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Chapter 8: Funeral
Quinn wakes to the steady beep of a heart monitor.
White walls surround her, reflecting fluorescent lights. The blinds are opened, allowing her to see the darkness of the outside world, but the window is closed and locked.
Her wrists are bandaged, and her arms and legs tied down to the bed. The bustle of the hospital is barely audible through the closed door: random chatter, along with the scrapes of wheelchairs and crutches against the floor.
There is a stand next to her bed, various flowers sitting atop it. Two chairs sit next to her bed. Rachel is curled up in one of them, asleep, but whimpering. Tears are flowing from her tightly shut eyes, and her hands are curling her graduation robes, obviously seeking something else.
Quinn goes back to sleep.
Rachel is still there when Quinn wakes in the morning. Her bloodshot eyes are wide-open this time, locked on to Quinn's, depriving Quinn from her chance to hide. They hold each other's gaze. Rachel is completely still, her entire body tensed and her jaw clenched. Quinn's chest rises and falls as she resignedly takes in each unwanted breath, her body limp.
They don't speak.
There's no need for Quinn to ask, nor for Rachel to explain. The second Rachel saw Quinn missing at the graduation ceremony, she went looking in the two places Quinn would never go, because she knew that those were the only places Quinn would be. Quinn wouldn't choose anywhere else to give up at.
Quinn wonders if Rachel is angry at her. Afraid for her? Both, most likely. So often they go hand-in-hand for Rachel. An inescapable pairing.
She doesn't want Rachel to feel that for her. She doesn't want her to suffer for Quinn; she has already done far too much of that. She has been a bearer of Quinn's scar for the past several months. It would have been better to erase herself and ease Rachel's pain.
And yet Rachel refuses to see this.
It as though that Rachel had heard Quinn's thoughts, for she rises to her feet all of a sudden. Her red eyes are hard as they bore into Quinn. Her words are cropped and short, empty yet certain. "If you go, I go."
Quinn does not have time to understand what has been said before Rachel has flown out of the room. It is only as the sound of Rachel's fierce steps begin to fade that Quinn slumps back against her pillows.
She realizes that Rachel has trapped her in life. Inescapably.
It is, as she is later told by the nurse, the second day since her hospitalization. There were a fair deal of visitors yesterday, or so the nurse happily tells her; all dressed in their graduation garb. A hispanic girl had to be dragged away, her screams and sobs too unruly for the wing. A jewish boy, tall with a shaved head, left an imprint of his fist in the wall. He too had been taken away, but he was too despondent to fight back. The nurse's retelling had loss some of its joy at this point.
Visitors come. Brittany is first to arrive, puffy red eyes and all; she deposits a stuffed duck next to Quinn. Santana next, who asks Quinn how she could do this; Quinn has the nurses take her away. Puck, who stares at her for several minutes before shaking his head and walking back out.
Her parents do not visit, but Quinn receives a card in their name; it is the most contact she has had with them since the day that Beth was born and she told them that no, she wouldn't be coming back to her parents' house, she would be going to Berry household, because she was in love with their daughter.
Rachel does not return that day, but Quinn is visited by a Berry. Hiram walks into the room with a sadness he tries desperately to hide with a smile, dressed in his doctor's coat. He sits at the side of Quinn's bed, takes hold of her hand, and tells her "hello."
She debates telling him of Rachel's declaration, but he is a man who knows his daughter. He knows her mind. He knows that he very nearly lost her as completely as he almost lost Quinn.
Quinn realizes then the pain she has caused Hiram and LeRoy, and the pain they were so barely spared. It is that thought, of causing pain to the two only people who have given her nothing but care, to the only parents she has ever had, that confirms in her mind how truly awful of an blight she is to them all.
But she can't save them from herself anymore. Rachel has cursed them all with that. She has cursed the world with the scar of Quinn.
She has cursed the world with two funerals, instead of a single body shoved into the ground.
