A/N: Thanks again to Lizzie (Paceismyhero ) for her assistance with this part. The character names, the chapter title – it's all you, woman. Oh, and yes, I'm a Dawson's Creek fan. Why would you ask? Thanks also goes to everyone reading and replying. The replies on this so far have been awesome. I'm totally blown away by your guys' faith in my writing. I hope this lives up to your apparently high expectations.

Disclaimer: I don't own Glee. I don't own the songs I'm alluding to. I technically don't even own the computer I'm writing this on. How sad is that?

Chapter One: The Two Saddest Words in the World

Finn's eyes hurt. He'd been staring at the computer in the teacher's lounge for so long it felt like all the moisture had been sucked out of them; that might've had something to do with the fact that he'd been up way too late messing around and trying to figure out what song he had even heard. He was still having no luck and he couldn't actually remember any of the lyrics. It wasn't the sort of thing he could ask Quinn about without starting a stern conversation that he really didn't want to have with her. Sure, it was water under the whatever and had all happened long ago but she was still sort of sensitive about Rachel. And when he brought anything with that up, she always mentioned commitment and he hated that particular subject of hers even worse.

One of the other teachers came in and stopped short when she saw him. "What are you looking so hard for?"

He sighed and sat back in the office chair. It rolled back away from the desk with his motion and his eyes slipped closed. "Hey, Katie." He sighed. "A friend of mine wrote a song that I heard on a television show and now I'm trying to find it so I can buy it and really listen."

She put a hand on her hip. "Well, there are about a hundred questions that spawns," she said. She considered which one to ask for a second before she plowed ahead. "I'm assuming it was Quinn's show. Why not just ask her?" She then moved to the fridge and pulled the door open before she ducked to look inside.

"Well…it's a long story," he dodged. He really didn't feel the need to rehash the last decade of his life over lunch, even if Katie was unusually sharp and almost always provided insight (whether it was asked for or not).

"Okay, then if this friend is so close, why not just call him and ask?" She had pulled up a clear plastic container with one hand and was still rooting around for something else in the door of the fridge. Her mind wasn't entirely on the question as she tossed it out there but his answer commanded her full attention.

"Her," he admitted quietly.

"Oh." Katie breathed. She'd found what she was looking for and grabbed it anyway, so she closed the fridge and came over to sit by him. This was where her usual sense of life doom came into play. "And Quinn doesn't particularly care for this friendship."

"That's the understatement of all time. Quinn is still totally weird about Rachel even though… well, even though Rachel isn't here anymore and she hasn't been for a long, long time."

"Have you kept in touch with Rachel?"

Finn offered an awkward shrug. "Kind of. She's not on my speed dial or anything, but… we email. We talk occasionally. She's friends with my stepbrother, too, and they squeal like girls whenever he's in New York."

"Wait," Katie said, holding up her hand. "Is this the girl you blew off work to go visit?"

Finn just nodded. "Quinn went with me."

Katie's voice was quiet. "Maybe, but you were all smiley for weeks after that, you know. And it wasn't really hard to figure out that…."

"That what?"

Katie finally shook her head and stood up, taking the bottle of salad dressing and the small plastic takeout container with her. "No. I'm not going to do this. I swore I would stop being, like, the way I am with this stuff. Good luck finding the song."

"Kate, c'mon. Just….I can tell you the whole story if you really want me to—I guess."

"Ah, but that's just it. You're reluctant about it and I'm not going to pry it out of you. I'm leaving. I only have fifteen minutes to eat anyway because the copier was broken and I need to run some stuff off before science this afternoon."

She was already leaving and he felt his chance to get perspective rapidly slipping away. He needed someone to tell him what was going on with him because he had no idea. But all he could really do was to go back and keep looking for the song, still fighting not to call Rachel and just ask her what it was.

Finn sighed. Katie was the friend he wanted to actually talk to about all this stuff. He wasn't attracted to her in the slightest (and her extremely large, stern husband might've had more than a little to do with that), but she gave him good advice. It was based on her friendship alone that he'd secured a teaching contract three years ago and based on her friendship that he'd formed a band (with her stern, large husband who was a bass player). The band was doing well, their friendship was doing well, and she had this way of verbally smacking him in the face that was much appreciated even if it stung for a while at first.

And no, it hadn't escaped his notice that not once in three years of friendship—even friendship as a foursome with Quinn and the stern husband, Josh—had Katie ever pressured him into marrying Quinn. She was quite possibly the only married one out of the gossiping old bitties they worked with at Montrose Elementary that hadn't brought up the topic. She was also the one of the few who hadn't offered to hook up with him on the down low. He shuddered a little bit at the thought.

No, he had kept all these secrets and all this stuff about Rachel and feelings and whatever to himself for so long. He wondered if now and if Katie weren't the perfect storm that would make him spill. And then maybe she could tell him what to do, even if she'd sworn she wouldn't do that again after the ill-advised cat buying incident.

He stared at the computer for one long second before he exited out of all the browser windows. He knew what Katie was talking about with the copier and he probably should've been on his way to head her off at the pass, submitting his own needs before she could get there, because they were team teaching the damn assignment to their fifth grade classes. But what the hell ever. He turned and veered toward her classroom instead.

She always ate lunch in there, said she preferred that to the teacher's lounge. Much like he had been repeatedly asked out by some of the grosser staff members, she had been subject to a lot of harassment based on the fact that her husband was on the coaching staff with Ohio State football. Everyone wanted something from him, and so wanted something from her, during football season. It didn't make for easy friendships and even though football season was over, she still ate in her classroom.

There she was, only sort of visible through the paper-mache globes hanging from the light fixtures by string. His class was doing those tomorrow and he wasn't looking forward to it—mostly because he'd hung all of hers by hand thanks to his height. It was always good to avoid taking a ladder into a class full of ten and eleven year olds who would find a way to rip it out from underneath you. And anyway, tying those strings had been a real bitch and he had almost ten more kids in his class than she did.

"Okay, well… what if I actually want you to give me advice?" He asked, no further preamble necessary. He dropped down into the green plastic chair that sat opposite her desk, always poised and ready to hold the adult parent of a troublemaking student. God only knows she'd had plenty of those in her class this year. The chair had become a permanent fixture. He was grateful for it in that moment.

"It's not going to involve me and Josh and a weekend of repainting and retiling your bathroom after the demon cat from hell gutted the room again, is it?"

He laughed out loud. It was totally a story for the future. At least now it was starting to be a funny story. "Probably not."

"How long is this going to take?"

Finn sighed and looked at her. "Well, I have to make the same stupid copies. So if you let me do this, I'll send one of the sick kids down to stand in line for both of our copies during baseball after lunch."

She laughed. "There's something very wrong with that, but fine. Shoot."

His glance melted into something altogether more serious. He took a second to rub at his tired eyes before he plunged in.

"Rachel is…" he sighed. "Well, she's like some weird combination of my high school sweetheart and the one who got away."

Katie put down her fork and tilted her head. That was enough to totally suck her into the conversation and she could barely even plan how she would try to finish eating her salad during the 15-minute post-lunch reading/quiet time. "Okay. Go on."

"Rachel made me join glee club. Well…okay. That's a long story. But really, she made me want to join glee club."

Katie snorted. "I'm sorry…what? You were that guy?"

"Hey!" He said sharply, even though he was grinning. "I was also the quarterback and captain of the basketball team. I could still kick your ass." She just shook her head and chuckled as he continued. "Anyway, she was…amazing. Seriously amazing. She wanted to be on Broadway and if there was ever anyone we knew would do it and get out of that stupid cow town… well, it was her. Except she has these big, beautiful brown eyes and…and this huge heart and…"

"And you totally fell in love with the choir geek even though you were the 'big man on campus'."

"Something like that, even if I don't like your tone," he said. He sighed. "Long story short, Quinn and I were dating then and—"

Her snort cut him off. "Wait, what?" Her eyebrows went up in disbelief. "You're still dating the same girl you dated in high school?"

"Shut up. Not exactly. Only sort of." He cleared his throat. "It ended…badly. That's all I'm going to say about that. She really screwed me over and it took me forever to feel like I could forgive her and there was Rachel during the in-between. And that was the…it was the best. We were still young and dumb and we totally screwed things up. Mostly her, but both of us did a lot of stupid things. And then… well, I thought maybe we were right there again. I knew I missed her, I knew I loved her, and she wrote this song."

Katie's eyebrows came together. "She wrote you a song?"

"Yeah, told you. Choir girl." He cleared his throat. "She wrote this amazing song and… well, I was already sort of back with Quinn by then and I was so confused and so… and then she was just gone. Somehow some record producer heard the song she wrote when she performed it at a glee competition and one thing lead to another and then she was gone."

"One thing lead to another? I'm sure there are more details there."

Finn sighed. "She basically got a record deal. I mean, it wasn't that simple. She had to write a few more songs and make a demo, which she did, and then they asked her about moving to Los Angeles to make an actual record. It was just our junior year, but she was super smart and had always wanted to go to Julliard so… she had everything she needed to graduate early and that's what she did. By the summer after junior year, she was gone to L.A. to make her record and we were all still finishing high school without her and it just sucked."

"Have I heard of her?" Katie asked, sitting back in her chair. The metal poles creaked a little with the change in weight and the sound ripped through the room like a knife. She had never seen Finn this intense, really, which was saying a lot. He was all about the quiet glares, the loaded glances, and not so much about the words. Until they came spilling out—either when he was drunk or on some sort of emotional overload. She sighed. During school hours, she would definitely go with the latter.

"Maybe. Her album did okay. She toured as like, the opening act for an opening act, and it was all for some band that sucked and I can't remember what their name was. Some emo-pop bullshit." He bit his lip a little bit. "I really missed her. Everything sucked after she left and I…I kept in touch with her even though it just about killed me. She was off living her life and she was so busy and it was everything she wanted and I…well, I just wanted her, I guess."

"God, were you still with Quinn through all of this?" Katie's eyes narrowed. "Because I can see how she would have a huge problem with the girl."

Finn shrugged. "We were on and off. There were other people, other boys for her and other girls for me and I was really busy anyway." His voice got very quiet, his head dropped down, and he took a long breath. "I was working my ass off to get into school in New York."

"Why?"

"Rachel still went to Julliard. She delayed her entrance for a couple years, but she was still going there. Even though we didn't talk much it was still just…I just knew that was her plan. So my plans kind of changed and lined up and…" he swallowed down the bitter disappointment that followed. Feeling it now was nothing compared to what he had felt then, but it was still one of the worst things he'd ever had to deal with. "…And then it didn't work out. I couldn't do it. Ohio State was as far as I could get. I didn't get into school in New York. Rachel did."

"So that was then. What about now?"

He sighed. "Now… well, Rachel is up for a Tony for her role in a play that just closed. It's not quite what she was after because it's an ensemble award, but it will open up other doors for her and…she's so happy. I'm happy for her. Quinn is happy if Rachel stays away and Quinn being happy makes my life about a thousand times better." He shrugged. "I just think I would feel better, like maybe less confused and stuff, if I could just hear that song again. Everything would make sense again and I could just get back to my life."

"Well…if you know she wrote it, it would be listed under her name somewhere. Google is all about cross-referencing like that. It's all connected. You probably don't need to ask Quinn anything about the show. And if you would feel better, you should do that. Life doesn't work when it's all about wondering 'what if'. You have to make your present the best place it can be and then live it." Katie sighed and reached down to her feet for her purse. She brought the worn leather black hole into her lap and rooted around for a second until she came up with her phone. "What's her last name?"

"Berry. Like the fruit."

Katie nodded even as she dropped the purse carelessly then kicked it under the void space under her desk drawers. She used her free hand to access the web browser and type "Rachel Berry" into the subject line.

"What're you doing?"

"I don't have all day for this shit," Katie said simply. "And you're going to be no good to me during the science lab if you don't find what you're looking for." After another minute, she turned her phone toward him and he reached across the desk to accept it. "There's the song. It's on an album. I suggest you just go buy the whole damn thing. Right now."