Hey all you fellow fantastic Faberry fans! (I'm loving the alliteration there) this is my first Faberry fic, despite the fact that I've been reading (and shipping) the pairing since before I actually started watching Glee. Anyway, I hope you guys enjoy this, and fair warning, it's going to get a little angsty. I also may tweak the canon a bit to suit my purposes in the future.
-Nightshade
I don't own Glee, I'm just borrowing the characters, dragging them from hell and back, then returning them, slightly damaged, but still in working order!
Schadenfreude
Chapter One
The imperceptible flurry of whispers before the silence fell. The astonished gazes that lit upon my face and shoulder like a flock of uplifting birds. The smallest steps backward as the crowd began to part like a Red Sea of adulation. Each little motion which I had become so used to, yet so aware of, sent a warm rush through my veins, and caused a tingle of contentment to climb the curved staircase of my spine in slow anticipation. Like every addict with their fix, I just adored the popularity. Something about it just felt so right, like each hit reinforced the fact that I, Quinn Fabray, was destined to be on top. Of course, like every addict and their fix, each high had its accompanying crash, which for me came in the form of the hulking bull of a football player, whose muscled shoulders rose like mountains as he thundered down the hallways.
"Whore!" an angry, low voice bellowed, the jagged, frayed edge of lightning where my delusion was torn in half. Suddenly, with a crude impact, the silence and the distance made sense. And the realization hit me with the same vicious, humiliating, icy blow as the garish purple slushy that was suddenly invading my senses, stinging at my eyes, seeping through my blonde locks and matting them to my forehead, and filling my nose with its sickly saccharine stench. I looked down, and suddenly in this shock-induced sober moment, I realized I was no longer wearing my shining red-white-and black Cheerios uniform, my status symbol and my suit of armor, and instead was wearing a limp, flimsy baby-doll dress which draped over my slight baby bump. I wasn't on top anymore. I wasn't even considered a Glee loser, no even that was above me. I was the going-nowhere Lima girl. I was the girl who couldn't keep her legs together. I was the mixed-up teenager. I was the washed-up cheerleader. Insults rained down upon my shoulders, their frosty bite hitting me deeper than any number of slushies. I'm nothing now. Quinn Fabray is something, and if I'm nothing, than who am I? I brushed the question from my mind as I tried to swallow down my tears, which despite all my efforts were trailing melted purple corn syrup down my cheeks. I realized that I was standing in the hallway, with students gathered around me in a circle like spectators in the ancient Colosseum, watching the lone gladiator being torn apart by the lions. Their scathing stares and mocking whispers burned at my limbs now, an uncomfortable antithesis to the freezing cloak of slushy I wore, and I bolted from their presence like the possessed. So wrapped up in my pity party of one, I only caught a glimpse of familiar brown doe eyes which burned holes into my heart. Great, people were feeling sorry for me now, I can't tell whether this is better or just more of an insult. I rushed to the nearest bathroom, my skirt sweeping around me as the door slammed shut, the loud bang resounding through the small, antiseptic room and shaking loose even more tears. I just shut my eyes as I braced myself against the sink, wanting-no, needing-something solid with which I could anchor my entire world to, and stop everything I knew from flying out of my grasp and getting lost in the blackness. I barely noticed the fact that I was shaking, trying with every cell in my body to deny the onslaught of everything that is true.
"This isn't happening to me!" I hoarsely protested, unable to keep the words bottled up inside any longer. "I am Quinn Fabray, I'm not the girl who gets pregnant and gets kicked out by her parents, and gets dropped by her boyfriend-slash-fake baby daddy, and ends up sleeping in her car because she has nowhere to live!" I tangibly winced at that last bit; I suppose I really haven't gotten used to that part. Ever since Finn ungraciously-yet-understandably-kicked me out of his house, I hadn't quite found a new place to live, so my little Honda was my current place of residence.
"You're living in your car?" a soft voice asked tentatively, and I felt an angry red blush bloom upon my cheeks as I recognized who it belonged to. I didn't even have to look up to envision the softness and kindness in those familiar brown eyes, the same brown eyes which had pinned me with their gaze in the hallway, the brown eyes belonging to one Rachel Berry. The fluttering warmth that started in my chest was only rivalled by the shudder of revulsion that wracked my petite frame. I shouldn't feel this way, not towards any girl, let alone the Hobbit…
"None of your business Berry." I spat at her, more out of habit than out of real hatred. I scowled at her, suddenly becoming aware that the slushy was uncomfortably drying to my face. Rachel was apparently immune to my venom at this point, as she simply gave me a frustrated 'tsk-tsk' sound before snatching a paper towel from the nearest dispenser.
"Quinn, once this stuff dries it's near impossible to get out, trust me, I'd know, and your clothes are already ruined! You don't need to be brusque with me, I was simply expressing my worry for you as a fellow Glee clubber. You've been off your game recently, and although you don't have nearly as much talent as I, you're still an instrumental part of the group. Plus you've just been acting weird, and I doubt that it can be passed off as pregnancy hormones-" She rambled in that adorable, quintessential Rachel manner. Something about her flustered appearance and the rosy blush appearing upon the tanned apples of her cheeks was even more endearing to me. Which in turn, evoked an even more negative reaction from me.
"Berry, I am in awe at your blatant audacity. I don't need your arrogance, I don't need your pity, I don't need your worry, I don't need your help, and I most certainly don't need you!" I watched the hurt materialize upon the smaller girl's face, and she dipped her head silently in a show of acquiescence and submission quite unlike her. Quietly, she turned around, the ghost of her warm gaze flitting over my shoulders before leaving the room. Her departure had been so abrupt that I hardly had the time to let the guilt from my actions truly sink in. Again, I was alone, and again, I was crying, barely able to see what I was doing as I wiped slushy off of my face. My makeup was running, my hair was a mess, and, true to what Rachel said, my clothes were ruined. Finally, my outsides looked like how I felt on the inside. I was just as big a wreck, except at least now I didn't look like a contradiction. Looking into the mirror, I saw myself exactly as I did in middle school, ugly and unwanted. The door to the bathroom squealed and I nearly jumped out of my skin from shock, rushing to make myself look presentable in case someone came in. But all that passed the threshold was a piece of folded fabric I couldn't make out through the haze of my tears. A frayed fiber of curiosity caused me to inspect whatever thing had been left on the ground. Through my blurry eyes, which still stung from whatever was in that slushy, I saw a bright pink sticky note on top of a navy-and-white-polka-dot dress which wasn't completely hideous, considering the fact that it came from God-knows-where.
-Quinn
I keep a change of clothing in my locker just in case of slushy attacks, and I hope that this won't be too offensive for you to wear, as it's obvious that you and I have vastly different tastes in fashion. Keep your head up, the only way they win, is when they make you feel so low that you lose yourself. You are much too special to be lost.
-Rachel
At this point, I didn't even feel that unusual giddiness whenever Rachel defied everything horrid I did to her, and treated me kindly, no now I just felt empty. When I was in Cheerios, Rachel Berry was about as low on the McKinley food chain as possible, and suddenly I was at par with her. Now, I was getting sympathy from her, I was that low. If this was the wilderness, I would have been devoured. Heck, this was the wilderness, and I was just clinging to the jagged edge of popularity, about to disappear completely. How much had I lost? I made one stupid, drunken mistake, and now I was responsible for a little human, and I'm ostracized because of it. Frankly, at this point I was just wishing that my head would shut up. There are just so many thoughts running around in there that I swear they've fused into one solid force that everyone around me can see clear as day. With a weariness which has become old hat to me, I forced it all away as I began the robotic task of making myself presentable. I snuck into the Cheerios locker room, avoiding all of the areas I know Sue bugged. I learned about the cameras and the little listening devices early on, their presence explained why she was able to appear inexorably fast if a Cheerio even breathed a word of skipping a practice, or worse, eating a cookie, or a slice of white bread, or anything that wasn't pre-digested and therefore breaking Sue's insane diet. If she caught me in here after I was kicked off the squad, to clean the remnants of slushy out of my hair nonetheless, she would kill me. Heck, she'd kill me, and then she'd make the remaining Cheerios drag my corpse across the field in some sort of sick, twisted punishment that only Coach Sylvester would make sense of. But I clung to the hope that the tracksuit-wearing Wicked Witch was off getting her monthly placenta-face mask or some other disgusting thing robots $like her take pleasure in. Hopefully she'd be too busy to watch the cameras. I was safe, for now. There was something about the familiarity of the room, the lingering smell of starved human bodies pushed to their breaking point, the ghosts of cheers and chants, echoing against the school regalia-enrobed walls, the sleek red lockers that Sue forces the rookies to scrub with their toothbrushes until their fingers turn blue, which soothed me. It was like the room provided just as much as protection as my Cheerios uniform. It soothed my racing mind, it made me feel less vulnerable, and I cherished that small solitude as I locked the doors, stripped off my dirty clothes and ducked beneath a shower. All the weight in that moment slid off my shoulders as the droplets of scalding water rolled down my forehead, clinging to my neck, over my collarbone, through the valley of my breasts, before finally hitting my barely-there baby bump, and just like that, the reverie was shattered. Reality, that one inescapable fact that just kept smacking me in the face. Groaning slightly at the small disappointment, I slammed the water off and grabbed a balled-up towel to shove over my body and dry off. After all, I had a class to get to next. I stared at myself in front of the wall of mirrors, put there to remind the Cheerios of their "abundance of shortcomings" wearing Rachel's dress with my hair in loose, damp ringlets. I didn't look like myself, and I had reasonable doubt that I wasn't myself.
"QUINN FABRAY! MY OFFICE! IMMEDIATELY!" Sue's grating voice shrieked through the speakers like some sort of spectre begging to be free of its chains. Another look in the mirror, was I even Quinn Fabray? Perhaps I could just ignore the announcement and wait for the real Quinn Fabray to hustle to Coach's office for a brutal tongue-lashing. I could just remain in my little flesh prison, this mask of beauty and fallacy, and not move an inch. Maybe, if I stayed here long enough, and if I changed drastically enough, Quinn Fabray could do what I longed to do? Simply cease to exist.
A/N please review!