summary: 'The first girl Quinn loves is Rachel. It's not something she's ever really unsure of, although she fights it for a long time, as passionately as she possibly can.' Five of Quinn's failed lovers and one that succeeds. Fits into "god's moving in your bloodstream" and "with your eyes alone." Definitely Faberry endgame.
an (1): this is angsty and sad and everything, but it has so much to do with explaining quinn in my canon, so here you go. i hope you're all well x
an (2): title from stars' "your ex-lover is dead." beautiful stuff.
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your ex-lover is dead
.
(when there's nothing left to burn, you have to set yourself on fire)
...
six.
.
The first girl Quinn kisses is named Eloise Pendleton. She's fourteen, and they're both attending a weeklong church camp in Cincinnati. They become friends the minute they meet, because they're both cheerleaders. They spend most of their time together, even though they're technically not in the same youth group; they sing together and help serve macaroni and cheese together at a local homeless shelter.
They're just talking one night, the two of them. Eloise is fifteen, and she's from Dayton; her father is a doctor and her mother stays at home; she has three older brothers.
Eloise, Quinn knows, is also beautiful, the kind of beautiful she's always craved, always envied, with a hunger that she also knows is sinful. Eloise has blue eyes and long brown hair. Eloise has dimples.
They sneak up to the choir loft of a church they're staying at one night. There's no light that streams through the stained glass now; they're muted, sleeping too. Eloise sits down on the red-carpeted floor behind the pipes of the organ.
"Do you tell people secrets sometimes?" she asks.
Quinn sits down next to her. "No."
"Me either," Eloise says. She takes Quinn's hand.
Quinn takes a deep breath and then she leans toward Eloise, who meets her in a tiny, chaste kiss. It's Quinn's first kiss, and her heart skitters around everywhere in her chest, completely out of control, crashing against her ribs, sinking to press against her diaphragm so she can't breathe.
Eloise backs up and stares at Quinn, then she shakes her head. "I can't," she says.
Quinn fists her shaking hands. "Me either."
They stand and walk back to their respective youth groups. They never talk again.
...
five.
.
The second girl is Santana, and the first time they kiss is the day after Beth is born, because Quinn feels like every single inch of her body is fracturing, coming apart at the joints, at the junctures of her eyelashes and ears. Nothing has ever hurt this terribly before, nothing has made its way into her blood and erased everything that used to at least feel okay.
Quinn goes over to Santana's house, twenty pounds lighter and fading into oblivion so quickly she's not sure how long she'll last.
So she kisses Santana then, to feel her heart again. It works to a degree, because Quinn's breath is taken away and the muscle in her chest dances in a perfect four-chambered waltz that she feels, except for now it hurts.
Santana kisses her back; Santana doesn't stop her then, and Santana doesn't stop her later that summer when Quinn sighs as Santana's fingers skim up her thigh, underneath her skirt.
Santana tugs Quinn's skirt from her hips—gently, painfully so, with such care that years later Quinn will be absolutely certain that in another life, they would have fallen in love—and then presses hard against her, again and again.
Quinn breaks; she crumbles further until there's nothing left but dust, because Santana murmurs, "Brittany," into Quinn's collarbone, her breath hot and wet against her skin.
Quinn whimpers, "Rachel," because it's a lie and a truth at once and Santana doesn't seem to mind.
Later, for a while, it will tear them apart so much that they can't even talk to each other. The first time they touch afterward is to fight in the hallway after school starts.
It pretty much feels exactly the same.
...
four.
.
The first girl Quinn fucks is Abigail. They meet at the third party Quinn goes to with the Skanks; Quinn's hair is newly pink and her nose is still a little sore from its piercing.
Abigail is wearing ripped jeans and a black Charlotte Gainsbourg tanktop, and she has out of control red hair and calm green eyes, and she smiles at Quinn.
Quinn ambles over—she doesn't hurry anymore; no one has that power over her—to the sloppy couch Abigail is sitting on and holds out her hand, then opens her palm.
There are two tablets there—of what, Quinn's still not quite sure—but she takes one and puts it onto the tip of her tongue. Abigail stands and she's as tall as Quinn, and Quinn decides in that moment that she absolutely doesn't give a fuck, that, if the only way she's ever going to love anyone is by sinning, she may as well check them all off the list while she can.
She runs her thumb along Abigail's lower lip and then slips the other tablet into Abigail's mouth, following it with her tongue.
She doesn't know how much later she wakes up, wrapped in Abigail's pale limbs; Abigail has one tattoo on her hip of star, one Quinn hadn't noticed before.
Quinn stands unsteadily and pulls on her clothes, walks home, falls into bed.
Judy wakes her up in what Quinn assumes is the morning, with a timid hand to Quinn's shoulder. Quinn turns over and Judy eyes what Quinn notices are a few hickeys along her neck before clearing her throat. "It's one in the afternoon," she says.
"Who gives a fuck?" Quinn mumbles, then presses her face back into her pillow and waits for Judy to leave, which she eventually does with a sigh.
Quinn goes out later that night, after it's dark, to another party. Abigail is there again, and this time Quinn doesn't offer anything and Abigail doesn't either, only takes Quinn's hand before leading them into a bedroom.
Abigail is studying biology at Ohio State, she tells Quinn, and her parents don't care that she's gay; she goes to parties because she thinks they're fun.
Quinn starts to cry, then, because nothing about any of this is fun; it's scary and painful and something Quinn would wish away if she could—if she was better at wishing, if God listened to her desperate pleas to please take all of this away—so Abigail kisses her as she wipes her tears.
"It'll be okay," Abigail says.
"I hate it," Quinn admits; it's a secret, one she can't forget, one she can't run away from. By it she means a lot of things, things that she can't quite articulate, things like performing and lying and pretending.
Abigail nods like she understands; Abigail pulls Quinn's dress over her head with an aching slowness; Abigail kisses the scars along Quinn's lower back from Russell; Abigail fists one hand in Quinn's hair and pumps over and over again with the other, until Quinn stops crying.
And then it's the roughest Quinn's ever been, like she's punishing Abigail for being someone she could love, for promising things that Quinn's sure will never be true, for caring. Abigail will have bruises; Abigail will be broken, too.
Quinn wakes up in the middle of the night and tries to find the tiny dress from Urban Outfitters and the flannel that she'd had on before, but she can't, so she takes Abigail's t-shirt and her jeans and puts them on, then walks home as quickly as she can, swaying all the way into her bed.
She falls asleep in someone else's clothes, with someone else's taste on her lips, but when she wakes up she's the same person.
She thinks of Fight Club and sobs into her pillow before collecting herself and heading towards a tattoo parlor.
The next time she sees Abigail, they don't talk. They smoke a joint in silence and then Abigail fishes out a strap-on from her bag as soon as they're alone.
Abigail closes her eyes and pounds into Quinn, until Quinn can't breathe.
It reminds her almost exactly of how it felt to get her tattoo: It's stupid; it's a mistake; she'll be marked forever; there's nothing that will take it away. Pressure tears through her soft skin, over scars. She bleeds a little.
It hurts.
...
three.
.
After Quinn and Rachel break up her senior year at Yale, she goes to London during the summer and then takes the Chunnel to Paris. She gets drunk and fucks someone absolutely beautiful, someone who reminds her very hazily and vividly of Eloise.
It very much hurts the next day; Rachel is halfway across the world but Quinn feels her every single time she breathes. Two days later she's in the hospital with pneumonia (again); she's sure there's no coincidence.
...
two.
.
The second girl Quinn falls in love with is Emma. They meet her first year of grad school at Brown; Emma is in her second year of med school. She's beautiful, with short curly hair, big dark eyes, perfectly smooth skin, in a way that reminds Quinn of the 1950s—and in a strange moment, she wonders if that's what people see in her—and she's smart, too, and funny, and they're both into the same music and fashion.
Emma is sweet, and she pays attention; she listens better than Rachel ever did. She's not vegan, and she doesn't have any strange sleeping habits that awaken Quinn much too early in the morning.
There are moments that are so easy, so perfect, that it floors Quinn; there's no part of her that wants to fight. The first night Emma falls asleep in her arms, a huge pharmacology textbook splayed next to them, in one of Quinn's sweatshirts, she thinks that maybe it should be this easy, it should be natural and simple and unblemished with guilt.
One morning, a Saturday, one of the first days they get to sleep in and relax together, Emma traces the scars along Quinn's ribs.
"You had a thoracotomy," Emma says.
Quinn nods.
"And you had spinal surgery."
Quinn closes her eyes.
"Hey," Emma says. "I don't—you're beautiful and strong, okay? I just—something happened to you."
Quinn counts five heartbeats before she says, "It was a car accident. When I was seventeen, I was texting and I ran a stop sign. I broke seven ribs, ruined my lung. My L2 and L3 vertebrae—it was an incomplete injury, so—and I didn't have any severe brain damage, which was apparently remarkable."
Emma is quiet, but when Quinn looks up, Emma looks profoundly sad and remarkably amazed. "You do realize that people don't survive injuries like that very often, right?"
Quinn takes a deep breath.
"And you had to learn to walk again, and you must've had to have done so much respiratory therapy, and—God," Emma says. She rolls over and kisses Quinn's ribs. "You're remarkable."
It's so different from apologies, from the haunting moments of Rachel's tears after Quinn's nightmares, and it doesn't feel good, but it also doesn't feel bad.
"I was stupid," Quinn whispers.
Emma shakes her head with a sad, gentle smile, and they spend the rest of the day lazily kissing, watching movies in French, and eating leftovers, and it's so gentle Quinn keeps falling asleep.
"I love you," Quinn tells Emma, because she does, although it's something different, and she also understands that. A few weeks later, when Quinn accidentally whispers Rachel's name as Emma's fingers are inside her, she's not surprised.
"I'm sorry," Quinn says.
Emma nods and says, "Me too."
She stopped lying a long time ago; Quinn thinks that people sometimes appear for certain amounts of time, for certain reasons. She misses singing and she misses not having any bacon in the fridge and she misses ridiculous arguments and she misses being woken up at 6 am to go to the gym and she misses history.
"Invite me to your wedding one day," Quinn says, kissing Emma for the last time.
Emma smiles. "You too."
...
one.
.
The first girl Quinn loves is Rachel. It's not something she's ever really unsure of, although she fights it for a long time, as passionately as she possibly can.
The summer Quinn moves to New York City after she gets her master's from Brown, her left lung completely shuts down one night. It's been a long time coming, so the only thing she can think through her complete gulf of pain is that at least she's not surprised.
Rachel gets her to the hospital and it's hazy after that, but then Quinn hears Rachel arguing. Loudly.
Rachel notices that Quinn's awake, then walks quickly over to the bed, takes Quinn's hand.
"Everything's fine," Rachel says, and Quinn tries to focus on her bloodshot eyes and strong fingers—the last time she was scared in the hospital was years ago.
"Why're you yelling?"
Rachel sniffles. "They want to do another thoracotomy, and I just want to be sure that you're going to be okay, and that they're not going to hurt you, and that—you have to be okay, Quinn."
Quinn tries to breathe and she squeezes Rachel's hand. "I'll be fine. I promise."
And she is; she's horrendously sore after surgery so they up her morphine, which Quinn knows by now functions as truth serum.
"I've never loved anyone like I love you," she says.
It's a secret, but Rachel kisses Quinn's forehead and says, "I know."