This is a sequel to Velocity, which was an expansion of a songfic/drabble/thing. The full title is meant to be Tell Me How's The Way To Be (To Evoke Some Empathy) from the extraordinary Lissie song Everywhere I Go, but the fic is built around lines from Drunk With The Only Saints I Know, by Carissa's Weird. I wasn't intending for there to be a sequel, but then I felt kind of bad for leaving it all angstified and open-ended.
think about how your friends are/all the people who you'll ever do wrong/just because they'll love you anyways
First, the time passed slowly. The remainder of their senior year dragged by, the hallways of McKinley High a warzone of slushie casualties. Quinn, locked away within her icy façade, refused to cry a single tear over Rachel Berry, and redoubled her determination to get out of Lima and never come back. Rachel, saddled doubly with both the guilt of breaking the heart of the one person she had loved above all others and that of being responsible for the return of regular slushie attacks on the high school population, narrowed her focus to glee and her studies, and decided that whatever silent doubts she may have held about her inevitable Broadway destination would cease to matter.
Day by day dragged by, ticking down to graduation. Quinn, a silent boarder in her parents' house since the birth of her daughter, greedily snatched up a full scholarship to Duke the moment it arrived in the mail; Rachel traveled to New York for her Julliard audition and did nothing but nod curtly when her acceptance came. Time ticked by at a snail's pace as blocks were crossed off on two wall calendars on opposite sides of town.
Then, things sped up. Graduation came and went, and Rachel left for New York the next week for a two-month workshop for incoming theater students. Quinn joined the Duke cheerleading squad as a walk-on and spent her summer in the sweltering North Carolina humidity, thanking Sue Sylvester every time her fitness outstripped that of her teammates. The summer vanished, and the semester started with Quinn juggling classes and cheerleading and a job at the library while Rachel threw herself into every song she sang in a Julliard practice room and studying every theater and music history book she could scrounge up.
College came and went in the blink of an eye. Rachel returned to Lima every Hannukah and for two weeks each summer; Quinn drove back with her sister during spring break her freshman year, packed up the remainder of her belongings from her parents' house, and never returned. Rachel fell headlong into a romance with a girl at school, a pianist with nimble fingers who broke Rachel into pieces after two years; somewhere between moving her things back to a dorm room and sobbing into a pint of ice cream, Rachel wondered momentarily if this was some sort of payback for breaking Quinn's heart. Quinn avoided dating like the plague, taking boys and girls alike into her bed only when loneliness and the broken feeling in her chest became impossible to ignore.
By the time college was over and done with, Quinn had perfected the art of Not Thinking About Rachel Berry, and ran with her marketing degree to her best job offer in Washington, DC. Rachel landed an ensemble role in an off-Broadway production and balanced her time between rehearsals and shows and working as a music tutor at a private school uptown. Four years of college and three and a half of real life vanished, and the moment Rachel saw Quinn striding down a sidewalk outside The Strand in New York with a power suit and a Blackberry, she stumbled to a dazed stop and wondered where time had run off to.
(The last time they spoke, it was in a locker room in a high school that has since been torn down and rebuilt. The last time they spoke, one of them was pressed into the lockers, with terrified and guilty eyes, and the other sashayed out of the room with an air of indifference that would have been worthy of an Oscar. The last time they spoke, it was eight years ago, and Quinn was broken and Rachel was guilty, and that was that.)
First, it was slow. After chasing Quinn down for a block and a half and being cut down with a single sneer, Rachel took to hounding anyone she could until she found out why Quinn was in New York. It took two weeks of nagging Santana to find out that Quinn had taken a promotion and a transfer to New York six months earlier, and that she was living in Manhattan. It took another week of attempting to formulate a sneaky way in which to get Quinn's phone number—or address, or email address, or even assistant's name—from her office; in the end, all it took was four inches of thigh and an eyeful of cleavage for the janitor to gladly offer all of the information Rachel ever could have wanted.
Days ticked by at a painstakingly slow pace. Every morning between going for a run and making her way to her first rehearsal, Rachel sent Quinn an email. Every afternoon, after wrapping her rehearsal and before making her way home to take a nap before the night's show, she called and left Quinn a voicemail. Day by day, she stubbornly continued in her quest to get the blonde to acknowledge her—why, she was unsure of, though she convinced herself that she was desperate for closure in the form of a apology she had never been allowed to properly deliver.
Then it was fast. After a full two months of emails and phone calls, as well as flowers and chocolates and a stuffed penguin and a truly poetic letter, Quinn relented and agreed to meet for coffee. The deserted coffee shop bore witness to apologies pouring out of Rachel's mouth at the speed of light and Quinn's resolve to stay angry and aloof slipping in minutes, her stony mask crumbling until she was leaning her elbows on the table, head in her hands as she finally let herself cry over the heart that broke eight years earlier. Rachel, taking Quinn's position from so long ago, rested a hesitant hand on Quinn's shoulder while she cried, and remained silent as she waited for Quinn to speak.
Hours and days and weeks blurred together after that. Rachel continued to doggedly pursue Quinn, desperate for a chance to fix what she had broken, and Quinn couldn't help but admit that she'd been missing it for almost a decade. Painful conversations at coffee shops turned into casual meetings for drinks after Rachel's shows, which turned into lunch dates, and then dinner dates, and then something that felt like a friendship that they'd never quite had before.
Then one day, Quinn waited outside the backstage access of Rachel's show, and Rachel came out in surprise to see the blonde waiting solemnly for her. Rachel stared with barely-contained anxiety and Quinn blushed uncharacteristically, and then Quinn squared her shoulders and pulled Rachel in by the wrist to kiss her.
They agreed that first it would be slow. Quinn was still guarded, wary of allowing too much of herself to fall for Rachel again out of fear of a re-broken heart being unfixable. Rachel was still scared, desperate to make up for all the years of loneliness and the hurt she'd subjected Quinn to by one avaricious comment. Formal dates were partaken, and there was a careful ceremony that accompanied the emptying of respective drawers in each apartment, as well as the exchanging of keys. Separate vacations were taken, as much for the sake of avoiding the tumultuous co-dependency that had once graced their relationship as for the sake of Quinn not having to return to Lima.
Rachel's fathers were ecstatic. Santana told Quinn that she was a moron, and then took a long weekend to fly to New York and warn Rachel face-to-face with the threat of an ice pick and a soldering iron.
The agreed that first it would be slow. They agreed that there would be discussions about how to proceed, when to proceed, the direction their relationship would take. They agreed that it would be slow.
Then it was fast. Quinn woke alone one morning in Rachel's bed to a numb left arm from Rachel sleeping sprawled up against her side and her foot tickled by the whiskers of Rachel's godforsaken cat, which Quinn was convinced Rachel kept solely to torture her. She extracted herself from the bed in the midst of grumbles and a delicious soreness in her muscles from the night before, and shuffled into the kitchen to find coffee, and found Rachel sitting on the countertop and waiting for her.
"Morning," Quinn mumbled. Rachel returned the greeting and offered Quinn one of the coffees; the blonde took it greedily and inhaled the smell of her favorite Columbian blend. It took the sound of her name to pull her out of reveling in the bitter taste she'd grown to love sometime during her first semester of college. "Hm?"
"I want to discuss something with you," Rachel said carefully. She bit her lip when Quinn raised an eyebrow at her, and wondered if first thing in the morning was really the best time for such a conversation; she pushed the thought away and forged on. "I know that we laid out a very specific set of boundaries for our relationship, and that we agreed that such limitations and restrictions were the best way to keep ourselves from stumbling into the same mistakes we made when we were younger."
She paused, fidgeting with the Star of David on her necklace. "However," she continued when Quinn made no move to interrupt her. "I think that we should move in together."
Quinn quirked an eyebrow up impassively, regarding Rachel with a blank gaze, and remained silent as Rachel continued to fidget.
"I'm aware that you continue to be weary of our relationship," Rachel said. "And I know that our mutually agreed upon boundaries were constructed to prevent us from falling too quickly. But regardless of those boundaries, I'm in love with you. I may always have been, but I know that I am now. And I may be out of line, but I'm relatively confident that you're in love with me again. I feel that the best step for us to take in this situation, now that we're older and wiser and far more respectful of one another, is for us to move in together."
Quinn continued to stare at Rachel levelly, eyebrow still raised. Rachel met her gaze for as long as she could, breaking away only when she felt that it was possible that Quinn was actually staring directly through her to the cabinet full of flatware behind her head. Second after second marched by, the painfully slow pace marked by each deafening click from the clock that hung above the kitchen table, and Rachel contemplated the possibility that Quinn had actually fallen back to sleep.
"Quinn?" she asked softly.
Quinn blinked slowly, tilting her head to the side as she stared at Rachel.
"What do you think?" Rachel asked, apprehension clear in her voice.
"Okay." Quinn shrugged. "But I want to stay in Manhattan."
They agreed that it would be slow. Their first attempt had been a whirlwind of love and lust and comfort and angst, and had been an unmitigated disaster on the scale of a tornado, one that leveled the entire school alongside them. They agreed that it would be slow, and first it was.
Then it was fast, even when it was slow. Two years after moving into a bigger apartment in Quinn's building, three years after Rachel first saw Quinn on a sidewalk outside of The Strand, and thirteen years after Rachel crossed a line they never toed again, Rachel offered Quinn a ring and Quinn simply smiled before pulling Rachel up from where she knelt and pressed a kiss to her lips.
"Okay." She shrugged. "But I want to stay in Manhattan."