AN: Hey there! So, I wrote this story for the Glee Femslash Big Bang on livejournal. It's 24000 words long. The chapters will be around 2000 words at first, but longer later in the story. I've been obsessing with this story like a mad scientists, so... I'm mostly just really curious about what you think. Which leads to the following request. If you want my eternal gratitude, virtual cookies and an author who is motivated to update frequently, I would like to ask you to write a review! I most sincerely hope you enjoy. Fic title taken from Walking With a Ghost by Tegan & Sara. Chapter title taken from Viva La Vida by Coldplay ;)
Disclaimer: I don't own Glee or anything I may refer to.
~ I used to rule the world ~
Rachel knew from the second she woke up that morning that something was wrong. She didn't know what it was, that vague feeling of queasiness in her stomach, her sixth sense on high alert. It started when she was lying on her bed without the slightest clue what chain of events had brought her there.
Then, she wasn't hungry at all, and even skipped breakfast, the most important meal of the day.
When she walked her 5 minutes to McKinley High she couldn't help but wonder if maybe her gut feeling actually was a bad sign, or just a way of her pent-up frustrations with Finn's absolute lack of romanticism and Glee's lack of showtunes to make themselves clear.
She decided on her usual tactics, bury it beneath optimism and hope, without which all would be lost in the world. Then, the first strange thing of the day happened.
She was on her way to her locker when it happened. The undeniably horrible combination of Karofsky and a lime slushie. Being target no. 1, Rachel was well aware of what was about to transpire. Karofsky never could resist. So she closed her eyes, held her breath and got ready for…
The bell rang. Rachel opened her eyes and turned around frantically. She might have hit someone, but didn't feel anything. She was supposed to have 5 more minutes until the bell, she was absolutely positive!
And 5 minutes couldn't have passed. She had a good set of lungs and she regularly trained them with breathing exercises, but as she blew out the breath she'd been holding she remembered her record being 2 minutes.
Karofsky was out of sight, and she was lacking the familiar feeling of a brainfreeze and dirty sweet bits of slushie sliding their way into her clothes. She looked down. No, nothing.
Then she realized she was late. She could kiss her flawless attention record goodbye now, because she, Rachel Berry, was late, for the first time in her life. She sighed, already both agonized and mystified by this day, before making her way to Spanish.
Others would have skipped the class altogether, she knew, but she wasn't others. The door was still open, she noticed, which meant Mr. Shue must have been running late as well. She breathed out a sigh of relief when she slipped inside the classroom and slid inside her seat, completely unnoticed.
The others were still talking amongst themselves of course, but the class fell dead silent when Mr. Shue walked in with red-rimmed eyes before slamming the door shut loudly. She caught a whisper behind her. "Do you think he fought with the red-head?"
But Mr. Shue's look laid down a blanket of silence over the classroom. His eyes went to Rachel's desk. Rachel smiled at him, but somehow, he seemed to not even notice the girl behind the desk. He breathed in deeply through his nose twice, and then unexpectedly, called out a few names.
"Kurt, Brittany, Puck, Tina, I'd like to speak with you right now. For the others, class dismissed." Rachel froze for a sly second, before making her way out of the class along with the others. After doubting a second she decided to wait for her team mates until they were done.
She was really, really curious what that was all about. She couldn't think of anything outside of Glee that Kurt, Puck, Brittany and Tina had in common, but if it were something Glee-related, Mr. Shue wouldn't have dared excluding her from it. He knew like no other what Glee meant to her.
She hadn't been waiting for very long when they came out.
"Hello!" Rachel started, but they walked past her without even so much as a sideways glance.
"I really wonder what he's so upset about," Tina stated. Rachel could hear Kurt's reply clearly.
"I'm sure he'll share it with us at the emergency Glee meeting next hour."
"Maybe his dog's sick," Brittany said before adding: "I don't like dogs, 'cause they don't like cats and they're mean to ducks and I like cats and ducks."
Then they disappeared around the corner, and Rachel wondered when her piercing, one of a kind voice had suddenly become inaudible. You see, there weren't many people out there who loved the spotlight and attention in general quite as much as Rachel. Thankfully, or the world would have been too small a place.
But Rachel wholly believed that even if negative attention wasn't favourable over good attention, it actually was favourable over no attention at all. And for a girl like her, few things were crueler and more horrible than being ignored completely, like now.
Devastation and hurt immediately pierced her chest. She'd been excluded from a Glee thing, the one thing that made her feel like she was part of something. She was the heart of Glee, the talented, fearless captain of the ship. Or at least the leader. She was the star.
The hurt went away, or at least beneath the surface, when she squared her shoulders. They couldn't exclude her from Glee. She'd be there next period, in the choir room, and someone had better have an excellent explanation for her.
She walked through the open doors of the choir room and went to sit on her usual seat. She spent the rest of the hour – unable to help herself - thinking about why nobody had told her anything, why the world seemed to be pretending that she wasn't there, in what eloquent manner she would make the guilt sprout up inside of her team mates, and when the bell finally rang, she was in full on battle mode.
The familiar faces of her fellow members of Glee club walked in, one by one, none of them acknowledging the presence of the breezing brunette in the corner. Mr. Shue walked in and closed the door while 2 seats were still empty, her favourite and her least favourite team mate had yet to join them, Finn and Quinn.
Mercedes beat her to the punch, saying: "Wait, we're not all there yet. We're still missing Finn, Quinn and Rachel."
"What? I'm right here, Mercedes. Look no further," Rachel said quickly but nobody minded her. Before she could say more, Mr. Shue said to Mercedes: "I know, they're not coming."
He scraped his throat and that look appeared again on his face. Defeated. Lifeless. Infinitely sad. He looked at the pupils, the students, the kids from Glee club, and then finally started speaking.
"I'm afraid Finn is too upset to join us now. Quinn is with him for moral support, but he got some really bad news today. News that is going to be a blow for all of you as much as it was for Finn, or myself. It concerns Rachel."
Rachel sat up. Nobody turned to look at her.
"There's been… a horrible accident concerning Rachel and her fathers. A car crash. One of her dads is relatively fine, one is still lying injured in the hospital, but Rachel… she didn't make it. She was dead the second they crashed."
It was silent for a few short moments, before Mercedes said: "Hold on. Wait. Like, dead-dead? No hope? Rachel is dead?"
"She is," Mr. Shue said in a soft voice.
Gasps and squeaks went through the group, and one emotion was gripping everybody now. Shock. Rachel blinked.
This was absolutely and utterly ridiculous. She knew she wasn't stupid - not according to her 3.9 GPA she wasn't – but she honestly just really didn't get the clue of this really weird practical joke.
Was it Mike or Tina who had thought of this? Asians always did have strange sense of humour. Perhaps Artie. He managed to be both positive, yet have a strange morbid side to him. She shot her teammates a look.
She had to give it to them, she'd thought she was the only one in Glee who could once get in to the biz as both an actress and a singer, but she saw that both Kurt and Tina could cry on demand like her.
Even Puck, Brittany and Santana were taking it seriously. Wait, were Santana's eyes moist? They were really pulling out all the stops, weren't they?
Of course, that was why Finn and Quinn weren't there. They would have ruined it. Finn unable to keep in is laughter, and Quinn unable to pretend she cared even in the slightest bit. Santana buried her head in Brittany's shoulder and, although it was kinda fun, Rachel thought it was best to put a stop to it now.
"I realize that some people have a more twisted sense of humour than others," she started, rising from her seat, "but this has gone on for long enough, and frankly Mr Shue, I believe it is highly irresponsible of you to sacrifice a Spanish class for a practical joke."
Tina broke a sob. Artie had trouble putting his arms around her, obstructed by his wheelchair, and he pulled her on his lap, without a second look from a still slackjawed Mike.
Kurt was blinking his red-swollen eyes feverishly, and Puck's face was aimed towards the ground before he suddenly jumped up, growled, kicked his chair and stormed out. Mr Shue was comforting Santana, Brittany and Mercedes.
Rachel was growing more and more annoyed, especially when it turned out that Puck couldn't pretend anymore either and left like that. She bet he was snickering with Finn and Quinn out there somewhere.
She walked to the front of the room, and it was then that she made the gesture that changed everything.
She tried to shake Mr. Shue's shoulder, but she felt nothing beneath her hands but air. She gasped and watched intently as, again, her hand passed straight through Mr. Shue's broad shoulders.
This had to mean that either Mr. Shue was literally untouchable, which was highly unlikely because Santana was clinging to him like she had no trouble touching him whatsoever, or she was untouchable, or she was crazy.
She ran to Mike and tried to smack him, tugged on Brittany's Cheerio's uniform, unsnapping one of Artie's suspenders, but her hand went through all of them, like someone who wasn't really there.
She stumbled back and realized that, if she wanted proof, this wasn't the place she would get it. No. Rachel turned around and ran, well, fled the scene, really.
She had a clear goal in mind and felt that her body didn't get tired from running at full speed. No stinging in her sides, no sweat, no racing heart – was it beating at all?
She didn't check, didn't want to know – she only stopped on her way to try and touch random strangers, or yell at them. It would have been embarrassing if they could hear her, but they didn't, so it was mostly just desperate.
She finally arrived at the sliding doors of the hospital. They didn't open. Rachel stared at the doors like they were kidding her. They were just normal, regular sliding doors. They always opened for her. They sensed people, or something alike, and after noting her presence they would open for her. But not now.
Nearly panic stricken, she started pacing in front of them, jumping, disappearing behind a corner before jumping out again, even trying to say "open sesame", but to no avail.
A mad idea came to her. She knew it was mad, but if she'd already gone mad – a real possibility – then what did it matter? She walked back several feet, swallowed thickly, closed her eyes and ran for the doors.
She felt like Harry Potter on platform 9 and three quarters. After counting to 20 in her mind, she opened her eyes and found that she was in the hospital.
Oh. Maybe the doors had actually opened after all.
It was a rather small hospital and on every floor there was a list with it's patients. On the 3rd floor she found the name of her father with his room number. Feeling nauseous, she went to his room.
The door was open, and she spotted her father, with her dad on his bedside. Both were sleeping, holding hands, tear streaked faces. She had seen enough and raced the stairs to the top floor.
Obstructed by a door again, she took a deep breath and felt barely surprised when she stepped through said obstruction, so she was standing in the hospitals morgue.
She walked past the slates, checking the tags. There, between Beckenbauer and Carlton, there she was. Berry, R. B. Rachel Barbra. Her breath stuck in her throat and she noticed her lungs weren't throbbing, no longer begging for air.
She kept holding her breath when she bended over and let her face slip through the blanket, trying not to think about what she was doing. She was met by her own face, but not like she knew it, mirrored. This was how other people saw her face.
Hopefully not like this, though, because she looked horrible. Asleep, but scarily pale. Probably cold, too, she couldn't tell. A thought occurred to her. Why not? Why, obviously, her essence had survived. And her body had, she was looking at it right now. Why not reunite them?
She already saw it happening in her mind, just like the movies. She laid down on the slate, slipping the rest of herself through the blanket, mirrored her body's position and waited. Myth busted. Nothing happened.
Disappointment struck her hard when she rose and didn't feel or see the blanket fall from her body. It was then that she was sure.
She was beyond hope. Rachel Berry had passed away.