['The only thing Quinn Fabray wears with more loveliness than sadness is joy' this is simultaneously 1) rachel's reaction to when quinn tried to commit suicide, & 2) how they get engaged like 8-ish years later. so, yeah, angst with such a fluffy ending for your valentine's days! (trigger warning)]
...
your hands can heal, your hands can bruise (i don't love you but i always will)
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Mean while/ The World shall burn, and from her ashes spring/ New Heav'n and Earth, wherein the just shall dwell/ And after all thir tribulations long/ See golden days
—john milton, paradise lost
…
Quinn wakes you up by going down on you. You'd never complain about that, and you fight your way out of a strangely similar dream and fist your hands in her messy, short, soft hair between your legs.
Your orgasm hits hard and quick, and Quinn scrambles back up and kisses you hard, and you taste her on your lips. "Happy we're-subjects-of-a-capitalist-state-aparatus-that-codifies-monetary-love day," she husks out.
You laugh into her mouth. "Happy Valentine's Day to you too, baby."
.
Kurt stays quiet and still on the couch, and it scares you how chilling your voice sounds when you ask, "Why did Santana go to New Haven?"
He takes a deep breath, and you know something is really, really wrong when you notice a few tears down his cheeks. "Rachel," he says, pleading.
You sit down next to him and your heart is pounding your breastbone so hard you think it might actually break bones. Your brain is on this loop of something is wrong, and you still trust your sixth-sense, and you grip Kurt's hand so hard your knuckles turn white.
"Quinn," he says, and you have to close your eyes because tears are already pricking at them, "she—um, she tried to commit suicide last night."
.
You've been waiting to propose for what feels like years and milliseconds at the same time, and you're pretty sure Quinn also has a ring because Santana had drunkenly almost let it slip that they'd been at Tiffany's a few weeks ago. Sometimes you still feel that Quinn is so much more elegant that you could ever be, full of this quiet stoicism, and there's a part of you that, for some inexpressible reasons, really wants to propose first.
You also know that Quinn would never want some public grand gesture.
So you wait until three days after Valentine's Day, and then you pocket the ring—a perfect 1.2 carat Princess Cut diamond on a plain platinum band, so much of Quinn's simple, graceful lines, her old-fashioned glamor—with shaking hands and walk to her office on campus. For February in New York, it's warm and lovely today, and you end up stopping by your florist on the way and picking up a bouquet of pink peonies.
She's working on editing a paper, reams spread all over her desk, glasses on and hair tucked behind her ears, bangs falling into her eyes. You take a few moments to just watch her, just admire how the sun hits her cheekbones through the window, the set of her shoulders, before you knock on her open door.
.
You throw up. You don't cry, and you make it to the bathroom, but you vomit the contents of your stomach. Kurt holds back your hair and you want to ask so many things. You're angry and you're sad and you're relieved because it didn't quite work. You're not in denial though, because you believe it so easily: Quinn, right now, is full of monsters. You don't misunderstand why she tried: they rest and explode in her veins.
Neither you nor Kurt have words for right now, and you feel hollow, confused, at such a loss. You end up drinking two bottles of wine and ordering a pizza, falling asleep crying and curled against Kurt's chest.
You are most upset, you think, because you care more than you ever wanted to.
.
You feel like your breaths are coming far too fast, skidding in your chest, when Quinn looks up at you. She smiles, pink lips curving beautifully, and she says, "Hi baby."
You walk to her desk and put down the bouquet of flowers on top of the papers as she stands and you kiss her hard, because you want her, and she seems surprised but grants you access to her mouth easily. You bite her tongue, then her bottom lip, and then you break the kiss, back up just slightly, rub your thumb against her cheek, trace the tiny bump in her nose.
"You okay?" she asks, softly, lowly.
You nod, and then you take a deep breath—maybe the deepest breath of your life.
.
Santana looks like she's aged years when she comes back. In the smallest parts of her body—the way she pours a cup of coffee, the way her smile is slightly less vibrant, this haunted darkness in her eyes.
You don't ask, so she doesn't say anything, so you both just go through the motions for a few days. You take Madison, the blonde girl with hazel eyes from your music theory class, up on her offer to dinner.
When you kiss her she tastes wrong, and you have never been more angry at Lucy Quinn Fabray than you are in that very moment.
When you get home—you apologize to Madison and get in a cab as fast as you can—Santana already has a bottle of Petron open, and you sit next to her on the floor and take four shots.
You're drunk enough to ask, "How?"
Santana's drunk enough to answer, "She cut her entire left forearm open with a knife. Thirty-one stitches."
You lay back. You picture Quinn's pretty soft pale skin flayed apart.
But she believes in sutures, she's told you that so many times, and you still don't cry.
.
"I love you," you tell her, softly, as honestly as you can.
One corner of her mouth quirks up, like it always does, like she still can't help but smile.
You continue before she can say anything else: "I love all of the parts of you—the dark, the light, everything in between."
Her eyes start to widen and you put your hand against her chest lightly, feel her heart speed.
"Rachel," she says, but you shake your head.
"Quinn, you're the prettiest girl I've ever met, but you're so much more than that, and I've been in love with you since I was eighteen years old. I really don't want to exist in any sort of world without you."
You heave a breath and grab her hand, and then you reach in the pocket of your coat and kneel down, open the box.
"Lucy Quinn Fabray," you say, and you can't help but smile when her eyes fill with tears and one of her hands flies to her mouth, "will you marry me?"
She nods, and then she says, "Yes," and then she says, "Oh my god," so quietly, with a little laugh, as you slip the ring on her finger. You let out a watery laugh too and stand and hug her for a long time. She kisses your neck and you bury your face in the lapel of her blazer, take in her smell, try to remember everything about this moment.
.
You don't really know how to exist around her the first time you see her afterward, a few weeks later, when Santana kind of forces her to visit.
You get home from class, and there she is on your couch, asleep, her head on Santana's lap. Quinn is almost painfully beautiful, the newly-hard, grown-up lines of her cheekbones, her jaw. They're watching Brokeback Mountain, which bizarrely pisses you off. She's wearing a Yale t-shirt and you catch the tiniest glimpse of a bright red line on the underside of her left arm.
You turn around and walk into the hallway, and you call your daddy because you don't know what else to do.
He answers on the second ring. "Hey baby girl. What's up?"
You rake your fingers through your hair. "Quinn's here."
He knows most of what happened between the two of you when you'd broken up with her almost a year ago, but she'd been in New York after that a few times and you'd dealt with it decently well.
"Daddy, she—she tried to commit suicide three weeks ago, and now Santana made her come here, and I'm so, so mad because she's beautiful in there on the couch and she wants to die and there are really bad times when I think it'd be easier if she had because—"
It's the most you've said about it. Your daddy is quiet for a little while. "Because why, honey?"
You feel your stomach bottom out. "I wish I knew how to quit her," you whisper, and to your daddy's credit he doesn't laugh. "I'm still in love with her." It almost ruins you to admit it, to understand it.
"Rachel," he says, soothing, softly.
"I'm so mad at her," you say, and finally you start to cry. "I'm so angry."
"Sweetheart," you daddy says quietly, "you don't choose who you fall in love with, or how long you're in love with them. And Rachel?"
"Yeah?"
"Quinn is—" he pauses for a moment—"troubled, but sometimes people get better. And you might have to let her go, but life has ways of healing things, and she's still alive, baby."
"She is," you say, wiping tears.
"Give her a hug from me," he says, and years later you'll always remember that as your permission to learn how to touch her again.
.
Quinn's colleague and one of your friends, Evan, pops his head in her office. "Congrats, Q!" he says. "And way to go, Rachel."
You realize that you'd left the door open, and Quinn starts laughing hard, wiping tears. You kiss her cheek.
"Let's see the ring," he says, and she sticks out her left hand.
The diamond glints in the pretty yellow light from outside, and she says, "You were right—she beat me to it."
Evan chuckles and pats her shoulder. "Rachel's a brave little thing, I knew it."
Quinn turns to you with this adorable, sheepish smile and says, "I've had a ring for you for months, and I just—this is better than anything I could've done."
You roll your eyes, and you say, "Timing has never been our strong suit, has it?"
She starts crying again, and Evan laughs, and she says, "This was perfect."
.
The next morning, Quinn is sitting on one of your kitchen stools, drinking coffee and quietly listening to NPR, when you wander into the kitchen after you get dressed to head to class. She's cut her hair in the past few months, shorter than she wore it in high school so it barely skims her jaw, and her glasses are different. She sticks her arm against her chest and you have no desire to pry it away at this point.
"Hey," she says, reluctantly, like it's physically painful for her too.
All of your words—and you know so, so many—get caught somewhere near your diaphragm, stick in your throat like glass, so you just walk up to her and wrap her in your arms.
She takes four breaths and then she hugs you back.
.
Evan announces to everyone in the department that's in their offices that Quinn is engaged, and of course someone has a bottle of champagne, and they toast to the both of you, admire Quinn's ring, and Quinn doesn't really move from your side the entire time.
.
Before she leaves the next night to go back to New Haven, after a dinner that looked physically painful for her to eat half a vegan burger and a side salad, which you can tell worries Santana as much as it does you. She's in a sweater and a peacoat, riding boots, and she looks thin and worn and exhausted, but still, Quinn Fabray has always worn sadness with incredible loveliness.
you squeeze Quinn's hand just once. You want to run away and never see her again, you want to kiss her.
"You can get better," you tell her. It's a promise and a plea all at once. "One day, staying will be worth it."
"I won't stop trying," she says. "I won't."
.
The only thing Quinn Fabray wears with more loveliness than sadness is joy, and as you get back to your apartment half an hour later—Quinn had just left her office without even bothering to straighten anything—she can't stop smiling. She holds up a finger after you unlock the front door and says, "Wait here."
She comes back a minute later, holding a ring in her palm. "It was my great-grandmother's diamond," she says, "but I had a new band put on it from Tiffany's and I hope it's okay and—"
It's the prettiest ring you've ever seen, white gold band and a graceful, small pear-cut diamond, and you say, "Baby, it's lovely."
She kisses you and then slips it onto your finger. You admire it for a few seconds and then pick up her left hand, turn it over. You kiss thirty-one times down the underside of her arm, and you both cry.
"You can say it," she whispers.
"Say what?" you ask, smiling slightly.
Her mouth is so close to hers, when she murmurs, "I told you so," the words vibrate against your lips.
"Quinn Fabray," you say, and kiss her, "I told you so."