Glithe
Sixteen-year-old Rachel is a modern nomad. Fierce and independent, she travels from city to city with her two father's rock band until an ominous attack forces Rachel back to Lima, Ohio. From there, all goes to hell.
Pairings mentioned/used include but not limited to Finchel, Quinn/Finn, Klaine, Kurtofsky, Brittana, Pezberry, Samcedes, Wemma, and Carole/Burt
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You have to be a special kind of person to have an acorn thrown at you. Rachel suspected she fell into two of these categories. You'd have to be either a very special kind of annoying (which most people knew Rachel was) or a couple of your old faerie friends can throw one at you with a message inside.
Rachel hadn't been expecting her acorn message. She'd left out milk with a little bit of sugar for Quinn, Tina and Mike, but she soon found out that they didn't come unless they wanted to.
No, Rachel had been at Kurt's house, the morning after their slumber party, eating a bowl of Cocoa Puffs, when the acorn soared through the open window and straight to her head. With a sound clunk, the acorn bounced back off her head and right into her cereal bowl. Kurt and Mercedes hardly batted an eye as she pulled out the acorn and dried it of vaguely chocolaty milk.
Rachel noticed there was a piece of paper sticking out, and she pried open the acorn right at the breakfast table.
Everyone is in danger. Mike is dead! Don't speak to the dark knight or his mother! - Q, and T
Rachel frowned a little. Danger? And Mike, he had always been so kind and joyful. Who killed him? The folk didn't just die on their own. Who was this dark knight? They only knight she knew was Finn, and he hadn't seemed dark. But he was the only knight she knew, after all. She had to make assumptions. He had said something about finding his mother.
Kurt stood up from the table to put his own bowl and spoon in the kitchen sink and gave her a strange look. "Acorns fall from the tree outside all the time, Rachel. It's not going to bite you."
She looked up to his face and then followed his gaze back down to her hands, which were squeezing the acorn in a death grip. She put it lightly on the table, the message still hidden in her lap.
"I wasn't expecting it." She defended, slipping the paper into one of the pockets on the sides of her skirt. Mercedes snorted, lifting her bowl and drinking her milk straight from the rim. Kurt shrugged and washed out his bowl in the sink.
Rachel knew what they were thinking. Let her be weird. But she knew the truth. She wasn't weird, the faeries had just contacted her via acorn! …okay, so that did sound weird. But it was the truth.
She slipped into her Mary Janes and waved goodbye to Kurt and Mercedes, Mercedes also heading out to her summer camp. They didn't pay much attention to each other, currently working hard on perfecting each other's fashion and hair. They hadn't bother to work on Rachel and Rachel already knew she was a walking disaster in their minds.
She had only gotten back to her grandma's when another acorn hit her, this time soaring into her slightly unbuttoned plaid blouse. She let out a squeak as it nestled nicely in-between her breasts. Digging inside, she pulled out the invading acorn and popped it's top to reveal it's message.
Come with us. Come see the witch - Q and T
She glanced around until she caught sight of something most people would think was a hummingbird. Quinn. She followed the trace of the blonde faerie until she was deep enough into the woods that Quinn could unglamour herself.
The blond dropped her glamour with an explosion, throwing it off and becoming bigger. Quinn gave Rachel a beautiful smile with her inhuman features before motioning to follow.
"Sandy should be here somewhere." Quinn murmured, fluttering her large butterfly like wings. They had reached a clearing filled with human trash and murky water. Rachel had never been here before, and neither did she want to. It looked like a dump.
"Boo, the pretty ladies are here! I know the truths and the lies, which secrets you've come to despise! Quinn, your nose is always glamoured! Rachel, you are living inside a giant ball of-"
Quinn shoved a trash bag into the hag's mouth. He was fat, wearing pink and yellow, and he looked something like a retirement home reject. His head was balding. Rachel had to remind herself that this wasn't glamour and that he was really really old in faerie years to be balding.
"Give Rachel her secrets. We'll tell her the plan." Quinn confirmed.
Rachel looked around the clearing for a place to sit. Eventually she settled down on a stump. Sandy, the hag, cackled as he pulled out a robin's egg.
He poked a tiny hole in each side. Then he gave her a Cheshire grin as he handed it to Rachel. "Darling, blow out the insides and on the shell shall be your secret."
Rachel held the egg gingerly. It seemed to fragile. What if it broke? Would her secret be lost forever? She lifted the tiny hole to her mouth and blew as gently as she could.
The entire egg collapsed.
"That secret is lost. We shall tell you another!" Sandy grabbed the yoke and liquidy remains of the robin's egg from her and dumped it on the ground. Rachel tried not to wipe her hands on anything, because they were covered in the remains of the egg.
Quinn started to protest. "No, her other secret will only hurt her!"
Rachel didn't want to know where this was heading. Her original secret was lost, and her second secret was dangerous. Maybe she didn't need a secret.
"But we must give out a secret, or we both shall die for being liars." Sandy took Rachel's hands in his own dirty ones and he leaned in close, ignoring her shock. She wanted to wrestle away, but his hands were too strong. Inhumanly strong.
Rachel shut her eyes, trying to shut her ears. What she heard, made everything she had been thinking of in her mind, useless and boring. It echoed through her mind, opening doors of terror.
"You are…" Sandy had whispered roughly into her ear, his breath hot and heavy against her skin. "one of us."
Rachel shrieked, shoving Sandy back into the debris of the clearing, speechless. There was no way, no way! Rachel Berry was Rachel Berry, daughter of her two Gay Fathers, won her first dance competition when she was six! Rachel could list every single one of her achievements and friends and thoughts.
How could she not be human? She could see faeries, but surely there were other humans who could as well. Rachel Berry looked human, acted human, only knew anything really about humans. But she really was a faerie?
"I told you it'd only hurt her! She didn't need to know this!" Quinn protested, her butterfly wings beating angrily.
"You knew all this time? And you didn't tell me?" Rachel said in a broken whisper, slowly standing up. "You, Mike, and Tina all knew? And none of you said anything to me? Why not? I thought we were friends!"
Quinn turned her little baby blue eyes to Rachel. "Oh, Rach, I'm sorry! We couldn't tell you, we could never be the ones to tell you!"
"That's the secret keepers job!" croaked Sandy, standing up from the spot Rachel shoved him down.
Rachel looked at her perfectly human hands. She knew faeries couldn't lie. Sandy was fae. He had told her the truth. Her hands shook with terror. She had no clue what she was doing.
"I'm wearing glamour, aren't I?"
"Of course! Why else would you look human?" Quinn stated, sitting down gingerly on Rachel's shoulder.
"To reveal what is unseen, touch iron in it's purest form or roll in a patch of clover, and be revealed." Sandy grabbed onto her arm.
Rachel decided that she would take a page from her father's book. When times got too rough and there was nothing left for you, you run to some where else better. This was getting too much. Escape, well… it sounded perfect.
Rachel made a run for it. And she didn't stop until she was well out of the woods and halfway into town.
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Brittany woke up early that morning to a boy; she had seen him in the group yesterday; moving around. He flashed her a quick smile. She untangled herself from the boys carelessly draped all over the common room.
"Morning, new girl." He yawned, pouring himself a cup of coffee. "Want some? It's cowboy coffee but we have some rum and sugar."
Brittany tried her best not to be too shocked. She didn't know what homeless people lived like, and for certain she had never imagined it was anything like this. Dalton Manor was a wonderful place, but it was cold, it was loud, and certainly there were one too many boys there.
"I like coffee." Brittany supplied, taking a cold cup into her hands. Cold. The only type of cold coffee she had ever had was iced from Starbucks. She liked her coffee piping hot. So that it could burn her throat and warm her down to her toes.
Brittany drank the cup anyway.
The boy gave her a grin. "I'm Flint. I didn't get to talk to you yesterday but it's nice to meet you, new girl."
"I'm Brittany." She corrected. She didn't know why he thought her name was new girl, but it was annoying. She had a name. She liked it too. Santana always said it made her sound pretty.
"Sorry. I don't bother to remember newbies names. They don't last that long. Last one Sunshine took in was hit by a train. You won't last long either. We all know that."
Brittany wondered for a moment what lasting here really meant. Living? Or just staying?
"I want to stay." She confirmed. There was no going back. No more Santana, no more Mom, no more Artie. She'd never get to see any of them again. Brittany tried to act as if this didn't bother her at all.
"That's cute. How about you come out with me today and we have some fun before we start deliveries."
To Brittany that sounded pretty good. Better than watch Blaine glare at her like he had the night before. Boys always loved her. Why did he hate her? It was in the boy handbook to love Brittany S. Pierce. She was hot, she had blonde hair and decently large boobs, she had long legs and she was skinny and curvy in all the right places.
But Blaine was looking at her like she was a ham sandwich. The only boy who'd ever looked at her like that was Kurt Hummel, and he was capital G gay. Or, she suspected he was. Everyone suspected he was.
…but Blaine was hot. In a straight way hot. Santana was a lesbian, and Brittany knew she had a pretty good gaydar. He was straight or at most bisexual, so how could he resist her? Brittany turned back to Flint, and she nodded eagerly.
They walked to the dumpsters first, and Flint handed her the decent things that he'd pilfered from the garbage. So far Brittany was holding a watch, several romance novels, a leather jacket with a few holes, an old iPod Shuffle with chipped paint and a broken backside, two bras, and a silk dress ripped up the side; all in a large cardboard box they'd found as well.
Flint picked up a backpack. "I wonder… why do people pay so much for things they throw away in the first place?" He mused, throwing the backpack out of the dumpster.
Brittany bit her lip. Was she supposed to answer him? She didn't know the answer, though. Brittany kept her mouth shut and picked up the backpack he'd thrown and placed it inside the box.
"I think we'll move on to the restaurants next and get ourselves some chow. How does that sound? Everything they throw out is only a day old, so it's all safe to eat."
Brittany nodded, handing the box over to Flint to carry. He gave her a small smile as he hauled it all the way to a little Italian café. In the back Brittany noticed the excess of bread and pasta. Wrong orders and leftovers as well.
She grabbed a relatively unmoldy loaf of bread and bit into it. She hadn't noticed how hungry she was until now. Dalton's Warblers had left everyone on their own to eat, and all she'd brought with her for the show with Artie was an emergency granola bar.
Flint grabbed a ravioli from the mix and plopped it into his mouth.
Soon the two of them were making jokes and eating everything that looked decent and running around. Flint grabbed the box and Brittany chased him all the way to Time's Square. Brittany was amazed, everything was so big! Back in Ohio, everything was so… small. Insignificant. Artie was insignificant! Here, everything was big! Everything was huge! Everything was… perfect.
"I feel like a gummy bear! I'm so small!" Brittany laughed, grabbing the box from Flint as soon as they'd stopped running.
"It's ant, new chick! Ant!" Flint grabbed her free hand and dragged her off again. "Let's sell some of this shit!"
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Rachel had found herself standing in front of Hummel Tires and Lube again. Kurt's Escalade wasn't there, it was a Saturday after all and that meant no work. She didn't spot his Escalade anywhere near.
Her thoughts flashed back to what Sandy had said. 'Touch the purest iron' or something like that. She was standing in front of a car shop. Surely something in there was iron. She knew that most cars were steel or something, but it was a shop full of metal. Something in there must be iron.
She snuck in the front door, hoping that nobody was there. She had gotten lucky. The man sitting at the counter was dead asleep, and Rachel didn't recognize him anyway. She snuck right past him.
The garage was empty save for two cars, a decaying Trabant they must have either been restoring or a self project because no one drove those anymore, and a VW Bug. Rachel didn't know much about cars, but she recognized the Trabant from an 80s movie she had watched with her dads.
She crept over to their tool box, hoping that it might hold what she was looking for. Iron. She couldn't get underneath the cars or into their engines to find the metal, since she couldn't pay to fix the cars if she broke something. Tools were a far easier choice.
She picked up a wrench. Nothing happened. The crowbar just felt heavy in her hands. The wielder's nosel was the last thing she'd picked up, and finally she felt a tingle. Like having a sunburn, her skin started peeling.
Underneath she saw patches of a pink color, like a baby girl pink. Her nails bloomed red until it looked like they were bleeding.
"Hey, wake up! Matt Rutherford, we don't pay you to sit around and do nothing." Kurt's clear as a bell voice rang through out the shop followed by a large smack. Rachel froze. Oh god, she didn't know how to reglamour herself. What the hell had she done? She was stuck and she didn't know how to get un-pink and she had no idea if it was just her hands or if the peeling had gotten to her face and legs.
Could she hide it?
"I'm so sorry, sir!" The man, no, teen's voice followed and Rachel heard the door open. She didn't turn around to face Kurt, she was too scared. Could she? She lifted a hand to gingerly touch her face, and she felt bits of her old skin fall off. She held her entire body stiffly.
"Rach? What are you doing here? Did you get pranked again, is that why you're all Barbie pink?" Kurt walked up to her, wearing overalls and sneakers. He got a good look at her face. "Oh… com'n, let's get you cleaned off."
He pulled her along into the shop's bathroom. There was little space, but Rachel sat down numbly on the toilet.
"Cheezus, sweet Gaga! They got you good." Kurt wiped her face with a wet paper towel. "I'll let you borrow my moisturizing…"
Rachel knew he'd seen what just happened. Instead of wiping away the pink, he'd gotten rid of more of the glamour.
"I'm not human…" She whispered, looking into his glasz eyes for something, forgiveness perhaps. She stared at her in shock. But one of Kurt's best qualities was to take things and run with them.
He gave her a half smile before returning to wiping her face. "Well, weirder things have happened. Let's get all of this off anyways."
She returned the smile, but it felt like it was stretched too far, like it was wrong. She run her tongue along her teeth and felt most of them were sharpened points.
As soon as Kurt had gotten to her eyes, she felt herself tear up. All she saw was that inside her tears was a lot of white and brown. Everything suddenly became a lot clearer. Kurt stared numbly at her and Rachel could pick out every single one of his pores, every single line and vein in his blue, then grey, then greenish brown irises.
"Your eyes? That was out of a fucking horror movie! Look!" He exclaimed, pointing to the mirror. She stood up and walked over to the sink and stared into the mirror above it just like Kurt had wanted.
She could see the little cracks in the mirror from age, every single wipe when it'd been last cleaned, and most of all, her face staring back at her like an alien.
Her cheekbones were the same, high as ever, and her mouth was as big as ever, and her hair fell the same as ever. But her skin was sugar pink and her mouth was a dark crimson like she'd put on red lip stain. Her teeth were in perfect sharp little rows, like a shark's. Her pupils were entirely black, and she did look a bit out of a horror movie.
"Well, let's take you home to my place and get you a shower. You'll need to get rid of the rest of this crap." Kurt held out his hand. Rachel took it, surprising herself as well as him. Her fingers were just a little too long now. Her fingernails were still crimson.
Kurt's Escalade was nearby and he pulled Rachel out the back entrance. She climbed into the back seat, looking down at her peeling pink knees. The car made her feel nauseous. It wasn't even moving and Rachel already had a bad case of car sickness. Kurt shut the door for her before heading back into the shop. Probably to tell his dad where he was going or what he was doing.
He came back out a few minutes later, staring back at her. "Well, now I can look at you with wanted to shove a needle in my eyeballs. Your scent changed too."
Rachel gave him an odd look. Her scent? She smelled fine, it was everything else that was suddenly smelling so much stronger. Like Kurt, she could smell the chemicals on him, the lotions and moisturizers, the hairspray, the cologne. And his natural scent, something slightly sweet and heavy and rich on her nose.
"You're the one who smells different. Like a million different things." Rachel protested, sniffing at her arm. She smelt like herself, her chamomile shampoo and her strawberry perfume.
"You smell like an explosion of fruit punch." Kurt corrected, sliding into the front seat and turning on the vehicle. "It's not bad, but it's no Armani Code Pour Femme."
Rachel had no idea what that was, so she didn't answer him. She sat awkwardly in the backseat and waited for the familiar Hummel house to come in sight. Ten minutes had never before lasted so long. She bit her lip, tapped her foot nervously. What if someone saw her in the backseat? The Escalade had tinted windows, but having all black eyes was a bit hard to hide.
She managed to get all the way there with out getting any weird looks. Kurt got her inside the front door, while she watched out for neighbors or something. Maybe she could say she was in costume. Halloween costume. Just, very very early. A few months early. Everyone knew Christmas in July, so why not Halloween in July?
Rachel hurried inside as soon as Kurt had unlocked the front door. The Hummel home smelled so strongly of what she'd missed last time. There was cologne, there was acid sweat, laundry soap and fabric softener, plastic, and iron. She stood awkwardly, unsure of what she should do. Kurt squeezed her hand.
"I'm going to have fun with this. Rachel Berry arriving in my house! We can give you a makeover of the century. I don't have any products for your skin tone but lotions. And your hair, I can give you something to make it silkier than ever. Then you can wear something of mine, I'm taller than you but skinnier and we'll find something! Think of this as an adventure!" He chattered as he dragged her down the stairs and into the basement. That's where his room was and he did have a bathroom down there.
Rachel was handed a loofa, a bottle of some fancy shampoo, a fancy conditioner, a bottle of body wash, an acne cleanser, and a towel before she was shoved into a perfectly clean bathroom.
"Use all of those! I'll get working on something for you to wear while we wash out all the skin on your clothes." Kurt gave her yet another reassuring smile. "And I'll make you something for lunch."
Rachel nodded mutely, stepping into the shower. She pulled the curtain closed and threw her clothes over for Kurt to wash. She heard the door close and she let herself start to freak out.
Her skin was PINK! Her eyes were all BLACK! She was a FAERIE! How was this happening? Why to her? What did she do to deserve this anyways? Be generally annoying and a talented unstoppable force destined for Broadway? …okay, so she had done that. But she didn't derserve this.
She turned on the water at a hot setting, She picked up the loofa and squirted some of the body wash onto it. Rachen then started scrubbing the rest of her old skin, her old glamour, off her skin. She revealed more and more pink, her tan skin peeling off easily. She got to her back and stomach, staring as she realized she no longer had a belly button. Well.
Rachel felt something thick and gooey dribble down her back, and she tried to scrub harder back there when she touched something that definitely hadn't been there before. She let out a shrill shriek.
It didn't take long before Kurt was inside the bathroom again. "Rachel? What happened, are you okay?"
Rachel peeled back the shower curtain and turned around to show him her back. He let out an audible gasp. She wanted to know if she had been right. She might have just been speculating, imagining something that she couldn't see.
"Rach, you have wings. Like, little dragonfly wings. I'm sure we can hide them under your clothes, they're so small, but… you have wings!"
Rachel nodded. She muttered solemnly, "I really am no longer human."
Kurt had nothing left to say.
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A/N: Well, I decided that I didn't want Rachel to look exactly the same as Kaye, so she's still a pixie, just a pink one. And poor Kurt, things are just starting to become more and more weird for him. Brittany will learn the secrets of the merry Warblers of Dalton later. No more character conversions for this chapter. Enjoy, and review if you have comments/concerns/flames/youwanttokillme/etc. C: Seriously, review. I'll love you.