Disclaimer: These characters do not belong to me.
Notes: Many, many thanks to caramelsilver for being an awesome beta and breaking down my mammoth sentences. :D (This was written before yesterday's episode aired.)
The thing about Rachel Berry is that music is not something she does. It's something she is. It's something she lives and breathes, beating butterfly-wings in her soul, notes and harmonies weaving their way through her body. When Jesse hears her sing, he feels recognition shock deeply through him, the jolt of realizing that here is someone, finally, who might understand him.
Rachel might be blind to a large part of who Jesse is, the scheming calculating part of him that lets him use her to boost himself in Vocal Adrenaline. But at least she sees crystal-clear the most important part of him. The part of him that, when he opens his mouth and lets a song pour honey-smooth out of his throat, ceases to think about what his voice can get him in fame and adulation. That just falls in love with the music of it, again and again, each and every time. Rachel might not see him fully for who he is, but maybe—maybe she sees the person Jesse could be. The person she sometimes makes him want to be.
Jesse is used to people who calculate motives as easily as breathing, making change with the currency of high school status and talent. Vocal Adrenaline is a powerhouse of talent that can catapult its stars to fame, and that is why Jesse's fellow singers try so hard to stay in it. There is no innocence left in their soaring voices, their trills shaped perfectly and calculated to display their range. There is no easy joy in the way they wake up, practice, try try try with the sweat rolling down their backs and their legs burning with exertion. The way they wait until Shelby crooks one eyebrow and nods her head in a way that they know by now means, Not entirely hopeless. That's not to say they don't enjoy themselves. It's simply a different kind of enjoyment—the kind that burns under their skin and builds up, builds up, builds up until it culminates with a trophy in their hands and the crisp sound of fervent applause ringing in their ears. It's the results that matter, you see, and Jesse gets that, sometimes feels that, but ultimately realizes he's different from that. The results don't matter if the music is flat. If given the choice between singing the perfect song to no audience but himself, and singing something cheap and easy to the eager eyes of hundreds, he might hesitate, but he will always choose the former.
That is something Rachel understands. He sees it in the way her fingers skate reverently over the piano's side before she stands by it to sing. He sees it in the way she inhales deeply, like she's tasting the words on her tongue before she begins. The way she closes her eyes and sings like there's nothing else on this earth at that moment, just her and the ringing of her song.
Jesse will never admit it, but it scares him that Rachel Berry might see farther into him than anyone else he has ever known.
Jesse prefers those people who sing with motive and not with that unearthly connection to the music itself. He does. He understands those people who sing with a goal in sight, who have to analyze lyrics and set their faces in the proper expressions in order to convey the emotion of the song. He knows them; they're easy to predict, easy to control, and he likes it that way.
Sometimes, though. Sometimes he hears Rachel sing and wonders what if? What if more people were like Rachel? It's not that Rachel doesn't have goals—she's one of the most fiercely ambitious people he knows, and that's saying something coming from him. In one of those unwilling moments when he finds himself starting to care about Rachel Berry just a bit, he feels his shoulders go tight with irritation at the way the rest of the members of New Directions look down upon her for her aspirations. Like it would be better if she were as aimless and directionless as the rest of them. No, Rachel has plenty of goals, and knows exactly where her voice will get her in life. It's just that Jesse can see, when she lifts her hand to the heavens and starts to sing, the exact moment when she forgets all that and just loses herself in the beat pounding through her body, the vibrato in her voice ringing through her veins. Rachel does not have to calculate what emotion her face should wear. She just feels it, deeper and more visceral than Jesse could ever manage. Every time Rachel comes out of her song, her face is still held in that faraway look of wonder, still trapped in that world she disappears into, where none of her prosaic "friends" can follow. Watching her sing and breathe her song, Jesse is torn between yearning for that ability to turn his brain off and just fall into that emotion, and wondering how she has managed to survive this long with such enduring vulnerability.
It's both a naïve way to perform and yet dangerously intoxicating in its constant success—a description that fits Rachel herself to a tee. Rachel keeps setting her heart out and falling, over and over, and she's letting Jesse do the exact same thing to her. And somehow—somehow—this socially inept, insanely talented, one-of-a-kind girl is making him almost regret it.
Jesse St. James does not do regrets. He does not waste time on the past, he does not consider others' bruised feelings. He does what it takes to push himself to the top, and that is that. It takes a thick skin to succeed in show business, and someone needs to teach Rachel to stop wearing her heart on her sleeve. She has to learn it will only get slashed into pieces by the ravening hordes always lying in wait to jump on those people who are a thousand times more talented than them.
What surprises Jesse the most is that when Rachel looks up at him with her trusting eyes, with her shyly pleased little smiles at the way he soothes her insecurities with his silver tongue, he starts wishing that the person who will have to teach her that lesson could be anybody but him.