White Dragon: Chapter One


The flood will lift the ghosts from

the Hollywood lawn cemetery and

they will disappear like ether in the

new dead air. All the names will be

erased from the billboards and the

theatres and the piers and the

magazines and the monuments.

You live by myths of immortality,

and your myths are not safe.


It was the middle of the summer in New York City. She purposefully didn't have a calendar in her apartment and she hadn't had a cell phone for months, nor did she watch TV or use her computer ever, but if she had to guess she would've said that it was sometime in mid July when the letter reached her by way of Santana.

As instructed, she'd slipped it under the door. She refused to accept it if Santana insisted on seeing her, and despite Santana worrying herself sick over her (something she'd never admit), she wouldn't injure her pride by begging.

But she'd come all the way from New Jersey to bring the fucking letter and didn't intend to leave without doing something. So she wrote a letter of her own that went as such: "I'm not your fucking carrier pigeon, Berry, so don't expect me to make any more trips to escort letters. P.S. Fuck you, you're a deserter bitch too."

Then in smaller, almost illegible scrawl she'd reluctantly added, "Call me if you need anything."

Rachel hadn't expected her reaction to the letter to be so severe. Quinn's letter, that is. Santana's letter had made her smile crookedly.

Quinn's letter made Rachel fall apart before she even opened it. Her dainty scrawl coupled with the scent that she apparently still wore was enough to reduce her to a crying mess. (Quinn always rubbed some of her perfume on her letters; it was something she'd been doing for years now, a subtlety that she knew a romantic of Rachel's caliber would notice and appreciate.)

Hands trembling she unfolded the paper and slid down her front door to her knees. She couldn't read it standing up. It was overwhelming.

Immediately Rachel went through her things and started her response letter. She wrote frantically, but before she finished she'd cried all over it and the ink had smeared incomprehensibly.


Back when Rachel was in high school, she sometimes liked to pretend that Quinn Fabray wasn't real; that she was just a shadow she'd conjured up in a moment of weakness to remind herself of what she wanted to be. In her head, when others spoke to Quinn it was just a lesson; a reminder that she could do that too, if a figment of her imagination could. When she watched her from afar, everything became a lesson. Rachel, you can be head cheerleader if you tried. Rachel, you can date the star quarterback of the football team if you tried. Or, you could date the resident bad boy of the football team if you tried.

It was easier this way, she found; that is, acting as if Quinn didn't really exist, because she was unfairly blessed with everything Rachel never even knew she wanted until she started high school. Things just didn't happen like that, right?

It was easier, too, because yearning for something intangible didn't exhaust or hurt her so much. She likened Quinn to her aspirations for Broadway. Broadway was always going to be there for when she finally had the means to attain it. So was Quinn, in her perfect world.

Rachel wasn't sure what her inner self meant by attaining Quinn, though. On the one hand, she wanted to be just like Quinn, but on the other, sometimes she found herself shamelessly fantasizing about her while exploring herself. The shame came after, when she'd cooled down from her sessions and was left with an imprint of a naked Quinn Fabray (at least, how she'd imagined her) burned into her brain.

Still, Rachel was content with the illusion she'd created for herself. She didn't have many friends aside from the few kids in the Glee Club she had recently founded, and even they chalked her up to be insufferable. In a way, she was living the life of what she considered a normal high school student vicariously through watching Quinn Fabray, who had many friends and whom she'd convinced herself was an angel of a sort. Sometimes when she was smiling at a boy or at her teammates, a real, genuine smile (Rachel had learned to tell the difference), she could have sworn Quinn was floating.

Or maybe it was Rachel with her feet off the ground; it seemed plausible, what with the way her head stayed in the clouds. She drifted through the hallways in a daze, barely focused in her classes (Quinn was in all of them), and only during Glee Club was she able to wake up, because Quinn's presence wasn't felt so harshly there.

It took several weeks before her fellow Gleeks, as they'd been politely dubbed, began to tolerate her; Rachel saw this as a huge success. Her dads had always taught her never to compromise who she was for anyone else, to stay true to her moral fiber, and being obedient and egotistical enough, she'd always done just that. It was her philosophy that if she talked enough, people would eventually care what she had to say, because they either liked what she was saying or because they wanted to satiate her so she'd stop talking.

It was hard to say which it was in the day-to-day cases of everyone in the Glee Club versus her, but they had at least started listening to her.

Mr. Schuester had announced one day that a few of the Cheerios, what the school's cheerleaders were nicknamed, wanted to try out for Glee Club. Initially, the Gleeks had been against it for various reasons.

"Oh hell to the naw, I am not dealing with those stuck-up, preppy bitches in the one place where I can express myself," Mercedes said.

Tina just hissed. Tina sort of scared Rachel.

Artie parroted Mercedes' sentiment, "I don't know if I'd feel comfortable having them here. They're intimidating...Also, that's like seducing the jocks to join too, Mr. Schue, and I think that would be almost as intimidating."

"Jocks won't be that easy to convince," Finn Hudson, their newest member (an utter surprise, especially to Rachel), piped up. He wore a sour expression at all of their meetings and didn't seem to want to be there at all, but while he was there Rachel wasted no opportunity to stare doe-like and adoring at him. He was Quinn Fabray's boyfriend, so that meant he was something special and desirable. Catching Rachel's eye, Finn looked away nervously. That happened a lot.

"I still have a grudge against those girls," Kurt added, also in the 'no' camp, "I wasn't allowed to join their team because Coach Sylvester said I was too delicate to be a bottom and too heavy to be a flier."

"That's silly. You have muscles," Artie chimed.

"She compared me to a porcelain doll, and while I'll admit that I do have beautiful skin, I didn't find it to be a compliment," Kurt said bitterly.

Rachel absorbed all of it. She was caught between staring holes through Finn with her eyes and drilling holes through her head with her thoughts. Having three random Cheerios in the Glee Club couldn't be too detrimental to their cause. In fact, Rachel couldn't think of a single reason why it would be; they would probably garner the attention they so desperately needed if they wanted to boost their numbers and qualify for competitions, and unlike her fellow Gleeks, Rachel welcomed the opportunity to get in good with a few Cheerios, because it meant getting to hear secrets about Quinn.

Somehow, Rachel thought if she heard something terrible about Quinn, it would fix all of the self-esteem issues her existence (pending confirmation) had caused her. It would give her power over Quinn, in a way. Maybe if the gossip was bad enough, she could even dethrone her and take her handsome boyfriend for a spin.

"Everyone," Rachel said emphatically, bouncing from her chair and clapping her hands for effect as she turned to face her fellows, "I know all of you are fully aware that I, Rachel Berry, am the vocal powerhouse of the group, however, as impressive as I am it is an impossibility for me to replicate the number of voices we'd need for group numbers in competitions. Currently among our ranks are six members including myself and our newest member Finn Hudson," she beamed at him and he looked away again with his face scrunched into an expression that resembled someone who had bad gas, "but, if we are to use Mr. Schuester's past Glee Club performances that he so thoughtfully lent to us on cassette as any indication, we are going to need at least nine more members to be considered a threat at competitions-"

"Hold up-" Mercedes started, having just processed the rapid amount of information being flung at her. Something about Rachel being the vocal powerhouse.

"Wait, wait," Rachel interjected, "Let me finish, please and thank you. Ahem.

"While I know that none of you particularly want to see any of the Cheerios in Glee Club, I would care to remind you that they are highly enthusiastic and capable of dancing, which could be a dire asset at performances seeing as none of you are particularly good dancers save myself-"

"What?!" Kurt's eyebrows shot up. He was sincerely offended. The rest of the Gleeks were seething in silence, especially Artie who had understandably taken more offense to the statement than the others.

"Oh, you're fine Kurt," Rachel reassured with a smile and a nod of her head, ignoring everyone else, "My point is, my fellow Gleeks, even though we don't want them we need them.

"And who knows, maybe they need us, too. Let's not forget what Glee is really about: opening yourself up to joy, and helping others find it, too. Through cheerful song and dance.

"Thank you."

Pleased with her speech, Rachel took her seat and grinned broadly at Mr. Schuester, who acknowledged her efforts with an awkward pat on the shoulder. She was vaguely aware of angry whisperings at the back of the room. Kurt and Mercedes, no doubt; they weren't her biggest fans.

"Um, can we at least know who these girls are?" Finn asked, still dumbfounded that any of the cheerleaders wanted to join such an unfortunate group of people at all.

Mr. Schuester shuffled through the papers on his clipboard until he found the sheet he'd scribbled their names onto. "Let's see here...

"Santana Lopez, Brittany Pierce and...Quinn Fabray. The head cheerleader," Mr. Schuester said curiously. He must've missed it before.

Rachel had been brimming with excitement at the prospect of getting to know some of the more faceless Cheerios and indirectly, Quinn. Already she was devising her schemes to instill loyalty into these girls and use them as her spies; she thought that the promise of an autograph when she was famous would do for bribery, and certainly they'd go for it after they heard her rendition of "Don't Rain on My Parade" that she'd been rehearsing since she was eight. She had that floating feeling again, and she felt less and less in the now and more and more in a daze the longer her thoughts of plotting and Quinn and plotting against Quinn lingered undisturbed.

Then Mr. Schuester's words sunk right through her brain and ended somewhere in the pit of her stomach. Most of the Gleeks met the news with suspicious glances amongst themselves, except for Finn and Rachel whose jaws both dropped simultaneously.

Rachel suddenly felt very anxious to the point of nausea and very much like irony's latest victim.


Quinn and her Cheerio lackies took an instant dislike to one flabbergasted Rachel Berry. Instead of encouraging a unity in the Glee Club that would potentially transcend to the entire school, they actively discouraged it.

During meetings, the three of them, the Unholy Trinity if you will, stayed off to the side of everyone else and only interacted with Mr. Schuester directly. Other times they only spoke up if one of the Gleeks (they thoroughly enjoyed this term as soon as they'd heard it from Rachel, and they turned it into something cruel whereas Rachel had found it endearing before) said something stupid, and even then they never made eye contact with any of them.

Rachel, as it turned out, had a lot of things to say that they deemed stupid. Basically everything she said inspired disgust in the Cheerios, and she was visibly stricken by the fact that they, Quinn mostly, were screwing up her perfect plan.

Even Kurt and Mercedes began to pity her, and that meant it was bad.

"Hey, Rachel," Kurt said to her one day after an especially brutal practice where Quinn had almost made her cry, "Don't let it get to you, okay? You're obnoxious and really annoying on the surface, but most of us know that you do mean well."

"Yeah, girl. What he said. Don't let those bitches bring you down to their level. Just keep showing 'em you're better than that," Mercedes conceded, "and yeah, you're a huge pain in my ass nine times out of ten, especially over solos, but you are a sweet person deep down underneath all that ego."

Rachel sniffled. They were sort of nice things to say, and sounded a lot like things friends would say. "Thanks, you guys."

They gave her half-hugs around her shoulders and left her standing in the hallway wondering if maybe having the Cheerios around to beat up on her was such a bad thing.


A week into the love affair that was the Cheerios and the Glee Club, the Cheerios had successfully crushed all hopes Rachel had of attaining Finn Hudson and the head cheerleading position and any semblance of popularity, and frankly, Rachel wondered how she had deluded herself into thinking any of it was possible in the first place.

Santana and Brittany as a duo was bad, but Quinn outscored them by leaps and bounds. Unlike her comrades, Quinn seemed to have something personal against Rachel, something she couldn't work out for the life of her. She'd spoken to Finn a few times, and all of it was completely harmless. Unless she could read her thoughts, Rachel didn't see why Quinn should hate her as much as she did.

Quinn had a plethora of names in her armada to use against Rachel, ranging from the name of an eclectic drag queen to less creative names like "That Thing." Somehow the less creative ones hurt more.

Along with name-calling, Rachel got slushied on two occasions during the week (a step up from her one-a-week record), courtesy of Quinn's cronies. Still she persisted, clenched her teeth and balled her hands into fists and held her head high, all the while thinking of her dads' and how proud they were of her for staying strong.

The pornographic drawings were the last and weirdest straw. Later that night, she had a melt down and swore she wouldn't mind if Quinn fell from the planet or at least into relative obscurity at McKinley, so she'd know how it felt.

And yet, ill will, bitterness and all, nothing could have prepared her for Quinn's eventual fall from grace, or for her very impassioned and visceral reaction to it.


"Pregnant," Rachel repeated slowly, as if she'd never tasted the word on her tongue before. It was a foreign concept to her, in truth; her fathers never discussed pregnancy for obvious reasons, and their only attempt to breach the topic came in the form of an awkward coming-of-age book (something about Your Body and the Weird Stuff It's Doing Now) they'd slipped under her door one day.

Kurt nodded and clicked his teeth. "Tsk, tsk, tsk..."

"They say it's Finn's," Mercedes whispered. Rachel had never known Mercedes to be much of a whisperer, so that helped the magnitude of the situation set in.

"Obviously," Rachel found herself jumping to Quinn's defense, "Who else's would it be?"

Kurt and Mercedes exchanged dubious looks. Kurt spoke first, "Rachel, hon, are you okay? You look pale."

Mercedes waved her hands in front of Rachel's face and received no significant response.

Rachel blinked a few times, robotically almost. Her expression stayed blank while her (unreliable) internal processor tried to compute the word.

Pregnant.

Quinn Fabray was pregnant.

Pregnant was Quinn Fabray.

"Excuse me," she said when she recovered from her trance. Rachel took the opportunity to set off to collect her books and go to her first period class, where she knew Quinn would be waiting before the bell.


Quinn wasn't there early, and as the minutes ticked by she knew that Quinn wasn't there at all.

Rachel couldn't focus for the rest of the day. She bit all of her fingernails off, the ones she'd slaved so hard over to make them perfect and adorable and polka-dotty. It wasn't a good sign when Rachel's worries were more important to her than her appearance.

She didn't know what to do, but she knew she had to do something. Already there were cruel rumors around the school, linking Quinn to everyone from Finn to Mr. Schuester to Principal Figgins; even Santana and Brittany had joined in on the gossip during Glee Club, and that made Rachel feel even worse. Who did Quinn have left? Her so-called best friends were already planning to uproot her from the cheerleading squad.

Rachel decided to see all of her teachers again before she left the school to collect the work Quinn missed. After a bit of prying, she was able to find out where she lived and everything.

She was going to be there for Quinn Fabray, dammit, even if she had to annoy a friendship out of her.


Dear Rachel,

I was horrible to you from the moment I met you, and I am so sorry if you ever remember me in that way. I know I have said it and written it an infinite amount of times before, but I am sorry for that. I have no explanation, other than that I think I was resisting you from the first time I saw you because I just sort of knew. You had this energy about you that I could feel that I was lacking and it was attractive and repellent at the same time and all I could do was hate you for it.

But do you know what? You were the first person to see me for me, and I remember the day you did. You brought me my homework.

I haven't stopped thinking about you since then.

Lucy


A/N: Long time no see, I know. I have been busy and battling with personal issues for several months now, but I have had this draft on my computer for a while now and I decided to go ahead and publish it to see if anyone is still reading.

Beginning poem is by street artist Robert Montgomery.

Again, thank you for the support.

Love, Jordan.