"Mercedes."
Her mother's voice drifts up the stairs and through her bedroom door.
"Mercedes, you have a visitor."
It's the same soft, tentative voice her mother has been using on her ever since she got back from LA three weeks ago. Dinah Carver-Jones is not tentative. She is not faltering or unsure; she is a powerhouse. And she has no qualms about bellowing Mercedes name throughout the whole house at the drop of a hat. Only now, she speaks to Mercedes as though too loud a sound will shatter her like glass. She seems to have missed the part where Mercedes already shattered.
She wants it to stop. She wants to yell and scream at her mother that no amount of hushed tones or silent dinners will bring Finn back, will make Mercedes feel better about the fact that something good is gone from the world forever.
But she's too tired. She's too tired to face her mother's tiptoeing. She's too tired to face the empty rage of Santana's grief or the self-destruction of Puck's.
She sang yesterday. Singing was supposed to make things better. It was supposed to make her feel better. But all it did was burn her throat like fire. She still aches all the way down to her bones and her lungs still feel full of water – she's still desperately trying to choke enough air down.
She had felt Mike's eyes on her when she started singing. He looked on the verge of jumping up to comfort her. But he had stayed seated, stayed silent, and it had forced the tear in her heart to get bigger; knowing how messed up things were with the people still here.
So she doesn't argue. Doesn't shout or snap at her mother. She drags her weary body out of bed and into the hallway. And there, at the bottom of the stairs, looking so small in the large entrance hall, hands clasped together in front of her, stands Tina.
She's dressed all in black with fingerless gloves, looking timid in a way that Tina never does anymore and Mercedes suddenly flashes back 3 years when they were both nobodies trying to work out if a shared love of music was a good enough reason to be friends.
Mercedes almost smiles at the memory, until the she feels the reality crash down round her ears and she flinches instead. Her walls creep up. Hands curl round her upper arms.
She can't see her mother so they've obviously been left to it. She takes a few steps down the stairs. Making the first move but resolutely deciding not to be the first one to speak. She doesn't have to wait long.
"Stop avoiding me." Tina's voice is quiet. It isn't angry like the last time they spoke, her voice just sounds as tired as Mercedes feels.
"I'm not-"
"You don't look at me. You don't look at me and you don't look at Mike. You make sure there's someone between the two of you at all times." Mercedes looks away "You think I want that? You think I want my friends shuffling past each other and sending broken hearted looks to each other?"
It was never supposed to be a secret. After the Schuster Wedding-That-Wasn't, they had agreed it was just one time and there was no need to tell anybody. Then a month later and after less than ten minutes alone in her dorm room, Mike was untying her jersey wrap-dress and pushing it off her shoulders to pool at her feet. And he was chuckling deeply into her neck saying that she should have worn something different if she was still thinking it was Just One Time.
Even after Mike made 3 trips to LA and they coordinated 2 trips back to Lima - even after Mercedes found herself turning dates down with other guys and Mike admitted there was no-one else - they convinced themselves there was nothing to tell. Because there wasn't supposed to be anything to tell. And even if there was something to tell, how could they talk to anyone else when they hadn't really spoken to each other? What could they explain to someone else that they couldn't begin to explain to themselves?
So the non-secret became accidentally secretive as Mercedes avoided calls from Tina just to avoid the twisting feeling in her gut when the topic strayed too close to her non-secret.
And then tragedy fell from the sky and every nerve was left raw and Mike was hugging her on the back porch at the funeral and Tina was staring and her eyes were wide. And the hug was innocent but it was intimate and close in way that they never would have hugged a year ago. And then Tina was halfway between anger and despair and Jake Puckerman was hissing at them to all shut up because Mrs Hudson-Hummel was on the other side of that door and was now really the best time?
So Tina stormed off with a promise of friendships ended and Mercedes and Mike had their own showdown on her front porch. She told him to leave. She pushed him away with grief and fear, with her words and her hands and she heard him yell – really yell – for the first time ever. Coming undone at the seams in a way that was so unlike Mike Chang. He punched a tree and she cried herself to sleep in front of her bewildered mother. She cried even harder when she admitted to herself that her tears were only partially for Finn.
She lay in bed for two weeks and wallowed in silence only broken by her mother's occasional prompts to eat. Kurt was with his family and Blaine was with Kurt. Artie was with that Cheerio bimbo. Santana was with Quinn in Yale. Puck was turning to Jack Daniels for comfort and she and Sam were definitely not in that kind of place. She needed Tina. She needed her girl. And singing was supposed to make it better.
Tina was now at the bottom of her stairs and it felt like the first time in 3 weeks she could take a full lungful of air.
"I'm mad at you Mercedes - I'm mad you didn't tell me – but I didn't want… I can't…" Her face was scrunched up and her fingers were frantically twisting round themselves. "He was my first Mercedes. He was my first everything. I know how you felt when Brittany stepped in with Sam even though you were through with him. That they didn't even tell you? And you and me are friends in a way that you and Brittany never were and I was hurt."
'Are' friends? She said 'are' not 'were' and Mercedes takes a few more steps down as she's drawn towards everything she desperately needed and everything she had been so terrified she'd lost forever.
"Do you know what this year has been like for me? I've been losing my mind. You left. You left and everybody said things wouldn't change and everything would be alright but things did change and you moved on and then I find out you've moved on together? When I'm stuck in the senior year that won't end?"
A noise chokes out of Tina that makes Mercedes heart clench in her chest. "Santana, today she completely lost it. She…"
Mercedes had known Santana would break sooner or later and she felt a wave of shame that she hadn't been there when it happened all because she was hiding in her room. Santana was a wounded alley cat that couldn't separate rage from fear or loss. She needed firm but gentle care and most of the people at that school were still afraid of her. They still didn't know she was more than her bark or her bite.
"They don't get it - The new guys. There are some things even Sam and Blaine…" Mercedes eyes jerked up from the floor as Tina breathed life to what she herself had felt was too selfish to say. "Those guys weren't on that stage in jeans and red shirts when Finn raised us all up to be something bigger. They didn't sneak past Sue to sing Nelly in the choir room at lunch-break because not singing together felt like not breathing. And soon you and Mike and everybody is going to leave again and I'll be left here with them now that things really have changed and nothing will ever be the same again."
Mercedes manages to stumble down the last few steps and get her arms round Tina before she hit the floor. But Tina's knees had already buckled so they slide down together until they are rocking back and forth on the floor of the foyer. Tina was sobbing. Her whole body wracked with shuddering gasps and Mercedes tries to grip as tight as she can while her vision completely obscures by the tears streaming down her face.
"I don't care if you're with Mike. I can't do this without you. I can't lose the two of you too."