summary: 'Quinn is a bitch to Rachel. Rachel is not a bitch to Quinn. Kurt sort of hates them both.' Faberry evolution through Kurt's POV. Drabble from before season 1, canon through current season 4 episodes. Faberry romance endgame.
an (1): because hummelberry is the best brotp ever and i never got to write as much kurt/quinn friendship as i wanted. i hope you're all well. x
an (2): title and epigraph from robert hass' "four poems."
...
giving them their graceful lift toward light
.
To study their shapes, because it is he
Who gets to decide
Which limbs get lopped off
In the kingdom of the dead.
...
Quinn is only beautiful the first time Kurt realises that she's sad. It's freshman year, in English class, and they're starting a brief poetry unit. The assignment is to bring in their favourite poem.
"Would anyone like to volunteer to read aloud?" their teacher asks.
The room is silent, shuffling. Everyone looks down intently at their papers. Like Kurt's, most are printed from the internet.
Finally, Quinn raises her hand, timidly, and the teacher smiles at her. Quinn does not smile back, and she takes a deep breath, tucks a strand of long, perfect blond hair behind her ear. She smooths out the crease in leather-bound book; it is not old, although it is worn.
"Four poems, by Robert Hass," she says. "Three." She licks her lips once, and it doesn't give them any more life, doesn't make them pinker. "You can fall a long way in sunlight," she reads. "You can fall a long way in the rain."
She recites the rest of the poem steadily, like she's read it before and again and again, and it seems like the room exists entirely of Quinn's voice, space and time being rounded up by her always-stuffy nose and pauses, the hitch of her breath. This is probably what poetry really is.
Kurt decides he does not like poetry.
Quinn finishes and the teacher thanks her. Her eyes are open wider and for a second she's the most breathtaking thing he's probably ever seen, the way that his mother was when she was in her casket at her funeral, her skin all perfect, her eyes bright, her jaw broken and set just so. It hits him that maybe if she cried he could love her, not in any romantic way, but with humorless sorrow, without choice, the way everyone falls in love with their friends.
Quinn closes her book. She blinks. All motion returns to the room and Kurt tries to understand that she is smarter than anyone else he knows, and that maybe this imbues her with an inherent sadness, and she's stuck in language just the same as he is, the same language and the same hum of existence, and that possibly this is what poetry is really about.
Kurt tries not to hate her for it, but she stands and breezes out of the room, ignoring that he sees the little invisible nooses of her ribs too. He tries not to hate her, but he does anyway.
Her locker slamming sounds like her laugh, brittle and reverberating. A ghost.
.
Quinn is a bitch to Rachel. Rachel is not a bitch to Quinn.
Kurt sort of hates them both.
.
He walks down the hallway, stealing away towards the nursery, alone. He has not gone to see Quinn. He won't.
He stands at the window and finds Beth.
In her little pink hat, her flushed cheeks and cupid's bow lips, her fluttering baby grey eyes, he suddenly wants to tell her poems. He doesn't know her; he never will, but he doesn't know poetry either.
She starts to fuss, but it's not actual crying. He's not sure if her lungs are fully capable of that yet. Kurt thinks she looks like Quinn, although he's not sure if this is an illusion or not—maybe he just wants her to look like Quinn.
Regardless, Beth is gorgeous, even if her cries are just little whimpers, even if she's barely breathing on her own.
.
Rachel is unequivocally his best friend. She's wonderful and lovely and he absolutely despises her; he smiles all the time.
One night, at one of their sleepovers, she whispers, "Quinn doesn't really have any friends I think. That's why she's so awful."
"She's horrendous."
Rachel sighs, then curls up into his chest and says, "I'm so lucky to have found you."
"Me too," he says. "Me too."
There are stars tacked to Rachel's ceiling, a little glow-in-the-dark, faded rainbow planetarium. Kurt can't be sure, but perhaps the white putty in the middle would serve as a metaphor: stalagmites, or the dancing feet of hanged corpses, or scars in the middle of hands.
.
Kurt meets Blaine. He falls in love, romantic love, which is much less shocking than any other love. It involves a completely different sort of apology than every other sort of love, a denouncing of oneself. He hears Quinn's voice in his head—he still has English with her—that it's Heidegger's disclosure of all other possibilities, an iridescent disillusionment,.
It's the most beautiful think Kurt has ever experienced, it absolutely destroys him. He stops believing in language and he stops believing in metaphor because how could he possibly explain what this feels like?
One warm, drifting summer night they go to the lake, he and Blaine, Rachel and Finn. They have a picnic and lie back on a blanket. They watch the stars, and when Kurt looks over and sees Rachel smile at Finn, her finger painting a phantom against the sky, he understands that she has absolutely no idea that constellations don't really exist.
.
"Quinn, I'd like you to stay after class," their AP English 12 teacher, Miss Baker, says. She's funny and bright and young challenging with dark, shoulder length curly hair and old-fashioned pumps. Kurt's been enjoying her class.
Quinn shrugs. She's sad, obviously so. This has been bothering Rachel, and it's fascinating to Kurt, because Quinn has pink hair and a nose ring and perfectly destroyed clothes, and maybe she's putting on a mask to hide another one. Watching someone destroy themselves is oddly lovely.
Kurt hovers outside the doorway after the rest of class shuffles out.
"Quinn," Miss Baker says. She sits next to the desk Quinn hasn't moved from.
"What?" Quinn's voice is husky, Joni Mitchell's lungs full of tar.
Miss Baker puts a paper down on the desk in front of Quinn. Kurt strains to see, but it looks like a bunch of random letters on a piece of paper. "Your supposed essay on postmodernism, Quinn."
Quinn laughs, an empty canoe, hollowed and floating.
Miss Baker sighs. Kurt thinks her patience is remarkable.
"Language is arbitrary," Quinn says. "It's random. The signifier never matches the signified. I was merely demonstrating."
Surprisingly, Miss Baker cracks a smile. "You're a Derrida fan."
Quinn looks down, like she's been caught committing some deadly crime, unarmed. "No, no, I—I just—"
"—Quinn," Miss Baker says. It's gentle and Quinn almost starts to cry.
"Fuck," Quinn whispers. Her voice splinters.
Miss Baker nods. "You're one of the gifted students I've ever known, teaching or in college. Have you taken your SAT?"
Quinn nods. Miss Baker doesn't look away. Quinn shrugs. "2320," she finally mumbles.
Miss Baker swallows. "Please don't waste yourself."
Quinn puts her arms across the desk and then puts her head on top of them, pink fluffs of hair in knots. She starts to shake. Miss Baker puts her hand on her back and starts rubbing little circles.
Kurt feels his cheeks grow hot. He should not be here; he should not watch Quinn Fabray fall apart (again, again, again) because he never plans on putting the pieces back together.
He starts walking away and Miss Baker says, "I expect an actual essay on Derrida this Monday, although I appreciated your original aesthetic."
Quinn's laugh is soggy, soft, lacking any rhythm at all.
.
"The world never stopped loving you," he informs her, harshly.
He means it, because Quinn made everything look exquisite, because when Quinn broke she shattered spectacularly, with such heartbreaking, staggering fury and gentleness, he couldn't stand it.
Because maybe the world never loved her anyway.
Because she looks like Grace Kelly when she cries.
She looks at him like he's absolutely insane. He wants to apologise because who the hell knows if Quinn stopped loving herself. Perhaps she's not finished breaking, not at all.
They are not friends. They don't know each other at all, not really.
.
Rachel twists her engagement ring around her finger. He sort of wants to rip it off—the finger or the ring, whichever disconnects easier.
Quinn gets into Yale. She also never shuts up in English, always going on about people named Lacan or Jameson, Pynchon or DeLillo. Her hair is blond and brushes her shoulders; she is all blazers and vintage dresses—all surface, no depth.
One day he and Blaine go to the Barnes & Noble at the mall and he picks up one of the books Quinn's always (still) going on about in class, a collection of Robert Hass's poems.
"Quinn only believes in metonymy," he tells Blaine.
"Is that, like, a denomination or something?" Blaine scrunches his nose.
Kurt laughs and doesn't bother to explain. The book gives him a tiny paper-cut; he allows a dot of his blood to seep onto the page then places it back on the shelf, spine straight.
.
They sit in the waiting room. He cannot understand, and he wants to sob, but Santana's already doing that, which is probably the scariest thing ever. Brittany is shushing her.
He excuses himself. It's horrifying, what he wants to do, but he tells Blaine he needs some air and he ends up on a courtyard in front of the hospital.
He hates Quinn more than ever now, because she might die and people like Quinn are supposed to exist in infinity.
But then he realises that people like Quinn are built to destruct, to live dramatic, dazzling years quickly—bright stars, burning quicker and then exploding, leaving those around them without a member of an inorganic system before sucking them into a black hole: He will feel the lack. People write elegies for people like Quinn. People like Quinn die young.
He takes out his phone from his pocket and unlocks it. On YouTube, he watches video of a spine surgery. There is blood and bones and so much life. It's very messy. Quinn is not a star and she is not a tornado or a hurricane or anything else beautiful. She is not anything but a person, atoms put together in a certain way. She is smarter than Kurt and through the sterile doors, he can almost smell her flesh being cauterized.
He throws up in the dirt of a flowerbed. It's so, so easy to die.
.
"Kurt?" Miss Baker says. He's exhausted—Rachel slept over last night and cried until early morning—but he nods, stopping as everyone exists the classroom. He nods.
Miss Baker knots her hands. "You—have you—how's Quinn?"
He lets out a breath. "She's off the ventilator, which is good. The swelling in her spinal cord is going down and her brain's stopped bleeding."
Miss Baker shuts her eyes. "She had brain trauma?" She's going to start crying and Kurt really doesn't have the energy.
"They don't think there should be any permanent damage," he tells her.
She steadies herself.
"You should go see her," he says. "They're supposed to let her wake up today and Lord knows she'll want to start talking about jouissance as soon as possible."
Miss Baker laughs. "Thank you, Kurt," she says.
Kurt wants to thank her too, for even caring. He doesn't, but it comforts nonetheless. Miss Baker smiles and squeezes his shoulder; he cries for the first time in the hallway.
.
Rachel takes him with her to the hospital the next day. Kurt feels nervous; he doesn't feel the need to explain it. He keeps messing with his hair and finally in the elevator Rachel just grabs his hand and doesn't let go. The nurses tell them that Judy and Frannie, Quinn's sister, have just left to get some food.
Rachel swallows and nods. She smiles. She says, "Thank you."
Quinn's asleep when they go into the room quietly, despite the florescent lights in full force. The bruises on her face have become greener, although the swelling around her left eye has gone down. Rachel sits down in a chair almost pressed to the bed, and he sits down next to her. Quinn's breathing is shallow and Kurt can hear the fluid in her lungs, the straining pulls of ropes against her ribs, up and down her throat, that the air makes.
Rachel takes their joined hands and places them on top of the bed, then scoots them towards Quinn's right hand, which is covered in little cuts. She tangles all of their fingers together, a gradient, and Quinn coughs a little, then blinks in slow motion before turning her head a little towards Rachel.
Rachel tries to smile but then Quinn closes her eyes with a whimper. Kurt wants to take his hand away, because there is no possible way he can give comfort with something like this; he cannot say anything.
Rachel responds, though, and scoots closer to the bed so that she can take her free hand and brush it through Quinn's hair, making sure not to go anywhere near the little monitor sticking out of Quinn's skull or the other places of severe fracture the doctors had warned them to be especially wary of.
"It hurts," Quinn mumbles.
"I know," Rachel says.
Quinn doesn't cry, though. She whispers, "Sing."
Rachel starts to sing some slow, acoustic version of Passion Pit's "I've Got Your Number," and she's pitchy and the timing is all wrong, but Quinn's grip on Kurt's hand relaxes slightly and Rachel doesn't stop.
Quinn falls asleep and for the first time Kurt sees the two of them without any pretense: Rachel's hair is messy and she has on jeans and a sweater, and she's not wearing any makeup; Quinn is beautiful but not, not right now, her perfect features marred and bruised without apology. There are tubes sticking out of her chest and by her collarbone and her lips are almost white and her hair is greasy. She is very much the human.
Have you seen me cry tears like diamonds? Rachel sings. Everything in the room is bright.
Does only such mutilation remove masks? Kurt wonders.
Then, Is this beautiful?
.
Quinn still talks about Robert Hass when she comes back to English. Rachel stays with Finn.
Kurt sort of hates them both.
.
He does not get into NYADA.
The first time he sees Quinn walk—not just stand, but walk—is on a Saturday morning; he and Rachel are having coffee and watching Blade Runner when the doorbell rings. Hiram and Leroy are out grocery shopping; he and Rachel go to answer the door together.
Then there's Quinn, wearing jeans and TOMS and a T-shirt with Beatles lyrics on it, smiling almost manically, clutching a cane in her right hand, knuckles white.
"Quinn!" Rachel squeals, and hugs her carefully but with no less enthusiasm.
"Hi Kurt," Quinn says, and he smiles too, giving her a hug. "I just stopped by because I was officially cleared to start walking again outside of therapy, and I—"
Quinn looks down, disarmed. Kurt realises she's actually surprised when her own honesty slips out. Rachel steps outside and takes Quinn's left hand.
Quinn raises her head to meet Rachel's concerned eyes. "I wanted you to be the first person to see," she finishes quietly.
The tendons in their hands flex—Kurt knows they are squeezing, grasping.
Rachel doesn't say anything. She starts humming and then Kurt says, "We're watching Blade Runner, if you'd like to join us."
"Have you discussed its neo-noir aspects yet?" Quinn asks, interest immediately piqued, and she takes a shaky step inside.
Kurt and Rachel share a smile.
"We were waiting for you, apparently," Kurt says.
Quinn makes her way to the couch, explaining, "It's really all about jouissance and Dekker's object cause of desire, you know."
"That would be Rachel?" Kurt asks.
Quinn nods. He swears she blushes. "That would be Rachel," she agrees.
.
The first time Quinn visits in New York, it's the last week in September. She smiles gently and everything she does is infused with care, but her happiness is also reckless. Her hair is short and windblown; she wears dresses from Madewell and scarves and a pair of calf-hair loafers that he and Rachel are jealous of. She laughs a lot, ungracefully, with her head thrown back, uncontrolled and meaningless, and it's better than any ghost.
They're sitting in the loft late one night, drinking wine and just listening to the rain and the city and Passion Pit on vinyl when Quinn sits up and quietly says, "Kurt, I like girls," before leaning back against the bottom of the chair and stretching her legs out.
He almost chokes on his wine and he looks at Rachel, who is smiling at Quinn so fondly he has no idea what to do.
"As in, you like like girls?"
"Yes," Quinn says steadily. "I told Rachel a few weeks ago when she was in New Haven, and I'm just being open about it at school and, yeah."
He scoots over to her, crawls along the rug, and says, "I'm so proud of you for coming out," and hugs her tightly. He wants to say more and he wants to ask a million questions, like what it was like to know this and live in a house like hers, and whether or not she's met anyone—Rachel, he knows, knows—but he doesn't, and he wants to apologise. "Love you," he tells her.
She smiles. "Love you too."
.
Rachel dates Brody—who is a good guy and also so handsome—and Quinn starts to visit more and more, all at the same time.
Rachel and Brody break up and Finn never really reenters the picture. A few times Kurt notices her look over girls in the park, track their entire bodies, head tilted, eyes hooded, lips pursed.
One night in November, just before they go home for Thanksgiving, Rachel leans against the counter. "I don't think I'm completely straight," she says, her eyes darting to Kurt's hands nervously, heaped in a cloud of soapy bubbles in the sink where he's doing the dishes.
Kurt smiles, tugging Rachel to his chest. "You don't say."
.
"Quinn's beautiful," Rachel whispers one night in January, after Quinn's gone back to New Haven. "Isn't she?"
"She's incandescent," Kurt mumbles, nearly asleep, thinking of Quinn's red, rough scars and the putty on the underside of all stars, speaking unveiled truth.
.
He isn't surprised in the slightest when he gets home from work on a Thursday evening in March and sees Quinn kissing Rachel, and Rachel kissing Quinn, and Quinn's hands fisting Rachel's hair and Rachel's hands palming the small of Quinn's back over her pretty dress. It's a nice height difference, and both of their eyes are closed. Quinn's cheeks are flushed, and she's crying. Rachel moans. They seem not quite sure, gentle, tentative, but strong, eager as well, practiced and learning for the first time.
Maybe it's some sort of rough, perfect poetry, or maybe it's not poetry at all: Kurt can imagine a future.
They don't hear him and he backs away, catching sight of a little mobile of hand-cut paper yellow stars hung from a beam on the ceiling, swirling chaotically, each piece held up by its own string noose, certain and steady, quiet, beautiful, floating into infinity.