Freedom in the Moonlight

To tell you the entire story we have to go back to the summer of twenty-twelve. It was a hot June day in Lima. I was out working in the yard for my mother. I had only a little time left in this town and I was wasting it working on the flower beds. Sure, no one was in town because Puck and Mercedes had left for the west coast a few days after graduation and Brittany was off at summer school in the hope that she would somehow be able to pass next year if she completed the course work. None of my friends were free.

It had been a really tough few weeks. Hearing where everyone was going and how they were escaping the Midwest made me jealous. I was only heading a few hours away to Louisville. Rachel was in New York, hell Finn was off god knows where with the army. I was the only one besides Lady Hummel that seemed to be stuck.

My mother's voice cut across the yard, "Santana, I need you to run by the Fabray's. Judy has the Sunday school schedule book still but it is my turn. Please, politely ask for it. I beg of you."

I protested, "Mama, I really don't think me going is a bright idea. I am not people friendly."

My mother did not hear my protests because she had already closed the back door. Now I was stuck getting the stupid book from the ass backwards Catholic Church my parents attended. Since coming out I had not been welcomed at that church and I really didn't want to do anything for it, but now my mother was forcing her to.

I got up off the ground and brushed the dirt of her jean shorts. I still had my wallet and keys in my pocket from when I had to go to the hardware store to get fertilizer for the lawn. I got up and walked towards the car. It was my papa's old beat up Firebird which he had given me as an early eighteenth birthday gift. It had seen better days. It had been his car in high school and before him it had been his brothers and before it was his brothers it had been in an accident which allowed for my mechanic grandfather to buy it. That sixty-eight, bright red Firebird was still running well in twenty-twelve. My dad and I use to bond over tinkering and fiddling with that car. It was a Lopez tradition and that Firebird is still in our family today.

The Fabray house was across town in the middle class white neighborhood in Lima. It was a part of town I usually would not be caught dead in. The only time I would cross out of the largely Puerto Rican barrio was when I would visit Brit. Her parents lived in the poorer artistic district with weeds for lawns and peeling paint on the sides of old houses. The neighborhood I found myself was the complete opposite. The houses were immaculate white stucco with a false brick front near the main door. Every one of them looked the same and for the life of me I could not tell you which house it was without an address printed on the side of each mailbox.

I parked my car in front of number forty-seven and made my way to the plain white door. The doorbell was a perfect cut out of Jesus Christ on a cross and the button was positioned where one would expect his heart to be located. At the time I was between laughing out loud because of how sacrilegious it seem and crying in horror. I rang that door bell and a bar Handle's hallelujah chorus rang so loud throughout the house I could hear it from my spot on the doorstep.

I when I rang the doorbell I was prepared for a simple retrieval, not what happened next. I had expected Judy to answer the door. Not her daughter. Quinn was holding a lit cigarette in hand.

"What do you want, Santana," she sighed, bring the cigarette to her lip.

I coughed slightly from the smoke, "I thought you had quit."

She smirked, "I did, but then I had to deal with Judy full time and I need some way to deal until I leave."

I grimaced at the idea of being left alone with that woman twenty four seven and realized I would probably go back to my old habits as well. She was really just that over bearing and she was also a raging alcoholic that needed to be taken care of like a four year old when she got drunk.

I muttered, "Sorry. Anyway, why I am here is my mother needs the church book of crazy and she sent me to get it from your mom."

She sighed, "Fine, come in this is going to take a while to find."

When I stepped into the house it was not the same as I had remembered it from my freshman year when I had come over for her fifteenth birthday. The house had been immaculate with not s thing out of place, but since Russell had left it was obvious that Judy Fabray had taken a spiral. There wasn't a surface that didn't have a glass or an empty alcohol bottle on it.

"Jesus, Quinn. When did she get this bad?"

She shrugged, "Sometime during junior year."

"Your crazy streak makes so much more sense now. I mean you seemed fine junior year and then that summer. I mean that break down was way too much just to be over Finn," I said.

Her shoulders dropped a bit, "Well, I better get looking for that book.

I felt horrible. I had obviously pushed too far into a sensitive subject for her. Of course she would have a break down. She was living in hell. I decided after that I should give her a little space as she searched for the book. After about ten minutes she finally found it under her mother's copy of Fifty Shades of Grey. Kids, religious nutjobs are a bit hypocritical about sex.

She handed me the book, "Here it is, now get out."

I turned to leave after grabbing the book, but for some reason in that moment I made a decision that would change the broken friendship we had.

I turnaround and said, "Q, if you need to get out of here just give me a call. I mean I know we haven't been really good friends in a while, but towards the end we were amicable again. I mean, we are the only people we've got right now."

"Whatever," she said closing the door behind me.

I got a text message from her two days later

Satan, Judy is unbearable and at this point you are the lesser of two evils. Come get me.-Q

That night I picked her up from her house. She once again had a cigarette hanging from the corner of her mouth. Her green eyes were tinted red, as If she had been crying. In that moment I felt something I did not know how to describe then, but now, in retrospect, I know my heart was breaking for this girl who hadn't really had the loving childhood that I was so lucky to experience .Nor did she have the support of loving parents. She didn't really have parents because her father had disowned her and ran off with another woman while her mother had reverted to the state of a four year old.

We got in that Firebird and started driving. We didn't have any destination but the dark sky and the tall corn surrounding the country roads outside of our town made us feel free. In that moonlight on that warm night her face glowed with a happiness I had never seen in her before. She was, in that moment, in the very place she wanted to be and doing what she wanted to do. She later told me that the reason she had been crying was that her mother in a drunken rage had said that she had to choose between her and Yale. She said that that moment of freedom she experienced that night gave he the courage to give up the only family she had left and pursue her dream.

We kept on escaping every night. That Firebird became a refuge from the impending adult world. We never really talked much as we drove off into that night. The comments were usually about the music playing on the radio. Then the last night before she left for New Haven came. She hadn't told her mother she was leaving. She had bought a train ticket to Connecticut and was all ready to leave. Only packing a few key things she would need so as not to give her mother any idea that she was about to leave. I didn't want her to go.

"We've all got to grow up and move on sometime," she told me.

I shuddered as a breathed in, "But I don't want to move on from you.

Tears began to pour from my eyes. I didn't know why then. but seeing me cry made her started to sob as well.

"We can't always get what you want," she quoted to me.

I responded, "But sometime you don't even get what you need."

We sat in silence for a while before I drove her back to that plain, white stucco home. I never drove back to that house again. Neither did Quinn. She left that home and Judy kept her word and never spoke to her again because two weeks after Quinn left she got into a car drunk and drove into a tree. Quinn didn't even come back for the funeral, but I did get a letter from her. It wasn't much, only a few words on a page.

San,

Why does this hurt so much?

Q

Kids, I drove to New Haven the day I received that letter. I didn't care that I was ditching class for at least a week, she mattered more. It took ten hours of driving, but I made in there to her dorm. Her roommate opened the door.

"I am here for Quinn," I said making my way in.

She was curled up into a corner, crying. She looked so broken in that moment. I just crawled right next to her and held her as her body taken over with sobbing. She never let anyone see her so broken before.

"I just don't understand," she cried into my shoulder.

I couldn't say anything back to her, because I too didn't understand.

A few weeks after that unexpected trip to New Haven I ended up dropping out. I couldn't take the same routine from high school. I didn't want to be stuck being the person that I was. I hated that version of myself, so I packed up all my possessions and took the first train to New York. I ended up living with Hummel and Rachel. Somehow they became my best friends, much like I considered Quinn to be.

When Christmas came around I hadn't seen Quinn since her break down, which was almost three months. Most of the former glee club was upset that she hadn't kept her promise to come back for the holidays. They didn't understand that she had nothing left here anymore. All the rest of us either had our parents or our best friends here. The closest thing Quinn had here was me, and even I wouldn't make her come back to this town which was so toxic for her during her youth.

I drove around in my Firebird trying to capture the feeling I had the summer before, but without Quinn I was starting to realize that maybe I didn't really have ties to this town. Brittany had moved on and in a way so had I. I had made peace with us and was ready for the start of something new, which was probably what led to the valentine's disaster of twenty-thirteen.

She showed up to Lima for the wedding. She was different. The broken Quinn had been replaced by an almost complete version of the Quinn I had seen that night out on the country roads. With some alcohol her guard was let down and my courage was fueled.

"You're like the sun," I said as we slow danced.

She looked down, "You know that's not true."

It was so odd to me that this girl, the girl who had overcome all of these obstacles in life didn't know how spectacular she really was. All of the confidence was an act to hide the insecure, lonely child underneath.

"But you are. I have never met anyone so beautiful in my life," I said trying to persuade her that I was telling the truth.

The next thing that happened is probably one of the greatest moments in my life. She looked up, her eyes so bright and questioning. As she moved in closer my breath hitched and then she kissed me. At this point in my life I had kissed a lot of people, but this kiss was the best kiss I had had at that point. It knocked all of the air out of my lungs and it made me question why I hadn't seen what could be with her sooner.

When she pulled away she looked into my eyes. She seemed like she was asking me to take charge, and I did. That night I showed her just how beautiful she was. I fell in love that night, making love in the back of the Firebird before we eventually found our way back to the hotel by the wee hours of the morning. Then we started again.

The sad thing is that that night was just a dream. We wanted something that we both couldn't have at the time. She was in New Haven and I was in New York. Then the time came for her to graduate, she was heading to Harvard Law and I was on my way to Los Angles after being signed to a label. It seemed like we were not able to be together anywhere but Lima.

I started to date and so did she. She ended up getting engaged by the time she left law school and even though it had been years, I couldn't stand the thought of seeing her with someone else. We slowly phased each other out. She got married and I went on a series of failed relationships. If I had I known what I know now, I wouldn't have wasted that time. I would have gone to New York and found the love of my life. I would have told her that twenty years would never be enough and that I wanted eight more years together, but I don't have that option.

As you know, I had become a minor star by this point. I had a few top twenty hits and was beginning to slowly become a household name. I met Dani then. She was a label guitarist who accompanied me on tour. Eventually we started dating. She was from New York, so the winter of the year I turned thirty three I returned to New York. The label was okay with letting me now be based on the east coast. If they needed me it wasn't a huge problem for me to catch a direct flight from LaGuardia or JFK back to Los Angles.

For a time life seemed to be perfect. I had a great girl and a great job. My life finally seemed to be going well, but then I saw her, your mother, from across the street, I started to doubt whether I had my life just the way I wanted it. Despite how great Dani was, I didn't feel the way I should. I had been with her four years and I didn't want to move in together or get married and somehow she was okay with that. I wanted to be with someone I couldn't wait to come home to in the evening, someone who I could see getting married to. I brought this up with Dani a few weeks later and she agreed that this was not the life we wanted.

The split was very amicable. I still get a call monthly from her and a Christmas card. She got married and had two kids. I'm glad I saw that blonde girl across street that day because otherwise those kids probably never would have been born and Dani would have never found the girl that would walk the world for her.

You see kids, before I started dating your mom, I never saw myself ever having children. Your mom always dreamed of having kids. She wanted to create a loving family that she never had at home, which is why you guys never met your grandparents from her side. I am glad every day that I changed my mind. I would never have had you guys.

I was given your mother's number by Rachel a few months after Dani and I had ended. I got into a little bit of contract trouble and needed some help. After going through several secretaries and being on hold forever I heard your mom's voice on the phone.

"This is Lucy Warren speaking, I hear you are a referral directly from my friend Rachel Berry," she said.

The phone slipped from my hand. I hadn't know what she had been up to for those eight years, but your mother, she had changed completely. I still don't know her entire story, but she had gotten married and had it annulled in rather quick succession. She had caught her husband cheating on her only a few hours after the ceremony. She had kept the last name because he had come from a family of prestige up in Boston and she really had no ties to Fabray anymore.

Lucy Warren was a completely different person from the Quinn Fabray I had known. She was the girl who had always been under the surface. She was the girl that was almost there that Valentine's Day. This time she was ready for me and I was so ready for her. On our first date we tried to set the past right.

"I just wasn't ready," she said. "I was a young, stupid kid. I was Quinn. Quinn and Lucy have always fought over who would be in control. Quinn was who my parents wanted and Lucy was who I was meant to be."

I just grabbed her hand across the table, "It doesn't matter, Lucy Q. It was a long journey, but we found each other in the end."

She looked into my eyes much like she had that Valentine's Day years earlier, but this time there was nothing but love in them.

"I love you," she said. "I know this is the first official date we've been on, but I love you. I have loved you from the moment you took me away that night before college. I loved you all this time and I can't imagine letting you go again."

"Good, because I'm not going to let you because I am going to love you for the rest of my days," I promised.

And I kept that promise. A year later we got married and we began what truly was the beginning of the happiest years of my life. Every year seemed to get better. Eventually after your half-sister Beth turned up looking for information about her birth parents, your mom and I decided to try for kids. In five years we had you three and our life was complete.

I had a good life with your mother. She was taken too early. If I could go back and pull every cigarette her stupid teenager and twenty year old self smoked out of her mouth I would. The cancer ate away at her body, going from her lungs to kidneys and onwards. She was only in her fifties when she passed away and I have never felt more pain than I did that day. Even with all of that pain I would not trade one single day with her. I just wish I could have all the days we wasted back.

You asked me to tell you your mother's story. This is it. Lucy Lopez was born Lucy Quinn Fabray in Columbus, Ohio. She moved to Lima with her horrible family. Under pressure she became Quinn Fabray, the first girl I ever truly fell in love with, but one day your mother became Lucy again and the true love of my life was born. Your mother was several people throughout her life, but none of them was more important to me than the woman she was when she died. I have spent my entire life loving the girl hidden beneath and I will continue to love her for as long as I shall live. I will always love that girl who found her freedom in the moonlight as we sped towards our future in that Firebird.