This Book is Called Branches
a Faberry Week Oneshot
She jumps off buildings, just to see how far she'll fall. Survival instincts kick in eventually, and her body will twist and propel itself upwards and away from certain death. She's always been handy with ropes, swinging through the streets of the city like the caped crusader himself. Only now she's discovered she doesn't need them to fly.
She wishes that she could fall. Fall to the ground just to see what would happen. Fall to see if what they say in Batman is true, you fall with no teather your death is instant.
Gotham City doesn't exist.
After she'd finished school she'd moved to New York, drawn in by the lights and the glamor of the city. She'd spent four years just eighty miles away, just over two hours by train, but New York still drew her in like a siren's song. She could never resist the inevitable draw of the city. She couldn't help herself, stuck in a tiny apartment paid for by a pitiful salary.
She is poor, she is underemployed, but by the grace of god, she is happy.
She's finally able to tell people her name is Lucy and she went to Yale. She's finally spent a long time looking hard at herself, trying to make sense of what forced Quinn out of Lucy. She thinks she finally understands.
She can smile and pull her friends close, sitting back on her days off, drinking coffee that they make themselves to cut down on costs. She can write tiny volumes of poetry and try and sell them at the local bookshop.
(When she dares let others read her work, her ears burn with humiliation. She cannot do this, but leaving the tiny pamphlets with the cover that Brittany drew for her at the register of the bookstore is somehow easier than she thought.
Maybe it's because she never has to see them reading it. Or know what they think of her.)
[ This book is called Branches. ]
The first time she flies, she is falling. She's heading own some steps by the docks to take a series of photographs for a freelance project she picked up to supplement her merger income. She trips, and her body doesn't fall down, but rather up.
It takes a little while to get used to. Experimentally flinging herself off of high places with a suicidal impulse she hasn't had since she was just-seventeen. This time the fear is not of who she leaves behind, fingers clenching around razors and pill capsules, but rather of what it all means. How did she get to be this way?
Does she even want to know?
The metaphysical aspect of what is happening to her alone makes her brain hurt. She asks Brittany one day, if it might-could-would be possible for humans to fly.
She's met with a blue-eyed smile accented with pure white teeth. "Only if they grow wings."
The secret cuts into her, she cannot tell anyone. She can see their concern as she pulls a tattered crochet throw over her knees and cradles her mug of tea close. She inhales the steam and it doesn't hurt her nose.
She can't get hurt. Skinned knees are a thing of the past. There's no wounds that she can worry at, pick away until the blood is there, reminding her that she's still breathing. Blue blood oxygenizing red against pale skin.
[ at times I fall
only to soar
unwelcome
life at my toes. ]
It isn't a good neighborhood, where she's come to call home. There's blood everywhere, violence everywhere – drugs, sex, prostitution. She turns her nose up at it, and tries to work her way out of this place - no matter how much she loves it here. The screams of sirens fill the night, cutting through the little sleep she's able to allow herself each night.
She doesn't realize it, but she's becoming like them, the super heroes Lucy used to love reading about as a child. Her ears are constantly alert, she watches people, looking for signs of wrongdoing, people she can help.
It's funny, she doesn't even realize it's happening until she's up to her eyeballs in it and is struggling on three hours of sleep a night. She'll take to the sky, because it's calmer up there, among the clouds and in the thin air. Her mind feels sluggish, drunk without the alcohol. The first time she reads about a failed Everest expedition she understands why, and lowers her flying altitude before it kills her.
Humans were never meant to fly so high.
[ To climb above
and see the world
as ants
To dine
Poppins' Way
perched upon a cloud.
still want I to trespass
for yet it feels like home ]
She's coming off the train one night, coming back from an evening among more civilized people. Rachel had asked her to be a plus one to her first cast party following the successful limited run of her first show. She'd gone without hesitation because it's Rachel and saying 'no' to her doesn't exactly work.
[ the songbird
stands at center
just off right
lips move once,
twice,
and a universe bursts forth ]
The screams are not loud, a quiet whimper and a hissed threat. She can hear it over the traffic and the music pouring from a bar open to the street. How she isn't quite sure. The instinct bites into her and she wants to turn away and continue on. The movie comes back to her then, 'with great power comes great responsibility'. She has to investigate because someone's going to get hurt.
She steps into the alleyway and sees him then. His pants half-undone and his fist full of his victim's hair. She looks so impossibly young and not for the first time in her very complicated life, Quinn Fabray finds herself acting without thinking.
She isn't a big damn hero or whatever the line was from that show that she watched when she was a kid. She's just a girl who punched a guy in the face before he was able to rape a girl younger than herself. She stood up for the girl and walked her to the women's shelter down the street. She left the guy in the growing rainstorm and tried not to think about how wonderful it would have been to call the cops on him. That's a challenge for another day.
Quinn helps this girl to the women's shelter because she's not thinking. Because to stay and to say anything would be utterly stupid, her identity cannot be known. She's already Bruce Wayne, even if she pretends not to get the reference.
She fades into inky blackness, floating high above the city, sitting cross-legged on a cloud. Cigarette smoke circles around her head as she smokes her turmoil away into nothingness.
[ The city
is exceptionally grand
looking down
on a lark. ]
She takes to the sky a lot these days. To escape the press of emotions that crush her when her feet touch the ground. It's a way of processing. She's still not entirely sure how she ended up with super powers, floating through the air with the greatest of ease.
There isn't a trapeze in sight.
She's avoiding Rachel these days. Her phone goes forgotten on her dresser when she goes out on assignment. Her camera is always ready, drawing out souls and laying them bare on luminous glossy photo paper. She likes her work as a free-lance photographer. She's working in a gallery to pay the bills; for the first time in her life, she actually enjoys what she's doing.
Rachel is a problem – she brings a level of complication to Quinn's life that Quinn's still not quite comfortable with accepting.
Santana tells her that she's got to pull her head out of her ass and admit it. Rachel's more than receptive. That's the problem. This was all so much easier when she could drown herself in self-loathing and buried affections. Self-pity always was her strong suit, and now her ability to wallow in it has been stripped away with gentle smiles and hesitant fingers on her palm. It's there now, they all know about it, and she can't keep a secret to save her goddamn life.
She's on her third cigarette, perched on the edge of a building, watching the streets below. There's been a series of purse snatchings in the area and she's determined that they've all probably started out of this particular subway station on this particular state.
Cue Gotham City on a rainy night.
She's like Batman, dropping down silently, overcoat billowing out around her, skullcap keeping her hair firmly in place. Her identity must stay hidden. She's got a mask now. Brittany helped her make it, under the guise of wearing it to a costume party that Quinn was feeling too broke to actually attend.
Quinn Fabray is no one's hero.
[ what does it take
to be a hero
?
am i worthy with this
empty burden
a battle fought
alone?
to be a hero
means
becoming kindred
with lonliness
. ]
She feels the presence almost before she sees it.
There's been another for some time now. Sometimes her police scanner (pilfered from an off-duty cop's apartment with a convenient open window) will squawk off the details of a crime and she'll go only to find her work done. She's wanted to meet this other for some time.
"This is my turf," she keeps her voice low. She's not Batman, but the cigarettes have helped her to develop a 'batman voice' that she puts on when talking to these thugs. It's a little nerdy that she knows that, but Lucy was - has always been really - a bit of a nerd. She supposes that it sort of goes with the territory. "Save the day somewhere else."
It isn't raining that hard, but there's water streaming down her face as her rival's tiny form steps into the light, full lips quirking upwards into a half-hidden and incredibly familiar smile. She's wearing a mask, her hair is in two braids at her back, and she's dancing on her toes.
Quinn does not particularly like having her personal space invaded, but she lets it happen. Lets this girl with her pretty lips and bewitching smile - eyes that just catch the light from the streetlight ahead - lets her come in closer and closer. Lets their bodies press together.
"I think we can share," Comes the whisper and Quinn just knows. Just knows that this is doomed though it's yet to start. That secret identities would come out and somehow this would be shattered because they know each other. They're (almost-maybe-not-quite) friends.
(And Quinn's in love with her.)
She finds her own lips quirking upwards. "I don't know…" she whispers. Her breath is catching and there's an unconscious guy by their feet. Maybe they are big damn heroes, because he's out cold and the police are just a phone call away. "I can be really hard to work with."
Rachel's hand is warm in her own as Quinn pulls them upwards into the sky.
"I'll deal with it."
It's nearly lost in the howl of the wind as they're drawn back to safety and Quinn's tiny apartment far away from the glamor at the heart of the city. She gets the message anyway, because she's always been good at understanding what it is that she cannot say to Rachel.
[ Her power?
Her power is song. ]