This chapter was destroying me from the moment I started it. I just couldn't get anything down without it feeling like word vomit, so I took a gigantic break from writing anything. And then in November I read some poetry by Richard Siken, wrote the entirety of considering the hairpin turn (which you should go read to let me know it's not complete crap) had a near heart attack at the stangeness of the writing in it, and then spent five straight hours writing this. I'm pretty sure this will give me chest pains, too, but what can ya do? All mistakes are mine, because I'm lazy when it comes to betas. Anyone want to help out. Oh and correction: last chapter I said that Kurt's dad died his junior year and I forgot to add in of grad school. Sorry.
Lastly: I'm taking requests. Hit me up yo.
The thing about Rachel Berry is that she's undefinable.
There's no concrete explanation for the way she is, no matter how many people blame it on the sexual orientation of her fathers, or the crazy likeness she has to Shelby. Rachel is the combined effort of all of them and simultaneously someone no one else has seen.
The competitions begin early. She's three and should be splitting her time between playing with too skinny barbies and throwing temper tantrums that would rival the future Brittany Spears umbrella incident; instead she's spending hours singing and tap dancing and learning that nothing compares to the feeling of ice cold gold clenched between her fingers.
(Later, in a high school bathroom, while scrubbing cherry red slushie out of her white blouse, she'll wonder if maybe they ruined her somehow.)
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In kindergarten her block towers are always the best, and in elementary school she picks up cursive and her multiplication tables faster than anyone. Junior high is a whole other mountain to climb, and she can't seem to find the right footholds. Childhood superiority, Rachel finds, doesn't depend on how well your Arrière is, but on how fast you move from training bra to actual bra without assistance from the rough toliet paper in the restrooms. Quinn Fabray manages to climb Everest faster than most and is declared Queen with a crown that was already supposed to be engraved with Rachel's name.
(Maybe the problem wasn't finding the right footholds, but making sure that you're not climbing behind someone who greases them as she goes by. Derek Hutchinson may have invented slushies in high school, but Quinn had a patent on sabotage by age ten.)
Freshman year, in the hallway between her first period computer class and honors Biology, she turns to move out of the way of a kid with a wheelchair and gets a face full of blueberry slushie for her trouble. The sting of the syrup and ice stuns the whole hallway into silence and a jock with mohawk spins on his heel, his face a mirror image of her own shock. For a split second she thinks he's going to apologize, and then the hallway erupts into laughter and someone slaps his back with a 'fucking hilarious Puckerman' and she flees up three flights of stairs. Nothing gets better after that, and she starts hiding stain remover in her bedroom.
It's only her luck that she falls for the good guy, the exact opposite of his best friend; the only one who loves Quinn Fabray enough to stand by her during the biggest fall since Eden. So maybe, after months of burying her head in her pillow at night and praying like a little girl she decides that she won't get what she wants unless she takes it. Finn Hudson is the Leonardo DiCaprio to her Kate Winslet. (Except, the whole you jump I jump thing is irrelevant because he left her for a few football players while the devil incarnate stayed behind with his hands in his pockets and a sheepish smile like he was always meant to be the good guy.)
So when she finds out that the Queen was not only a slut but also a cheating, lying slut, the words tumble from her lips, red-hot like the ripe fruit from the forbidden tree.
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The summer after her first year in college, she finds Noah waiting for her at the baggage claim. He's wearing that stupid smirk that was partially the cause of their brief dating stint her sophomore year. He's not carrying flowers, or a ring and maybe that's why she doesn't turn and walk away. Because they haven't spoken in over a year, and he's still the same Noah Puckerman. The guy confident enough in his charm to believe that picking her up from the airport after the spending a year avoiding the fact that they not only slept together the night before she left for New York, but that he also drunkenly asked her to stay. (She, for her part, had actually considered it for a fraction of a moment before remembering that he had enough Jack Daniels in his system to take down a bull.)
Anyway, when she gets close enough, he tilts his head to match his grin and says 'you didn't stay' because of course his alcohol tolerance is more than a fucking bull. But he's Leo plus the you jump I jump and so she smiles and lets him carry her bags.
Five months after that, Quinn calls during winter break, panicked in the subtle kind of way she got from Santana, and tells her that Finn has brain cancer. Rachel hyperventilates on the phone long enough for Puck to figure that something is actually wrong and it's not something like a Broadway play has shut down because the whole cast has pneumonia. They're on the next flight to Chicago, and Puck squeezes her hand hard enough for her to remember that Finn was Puck's best friend long before he was her boyfriend.
A year and a half after they crowded into a room during the recovery of one of their own, they sit in a church during the funeral of another. Britney's death takes the breath out of her, and she only notices two days after, because she's been so busy making sure Finn wasn't under too much stress and helping Quinn make sure Santana and Matt didnt have the frantic look in their eyes twenty four hours a day. And finally when all is said and done, she presses her face into the space between Puck's shoulder blades so she won't have to watch him hyperventilate in Matt's bathroom.
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Throughout college and the three years of endless auditions, she gets to watch the slow destruction of her friend's relationships, and just as she's beginning to wonder how they became the most emotionally stable out of the group, the stick turns blue in a department store bathroom stall.
She waits, too long to do anything about it, because she knows Puck is good with kids, is great with his sister, but has no idea how he'll be with his own child. But eventually she has to tell him, when the bump begins to get harder to hide, and he sits for a good five minutes, blank-faced with his fists clenched on his knees. She had hoped for excitement, braced for shouting, and was shocked when he wordlessly grabbed his keys and walked out.
He calls her three days later, says that he's going to visit Finn for awhile; that he'll call her later. Two weeks after that, and she's just about given up calling Quinn and emailing Finn, when her phone buzzes with an arrival time. She reconsiders going fourteen times between her dorm and JFK but decides that Puck will just hunt her down anyway. He still doesn't have flowers or a ring but he does have that grin that tilts on its side when he says 'how about Amelia?'
They're married six months later, partially because Rachel's dads are really rather terrifying when it comes to the defilement of their little girl, partially because Puck's mom loves weddings, and mostly because Rachel had decided she had enough of waiting for him to ask and had done it herself.
Amelia's stillborn because that's just the way things work in their lives, and Puck seems to take it like a champ until he scales Matt's fence.
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The thing about Rachel Berry isn't just that she's undefinable, but also that she's good at standing her ground. Whether it's competitions at three, malicious comments at ten, solos at sixteen, or her best friend getting a brain tumor at twenty, she takes no hostages when it comes to getting what she deserves.
Except, on a Thursday in April she gets a phone call saying her husband had decided to be poetic about the fact that he's been drowning for years and threw himself into the bottom of Matt's pool. And suddenly she's eleven and three quarters old again wondering why the hell someone's slicking the footholds of her life. Kate let Leo die because she was selfish with the piece of door that was clearly big enough for the both of them, and for some reason the only thing Rachel can think of is their friends spending countless hours holding her hand like she was the only one who lost something.
The room splits when Mike, after fidgeting and grinding his teeth for twenty minutes, gets up and makes his way to the supply room down the hall. Artie rolls in between Matt and Quinn, because they held their ground. There's room for Finn but no one really expects him to do anything but pace the hallway because the rule of dead dads and half-dead best friends has a standing-only policy. (Also, because Finn almost drowned when he was eight, Puck slipping the cooler string off his ankle just as his air ran out and Rachel knows the guilt, feels the guilt down to her bones, of not noticing Puck's air was running out weeks ago.)
They're silent, eyes on the ground, and maybe they're the ones who stayed behind but that doesn't make them any less susceptible to the dark cloud of tragedy that seems to stalk them all.
Santana and Tina huddle near the water fountain across from them, whispering in hushed tones about the definition of superiority and where Puck would be standing in this stand off of strong versus weak.
Everybody, though, tries without much success to ignore the dead, blond cheerleader in the room. (It doesn't work, and someone should probably stop Mike from stealing too many cotton balls, but no one will because widows have a right to do what they please.)
Rachel finds herself somewhere on the line, flailing futilely for something, anything to grab onto because this is the third time since she was fifteen that being in a hospital had made her stomach churn. (Babygate counts because that was universally tragic.)
Kurt walks in, half carrying Finn and everybody turns to look at the boy who ran the farthest, the fastest, away from all of this. He looks up, notices the stares, and his response makes her snort. Makes her breathe again.
"Well hell, you'd think we'd get a fucking break, huh. Oh, and Matt just got caught shoving an entire box of medical masks down his pants."