She always evaluated her boyfriends, she evaluated everyone. How they dressed, talked, acted, looked, everything! And then she asked herself what they had to offer. Sometimes she was unaware of her behavior but recently, she had to admit, she had been very much aware of what she was doing. She told herself she had to do the things she did, that she wasn't a bad person; she just wanted her life back. But the problem was never her motives, but how far she would go to get what she wanted. How far she would go to keep being popular, successful, beautiful; anything, as long as she wasn't a loser. It all came down to being a Quinn or a Lucy. Before the option was simple, anything but Lucy! But if 'Quinn' was the type of person that would destroy a little girls' life by taking away her mother… then she wasn't sure she wanted to be a Quinn either. Fortunately she had people who could stop her from doing stupid mistakes in her life. (Who would've ever thought she'd be grateful to have Rachel Berry in her life, huh?). So who was Quinn then? She had been so many different versions of herself she didn't even know. When she walked through the corridors she knew the different ways she had walked to make certain impressions, but she didn't know how to just walk. She knew the different ways she had smiled to look certain ways, but she didn't know how to just smile. She knew how to be calculating, she knew how to manipulate people around her and she knew how to manipulate herself. Before she wasn't aware of this constant evaluation of her actions, but now she couldn't stop thinking about it. That's how she noticed it, the one thing she did without thinking. The single act she did without calculating it first during the whole day: walking in to Glee-practice and taking a seat. You would think that would be one of the biggest decisions during the day, but the action was so natural to her she didn't even notice it until several minutes later when she turned her head to the familiar profile of a certain blue-eyed boy; a boy whom she either sat right next to or just behind.
Maybe the old Quinn had taken one glance at him and decided he had nothing to offer. Maybe he had slowly grown on the real her because he was not interesting to all the other Quinns she had tried to be. Maybe she didn't have to walk a certain way when he was around, because she didn't have to make a certain impression on him. Maybe she could smile a real smile with him, because she didn't have to look a certain way. Maybe she never manipulated him or herself when there was just the two of them, because she used to consider him to be a nobody. And maybe this nobody was the only person who knew the real her, maybe he was the only decision she had made in her life that wasn't affected by reputation or fear. Maybe he wasn't nobody, maybe he was everything.
The blue-eyes, framed by a pair of glasses, meet hers in a questioning look.
"What are you looking at?" the voice was amused with a hunch of worry.
"Oh nothing…" she answered with a mocking, but friendly, smile on her face. "Just a boy in a wheelchair…"
A/N: I wrote this one-shot to understand this pairing better. The minute I heard of 'Quartie' I immediately loved it but I'm the type of person who want my pairings to be believable. I always knew that, to me, the biggest strength about QuinnXArtie is that they would be real, unlike all of Quinns past relationships. I just had to know how Quinn would come to discover this and here's the result. I also wrote this to send it to all my non-Quartie-shipping-friends to try and convince them to join the team ;) Come on guys, can you honestly say this is an impossibility?