A/N: This is the story that I meant to churn out last night that ended up coming out as a completely different Brittana story instead. This is a longer (for me) one-shot that focuses on Quinn with subtle hints of Faberry and side notes of Brittana. Please be warned that this story contains self-harm, and if you aren't all right with that, you won't hurt my feelings if you stop reading now. As always, though, please review if you do read.
Disclaimer: "Glee" does not belong to me.
Observations of Beauty
She didn't like Lucy Fabray. Nobody had liked Lucy Fabray.
There was a reason she dyed her hair and lost the weight and changed her name; Lucy Fabray wasn't a happy little girl. She has to admit, however, that Quinn Fabray is not a particularly happy young adult. She stopped being happy a long time ago. She thinks it might have been some time between the first time she threw a slushie and the day she felt fat and let Puck get her drunk on wine coolers.
Quinn has already lamented all the things she lost her sophomore year of high school. They've been listed and they don't really need to be said again; it'd just be another painful reminder of who she is and who she isn't. She knows her past better than anybody else, which is why her world seems to break that much more when it isn't her name announced for Prom Queen.
Everything seems to fracture around her, and she's not sure if her world is really crumbling or if it's the mixture of tears and mascara muddling her eyesight. Either way, nothing is right and everything is ruined. But she's Quinn Fabray and nobody seems to see the sadness in her eyes, so she excuses herself to the bathroom and she cleans herself up. Nobody can say that Quinn Fabray doesn't know how to save face.
She smiles a smile that doesn't quite reach her eyes when she hooks her arm around Finn's, and they stay the rest of the night even though her heart breaks a little more every time she sees the crown that isn't atop her head. He doesn't notice and she doesn't expect him to, but it's okay because she has a plan.
At the end of the dance, she steps into the warm spring night with Finn at her side and Santana and Brittany just behind them. She's happy for her best friends; at least two of them will wake up tomorrow with life a little brighter than yesterday. They stand in the parking lot for a moment before they realize that their limo is gone and a quick text message to Puck reveals that he commandeered their wheels for the night to take Zizes out on the town.
Sam sees them and gives his best (worst) Sean Connery impression before offering them rides home. It's just a little awkward, Quinn thinks, but Finn is oblivious and Brittany and Santana are too enamored with each other to care, so she'll endure it this one time. Sam drops Finn off first, which eases some of the tension, but then both of them are trying to ignore the smacking sounds emanating from the back seat and they make bad jokes in an attempt to break the ice.
They stop at Quinn's house next, and when she looks out the window at the mansion that's not a home, she has to swallow back the pain that makes her want to cry out and grab hold of the nearest body for strength and comfort. She smiles a fake smile again, and Sam looks at her curiously because he can see right through it but seems to dismiss it. She takes her keys from her pocket and the gentle clack of heels on paving stones resonates through the darkness as she approaches the front door, unlocks it, and slips inside.
The lights are off and she knows her mother isn't home so she doesn't bother turning any on as she passes through the foyer and up the stairs to the bathroom attached to the bedroom that doesn't feel like hers anymore. She slides her feet out of her shoes and kicks them into a corner as she closes the door and locks it behind her.
The linoleum is cool and refreshing against her tired feet and she takes a moment to revel in the sensation before she steps onto the warmer bath mat and reaches for the knobs in the shower. She cranks the hot water up all the way, and the small enclosed space quickly fills with steam and heat. The mirror fogs and she wipes it clean with a single swipe of her palm, and she takes one good look at her reflection before she turns away.
She doesn't bother taking off her prom dress as she steps beneath the beating stream of hot water. She doesn't feel its scalding sting as she lowers herself in tub. She reaches for her shaving razor and it takes her a second to pop the removable head from the handle. She's never done this before, and she cuts herself as she tries to remove one of the single blades. She almost decides to turn back, but then one of them comes free and she holds the sliver of metal between her thumb and forefinger. She's not sure how to do this, but she's heard stories and jokes so she has some idea.
She catches her bottom lip between her teeth and bites down as she presses the blade against her flesh and draws it from hand to elbow in one long gash. It hurts more than she thought it would, but there's already so much blood that she's sure she did it right. It's harder to hold the blade in her left hand and she's starting to feel a little dizzy, but she manages to repeat the action on her right arm but the line is a little less straight and a little less clean. It's done, she thinks, as she drops the blood-stained blade over the side of the tub and then lets her arms fall tiredly at her side.
Her eyes begin to flutter closed, and she catches a glimpse of crimson seeping into her once-beautiful-now-ruined prom dress and she thinks it's symbolic of all the bad creeping into her once-wonderful life. Marring it. Staining it. Ruining it. Her mind is growing fuzzy when she hears somebody on the other side of the door, and she thinks it might be Santana. She hears a clipped version of, "Bitch, you left your phone in Sam's car and I don't want to see the pathetic attempt at sexting Finessa makes." She doesn't answer, and then there's a knock on the door which turns into pounding and then shouting but Quinn's too tired to care.
She hears the door break open and then there's screaming and crying and the beating of the water on her face is gone and somebody's wrapping something soft around her arms. Quinn struggles to open her eyes, to tell Santana to go away, but she feels strong arms lift her out of the tub and then she's resting on the bathroom mat and Sam and Brittany are hovering over her and she sees Santana in her bedroom swearing loudly into a phone.
She tries to shake her head violently, to tell them no, but she can't muster the strength but she can't go back to sleep with the knowledge of the haunted look that painted Brittany's face, so she tries to stay awake for them, to listen to them.
Quinn isn't sure how much time has passed when men in uniforms arrive, but it takes a police officer to hold Santana back when the Latina tries to jump into the back of the ambulance with her. They let Sam ride instead, and later on she'll wonder if they thought he was her brother.
She loses consciousness before they reach the hospital, and when she wakes up, all there is to greet her is the steady blips and beeps of machines attached to her, and she thinks she's back where she started.
Alone.
Her mother doesn't want her to go to a psychiatric facility, even a temporary one, for which Quinn is grateful. Instead the nurses hover carefully near her private room, but she thinks this is much better than the alternative. She isn't crazy; she's just sad and maybe a little broken.
When she opens her eyes again, she expects to see her mother with quiet tears in her eyes but instead she's met with an angry glare that doesn't belong to Judy Fabray. She turns her head away to break the eye contact but is met with an audible growl.
"No, you don't get to pull a stunt like that and look away from me, Fabray," Santana growls, and she marches to the other side of the room to try to catch hazel eyes again. "You don't get to slash your wrists and try to take the easy way out. You don't get to-" Quinn watches her stony facade crack with every word until it breaks and there are tears and pain and she wants to look away again but can't.
Santana's on her knees beside the bed now, shaking hands gripping at the sheets as she sobs. Suddenly, Brittany is there too with whet eyes, and Quinn feels sympathy at first, but then the anger is on her in a flash and she's shouting at Santana. She doesn't remember the hateful words that leave her mouth, but the Latina stares at her shocked until a nurse comes in and ushers her and Brittany away and gives Quinn something to calm her down. She drifts back into a haze not dissimilar to the one she caused herself on prom night.
When Quinn opens her eyes again, Puck is at her side sans Lauren and she's thankful. She might have respect for Lauren's own self-respect but it doesn't mean she likes the girl anymore; Zizes still has a bad attitude in a way that Quinn never did.
She doesn't really want to talk to him and he seems to understand, so they sit in silence because maybe he understands her better than anybody else. He lost his daughter, too, and even if that is only once piece of the wobbling Jenga tower that is Quinn's life, it's a piece they share. He leaves as she starts to fall back into dreamland again.
Mike and Tina are in the room when she wakes up again, and she's not sure what day it is or even what time it is, but she's still feeling somewhat apathetic to the world. They tell her how sorry they are and offer what feel like fake sentiments even if they aren't, and Quinn wants to yell at them, too, but they leave before she can.
When Kurt visits, he brings the Prom Queen crown for her and sets it in her lap. She bursts into tears and he leaves in a hurry. She pushes the torc off her lap and falls asleep with tear stains on her cheeks.
The next time she opens her eyes, Sam is sitting in a chair beside her bed. His hand is resting near hers, but he seems hesitant to take it, and she wants to be angry at him, too. She doesn't scream at him like she did Santana; she glares at him instead until he sighs and stands. He reaches for something in his backpack before he leaves, and she recognizes it from her room. He flips it open and sets in her lap.
"I told Finn not to come. If you're not going to let any of us help, maybe you can let her," he says sadly, but she barely hears him because her eyes are focusing and un-focusing on the open sketchbook in front of her.
Quinn wonders how he found it, why he might have been going through her things, but then she realizes that people like answers and she created a really big freaking question when she tried to take her own life.
Why?
Her body still feels like somebody pumped her limbs with lead so it takes a little effort to rest her hand on top of the sketchbook. She struggles to trace the lines she once drew in pen (the doctor said she nicked a nerve and may have suffered a minor loss of motor function in her right hand), and she turns her head away so tears won't fall onto the drawing. She wants to throw it across the room, pretend it doesn't exist, but even if she had the physical strength to do so, she's not sure she's ever had the emotional will to do it.
Quinn falls asleep crying softly to herself.
When Quinn opens her eyes again, she's met with the face she fell asleep looking at on paper. She panics and tries to grab at the sketchbook to close it but realizes it's no longer in her lap. Her eyes spot it, closed, in the hands of her visitor and she sinks deeper into the bed upon this realization.
"Hi, Quinn," meets her ears.
She doesn't answer, and instead she focuses on the tiles of the ceiling. She thinks if she counts them all that maybe Rachel Berry will disappear and this will all be a bad dream, but when she reaches thirty-six and has run out of tiles to count, she knows this isn't a bad dream but a bad life and she sighs in resignation.
"Please look at me?" Rachel asks quietly.
Quinn isn't sure if she can deny her or if she wants to deny her because that pain she swallowed down is back and she's ready to reach out and grab the nearest body for strength and comfort; it doesn't seem like that big a deal anymore that it's Rachel Berry or even that she wants it to be Rachel Berry. She doesn't reach out, though, because she's just admitting this to herself and she's not ready to make a show of it. She turns to look at Rachel with as much indifference as she can muster as a compromise.
"These are really beautiful drawings. May I keep them?"
Quinn wants to shake her head, to hold out her hand for the sketchbook back; she doesn't do anything to stop herself from nodding or shaking her head. "Why are you here?" she finally asks, and her voice is raspy from disuse aside from shouting; she hates the way it sounds.
"Because believe it or not, Quinn, I do care about you. A lot of people care about you, and a lot of those people were hurt by what you tried to do. I, myself, am a little bit angry with you."
Quinn wants to draw her hands into fists and swing them at that big nose that was only just recently broken and healed, but then she doesn't and she relaxes. She wants to say something mean and spiteful, something to push away the only constantly nice person in her life but she finds an overwhelming sadness bubbling up from her stomach and through her chest and out her mouth with choked words.
"It hurts," she chokes.
Rachel moves closer, taking one of Quinn's bandaged arms in her hands as she sits on the bed. "I know," she whispers just as her lips graze the gauze and cloth swathing scarred alabaster skin. And then there are more tears and more choked sobs and cries, and all through it Rachel stays with her, crying with her, sharing her pain, and when it's all over and a nurse comes in to guide Rachel away, Quinn feels her heart a little bit lighter and a little bit put back together. And she believes, maybe, she can be whole again some day.
After a week in the hospital, she comes home on a Tuesday. Finn is waiting at her front door with flowers and a box of chocolate as the car pulls into the drive. He is smiling that goofy smile and it makes Quinn's heart wrench as she simultaneously wants to vomit. She approaches him slowly, tugging at the sleeves of her jacket to self-consciously cover her forearms. He greets her happily as if nothing bad has happened and when he leans down to kiss her, she turns her head so his lips meet her cheek. He straightens up, confused. Her voice cracks when she tells him that she can't do this anymore, that she can't be with him, that she doesn't want him. He's entirely baffled as she steps inside her house and Judy Fabray offers him a look of condolence before she follows her daughter and shuts the door quietly.
Quinn wants to be disappointed that Rachel isn't there to greet her when she gets home, but she stops herself when she acknowledges that being disappointed that Rachel Berry isn't at her house might be one step too fast. She can't stop the soft smile, however, when she spots a brand new sketchbook and pens wrapped in red ribbon resting on her bedspread. There's a gold star sticker in the upper right-hand corner of the first page, and Quinn gets to work at fillinng it with observations of beauty.
It's a goal she made in the hospital, that Rachel suggested to her. To keep her eyes more open, to be more willing to see all of life's beauty, even in the ugly and the painful things. She wants so badly to be able to touch the optimism that Rachel seems to exhibit daily, and so she agreed. This was Rachel's way of helping her reach that goal.
She starts by drawing the most beautiful thing that comes to mind, and she makes another goal, a promise to herself that she will stop holding herself back from the things that might bring her love and joy and happiness. When she was Lucy Fabray, she took charge and fought for change. She's Quinn Fabray, now, but maybe it's not a bad idea to follow the path her younger self took.
She didn't like Quinn Fabray for a long time, but she thinks she might be ready to learn to love herself again. And maybe, she thinks, one day she'll bready to learn to love another person that she believes so readily deserves it.