A/N: After getting a few requests to continue with This Hell I'm Living, I wrote this. I wanted to look at Theatricality from Shelby's perspective and try to understand why she is the way that she is. I wasn't able to finish everything before Funk tonight, but I wanted to share this just in case some of the details shared about our favorite surrogate contradict those I've written. (Edit: So far so good…I'm glad I've never thought of Shelby as a math whiz.) Please, enjoy and let me know what you think!

With the 25,000 watt spot following her around the Carmel High stage, Shelby Corcoran felt alive. While she was taking the opportunity to teach her kids a thing or two about being theatrical – who better to channel than Barbra, after all? – she took thrill in having a moment in the spotlight again. It was so bright she couldn't see their faces, but it didn't matter: they could see hers, and after years of watching Fanny Brice's heart break she knew exactly how to emulate the even the subtleties of the dramatic performance.

"Funny…how it ain't so funny. Funny girl…"

She finished with her arms wrapped around herself, using her own deep sadness to further express the necessary sorrow and hit the lesson home for her kids. She could feel their admiration coming from the seats below, and when coupled with the powerful beam of light illuminating her, she was simultaneously invigorated and reminiscent of better days.

"Ms. Corcoran?"

Shelby turned her head to find the person addressing her and her heart began pounding like a bass drum when she saw who it was. Rachel Berry, the little girl she had given birth to but had never met, was standing at the base of the stage, her brown eyes wide and scared and focused right on her. Shelby was petrified, oblivious as to what to do. She hadn't felt this staggered since the day her doctor informed her she'd never have children again and it seemed as though Rachel was just as dazed; her mouth moving as though trying to find words but none were forming. She momentarily thought of Rachel's ability to display confidence when everyone's attention was on her as she witnessed at Sectionals and it occurred to her that perhaps it was not Rachel's intention to seek out her mother this day.

"I'm Rachel Berry," she said finally, her voice clear but not strong. "I'm your daughter."

Only a moment ago, she was completely in her own world on stage, channeling her loneliness, but suddenly that feeling was obsolete and was very swiftly being replaced by panic. While she spent years imaging this scenario, part of her had expected to have a minute of preparation to find the perfect words to say to initiate the perfect reunion she always wanted. She didn't expect to suddenly be feet from her daughter, pulled from a trance by a fear-filled face with at least a dozen people witnessing it. It was one thing to choose to share one's internal state with an audience in order to emphasize an act, but as she looked down at Rachel, the stares from the seats in front of her were boring into her like a hundred drill bits. This was not meant to be shared with them.

She turned her genuine look of shock into one that expressed coolness and approval at Rachel's presence and simply said to her, "Yes you are." Then that coolness turned to coldness as she reached into her pocket to remotely turn off the spot and stared fiercely down at her unwanted audience. "Practice is over. I want you out of this auditorium in one minute! Is that clear?"

Her Vocal Adrenaline kids, very familiar with that tone, scrambled out of their seats and hurried to empty the theatre to find dressing rooms and change out of their metal-and-lace costumes. Out of the corner of her eye she saw two students who were not her Glee kids on the upper level, and she glared at them until they also began clambering out of their chairs. Shelby ignored the loud whispers her students hissed at each other or their obvious glances over their shoulders as they rushed out and instead watched as Rachel's fright melt into an expression of simple apprehension. She understood the feeling well.

"You listened to the tape," Shelby stated rather than questioned. She had already figured out why Rachel was looking so emotional and shocked in her auditorium; it wasn't that she came here to seek Shelby out, it was that she and the other two students above were spying on their competition (she couldn't blame them, really) and Shelby's voice must have struck a chord in the girl. It seemed rather ironic that two Funny Girl songs brought them together: "Don't Rain on My Parade" drew Shelby to Rachel, and Rachel just witnessed her perform the film's title song and it pulled her down to where she stood, appearing so vulnerable. It should have felt more whimsical than it did, but instead the tension was nearly unbearable. "That's how you know? Just because of the tape?"

She nodded slightly. "I have a very sensitive ear. And you look like me."

Shelby's lips twitched upward at that. She had always thought of Rachel looking like her, and found the girl's self-assurance charming.

"You remember the tape?" Rachel asked faintly, apparently taken aback by the older woman's correct presumption. Obviously, Jesse St. James' acting chops were as good as he claimed, for he was able to convince his young girlfriend that the cassette was a relic from her childhood rather than a manipulation in the recent past. But Shelby couldn't lie to the girl.

"I asked Jesse to make sure it got to you."

She allowed the girl a moment to process this. Her face seemed to harden, and for a second Shelby questioned her approach and whether the confession of her and Jesse's deception was a good idea.

"Uh…just…just take a seat, I-I'll be right down," Shelby requested with a gesture to her desk in the seats. Rachel nodded, and Shelby tried to smile but it wasn't working. Instead of the sheer excitement and happiness she had always hoped to feel in this moment, she was stuck with a clenching, wrenching stomach as she crossed the stage to the stairs at the end. It was a long walk, but finally she reached where Rachel was sitting with perfect posture and a blank face and hesitated.

What was she supposed to do now? While she had always felt connected to Rachel, to the girl she was a stranger that she had just introduced herself to. Not to mention there was the whole giving-up-her-own-child thing that always made anything related to Rachel tense. If she were the teen, she would probably have some involuntary hard feelings towards the mother she had never met. So she gave her space; taking a seat in the row behind her and a few seats away gave them both room to think.

"I want you to understand everything," Shelby said seriously, leaning forward in her seat so she could look at Rachel. "Why I did what I did. What do you know?"

"Just…just that my dads' picked a surrogate based on intelligence and beauty," she responded, clearly uncomfortable relaying the compliment when they had yet to know each other. "And when you were pregnant they made sure you ate well and took vitamins to make sure I was healthy. They've told me about how they would play classical music and talk to your belly in hopes that I would hear it."

Shelby sat back in her seat, and though her eyes looked toward the stage they did not focus on anything there. Rachel's fathers did not lie to her. She didn't have a single cheeseburger during her pregnancy; that was a fact that had slipped from her mind over the years until now. And she remembered listening to Mozart, Elgar, Brahms and Vivaldi for months on end until she began going crazy. But her dads couldn't have told their daughter about how Shelby too had talked to her in the womb, giving her any advice that the 22 year old could think of and telling the baby about how lucky she was going to be. There was a lot that Rachel would never know unless she told her.

Shelby decided for both of their sakes that she had to be frank. And she couldn't think of a better place to start than the beginning. "I was fresh out of college when I saw the ad in the paper. Your dads offered me enough money that I could to try and make it in New York for a couple of years. While I knew it was a big job, I figured carrying someone else's child wouldn't be so hard. I knew your dads would love you."

That last part was an undeniable fact. The way that the two men had behaved around Shelby's growing belly had been adorable to the point of nauseating—though that could have partly been the morning sickness. The further along she got, the more difficult it was to watch and witness the intimate moments they had with their unborn daughter that she was privy too; it was hard because she had begun to want what she couldn't have and had resented the men for it.

"Did you ever regret it?" Rachel asked quietly, interrupting a building silence that Shelby hadn't even noticed. She wondered if Rachel had thought about that question as much as she did over the years.

"Yes. Then no. Then so much."

She had a period in her life when she did manage to find peace with what she had done. After all, she had given a wonderful couple the child they had always wanted: how could anyone not find some satisfaction with that? Still, there was always a nagging in the back of her mind, a longing for what was partially hers, and when she knew for certain she was forevermore barren, that feeling amplified exponentially. She had her chance to have children and she blew it. She had given her baby to someone else.

"When did you realize it was the right time for me to find you?"

A miniscule laugh escaped Shelby's throat as she remembered seeing her daughter perform weeks ago. She had been so amazed not only because the girl was fantastically talented, but she had all the potential that Shelby had at that age and more. The memory of watching Rachel work her way up to the stage, singing that Barbra number with everyone watching her in awe, was enough to bring a genuine smile to her face. "I saw you sing at Sectionals. You were extraordinary. You were me."

"Was it hard for you to not become a star, to not have your dreams come true?" Rachel asked, and that feeling of happiness she had experienced when thinking about her connection with Rachel began drifting away, like a boat out to sea.

"It felt like a broken promise," she answered grimly, thinking back to all of the time she wasted. She had spent more than half of her life dreaming about being a star and having her name in lights, and when it didn't happen it almost mockingly ripped her open inside. "Like the Fisher King's wound: it never heals." And just like this wound of lore, it poisoned the rest of her life until there was little left. Combine that with that contract she had signed nearly 17 years ago and there was a perfect explanation for why Shelby Corcoran was the cold, ruthless bitch people talked about behind her back.

"Wow. Genetics really are amazing; you see the world with the same fierce theatricality as I do. Even the way we're sitting right now is so dramatic and yet we feel so comfortable with it."

It wasn't all because of genetics. However Rachel turned out was because of how she was raised and the experiences she had, none of which Shelby had any access to. She wished she knew what made Rachel the way she was, but it was possible she would never know.

"I've missed so much," she said weakly, feeling the tears that she never allowed to fall begin to form and the agonizing ache grow in her stomach. She finally turned her eyes to the teenager in the row in front of her. Did she also feel sick with longing for what they would never have? Was she happy to finally know who her mother was? She leaned forward to see her face and realized with sadness this was the closest the two of them had ever been since the moment of Rachel's birth. "How do you feel?"

She genuinely wanted to know. As she had acknowledged, she had missed so much in Rachel's life but she had spent every day since New Direction's Sectionals performance thinking about how she wanted to be a part of Rachel's future. She wasn't sure how, but she hoped to try to be a parent to Rachel. That could all begin by a question as simple as one expressing concern for her little girl.

"Thirsty," Rachel replied, and Shelby was confused. There were times, like this one, when she was so caught up in her mind that she forgot simple things like drinking, eating, and sometimes even breathing, so excluding the simple arbitrariness of the teen's answer she found it beyond her comprehension. Rachel turned her head, and Shelby's heart began hurting from overexertion when she met those beautiful dark eyes. "When I was little and I used to get sad, my dads would bring me a glass of water. It got so I couldn't tell if I was sad or just…thirsty."

Thirsty. She finally understood…but she understood too much now, she realized painfully as she sat back in her chair, her eyes pulling away from Rachel's focused gaze. Rachel had two parents already, and they loved her so damned much. There was no need for her.

It also became clear to her that she wasn't sitting in that auditorium seat because she wanted Rachel to have her mother; she tried to connect to her so she could have her daughter. It was incredibly selfish and she couldn't believe how awful of a person she was to have put Rachel in this situation.

"Uh," she started uncertainly, glancing at Rachel, hoping the right words would flow from her by virtue of their genetic bond. It was all they had. Not surprisingly, she did not have the perfect thing to say and her trembling hands went up in front of her in defeat. "I shouldn't have done this," Shelby admitted with self-loathe lining her voice. She got to her feet and thought about how muddled this entire reunion was, not only because of how it occurred but also why it occurred. This moment that they were experiencing was one her imagination played in her mind a million times a million different ways, and even her cynical way of thinking couldn't have prepared herself for how emotionally terrible this all was. "This was supposed to feel good. We were supposed to have some kind of slow-motion run into each other's arms. This is all wrong."

"Maybe we can just go to dinner or something, just to get over the initial shock?" Her tone didn't give it away, but when Shelby looked down at Rachel she realized that the girl was begging her not to go. She hoped Rachel didn't think that any of this was her fault, but she couldn't find it in herself to explain that it was she who was screwed up and who wanted so desperately to be a mother that she was willing to disrupt Rachel's clearly wonderful family so she could have a place in it.

"I'm so sorry Rachel," she said to her, and she meant it more than anything in the world. It was breaking her heart to look down onto the girl's hauntingly dismayed face and she put her hand to her forehead, trying to figure out what she could say to make this all better. She knew she needed time to figure it out. "I-I'll call you."

With one last look at her disorientated daughter, she turned and walked down the stairs, focusing on the exit and thinking about the brown eyes that were undoubtedly following her insensitive departure.