor quality of this screen, like a movie star, like a moon in the sky. Distant, brilliant, untouchable.

Rachel wonders if she looks the same, on the other end of things – she’s earned a decent amount of attention for Jane Austen Sings! and for her off-Broadway roles, even if it’s mostly among teenagers on Tumblr.

(Even if these Tumblr teenagers are also fans of her Funny Girl replacement, who lives in Hollywood now, who is on movie posters and is halfway to an EGOT and Rachel is jealous of her because she’s still human)

She wants to be elegant, untouchable in the same way. She wants to be lofty. She does not want to still want more than she has. All of it is paradoxical and frustrating and unclear, and here is Quinn Fabray, with her life together, donating an egg because she is that certain of her own place there, that it’s nothing more than a favor.

“We’re adults,” Rachel repeats, once it’s obvious that Quinn has nothing else to say on the subject. “We can be normal about this.”

“Exactly.”

“You won’t see me during the pregnancy at all.”

“I’m too busy working on the dissertation.”

“Exactly.” This is good. This works - this will work, and it will not feel complicated, and Rachel will carry Quinn’s baby and give it to Kurt and Blaine and none of them will feel weird about that at all, because there’s nothing to feel weird about.

They could be mirrors of each other, and it will work out perfectly fine, and then they will move on with their lives.

***

“I never thought I’d come back here,” Quinn says. She’s never been good at hello, Rachel notices. She’s started a trend, maybe, because now Matt Rutherford (of all people) is singing onstage and there’s a small crowd cheering him on.

“I think some part of me knew I wouldn’t be able to stay away,” Rachel admits, because this is how it works, this is equivalent exchange. Respective relationships, disparate feelings. One building (or a couple of buildings, if you care for semantics, which she does) and a million different experiences with it.

It should be difficult to hear her over the din, but Rachel has a trained ear, she can pick these things out with ease, and besides there’s no missing Quinn’s voice, the slips and slopes of her gravelly sentences, the way she curls around syllables, and it feels - meaningful - that she still recognizes this, too, after everything.

“You know, if somebody told me that my very best friend would be Santana Lopez and I’d be willingly returning to McKinley, I think I’d laugh in their face.”

The song changes, something softer. Quinn thinks she heard it on the radio, or maybe one of her students played it.

“Why’s that even a saying?”

“What?”

“‘If somebody told me this would happen, I wouldn’t believe them.’ If someone claimed to know my future I wouldn’t believe anything they said. I’d just think they were crazy. ‘You’re a professor of literature at Yale. You’re gay.’ Even if any of it did make sense, why would I believe it?”

“That’s because you’re a pessimist.”

“I was.” Quinn adjusts her cufflinks, smiles to herself. “I think I turned out fine, in the end.”

“I think that we both did.” Rachel pauses, shakes her head, recalibrates. “But really. You and I. Fourteen years ago, who could have predicted it?”

“I don’t know.”

They both go quiet for a moment, because they have the space to do that, because Rachel no longer needs to push and push and push for attention; she can just be, which she also never really thought possible, and she feels the stupid, young urge to hold Quinn’s hand, to pretend (even for just a moment!) that they are here together, that it’s not likely they won’t ever see each other again after tonight, that she isn’t trying to commit each one of Quinn’s expressions to memory.

It’s too much, is the thing. They’ve always been too much for each other. And it hurts, and she’s so tired of it hurting, she’s tired of coming back here too (even if she romanticizes it, even if she’d probably still be struggling for community theater roles were it not for the Glee Club and the notoriety that winning Nationals brought her and the support of her friends and Finn, oh, if it weren’t for Finn) and of wanting, she’s spent so long wanting.

So Rachel does something she never would have done while she was a student here. She does something that might very well be - for both of their sakes - the only logical thing.

She runs.

***

It takes Quinn an awful minute to realize Rachel isn’t there, and she hates the way her chest seizes up with - what? Not panic; there’s nothing to worry about. Fear? Sadness? It’s not relief. Relief, for her, has always been a release, an opening of her heart, but right now it feels like it’s being squeezed to death.

“I have to go,” she says, and grabs her cane from the wall and makes a berth in the crowd with it - here is your power, here is the world parting for you after all - and pushes open the double doors and knows exactly where Rachel will be.

***

Most people don’t stay this late at their high school reunions; most people go and say hello to the people they’re still friends with and then mock the people they don’t with those same friends, and then maybe they go to a bar or maybe they go back to their hotel or, if they are particularly unlucky, they go to their house that is just a few miles away from the school and contemplate where it all went wrong.

Rachel does not do any of these things; Rachel flees to the bathroom, which is exactly the same and she is so relieved about this for some reason. Still the off-white porcelain sinks, the red tiles on the walls, the stalls that don’t swing exactly right.

She grips the sink tight enough that she feels she might crack it. She does not cry. She will not be the sort of person to cry at her high school reunion over a girl.

***

It’s all memories. This entire place is made of memories; it’s sick with them. Quinn doesn’t know how anyone can stand it. And she’d lie, if she was a little worse off. She’d pretend she had no fucking clue why she kept coming back here but the problem is she’s been in therapy for nearly a decade and she knows who she is and she knows without a doubt that she’s here for Rachel Berry.

Rachel, who was married until last year.

Rachel, who Quinn has been in love with for years and years and years.

Rachel, who is bent over a bathroom sink, lit in profile, and in over a decade Quinn has not ever loved her more.

“Rachel,” she says, and she looks up.

“What are you doing here?” Rachel whispers. “You should be gone.”

“I’m-” there’s the choke, there’s the lack of movie-ending cleanliness to them. “I’m sorry.”

“What on earth could you be sorry for?”

“For running? For being such a shitty person in high school, for acting like I didn’t care about this place and you and that I was better when I just- I wasn’t.” The door doesn’t have a handle; anyone could come in. Anyone could leave. “God, Rachel. It’s always been you.”

Rachel stares at her, one hand on the sink, the other lying limp at her side, eyes brown and warm and teary.

“Don’t- Quinn. I understand. I understand why you hated it, why by all means you should actually hate me, because I represent everything that went wrong in your life, and that’s just in the handful of years we actually knew each other, I understand why you don’t want to be here anymore. I wouldn’t, either.” Rachel takes a deep, wet breath.

***

Quinn doesn’t disappear into her surroundings here, the way she used to. She’s in this bathroom and she’s outlined in bold and Rachel’s heart is beating so loud it might well be in surround sound, it might well be something Quinn could hear, and that would be embarrassing, wouldn’t it? A lifetime of keeping this one thing held inside, and she fucks it up on what may well be the very last time she ever sees Quinn.

“I mean, what even is this? Trauma-bonding? You hated me, and I couldn’t stand you either, and maybe in the Glee Club you could call it necessity because you were the only person who saw what lengths I was willing to stoop to and didn’t try to make excuses for me and stuck by me anyway but now that we're both living our own lives-”

“What?” Quinn, puzzled. Quinn, not knowing exactly how important this is. Do you have any idea what you mean to me?

“I’m not a good person, Quinn. I’m jealous, and I’m petty, and I talk too much and I want too much and I’ve never apologized for any of it. I’m somebody who sent a girl to a crackhouse because I was jealous of her. And I was lucky enough to have people who looked past that. Santana, Kurt, my dads, Jesse.” Hold back the tears, don’t fall apart in front of her. “Finn.”

Probably the remaining members of the Glee Club are going to the choir room now. They’ll sing “Don’t Stop Believin’” for the one hundredth time and they will wait for their leader to sing the second part of the first verse and they will wonder why she missed it.

“Rachel…”

“No, Quinn, you are going to let me finish this because otherwise I may not ever say it again. You didn’t look past it. You looked right at me, you saw me, and you weren’t afraid.”

“Because I was just as bad.” Quinn picks at a button. “Worse.”

“Because you understood. And I’ve been so selfish, trying to keep you here, trying to call you back, when I should have let you go a long time ago.” It hurts to say it. But the right thing is supposed to hurt, isn’t it? “You have such an incredible life, Quinn. You’re- you’re happy. You’re successful, you’re not stuck here, you’re a professor at one of the most prestigious colleges in the country and you’re happy.” It bears repeating, it bears saying it a hundred times and then some more.

“I know.” And Quinn sounds like she did in high school - breathy, nasally - but she’s looking at Rachel now.

“So you need to stop coming back. You can’t keep- doing this to yourself. Because I’ll miss you and I do miss you but it’s not healthy, is it?” And oh, no, here are the tears. “Maybe we were - star-crossed, the kinds of people who were just supposed to cross paths for a time and then keep going. We have to let each other go.” Here she is, selfless. The moment of redemption, the great sacrifice – the end of the movie. She might as well have music swelling behind her.

“We don’t,” Quinn says, and she sounds surprised at herself. Rachel blinks.

“What?”

“You’re right.”

“I am?”

“Rachel. I know. And I am happy. That’s why I…”

***

Now or never. And Quinn has always been reckless, really. She didn’t care much about herself, she was always trying to find the next thing, the better thing. And she’s comfortable now, she's more careful now. She could turn around, leave. It would hurt, but it would scab over.

But she doesn’t want to. She wants- oh, how she wants.

***

“That’s why I’m here. Because we don’t need each other. But I want- this. I’ve always wanted this.” Quinn tips her head back, blinks fast, then stops. She looks right at Rachel. “Rachel, I’ve always loved you.”

***

The world stops. Rachel steps closer, Rachel puts her hand on Quinn’s cheek, Rachel is breathing and breathing. Quinn knows what she's doing - she's waiting, she's giving her one last out.

***

“I’m going to kiss you,” Rachel says, and waits for Quinn to move away, but she doesn’t, she doesn’t, and Rachel kisses her and it feels like a supernova, like the universe, exploding, expanding, Quinn’s hand in her hair, Rachel’s tongue in her mouth, both of them, pressing closer and closer, leaning on the sink, hungry, warm, hot, the sink crunching under their combined weight, Quinn seeing double in the mirror and still only looking at Rachel, Rachel, loving her, loving her, loving this woman the way you can only love somebody if it’s been a lifetime of loving them, uneven, rough, tender, duets and spotlights and screaming matches and noses and fireworks and train passes and snow and Quinn, always Quinn.

Quinn, who is the first to break away, and her cheeks are flushed and she’s smiling so wide and she takes Rachel’s hands into her own, fearlessly, unabashedly.

They look at the door.

There are a million ways this story could end.

They could go home and have sex, they could get married, they could flip off that whole institution, they could have a hundred children, they could break up and it could be ugly, they could keep this as a fling, they could love each other forever.

They could rejoin the Glee Club, they could never see each other again, they could write this off (they couldn’t write it off), the world expands into a million possibilities, undefined things, potentiality and possibility and them, Rachel and Quinn, through it all.

They hold hands, and Quinn leads.

They step towards the door, and Rachel starts to pull her forwards.

They kiss again, and they have to break apart a few times for how much they’re smiling, how long they’ve waited, they can’t even keep their hands off each other for a few seconds.

They could do anything.

They—