Title: Life's a Show
Author: takeanotherturn
Rating: PG-13
Length: 2000+
Spoilers: Up to and including all of season 3.
Summary: Everyone thought that Rachel would be the one to be discovered. They all thought that Rachel would be the one to become a star. They were wrong.
Quinn Fabray sighed in disgust and tossed the thick script down onto her coffee table. The plot was contrived, the dialogue stilted and the premise was completely unrealistic; the script was like a Frankenstein monster that created from all the worst parts of every romantic comedy that had been released over the past two years. It was truly awful and that was coming from a girl who'd played the evil cheerleader antagonist in both Bring It On 7: Cheer Camp and Fired Up 2 The Max!
She kept trying to tell her agent that she wasn't funny enough to be comfortable doing comedies but they seemed intent on trying to turn her into the next Reese Witherspoon.
As she laid back into the buttersoft leather of her sofa and let the soothing melody of Radiohead's No Surprises wash over her, Quinn still couldn't believe that this was her life; twenty four years old and on the cusp of superstardom; sometimes she still had to pinch herself.
It had all started her freshman year at Yale. She'd been exiting an audition for the drama department's production of A Streetcar Named Desire when she'd been approached by a man named Martin Slade, who'd asked her if she was interested in being the star of his movie. Making the completely reasonable assumption that he was a pervert trying to lure her into the amateur porn industry, Quinn had bitched him out and continued on her way.
But luckily, Martin had chased after her and explained that he was a former Yale alumni turned director, looking for a girl to star as his leading lady in his first full length film, a straight to dvd horror movie, and that she was exactly what he was looking for. Quinn had eyed him suspiciously and pointed out that he didn't even know if she could act. Martin had laughed and told her that with a face like hers, it didn't really matter. Never one to make an impulsive decision, Quinn had accepted his card and told him that she'd consider it.
That night after she'd returned to her dorm room, Quinn had done her research and discovered that Martin was on the up and up. He'd graduated from Yale three years ago and had since directed numerous music videos along with writing/directing/producing two relatively successful web series. Once she ascertained that the offer was legitimate, the decision to do it was a no-brainer. An all expenses paid trip to Ireland to film for three weeks and they were offering her enough money to pay off nearly all of her student loans, she would have had to have been crazy not to accept. And if there was one thing that Quinn Fabray was not, it was crazy...anymore.
And so at nineteen years old, Quinn Fabray made her film debut in Black Forest; a low budget horror film about a group of American friends who go on a camping holiday in the woods of Ireland and end up being stalked and killed by a mysterious figure. Groundbreaking stuff, right? It's saving grace was the surprise twist near the end that revealed (spoiler alert!) that Quinn's character was the killer. Before going to dvd, where it developed somewhat of a cult following, Black Forest had made the rounds of the horror film festival circuit where it and Quinn had picked up a few minor awards.
After returning to Yale and appearing in a bunch of fairly terrible student films that Quinn prayed would never see the light of day, opportunity knocked once again in the form of Martin Slade. He offered her a lead role in his new webseries, the only draw back was that she'd have to move to LA. After much serious consideration, Quinn decided to go for it, dropped out of Yale and moved to Los Angeles to pursue acting full time.
The gamble paid off when one of the executive producers of Martin's webseries decided that she wanted to cast Quinn as the teenage daughter in the new sitcom about a dysfunctional family that she was producing. The show only aired 10 episodes before it was cancelled but Quinn couldn't complain, she had been surprised -and a little bit horrified, if she was being completely honest- that the pilot had even been picked up in the first place.
After that Quinn had done the usual rounds, auditioning for everything, taking every acting job she could land, guest starring on over a dozen shows and eventually the jobs started getting better. By the time she was twenty one, Quinn had decent sized roles in four wide release films and then she got her big break.
Among Us, hailed as the successor to the Twilight saga, was based on a series of books about a teenage alien exiled from his home planet who tried to blend in on Earth by wearing a magical bracelet that concealed his alien form and allowed him to appear human. Quinn, of course, played his human love interest, Sky, who was the ugliest -Hollywood ugly though, which just meant putting Quinn in a mousy brown colored wig and thick framed glasses- and most unpopular girl in the school. Axle Hawke, who's powers included the ability to only see people's inner beauty, sees her as the most beautiful girl in the world -aka Quinn minus the wig and glasses- and they fall madly in love with each other.
It was exactly the kind of crap that teenage girls and desperate housewives alike ate up with a spoon. Sky was written so blandly that it was easy for them to imagine being in her place and that one day their special, gifted, incredibly handsome Axle will come along and fall head over heels in love with them.
The movie was a huge money spinner for the studio. Made on a budget of only thirty million dollars, it grossed over one hundred and ninety million dollars at the domestic box office, plus another two hundred and thirty three million worldwide. The next two movies in the series were automatically greenlit and Among Us' two previously unknown stars were catapulted into the spotlight. To this day, Quinn considered landing that role to be both a blessing and a curse.
Let's see what they're saying about me today. Quinn leaned forward and collected her iPad from the table and proceeded to check the Google alerts for her name. She knew it was a terrible habit, her manager had warned her that she would drive herself crazy by constantly worrying about what was being said about her, but she couldn't help herself. She had to know.
She clicked on the top link, a story that had only been posted half an hour ago but had already been picked up by twenty six other gossip blogs.
Quack's Afternoon Delight!
Quinn Fabray and her on-and-off screen love, Jack Cohen, were spotted popping into Void Cafe in Beverly Hills this afternoon for a late lunch but apparently food was the last thing on the lovebirds minds. "They were all over each other, she was practically eating his face off," our eyewitness reports. "They didn't care who was watching!" Ah, young love! Fabray and Cohen recently wrapped production on the latest installment of the hugely popular Among Us saga, Revelation, due to hit theaters in late November.
Funny, here was Quinn thinking she'd been at home all day.
This was the part of her job that Quinn hated; all the lies. Coming into the business, Quinn was aware that nothing was as it seemed to be in Hollywood but she had no idea how far it all went. Needless to say, now that she'd peaked behind the veil, Quinn wished she could get back every dime she'd ever spent on a gossip magazine.
In the two years since her and Jack's first public date, Quinn had been engaged several times, pregnant four, had three abortions, one miscarriage and three affairs -with men who simply happened to be within three feet of her when her photo had been taken- and been dumped twice. At least, that's if you believed the word of the Hollywood gossip machine.
She had to admit that some of it could be incredibly hurtful -mainly anything relating to pregnancy rumors, for obvious reasons- but on the whole it was mostly kind of amusing to see what kind of stories they could come up with based around a few pictures and quotes from mysterious 'sources' and unnamed 'close friends', that in reality were from the office of either Quinn or Jack's publicist or just plain made up by the reporters themselves in order to make their fictional stories sound more credible to the gullible public who consumed them.
Now Quinn couldn't believe that people actually bought that crap and still treated the word of gossip reporters word as gospel. She couldn't even begin to count the number of times her mother had called to ask "Quinnie, why didn't you tell me you were engaged/pregnant/dumped?", it didn't matter how many times Quinn told her not believe anything she read.
Quinn lazily browsed the comments that had been left on the 'article'. Several were from Quack fans saying how cute they were together and wishing that there were pictures and one from a user that called themselves Skylar77 -a notorious hater of all things Among Us, especially Jack and Quinn's relationship- who pointed out how tacky and rude it was to put on such a display in public where people were trying to eat. Even though the comment had accumulated 34 thumbs down so far, Quinn couldn't help but agree with Skylar77. Vulgar, over the top public displays of affection were something that she definitely didn't approve of.
Exiting the browser and setting the tablet back down onto the table top, Quinn's eyes fell onto the stack of still unread scripts. If they were anything like the first she'd read, she was going to need a little liquid assistance to get through them.
She clicked a button on the remote that controlled her ridiculously expensive sound system which would activate the speakers that were set up all over the house and got up to head down to the kitchen. Music always helped Quinn feel less alone in the house that was far too big for her.
Quinn wouldn't have minded staying in her old one bedroom apartment but her people had advised her that it looked strange for a young up and coming starlet, who'd just received a six million dollar payday for signing onto the Among Us sequel, to keep living in a shoebox apartment in a not so great neighborhood and that questions would undoubtedly start being asked.
So Quinn had ended up paying a cool 1.1 mil for a four bedroom, two and half bathroom home in the Hollywood Hills. It had a decent sized backyard complete with lap pool and hot tub and it oozed Old Hollywood charm, just like Quinn did. At least, that's what her real estate agent claimed.
The house was beautiful and she did love it but it was clearly designed for more than one person to live in and it only served to magnify Quinn's feelings of isolation.
Quinn had never been the best at making friends, her therapist suggested that it maybe the result of her Lucy years. The transient nature of movie set friendships didn't really help matters but even in high school the people she called friends were really only ones of convenience, first the Cheerios and then the Glee club and without those things to keep them together she'd let herself drift away from them. It didn't help that when one gains even a little bit of fame, their Facebook account is one of the first things that needed to go if you wanted to maintain any semblance of privacy, so that link to her old friends was severed years ago.
She wished that she hadn't let it happen so easily, she wished that she tried harder to keep in touch after she left for college. That's not to say she'd completely lost contact to her high school friends, she still saw Brittany and Santana occasionally but catching up with them on a regular basis was next to impossible. Brittany had become somewhat of a modern day David Attenborough, with her own hit show on the Discovery channel, which Santana was one of the executive producers of, and the pair were rarely in town for more than a few weeks at a time before jetting off to some new exotic location to film. The last time Quinn had spoken to them was when they'd gotten together for dinner a month ago, the night before they left on an expedition to the North Pole to film a three part series about a mythical black polar bear that had supposedly been spotted in the region over the past few years but had never been photographed.
Alarmingly, the person from high school that Quinn had the most contact with was Jacob Ben Israel, who'd ridden on the coattails of Quinn's fame to become one of the most popular gossip bloggers in Hollywood. Just before the release of the first Among Us movie, at a time when everyone wanted to know about the mysterious new It Girl, Quinn Fabray, along came Jacob Ben Israel, armed with old yearbooks and exclusive tales of Lucy Caboosey and teen pregnancy.
Luckily, it had mostly worked out in Quinn's favor, thanks to her PR team spinning the Lucy issue into an ugly duckling fairytale that tied in nicely to her character in Among Us and scored her a sweet endorsement deal with ProActive, and her lawyers taking out an injunction to keep the media from talking about Beth, which scared most of them away from mentioning her pregnancy at all for fear of getting the pants sued off them.
Quinn was very well aware how sad it was that the people she was closest to now were her manager, her personal assistant -who had no qualms about occasionally selling her out to the paparazzi if the price was right- and her therapist. Most of the time she didn't care; Quinn was a loner, she always had been, yet sometimes she couldn't help but crave the companionship she'd felt in Glee club, where they all screwed each other over six ways from Sunday but when the chips were down and you really needed them, you knew that they'd always have your back.
After making her way down to the kitchen, Quinn put the kettle on to boil before going to the cupboard to pick out a tea from her extensive collection. Deciding that it was a Raspberry Rush kind of day, she went about preparing the loose leaves in her favorite teapot. She was sure that her teenage self would be horrified that she even owned a teapot, let alone had a favorite one, but the ritual of brewing tea was something that she found very soothing and had fallen in love with.
A garment bag and a stack of mail were laid out on the counter where her assistant, Max, had left them when he'd dropped by earlier. Quinn decided to check her mail while she waited for the tea to steep.
The first few in the stack were all junk mail but buried underneath was a square envelope with her name written in beautiful calligraphy script on the front and fastened with a wax seal.
"Huh." Quinn hummed to herself as she broke the seal with her finger and removed the embossed card inside.
You are cordially invited to the wedding of Tina Muriel Cohen-Chang & Michael Aaron Chang (no relation), to be held at the Lima Heights Country Club at 1:30pm, Jul 8th, 2018, it read. And then written at the bottom of the card in blue ink which had clearly been later, Please come, Quinn, we all miss you – Tina.
Quinn couldn't help but grin widely. They'd actually made it. The last Quinn had heard of the couple, they were going to attempt to do the long distance thing with Tina still in high school and Mike going off to college. She'd thought it was sweet but naïve that they expected it to last. But apparently Tina and Mike had beaten the odds and Quinn couldn't be happier about being wrong.
The only thing that was stopping her from filling out the RSVP card immediately was the fact that the wedding was being held in Lima.
Once Quinn had left Lima for Yale, she'd never once looked back. The closest she'd gotten to her old hometown since then was when she'd celebrated Christmas with her family at her sister's home in Cleveland and that had been over three years ago now.
Lima just held so many bad memories for her, too many, and not nearly enough good ones to combat them nor the motivation to return home that was strong enough to overcome them. Until now.
Before she could overthink herself out of it, Quinn fished a pen out it's holder and started filling out the RSVP card. Look out, Lima, Teen Choice Award winner Quinn Fabray was coming home.