A/N: I know it's fucked up and possibly wildly out of character, but I wrote it so I wouldn't go through with it. Takes place just after Rachel spills the Puck/Quinn baby beans. I set it in winter.
She knew she would not be "Defying Gravity" today. In fact, she'd be acquiescing to its demands. She couldn't really bring herself to mind. It was a fantastic song and she would love to sing it some day in Glee Club, but she doubted that day would come. Well, she doubted that day would come and she would see it. So submitting to gravity instead of defying it didn't seem so sacrilegious. She'd never have to face the song again.
Cold, white snow settled into her dark hair like some cruel mockery of a Christmas card scene. She reached out her hand to an invisible lover who stared over the edge of the bridge with her at the expanse of railroad tracks, covered stealthily with the icy powder. It would be so much easier, believing someone was holding her hand. She wanted to pretend it was Finn, but that hurt even more. She'd rather jump alone. So instead, she crafts the perfect fairytale prince to clasp her cold fingers in his own while she contemplates her seemingly short future.
Rachel Berry has never done anything without thoroughly planning. The jump would hurt her – enough to make her think seriously about what she was doing, put her in a state of panic. It would give her a chance to change her mind and crawl out of the way. She could call 911, claim she'd had an accident and slipped, and they'd come get her and put the broken pieces of her legs back together, or whatever was necessary. But if she got down there – if she didn't care – the snow would numb the pain soon enough. It would continue to drift down for at least another few hours, and given it was coming down fairly heavily, if she laid there quietly enough, under the bleached white sheet she had brought, it would cover her thoroughly enough that the person running the train would never see her. He would assume she was a snowdrift, if he saw her at all.
Rachel Berry fading into mediocrity in her final hours. It was irony at its finest. She'd like to go out in some fantastic and dramatic way, but that was what caused it. Every time. Her need to help, her need to be the center of attention – she'd done this, again and again and again. And this time it seemed unforgivable. Finn wouldn't look at her. Quinn was so depressed she couldn't bring herself to feel hatred. And Puck? Puck was bizarrely stoic about the whole thing. That was bad. But the looks of disappointment and shame from the other club members hurt nearly as much, all over again.
She could read it in their eyes. "How could you ever think you were helping? You have never helped. You have only made things worse."
It had been her entire life. So eager to do things right, do things perfect. She remembered when she was eight the time she had decided to help her dads with dinner and clean the jalapeno peppers that were sitting on the counter, because peppers needed to be cleaned before they were eaten. She knew the oils were very, very hot, so she cut out the seeds and the ribs just like she did with sweet peppers, then washed her hands with Dawn. If it could take oil off baby animals it could take the oil off her fingers. She even washed them a second time for good measure.
No matter how cautious Rachel was, it never seemed to be enough. Her "cleaning" made things worse. They couldn't eat until nearly 8:00 because her dads had to flush her eyes with water after she brushed one with a stray finger that should have been clean. She had chemical burns for a week and her dads nearly took her to the hospital out of concern.
The sheer physical pain indelibly etched itself on Rachel's brain. The next clear memory was the time in 9th grade – the episode that had truly cemented her total unpopularity. Lexie. The girl was every kind of emo. Whiny, annoying, bitchy, hypocritical – but she was a friend, and she needed to learn what her faults were on her own. No amount of telling her could get it across. And yet Rachel told her. Upset her, less than a month after butting into a conversation while Lexie tried to speak to the guy she liked, essentially ruining her chances. She'd been trying to help both times and only upset the girl. They never talked after that, and slowly friendships she had managed to scrape and hold together evaporated like a puddle of water during a hot summer.
Rachel's entire life was a botched experiment, like a batch of bad vaccines. It was time to shut down production.
"Close my eyes and leap," Rachel softly sings to herself, wavering for the first time. The imaginary prince clasping her cold hands smiles softly at her as she clambers unsteadily onto the railing of the bridge. Her heart skips a few beats as she slips on the rounded, cold metal and nearly loses her balance. She takes a moment to catch her breath. "Come on. You're Rachel Berry. You're fearless. And it's only twenty feet. You'll be fine if you land on your feet. As fine as you can expect. You won't have enough time if you don't get down their right now."
She breathes heavily and with no little sense of panic. Then she lets herself fall. It hurts like nothing else has ever hurt, and she lets out a muffled shriek. Her indecisiveness is still running rampant and then with a sudden burst, her life almost flashes before her eyes. Except… The people who have loved her flash before her eyes. And the list is pitifully short. The only two she's sure of are her dads.
And this will kill them, but if she opens her eyes, along with the burning tears of pain, and shame, and sorrow, will come all the images of the people she's hurt. She doesn't want to see them so she keeps her eyes screwed shut as her numb fingers scrabble around. She blinks quickly as she drags herself to lie on the train tracks, letting a few tears escape in exchange for the certainty of knowing by sight instead of her deceptive, nearly non-working sense of touch, that she is indeed on the train tracks. The white sheet she has been clasping gets unfolded and cast over her entire body, and she remember sitting under the huge, rainbow parachute in gym class. The people who sat next to her always tried to scoot a few inches closer to their other neighbors. She remembers pulling the crisp, baby pink cotton "sick" sheet over her head when she had just finished throwing up. She remembers the first time she can recall seeing snow, and how she had fallen over in it. It was so deep she thought she had gotten lost until her dads came and scooped her up.
The white sheet settles down over her tired, broken legs, then her torso, then her face. It is all of these things. It is her loneliness. It is her illness. It is her terror.
And it comforts her, strangely. She feels clean and new under this sheet, and is glad she is dying a virgin. She is almost a sacrificial lamb for God on Passover, to keep her dear dads safe. Perhaps she'll even get to go to heaven for sparing so many people the pain of her existence, and trying her hardest to be a good person, though she has failed wildly every time.
She thinks of the note – "I'm sorry," and her name, and wonders if she should have left a list of songs for Nationals. No.
Her helping would just make things worse.
It's better this way. Quiet and almost holy. The cold seeps into her, stinging at first, at odds with the hot, desperate tears that fall down her face, washing her peccadilloes away. Just like settling in under her pink "sick" sheet, she slowly falls asleep. She's so deep into the hypothermic reaction when the train comes that she doesn't feel a thing. And then, the gold star that was Rachel Berry is only a bloody smear on some train tracks, and the people who have just torn her to pieces have no idea.
And it wasn't the people on the train.