Disclaimer: Glee's not mine, sadly.

Dear Rachel,

I started this letter six months ago, writing it in cramped cursive on a tattered piece of foolscap on the way back from the station. Then I got home and I looked at my scruffy ink stained efforts that basically just said the same thing over and over again, pushed together with eagerness and rashness and whatever was in the air that day, and I put it away. It wasn't good enough for you. You deserve the best things in life- the cream of the cream, diamonds on your doorknobs, birds helping you like a princess in a fairy tale because…well, I'm deviating. I needed to write this letter to you, but it had to be perfect. Since then, I've started and thrown away a million efforts. I'd find myself sitting up in my dorm room late at night, wrapped in a blanket and looking at that picture of us at Nationals (I've got it framed above my bed) and trying to get it right. But now it's nearly Christmas and the Glee Club meet-up, and I have to tell you this soon because if I don't, it'll come out in the wrong way at the wrong time.

So, I decided just to write and not cross out a thing. Then it will be true and whole, and hopefully you'll see what I mean you to see. I'll have to tolerate a little imperfection, however difficult that might be for me. It is so hard to do something perfectly, and I just don't have the time to get this as immaculate as I dreamed. If you'll just understand what I'm trying to say, it'll be worth it. And if you don't- well. It won't matter in time.

Some people are born to rise and glow above the world, and some are destined to sit and chart their progress across the sky. You are a star, Rachel Berry, and I am an astronomer. I often wonder what it would have been like if our roles would have been reversed- I, an outcast, and you a cheerleader. I believe that we would have still ended up falling into those roles, of the watcher and the watched, of the famous and the nobody- regardless of circumstance. You are extraordinary. A perfect being. You are the shell on the beach that everyone wants to pick up. The conch in Lord of the Flies, the poem in The Perks of Being a Wallflower. You are the thing that binds the world- the irreplaceable point of the story.

I've always felt that, in Glee and throughout the rest of high school. You were special, set apart from the rest of us by your talent. It threatened me- sent feelings running up and down my spine that I tried so hard to push away, through Puck and Finn and wanting to be Prom Queen. And because of that, I tormented you until I got to know you, and then I continued to torment you a little more, because I was scared. For that, I am truly sorry. If I could go back- back to that first day I met you in English (do you remember? You wore a blue sweater and a plaid skirt and you stuck your hand so confidently in the air when the teacher asked if anyone had read The Catcher in the Rye) and decide, conversely to how I did then, to be friends with you, I would.

I know we're friends now, and apologies still don't count for much- not after the slushies and the humiliation- but I still wanted to say it. It's important. I'm sorry, and I will never stop feeling awful about it, not until the end of my days. Please remember this as you continue to read this letter. I have a feeling that I'm coming up to the important part very quickly, and I've imagined how this will go so many times that simply writing it seems false.

I've imagined a car, idling under the soft yellow half-moon of a streetlight, after a concert. I'm driving and you're in the passenger seat, and I say something like, "Brittany wasn't Santana's first. It was me," and you look at me half-confused with that quirk of an eyebrow you do and I bite my lip nervously and then… No. Not like that.

Other times, when it's snowing in New Haven and my back is hurting so much that I feel like I'm in the hospital again, I imagine that you came to visit me, and you're sitting in the white sterile room, lighting it up like you do every space you visit, and you're crying a little and I'm still loopy from the drugs so I blurt out the real reason that I didn't want you to get married to Finn.

Or Santana tells you. Or Brittany lets it slip out in her careless, aimless way. Or I tell Kurt after a few too many shots and he, of course, goes straight to Mercedes, and she calls you in a breathless rush and you meet for coffee and you spit out your vegan split-roast whatever in shock, and then your lips tilt into a smile and your eyes soften for just a second.

I've imagined it in every conceivable way, but none of them have happened, so I'm here, writing it down in black and white, without a single possibility of retraction because this is the only way left to me.

The truth is, Rachel, I'm in love with you. I have been for quite some considerable time. I don't hope for you to return my feelings- and I certainly don't expect you to. I do hope that we continue to be friends, if that's not too much to ask, and I really hope that this doesn't destroy our relationship. I'm sorry for burdening you with this, but I had to tell you. It was like fire, a burning need that is incomparable to anything that I have ever experienced before. For this whole tangled mess of words, I apologise.

I remain,

Yours forever faithfully,

Lucy Quinn Fabray

A/N: Reviews are like gold-dust, falling softly through the air. I'd love some.