A/N: Something quick I needed to write because I was blocked on a different fic. Quinn has been very inconsistently characterized over the past season, especially in regard to S1, and this is what I perceived to be at least a component of that characterization.
She looks up in the the mirror, still streaked with condensation from the too-hot shower, and smiles. The person who smiles back at her, blurred and soft, is still just as conventionally beautiful and dainty and empty as always.
Blonde hair, darkened with water; pink, utterly soft lips; gentle and hauntingly lonely green eyes. Empty and lonely because in the end, even if others betray and hurt her, Quinn herself will end up hurting those people first. She will push and push and push to be perfect, a sociable and well-mannered young lady who deserves everything, not because she truly wants it, but because it will make her happy instead. Fill the aching void in her life since Puck and Beth, since Mercedes, since Finn even, since the people in her life who once loved her were hurt by her and realized it, hurt because she pushes too hard and forgets to act like that façade of a well-mannered girl.
Quinn relaxes the curve of her lips and skims her hands up her sides, moving them until they settle over her belly, which was once much larger and fatter and uglier, but also a bringer of discernible joy and potential. Potential is all that she can survive on these days: her potential to maybe, just maybe get out of this cow town, to move on and move out, to bury the heartache she has both experienced and caused as far down in her being as she can.
As Quinn loosens the towel, lets it drop to the ground and goes to retrieve her pajamas, she thinks that the only way she will be able to achieve anything significant in her life is to bury those memories, and simply try to forget. Put on a mask instead and campaign to be the prettiest, the best, regardless of everyone else. It may be painful, but it is what she does best.
