Title: Mad World
Chapter 10: Things I'll Never Say
Fandom: Glee
Genre: Romance/Humour/Angst
Status: WIP
Pairing(s): Quinn/Rachel, Santana/Brittany
Rating: M-ish, PG-15.
Words: 3,333
Spoilers: None.
Disclaimer: I don't own Glee or the songs. I only own my plot, my own work, and some characters like Phoebe and Amanda.
Note:Things I'll Never Say' by Avril Lavigne. Also, 3,333. Most awesome fanfic-writing moment of my life. And I've upped the rating to 'M', just in case. This chapter isn't very 'M', though.
"Are you hungry?" Quinn asks while pulling out of the parking lot. Clearly, Quinn was the better driver, so now Quinn drove Rachel's car when they were together. Rachel had had no say in the matter. Besides, Quinn no longer had a car. Hers was probably in the driveway, unless her dad had already gotten rid of it, and she didn't particularly look forward to asking her mother for the car.
"Not really. I actually feel strangely sleepy. I believe the stress of the entire day has finally caught up to with me and now my body is responding my sending me signals to go to sleep and recuperate and- Quinn, why are you humming?" Confused, Rachel inclines her head to look at Quinn, who was indeed humming what sounded suspiciously like Pink's 'So What'.
Quinn smirks and then glances at Rachel innocently. "Humming? Was I? I didn't realise. I have been told I unconsciously start humming when people start elaborating too much, though."
Rachel takes the good-natured jibe in stride and smiles. "No, Quinn, I'm not hungry."
Quinn gasps and Rachel frantically asks, "What?"
"You spoke for less than 10 seconds!"
Rachel rolls her eyes. "Sorry to disappoint."
"Kidding. Go to sleep, Rachel. I'll wake you when we're back at the house. I wouldn't, but I can't carry you into the-" Quinn shuts up when she sees Rachel has already slumped into the car seat and has her eyes closed, breathing evenly.
Ten minutes later, only a repetitive poking of Rachel's shoulder and calling of her name manages to rouse the girl from her sleep. Quinn stands at the open door and catches the small girl when she almost topples over in her bleary state. She uses a foot to close the door and lets Rachel, still half-asleep, lean against her going into the house.
"Bed,' Rachel mumbles, 'tired."
Quinn wonders whether having the girl speak fewer sentences was worth dragging her up the stairs. However, with a little bit of effort to raise her feet sometimes on Rachel's part, Quinn manages to get Rachel to her room. The brunette immediately curls up on the bed.
"I'm gonna go make you something to drink, okay, Rachel?" She has this weird memory of Phoebe always making her hot chocolate when her parents were being useless. It used to help her, until she could no longer drink hot chocolate on a regular basis because Sue Sylvester trained a wolfhound to sniff it out.
"Don't wanna chocolate, wanna pillow,' Rachel mumbles into her pillow. Quinn grins and leaves the room, letting the girl snuggle into her pillow in private.
The moment Quinn steps out of the room, Rachel sighs quietly. This thing will Quinn, whatever it was, was developing rather quickly. Quinn only had to touch her lightly to make her heartbeat start to race. Her emotions had always been a little too... strong. She turns onto her back and stares up at her ceiling. Glow-in-the-dark stars gaze back down at her. For once she doesn't find it at all comforting. Rachel groans and turns onto her side. Then she keeps turning until Quinn walks back in.
She watches through half-lidded eyelids as Quinn slips into the room again, a mug in each hand. Quinn sets one mug down next to Rachel's bed, on the bedside table. She abruptly loses her view of the blonde but feels a tugging at her shoes before her feet come free. When nothing happens after that, Rachel dares to open one eye. Quinn was gazing down at her with a slightly frustrated, confused look on her face. There was some strange emotion in the other girl's eyes.
Afraid that the blonde was about to regress and dump another liquid on her, except this was hot chocolate and would hurt a lot more, Rachel blurts out her name. "Quinn?"
Quinn blinks and seems to come out of her reverie. Rachel wriggles into an upright position, her back against the headboard, and pulls her knees against her. She smiles gratefully when Quinn hands her the 'Wicked' mug. Rachel holds it in two hands and sips slowly, before grinning widely and saying, "Vanilla and mini-marshmallows, Quinn?"
"I found them next to the cocoa powder. I figured you were probably the one who bought it so I chucked it in," Quinn mutters distractedly. She finds herself looking around the room mindlessly. She doesn't even know what's wrong with her. All she knew was that she was suddenly replaying in her mind again and again how she kissed Rachel on the cheek. It was just a kiss on the cheek! Friends did that all the time. So did parents. It was a gesture meant to provide comfort, right? And Rachel needed comforting at the time, didn't she? Right.
"Hello, Quinn? Are you there?" Rachel calls yet again.
Quinn shakes her head and nods. "Sorry. I'll go and let you get to sleep." She turns to leave.
"Quinn, wait,' the words slip out before she can reel them back in. "Stay with me for a while?" She pats the bed.
Inwardly, Quinn fights a raging battle with herself. Friends shared beds all the time, didn't they? Santana and Brittany shared a bed all the time. That was a bad example. She'd shared a bed with the two of them before and it hadn't been weird at all. She wasn't even going to sleep there, just stay with Rachel for a little while. The girl had been through a lot and now Quinn was just being a good friend, right?
Crap, now she was over-analysing.
But if it had been Brittany or Santana asking her for a little bit of comfort, not that Santana ever would except for the one time her dog died right after Brittany decided it would be a good idea to kiss Mike Chang, she would have been there without any hesitation. And Rachel was... She was trying to be a good friend to Rachel, and that meant treating her the same way she treated Brittany and Santana. So why was she hesitating?
"I mean, you don't have to, because obviously you have homework to do, I'm sure." Rachel is rambling again. And there, the perfect excuse. Homework. She actually did have homework to finish. But then she caught the flash of disappointment and dejection in Rachel eyes and felt her desire to do homework shrivel up into a tiny ball.
When she climbs onto the bed without warning, Rachel squeals and sets her mug back on the table because Quinn's foot had somehow caught the underside of Rachel's and, unbeknownst to Quinn, that was the most ticklish spot on her entire body.
Confused, Quinn settles into the spot next to Rachel. "What?"
Blushing, Rachel hurriedly shakes her head. "Nothing. Nothing at all. I didn't just squeal into your ear because-" She cuts herself off abruptly.
"Because...?" Quinn presses, curious.
"I'm just... extremely ticklish there,' she admits. She fully regrets the decision to tell Quinn this when the blonde runs her foot over the same spot. Repeatedly.
"Quinn! Don't! I can't- Quinn!" Grinning, Quinn finally pulls away and lets the brunette breathe through her abating laughter.
It's as though the tension Quinn felt had melted away with Rachel's laughter. She finds that she's suddenly a lot more comfortable in the bed than she was a few minutes ago. She turns on her side and watches in amusement as Rachel calms down from her laughing fit. Rachel smiles awkwardly at her and rolls her eyes before picking up her mug again.
"Rachel, do you want to maybe talk about it?" The question had just slipped out. She hadn't meant to ask Rachel to once more relive the entire stressful day but she had been curious as to how the girl could be so... Rachel. There just wasn't any other way to describe it.
Misinterpreting and almost choking, Rachel splutters out, "Talk about what?" Surely Quinn hadn't realised that...
"Karofsky,' Quinn blurts out. "If you feel like you need to talk about it." She looks uncomfortable.
"To be honest, Quinn,' Rachel says slowly, 'I don't feel traumatised. I'm expected to feel that way, but I don't. What he did to me isn't as bad as what he could have done and could have been far worse. Compared to so many other women I got off easy. I prefer to think of myself as one of the lucky ones and just put it all behind me and move on." She takes a sip of her drink before softly continuing to say, "And it's hard to feel afraid or depressed when you're here with me. It's nice to have a friend," she ends in a whisper.
Quinn blinks rapidly to dispel the wetness in her eyes, but that just makes the tears come faster. She roughly rubs her tears away. Hormones. That had to be it.
"Why are you crying?"
Quinn shrugs and Rachel asks back, "Do you want to talk about it?"
"About what?" Quinn shoots back defensively.
"About whatever you wish. You seem distracted and worried about something. You also reacted far too defensively than if there was nothing to talk about." Rachel shrugs, mimicking Quinn's actions. "All I meant, Quinn, is that you can talk to me if you want. I won't judge you. I've been through years of being judged and it's nothing new to me, but it's taught me not to judge others. There's no point in it."
"Stop spewing wisdom at every turn, Berry. It's beginning to make me think you're some kind of centuries-old guru reborn into an annoying teenager's body," Quinn quips to lighten the mood.
Rachel giggles and snuggles into her blanket. "I'm sorry I'm smart, Quinn."
Quinn rolls her eyes and flicks the brunette on her arm. "Go to sleep, guru."
Rachel flips over to stare Quinn in the eyes. Seriously and apprehensively, she asks, "Will you leave me?"
There is a hidden question in her words. The most obvious being whether Quinn would leave her alone right after her traumatic experience that apparently wasn't that traumatic. But Quinn senses that Rachel is also asking the question in a much broader sense. Was Quinn going to leave her when everything was over? Was Quinn going to go back to the top and leave Rachel in the pit of loneliness?
She doesn't know, but an honest answer lies on the tip of her tongue and it blurts itself out before she can stop or over-think it. "I don't think I can."
It seems to have been the right thing to say because Rachel smiles winningly before closing her eyes to go to sleep. "Thank you,' she whispers, burying her face into her pillow. She is unaware of the intent, confused stare Quinn gives her before the blonde also drifts off to sleep. One sentence keeps replaying itself in her mind on a continuous loop, her mantra instead of counting sheep: 'It's nice to have a friend.'
She knows it is a dream. It has to be. How else could she be standing on utter blackness, an empty void, and not fall? But it a weird dream. She sees Santana, Brittany holding her from behind and her chin on the Latina's shoulder, standing with her hands perched on her hips. "Q,' Santana barks, (literally, she barks like a dog, but Quinn understands what she's saying), 'We love you, seriously, but if you don't get over your stupid obsession over being straight, I will tell Sue Sylvester you were the one who scraped the paint off her car while you were reversing."
It's hard for Quinn to talk because her mouth is full of marbles. She can taste the cold glass on her tongue, but somehow manages to warble out, "Wha?"
"Get over it already, Quinn! You're the most repressed le-"
Quinn opens her eyes, blinking hard. She had had the strangest dream. Santana had been telling her she was a pressed lemon. That was... interesting. Then she squints, because it seems she's still dreaming. Santana and Brittany, in the exact same pose from her dream, are standing in Rachel's bedroom doorway. She closes her eyes to slip back into her dream and maybe learn something about how she was a pressed lemon.
"Wake your pregnant lard ass up, Quinn. Don't make me walk over there. I don't want Berry germs."
Quinn groans. That was no dream. It was the real Santana Lopez, through and through. "What are you doing here?" She complains, automatically shifting closer to the source of her warmth and snuggling into it.
"Well, I was here to annoy you, but I see you're busy with your afterglow. Should I leave you in case you want to have sex under the sheets? Oh god, Q, you're not naked under there, are you?" Santana smirks as the blush rises rapidly from Quinn's neck up to her hairline when she realises the warm thing she was cuddling up against is actually Rachel Berry. She hurriedly detaches her arm from around the brunette's waist, wincing at the stiffness coming from her injured right arm. Stupid arms.
She tries to push herself away from Rachel but ends up slipping off the bed onto the floor. "Ow! Bitch!" she exclaims.
Her cry wakes Rachel up, who up till now had been comfortably asleep in her dream of graciously accepting an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony Award at the same time. It was a recurring dream she had. She curiously turns to see that there are two Cheerios standing in her doorway, though they're not in their uniforms. She finds that she's weirdly amused about this. She'd thought their Cheerios uniforms were soldered to their skin. But they're in jeans and matching t-shirts, though Santana's was black and Brittany was in red. Quinn was right. How had she not noticed they were dating?
"What are you doing here? In my house? In my bedroom?"
Santana sighs in annoyance. She wonders why she even bothered, but then she sees her girlfriend pulling Quinn up from the floor and she remembers. Brittany had innocently asked her out on a walk, and she had walked to this house. God, she was so whipped.
"We came to look for you,' Brittany explains, brushing Quinn off.
"Yeah, we came to look for you, you blonde bimbo Barbie. Then Berry's dads liked me so much they adopted me and told me that I was supposed to have this room. I guess they forgot they already had a kid. Also, dinner in twenty minutes," Santana says sarcastically.
Rachel slumps back onto the bed before pulling the blanket over herself. "Wake me up in 15 minutes,' she grumbles.
"Adorable, isn't she?" Brittany comments before flinging herself onto the bed and patting Rachel on the head affectionately. "You're so annoying!" Quinn growls as she smacks Santana in the arm, ignoring Brittany.
"San, Quinn, stop antagonising each other. It's beginning to get on my nerves. You know you love each other; there is no need to hide behind a mask of forced companionship. We're not in school, so chill out," Brittany commands. Santana and Quinn grudgingly stop harassing each other and Santana pouts at Brittany before climbing into her arms, not seeming to care that Rachel is staring at them while stuttering unintelligibly.
"You'll have to speak up, Rachel. I couldn't quite catch that," Brittany smiles wickedly. In response, Rachel can only gape at the snuggling couple on her bed. On her bed. Brittany said 'antagonising' and 'forced companionship'. Brittany and Santana were snuggling on her bed. Brittany was verbose. The sky was falling.
Santana chuckles as Quinn grins. "I might have forgotten to mention this in all the excitement, but Brittany is smart, Rachel."
"But Brittany... She's... She... She's adorably stupid! She's dumber yet still cuter than Finn. At least, she's supposed to be,' Rachel mutters.
"I wholeheartedly agree with the adorable part, but the stupid part is only what you see, Rach,' Brittany explains as she draws random shapes on Santana's bare arm. "When you pretend to be an idiot and not understand what people say, they speak simply. It saves me from long-winded speeches because they think I'll never understand. Except you, though. You still say far too many things to me even though you think I'm an idiot. Also, they show their true colours. They assume that you don't understand their insults because you're stupid."
"For example, I've learned that Artie can be kind of a dick to people who he thinks aren't as smart as him. It makes him feel better about himself because of his disability. We have legs; he has brains and things like that. Basically, it gives him something to gloat about, and gloat he does." Brittany grimaces and, mockingly, she imitates him. "Failed Spanish, hmm? Oh well. I can't say I'm surprised. Now I'll roll, roll, roll away because I'm a pacifist and I don't like conflict. Roll, roll, roll." She mimes throwing up. "Just because no one else knows about my 26 public speaking awards-"
"39 dancing awards, 10 swimming medals, nine English essay writing competition grand prize winning essays-" Santana continues.
"Six short story Scholastic awards for six consecutive years until she stopped entering, 2 dogs, one hamster, and diploma in the piano-" Quinn drones on.
"And a partridge in a pear tree!" Santana sings to finish off.
Rachel looks like she is about to faint. Brittany has the grace to blush. "My mom likes to brag. Often,' she mumbles. Santana laughs against her collarbone. Quinn chuckles and starts struggling out of her clothes into a t-shirt and shorts. She'd forgotten to change before falling into bed with Rachel. Wow that sounded bad. She blushes again and faces away from her friends.
Rachel blinks rapidly and looks away from Quinn's pale, smooth skin to find Brittany smirking knowingly at her. She clears her throat and hurriedly says, "So, to clarify, you're actually a genius but you enjoy pretending to be dimwit to get inside people's heads because you find it amusing."
"Yup!" Brittany agrees cheerfully.
"You and Santana are dating, but you're not out."
"Oh, we're out. It's not our fault the whole club is fucking dense and blind to everything except their own inconsequential problems,' Santana rants, 'They're all idiots. If they don't want to see what's under their stupid noses, whatever."
Rachel nods, trying to wrap her head around it all.
"Stop stating the obvious, Rachel,' Quinn laughs, earning her a glare from Santana.
The diva frowns thoughtfully, then adds, "Quinn is pregnant with Puck's devil's spawn."
Santana lets out a bark of laughter while Quinn just rolls her eyes. Brittany giggles and pokes Rachel in her side. "Diva's got a sense of humour, huh?"
"Miss Airhead actually is Miss Know It All, huh? And Miss Talent. And Miss Looks. And Miss Legs. Oh no, I didn't just say that aloud." Rachel clamps her hands over her mouth.
Santana hits Rachel on the head with a pillow while Brittany guffaws. "Do not perv on my girlfriend, Berry, or I swear to god I will cut you. Get your own damn girlfriend to perv on."
Rachel nods hurriedly and glances from Quinn to the entangled couple next to her. They were wound so tightly against each other it was hard to tell who was who. It hits her that just last week, the same three girls had asked her whether she was going to go to the prom for losers in Loserville, United States of Argyle. Brittany was actually smart. Brittany and Santana were actually BrittanyandSantana. Quinn Fabray was living in her house. It's a mad, mad world, this world of hers.
A t-shirt suddenly hits her in the face and she lets out a squeal of protest.
"Get changed, Berry. I want my jacket back. And I want to eat dinner. We'll meet you downstairs,' Quinn commands, hauling the two Cheerios to their feet.
Rachel can only nod.
Pressed lemons are yummy. ;)
'Things I'll Never Say' by Avril Lavigne. I used this song because there are so many things that they both want to say but don't know how to say because they don't quite know what they actually mean to say. And if you understood all that, high-five!
Liked this chapter, hated it, loathed it, loved it, tell me, aye? Someone asked for fluff, and I don't quite know if I delivered. Also, sorry for the length. I'll try to make the next chapter longer.