In June, she ran.
It had been eight months since she could last run. Her body hadn't handled the abrupt shift from the constant activity of cheerleading to the almost-sedentary stasis pregnancy required; even years of training under a maniacal coach, pushing her body far beyond its perceived limits simply because she was the captain and thus always had to be the last one standing, had done nothing to prepare her for the energy-sucking exhaustion that came from a whole other person growing inside of her. And so, less than a week after Shelby Corcoran walked out of the hospital with a baby girl who already had Puck's smirk, Quinn started to run.
It was familiar, in a disconcerting way. As if she had been absent from her home for a period far more extensive than that of her pregnancy, as if she was just now walking back into a life she had abandoned. She hit the ground running and refused to look back, unwaveringly certain that the moment she did, she would shatter at the memory of a tiny bundle wrapped in pink with Puck's smirk and her blonde curls.
Every day, she ran. The hollow emptiness of her parents—no, her mother's—house felt cavernous and imposing even without her father's presence, so she pulled herself out of bed early every morning and ran. The direction didn't matter, and neither did the pace, the distance, the route. Some days she made her way to the gym a few miles away and shifted effortlessly from running to the various yoga and pilates and cycling classes they offered throughout the day, headphones in and her mouth sealed shut in a silent line as she patently ignored every person who spoke to her. Others, she wound up at the public library and ignored the disdainful looks thrust her way by the aging librarian at her sweaty state as she ambled in and picked a random book and spent all day reading it in a corner alone.
Every day, on her way home, she made her way past the nursery school both she and her sister had attended before kindergarten. And every night, between uncomfortably silent interactions with her mother at the dinner table and Mrs. Fabray retiring to her bed, Quinn helped herself to one of the bottles of Grey Goose from the three cases her father had left in his study.
It took the combined exhaustion from constant exercise and the alcohol to unwind her chest enough for her to lay down and sleep without nightmares.
It was a Thursday when she jogged through the parking lot at the gym and skirted around a group of awkwardly blushing prepubescent boys on her way through the doors. Focused on the music pounding in her ears, she noticed at the last possible second that she was about to run into someone, and barely managed to pirouette to one side; her right ankle rolled and it was only the arm grabbing at her waist that kept her from falling to the concrete.
"Watch it, tubbers," Santana ground out, setting Quinn back upright.
Quinn blinked, automatically tugging her headphones out of her ears and staring at Santana as if she hadn't seen in her years.
Then again, she thought wryly, she hadn't spoken to anyone from school since the last day of classes, so the feeling wasn't that unusual.
"Sorry," she muttered, habit pushing the word out more than remorse.
"Uh huh." Santana crossed her arms over her chest, eyes scanning up and down Quinn's form skeptically. Quinn shifted uneasily, heart pounding from the run as much as Santana's scrutiny. They had been friends since the first grade, but Santana Lopez had always possessed an intimidating quality that consistently made Quinn feel like a cowering idiot.
Taking slow breaths, Quinn forced herself to carefully wrap her headphones around her iPod, determinedly not looking at Santana. Her legs felt heavy the longer she stood, and she itched to either move, in the gym or on the road or anywhere else, or to wrap her fingers around cool glass and feel the hot sting of expensive vodka sliding down her throat; anything to distract her from the first interaction she'd had with any of her friends since summer started.
Santana's eyes scanned up and down Quinn's form once more, taking in the sweaty and tangled ponytail, the flush in her cheeks, the way her shoulders and chest and stomach all flexed and relaxed with each heavy breath she took, the barely-visible tremors in her legs from the sudden halt in blood flow.
"You shouldn't run so much, Q," she finally said. Uncrossing her arms, she twirled her keys around her finger once, nodded curtly, and made her way out to the parking lot.
Quinn stood, watching her deceptively small form disappear into the rows of cars, and realized when she finally uprooted her feet that the yoga class she'd been running to had started fifteen minutes ago.
She set off at a slow pace, settling into easy strides for the six miles back to her house.
In July, she slept.
She still went out running every day, and she still tossed back her nightmares like the shots of vodka she swallowed every night, but instead of running to the gym and exercising all day, she ran home and showered and curled up in her room with the blinds closed and music playing softly.
The cases of vodka slowly started to disappear. Though she was exercising less, she felt more exhausted, and it took less than she expected for the burn to spread from her throat to her chest to her stomach, then out to her toes and fingers, and finally into a numbing haze that spread behind her eyes and lulled her to sleep.
When it didn't work, she raided her mother's liquor cabinet, bypassing the expensive vodka for the expensive gin, convinced that its dry nature would dehydrate her and suck away the tears that slipped out when she tried to sleep.
When she wasn't running, she lay in her bed under a mass of blankets. Though it was swelteringly hot outside and comfortable inside the air conditioning, she bundled herself in sweatpants and thermal shirts, wrapping fleece blankets around her form as she stared blankly at the ceiling, hands cradled under the blankets and against an empty and hardening stomach. The burn from the alcohol never kept her warm for long, and the sweat and heat she earned on every run never actually felt warm, and quickly cooled and slid chillingly across her skin the moment her heartbeat slowed down.
Every day felt exactly like the one before. She was never hungover from her self-medicating, never sore from her exercise, never bored with staying in her room all day, never lonely from the prolonged isolation that stretched from one week to the next. The simplicity, the predictability, of her routine was comforting and familiar, almost familial in a way her real family never had been.
Her phone rang every now and then, voicemails and text messages building up in number slowly. Mercedes, Puck, Kurt, Brittany; even Artie and Rachel and—a few times—Finn. She never answered. Her only human interactions came when she threaded her way through other morning joggers on the sidewalks, or stared blankly when her mother tried to speak to her about anything of importance.
Santana appeared in the doorway on a Tuesday, arms crossed familiarly across her chest and a bemused look on her face. Quinn, blinking dully at her presence, said nothing and noted dispassionately that they had done this once before, when Quinn's grandmother had died and Santana had come at Quinn's sister's request to talk the blonde into leaving her room.
"Mama Fabray says you won't talk to anyone," Santana said. She sounded bored, and Quinn simply blinked again before turning her gaze to the wall to the left of Santana. The other girl rolled her eyes, her entire body shifting with the movement, before stalking into the room and shutting the door before yanking at the blankets covering Quinn.
"Come on," she muttered. Her brow furrowed as she came away with a heavy mass of three blankets in her hands, leaving Quinn with her legs curled up to her chest, arms wrapped around her shins protectively. "Damn, Q, you have to be burning up."
Quinn shrugged, pulling the cuffs of her sweatshirt down over her hands. Santana's frown deepened, something undecipherable pushing at her expression, and she tossed the blankets aside and awkwardly reached out to press a palm against Quinn's forehead.
"Damn," she breathed out again. "Are you like sick or something?"
"I'm fine," Quinn said half-heartedly. Her voice came out husky and rough, her throat aching from days of disuse.
"Are not," Santana retorted. "You go from running all day to sitting in your room alone all day? What the hell is okay about that?"
Quinn shrugged, lacking the mental coherency to argue. Santana was infamously impatient, and Quinn could wait it out until she left.
Santana sighed loudly and dramatically. Hands on her hips, she surveyed the room around her, her eyes settling on the television on the opposite wall. Picking her way across the familiar landscape with ease born from ten years of practice, she located a random movie from the shelf and set it in the DVD player. The volume, even though it was barely turned on, sounded loud enough to echo throughout the entire cavernous room, and Quinn unintentionally shrank back against the pillows behind her.
"Move," Santana ordered, elbowing Quinn to one side of the bed as she settled down next to her, legs stretched out lazily as she fiddled with the remote.
They were halfway into From Paris With Love when Quinn spoke. "This is a stupid movie," she mumbled into her knees, not having moved from her defensive curled-up posture. John Travolta threw an explosive vest out of a window and blew up a car full of terrorists, and Quinn blinked dully.
"You're the one who owns it, dumbass," Santana pointed out, shooting her an irritated look.
"You gave it to me for Christmas because your parents wouldn't let you have it at your house," Quinn shot back. "It's an idiotic movie."
"Maybe," Santana said after several seconds had slipped by. "But you kept it anyways."
In August, she walked.
Santana had silently started appearing at the Fabray household every morning, just as Quinn was making her way out of the shower from her run. They systematically made their way through every DVD in the house, then moved onto Netflix rentals from both of their accounts. After both Netflix queues were exhausted, Santana one day levered Quinn off of the bed and dragged her unresponsive body out to get dinner at Breadstix.
The next day, they walked out to the park near the high school. The barely-there sound of football pads crashing together from the summer training camp was a quiet backdrop to the empty park—no one else wanted to be outside in the heat—as they wandered around silently. When they made it back to Quinn's house, they split half a bottle of gin and Quinn woke up with a dry mouth and a half-drunk Santana passed out next to her with one arm flung lazily over Quinn's stomach.
They went out to lunch every day, never to the same restaurant. First they hit every establishment within walking distance, and then further out, making their way in an ever-expanding radius across the town. Before and after every lunch, they walked, Santana sauntering with a bored look on her face and Quinn shuffling along in a too-big sweatshirt despite the heat.
Eventually, Quinn started to talk.
"I've felt cold ever since she was born," she admitted in a soft mumble one day as they sat on a bench, staring at the pond in front of them. It was half-empty and the water looked more like mud; debris scattered around the waterline, sticks and rocks and old litter spread out in the mud. "I was always hot when I was pregnant, it drove me insane. And now I can't get warm."
Santana never responded, simply nodding blankly every now and then to show she was listening—or, perhaps, to give the illusion of listening; Quinn wasn't sure. She spoke of how she'd thought she might want to keep her daughter, how she thought she might want to take Puck up on his offer and determination to be a family, how she thought she might be strong enough to handle it all. She spoke of how she had stood in the hospital and taken in the heartwrenching look in Puck's eyes as they both stared at their daughter, how she had realized in one fell stroke that she was only sixteen and wanted to be sixteen again, how she had realized she would never be strong enough to not resent her daughter for the childhood she lost if she kept her. She spoke of how she hated what she had done to Finn, how she had desperately spun out of control in every facet of her life, how she had cobbled together a half-assed plan with the Glist to regain any semblance of notice from her peers. She whispered out every moment of self-loathing and guilt and disgust, and Santana simply nodded silently the other time.
"People screw up," Santana finally said, one day out of the blue. They were once again sitting at the pathetic pond. Someone had attempted to build a mud castle on the shore, but it had eroded down to a lumpy brown mass with sticks poking out of it and a soda bottle wrapped hanging as a limp banner from one. "You made, like, every wrong choice possible. Everyone knows it. But whining about it isn't going to make it better."
She had looked Quinn in the eye then—really looked at her, as she so rarely did to anyone—and held the blonde's gaze discomfortingly. "Stop hating yourself," she said bluntly. "It's boring and redundant and emo and, frankly, stupid. So stop it." Her gaze softened momentarily.
"And you don't deserve it," she added, her voice on her hips, she Hand
Quinn stared at her, eyes wide and unblinking, shoulders slumped as they so often were, and wished for a shot of vodka to jolt her senses awake. Santana flushed, the slight coloring spreading across her cheeks unexpected and unprecedented even in the long span of their friendship, and she crossed her arms back over her chest, slumping back against the bench and kicking a pebble up from under her shoe. It skittered across the sidewalk and stopped abruptly at the base of the mud castle.
"Who the hell makes a sand castle in the mud?" Santana muttered. "Moronic kids."
Quinn smiled in spite of herself, the faintest tug at the corners of her lips, and she matched Santana's stare at the pile of mud, mirroring her posture. Seconds ticked by slowly, and for the first time since a pink bundle with Puck's smirk and her blonde curls disappeared into the waiting arms of Shelby Corcoran, she felt a prickle of heat spreading over the back of her neck. A few more moments slipped by, and Santana remained silent and motionless beside her.
Her skin starting to itch in the heat, Quinn unthinkingly sat up and tugged the sweatshirt she was wearing over her head, letting out a tiny sigh of relief at the feel of cooler air brushing against the bare skin of her arms and shoulders. Santana still didn't move, but Quinn could somehow feel the other girl smirking.
In September, she walked.
School swallowed her back up again, and the first apprehensive days where she had no idea where she stood—having never experienced McKinley High School without the protective armor of a cheerleading uniform or the sullen weight of a baby—were banished to the wayside by the presence of Santana and Brittany once again at her side. Brittany chattered like always, flitting from topic to topic energetically, and Santana walked with her chin lifted and shoulders squared, eyes darting around to anyone who dared stare at Quinn.
After the comparative solitude of the past months, the hustle and clatter of the high school was both overwhelming and beautiful to Quinn. Without cheerleading to occupy her time, or a pregnancy to occupy her energy, she finally—for the first time—felt a comparative quiet in spite of the clutter around her. No longer needing to run from class to practice to rehearsal to the obstetrician, she walked instead. She still went running every morning, but walked at a slow ambling pace the rest of the time, Santana at her side comfortingly. Her life continued onwards at a slow, steady pace, plodding forward day by repetitive day, and she welcomed the redundancy.
Repetition, for the first time since she walked out of the hospital, was thrown out the window the day that Santana pushed her against the door to her bedroom and kissed her roughly, the phantom taste of gin on her tongue and the familiar scratch of a cheerleading uniform pressing against Quinn's bare skin. Like the first time she ran into Santana over the summer, the first time Santana came over to the Fabray house, the one time she told Quinn she didn't need to blame herself, it caught Quinn off-guard and felt so wonderfully unexpected that it had to be perfect.