sky of the sky of a tree called life
here is the deepest secret nobody knows
i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)
- e. e. cummings
Quinn sleeps with a hand under her cheek.
Tucked between her pillow and her face, palm cradling her jaw. She lays on her left side (better for the baby, Mercedes' mother once told her – nine months is long enough to build a habit) and puts her hand under her cheek, her thumb digging into her skin just below the hinge of her jaw, seeking out her heartbeat.
She feels that steady beat (ba-dum ba-dum ba-dum) until it's the only thing she's thinking of. She closes her eyes. Her heart thrums with nothing to echo it.
She carried two heartbeats around once. There was one in her womb, smaller and quicker but infinitely more important.
Quinn sleeps with a hand under her cheek, feeling her pulse, and listens to the absence of anyone else.
Her body feels foreign to her for a long time. She wakes up in the strangest ways, an ache between her legs, a hand against her belly, tears soaking her pillowcase.
But the girl in the mirror looks the same.
There is always Puck.
Always Puck, the same way there's always Lucy. It's a part of her buried so deep that it's lodged there now – she drove it so far in that she doesn't think she'll ever be able to get it out.
"I don't care about you," he says.
She's wearing too much makeup to cry.
Before she carried his baby, she would have said it to him too, she would have sneered, she would have thrown it right back – she wouldn't have cared for him. It wouldn't have meant a thing.
"I don't care about you either," she tries to tell her reflection. I don't care about me either, she says instead.
She watches her mother sometimes. Judy sips water (gin) while she reads the Bible, fingers catching on the edges of the pages.
Quinn makes lists of all the things she wouldn't do, of all the ways she's learned not to raise a daughter. She commits them to memory.
As an embryo, her baby was Drizzle, named for her not-father's favourite weather condition. When she came into the world, so small and so real, Puck and Shelby named her Beth.
Quinn wanted to call her daughter Caroline.
She dies her hair pink and hangs out beneath the bleachers, skipping class and smoking cigarettes. She wears too much blush and black clothing, torn t-shirts and clunky boots.
She figures the outside should match the inside, after all.
Do you see me now? she wonders. Sometimes it feels like she's lost her voice.
Rachel Berry is the only one who really notices.
Oh, Quinn thinks. How the mighty have fallen.
The myth of Quinn Fabray is built on lies, on surgeries paid for with Daddy's credit card, on dyed hair, on the stretch marks hidden beneath her clothes.
She is not that ugly, lonely girl anymore. She's not the captain of the Cheerios. She's not a straight-A student, not a member of glee club, not Finn Hudson's girlfriend, not prom queen. She isn't beautiful or popular. She isn't much of anything.
Nothing but a mother – that's the one part of herself she can't break or extract or pretend away.
She changes herself yearly, monthly, whenever it pleases her. She manipulates the world to her whims and it has always, always obeyed her. It never once occurred to her, pregnant and alone, how permanent her baby would be, what a massive part of her that one tiny being could take away. She's aware of Beth with every beat of her heart.
Still, her arms are so empty.
fin