Author's Note: the title is from Finch's Perfection Through Silence, but the whole story is really about Tracy Chapman's Fast Car.
It was nine at night on a Thursday in March, and New York City was Lima, Ohio.
She stepped quietly into the dark apartment, one hand moving instinctively to flip on the light in the foyer. Her shoes were kicked carelessly to the side from the doorway, sliding across hardwood floors and skidding to a stop just shy of the wall. She'd get an earful for it later, but there was a pamphlet from a funeral still crumpled in one hand and her parents' last will and testament carefully stowed in the carryon she clutched in the other, so she didn't particularly care.
It had only been a week since she flew to Ohio to bury her parents, but there was a thin layer of dust coating the countertops in the kitchen, dulling the sheen of black marble and stainless steel. If she didn't know any better, she would think that she lived alone. A note was waiting for her, edges perfectly parallel to the clean lines of the refrigerator a picture magnet held it again. She ignored it, locating a bottle of wine and a glass and finding a way to carry everything to the bedroom.
It took fifty two steps to make it from the kitchen to the bed. Three second delay between pressing play on the remote and the iPod in the dock starting to play. Sixteen steps from the bed to the bathroom. Thirty seconds to exchange contact lenses for glasses, three minutes to wash her face and brush her teeth. Twelve steps to the closet, nine back to the bed with a handful of sweatpants and a t-shirt. Five minutes to change and slide through the stretches her physical therapist had prescribed ten years ago. One side of the mattress was more indented than the other—partly because one of them wasn't there half the time, and partly because even when she was sleeping in their bed she tossed and turned too much to ever wear a space down.
The suitcase sat by the foot of the bed, unopened. She stared down at it for long seconds before delicately extracting the legal paperwork her father's lawyer had pressed into her hands before she left for the airport. Her parents' names shone dully in the middle of the other text, and her hands shook as she slipped under the covers and flicked off the lamp and set her glasses on the bedside table atop the book she'd been reading before she left New York.
Her side of the mattress had a defined dip. She fell asleep on her left side every night and rolled onto her back shortly afterwards, never moving until she woke up. Laying back in the empty bed, she shuffled out of the groove she'd worn in, to the cooler center of the mattress, and rested the stack of papers atop her chest. She stared at the ceiling, reciting multiplication tables in her head and ignoring the fact that she was sleeping alone, just as her mother had for the ten years between leaving her husband and finally letting him and his new sobriety back in.
Rachel rarely drank and Quinn was far more than a paralegal who married a young attorney, but Rachel was never home anyways and Quinn spent her nights alone in an oversized apartment with novels and wine to round the sharp edges of her empty life.
It started in college. Ninety miles and an outrageously expensive bus system separated Quinn's scars and braces and limp from Rachel's guilt, but at least twice a month, Rachel made the trek to New Haven to visit. By the time summer had passed and Quinn had graduated from high school and Lima and a wheelchair, they were something like friends, and Rachel never asked if she could come visit. She simply verified Quinn's schedule, saved her money, and emailed Quinn a bus itinerary every few weeks.
Quinn still—on the days when she wasn't strong enough to make it to class without a cane, when the scars on her left arms caught and stretched and burned every time she moved in the cooler weather, when she woke up back on a backboard beside crushed Volkswagen Beetle with one paramedic securing a neck brace and the other cutting into her throat to intubate her because she couldn't breathe on her own—hated the almost-faded tan line from Finn's engagement ring. But Rachel came anyways, eyes shining with New York City and expectation and dreams, and Quinn's fury and the ache in her body faded to a quiet accompaniment to Rachel's optimism.
Rachel was going places, and Quinn might have been excelling in her classes and on the path to a plentiful Wall Street career, but Rachel was moving in a bubble of cheer and happiness and Quinn was mired down by a leg that would probably never be what it once was and scars still stark and pink against white skin. So she cleared her schedule every two weeks for Rachel's visits, and watched her surreptitiously and constantly, and considered the possibility of happiness being contagious, because Rachel was going places in all the right ways and Quinn wasn't going anywhere.
She never planned to kiss Rachel—had never particularly wanted to, though by then even Quinn couldn't ignore the fact that Rachel Berry was irritatingly beautiful—but it was a Saturday night in her dorm room, roommate gone, and they were tipsy on cheap champagne to celebrate Quinn managing a full week without needing her cane or brace once. Rachel's eyes were overly bright in the dim light cast across the room from a desk lamp and a laptop screen, and she was giggling at something.
Quinn couldn't be bothered to care about what was so funny, but Rachel was excelling and flourishing at NYADA in a way that no one predicted, and she was moving a light speed to a fairytale career. Quinn was succeeding but never happy and Rachel had never worried about carrying someone on her coattails to stardom and perfection, so when Rachel leaned forward to grab the champagne bottle from Quinn's hands, Quinn caught her chin in one hand and kissed her.
Russell and Judy Fabray had been in love, once. When they were young and he was working off law school debt, when she still kept in touch with college friends and only drank on weekends. Quinn had seen pictures of them from then, and her father's eyes had shone bright with confidence and ambition and affection, and her mother's eyes had reflected it all. It wasn't until time and stress and one dying town after another had dragged them into empty scotch bottles that the lights faded, but neither of them had ever been so full of joy like Rachel, so when Rachel kissed her back, Quinn pulled her close and didn't stop.
It seemed like such a good idea at the time.
Rachel's side of the bed was untouched when Quinn woke, her parents' will heavy on her chest still. She set it aside carefully, put on her glasses, and rolled her shoulders briskly. Her left side pulled, like it did every morning, but the scars were almost completely faded and she refused to acknowledge it. Sharp movements lifted her from the bed and distanced her from all she had left of her parents—half of their assets and the deed to an empty house in Ohio—as she made her way into the bathroom.
She had told her boss she would be back on Monday, but the empty glamour of their apartment was too much like the cavernous hostility of the houses she grew up in, so she dressed on autopilot and strode out of the apartment towards the closest coffee shop. The bed was left unmade behind her. Rachel would hate it, but Rachel wasn't ever home and it felt less dangerous than starting the morning with her mother's traditional coffee laced with Irish whiskey.
After lunch, a flower delivery was set upon her desk with a flourish by a teenaged courier. She ignored him until he went away, and only when she had to stand up to stretch the stiffness in her leg out did she pause to look at them. Calla lilies—her favorite when she was younger and for the first time full of possibility, because she had a degree from Yale and a host of job offers in New York and wore an engagement ring to match Rachel's on her left hand—and a simple card stared back at her.
I'm sorry I wasn't there when you got home. I love you. –Rachel
She tossed the card in the trash and took the flowers to the break room because there was always at least one junior who had pissed off his girlfriend who could use a bouquet and Rachel's assistant still hadn't figured out that when she wrote to Quinn, she always signed with her initials and a star.
Russell never accepted that Quinn was with Rachel. She tried once to reach out to him, when they first got engaged, because Rachel insisted ("You're extraordinary, Quinn, and you deserve for him to see that just as much as he needs to see it.") and Quinn did what she was told because she was just along for the ride. She took a trip down to Cincinnati alone for a weekend and tried, but he was drunk and empty and philandering, so she turned around and changed her ticket to fly back the same day.
She kept tabs on him through her sporadic phone calls with her sister. He drank too much and lived alone, with the occasional visit from a local bar girl or prostitute to keep him warm over the winter nights; she and her husband flat out refused to allow him near their children. Once upon a time he had been a good man, a kind man, but he hit the bottom of his canyon when he woke up from a drunken haze on the steps of a downtown church wrapped in the coat of a drag queen who had stopped would-be thieves from mugging him throughout the night. She deposited him in an AA meeting down the block, and he never saw her again, but three years later her made his way home to Lima to see his wife.
Quinn's mother had, after a few months adjustment, taken Rachel in stride. She sent cards addressed to them both and called on Rachel's birthday each year, kept the framed pictures of the girls in New York that Rachel sent her, and managed to master a few vegan dishes. Without Russell, she was still quiet and still demure and still proper, but she drank less and read more and withdrew from his church. Without Russell, she was her own person, supporting herself and making her own decisions and building a relationship with her daughters she'd never had. But the lightness in her shoulders and glimmer of humor in her eyes never came back, so when he came calling one day with his hat in his hand and a three year sobriety chip, she quietly invited him in for coffee.
Quinn found out a month later. She sat in the kitchen while Rachel paced, ranting about feminism and too many chances and stupidity, and Quinn traced her fingers through the condensation forming on her water glass instead of interjecting with the fact that they had become her parents.
It was a car crash that killed her parents, and Quinn slept on the couch in her office instead of going home to where their will sat by her bed. Her phone chimed intermittently throughout the night, and she ignored it with ease built on experience. She dreamed of crashes, but she was never in the crushed car.
By the time she made her way home late Saturday afternoon, she was too tired to think. Her shoes from last night weren't in the foyer anymore, and she kicked the heels on her feet to the spot the other pair had occupied. There was music floating through the apartment. Rachel was home.
She walked softly into the kitchen, dropping her suitcase on the kitchen table, and poured herself a glass of water. Rachel appeared in the kitchen, a script in hand and a red pen propped behind one ear. Her eyes darted down Quinn's bare feet and her brow furrowed in a short grimace before she spoke.
"Hey," she said quietly. "How are you?"
"I'm fine." Eight ounces gone. Three seconds under the faucet to refill the glass precisely to eight ounces once more. Four measured sips to swallow it all. "New project?"
"It's just a rough draft." Rachel was already distracted, eyes back on the script, as she blindly opened the fridge and reached for one of the six premade vegan smoothies her assistant was paid to stock the house with. "But Micah thinks it could be reworked for Broadway."
"Sounds promising." Three seconds under the faucet. Four sips, and the room stayed silent except for Rachel setting the script on the counter and grabbing her pen to scribble something in the margin. Quinn put her glass in the dishwasher and left the kitchen, stripping her jacket off.
"Quinn," Rachel called. "Please don't leave your shoes in the foyer. I almost tripped and broke my neck when I walked in today."
Quinn cut to the left, crossing the living room silently on bare feet. She dropped her blazer on the coffee table, directly over one of the pointless coffee table books Rachel's interior decorator had placed just so, and strode over to the liquor cabinet. Glass in one hand and scotch in the other, she padded back across the living room. Fourteen steps to the hallway, hang a left, brush past Rachel's nose buried in a script, and thirty more down the hall past the home gym, her office, Rachel's office, the media room that really served as Rachel's trophy case, and a bathroom and two guest bedrooms until she was in the bedroom.
Her name coasted down the hallways after her as she crossed into the bedroom. Quinn set the empty glass on the bedside table and the bottle next to it, careful to avoid the will, and ambled back to the doorway. Rachel stood halfway down the hall, staring at her with eyes mired between confusion and indifference.
Quinn shut the door impassively and rested her forehead against it, exhaustion seeping into her bones and making her teeth ache. She counted the seconds, because Rachel never waited more than twenty to come after Quinn if she was going to at all.
Thirty seconds passed, and Rachel never came. Silent and dry-eyed, Quinn moved to sit on the bed. She cracked open the bottle and poured herself a glass, downing it in one burning go before she picked up the will.
She was far from a failed mother of two and a former paralegal—her own earnings almost matched Rachel's most years—but she was nothing more than her mother had ever been. Her parents lived together and died together. It wasn't because of great love or great dependency or even companionship. It was because empty spaces were made to be filled and conformed to the shapes that filled them over time. Quinn lived with Rachel, would die with Rachel, because nature abhors a vacuum and their spaces had slotted together over the years.
She poured herself another measured portion of scotch and swallowed it slowly. The details of her mother's life insurance, her father's assets, the fair value of their house, crept by slowly as the pages turned. New York City was bright and loud and gritty, but it was never anything but Lima, Ohio dressed up in fluorescent lights.
Rachel never came to bed. Quinn never waited for her, just as Judy had never waited for Russell.