Author's Note I: I have been struggling with this fic for a while, thinking where I want to take it. Time kind of got away from me, and after careful deliberation I decided to change my original plan for this slightly. I was originally intending to recap everything up until Sectionals, but considering we're in season two now, and many others have done the same thing, I figured that would just be redundant. There will be a couple more chapters of Prologue (and they'll be longer), and then we will be truly in AU/LA and I will flashback to any important moments that I might have planned on mentioning in the prologue. Chapter title is from Beat Your Heartbeat by The Kissaway Trail.
Quinn had done surprisingly well at refraining from murdering Rachel. She had devoted all of her energy to silently running interference between Mercedes and her best friends. Every time Kurt said something transparently gay, the words would fall on Mercedes' deafened ears before she threw a hesitant glimpse at the three cheerleaders. Quinn would smirk and nod encouragingly, which in turn emboldened Mercedes enough to turn back to her friend and attempt a tragically dense form of flirtation.
She had walked tall - the acme of the Quinn Fabray she had striven to become, elegant, composed, and cunningly conniving. Nothing could have dislodged her from the Heaven high pedestal she was comfortably positioned on. Nothing except the combination of Rachel Berry's voice suddenly leaving her ears ringing - painfully akin to the noise of her father's old dial up modem - and the faint scent of vomit invading her nostrils from a girl bent over a trashcan a few yards away from the group.
No one else had seemed particularly affected by the smell, but Quinn had needed to breathe through her mouth and turn her face away. Otherwise she ran the risk of tackling the Vocal Adrenaline soloist to the ground just so that she could possess the prime space above the wastebasket. She found it atrocious that it had gotten so far to the point that Rachel was actually making her physically sick.
Whilst Rachel and the others had gratefully accepted Andrea Cohen's invitation for them to sit and observe the remainder of their rehearsal, Quinn had quietly excused herself to the bathroom. When Santana protested about being left alone with the gleeks, the head cheerleader had scathingly assured that she would be no longer than five minutes. In reality, she had hidden away in a locked stall for the majority of Vocal Adrenaline's run through.
When she had received Brittany's anxious text message informing her that Santana was seconds away from succumbing to a rage blackout because nobody knew where Quinn had gone - and she'd been missing for half an hour, her thighs were burning from the strain of being crouched down before the toilet bowl. She'd been motionless, unaware of the minutes passing with her arms outstretched and palms splayed on the prefabricated wooden partitions either side of her body, supporting her weight so her spine could curve and allow her head to hover above the porcelain bowl. She had been waiting for the inevitable, for the molten swirl of guilt and regret in her stomach to reach its boiling point. For it to burn through her flesh and leave ashes in its wake, expelling her soul to the depths of Hell. Or for it to finally outgrow its confines, being forced up past her heart and out of her throat.
She was sure that she had been on the verge of vomiting, but the only bodily fluid leaving her body was the small droplets of sweat secreting from her pores and gathering on her forehead.
She had flushed the toilet out of habit and moved to the sink to wash her hands and her face. When she looked in the mirror she barely recognized the person staring back at her wearily. Her normally clear complexion was marred with angry blemishes, dark smudges beneath her glassy eyes. She had been leaning in closer towards the reflective glass when the door to the bathroom swung open, connecting with a hand dryer mounted off to the side on the wall.
Santana was already ranting when she entered the room fully, not pausing to take a breath as she marched over to where Quinn was stood. Her arm rose quickly, with the intention of clutching the blonde's wrist and leading her back to the group she had strayed from. But with the sudden movement Quinn had flinched and brought both hands up to protect herself from the intrusion. Her own right hand had grazed her chest and she winced involuntary at a twinge of soreness from the contact.
Santana raised a perfectly sculpted eyebrow, held her palms up in front of her face and then slowly and purposely took her friend's hand and left the overly lit bathroom.
Thankfully, seeing Dakota Stanley in motion hadn't deterred Rachel from the pursuit of enlisting his services. When Quinn and Santana rejoined the rest of their teammates in Carmel's auditorium, the brunette's face was hardened with a steely look of determination. The rest of the gleeks however, looked terrified as their rivals hurriedly left the stage at the barked orders of a short man standing in the wings.
Dakota was willing to choreograph a routine for them, but it would come with a hefty price tag. Quinn saw the trepidation on Kurt, Tina, and Mercedes' faces once the egotistical man had sped away in his sports car, and she was amused to see them looking both grateful and frightened when Santana announced that she knew of a way for them to make the money for Dakota's fee.
The three Cheerios quietly conferred with Coach Sylvester on the sidelines the next morning at practice and after making the entire cheerleading team run 10 lengths of the football field; Sue picked up her megaphone and demanded that all female students form a circle around her, whilst the men continued jogging. She grudgingly told the teenagers that they would be participating in a car wash later in the day - which she was organising to assist the glee club with fundraising. When the girls had collectively laughed or groaned, Sue warned them that the car wash was mandatory, and failure to cooperate would result in their dietary plans being condensed until they were supplementing themselves with nothing but water and rice cakes.
Sue had dismissed the squad early so that she could begin completing the necessary errands that would transform the school's parking lot into an impromptu car wash by lunch time. Quinn had checked the time on her cell phone and found that there was still approximately thirty minutes left before the first students would begin arriving at the school. To gain all she could from the situation she had walked quickly to the nurse's office, laying down on an empty cot and immediately falling into a peaceful sleep.
She had only intended to take a short nap until it was time for her to make her way to homeroom, but after being gently shaken awake by the nurse - an old woman with kind eyes - she was told that there were only ten minutes until the lunch bell would be ringing. Quinn was embarrassed; she had never missed or skipped a class since elementary school - unless it was for a doctor's appointment or family emergency. She thanked Mrs Lancaster for waking her, gathered her books from the ground and ignored the vertigo as she stood suddenly. She hastily walked through the door, turning slightly to thank the friendly woman once more.
Her back collided with someone as she'd crossed the door's threshold and after regaining her balance she was immediately admonished by Santana, who gruffly instructed for her to watch where she was going. The Latina's mood was visibly sour so Quinn remained silent and listened to her best friend muttering angrily about the moron who had invented show choir and the imbecilic nature of high school boys. Quinn placed a hand on Santana's arm and pulled her roughly to a stop in the crowded hallway when the other cheerleader began to rant about how she had just broken up with Puck.
Quinn's hazel eyes were wide when she questioned Santana's motives for ending the relationship they had been carefully constructing since the first week of freshman year. The brunette had shrugged noncommittally and said that Puck simply could no longer cater to her financial needs, and that she was currently suffering with a particularly unrelenting bout of PMS.
Quinn had laughed heartily for a moment, but suddenly it was as if a thousand sharp-edged jigsaw pieces had been dislodged from where they had previously lay dormant in her brain matter and magnetically aligned to form a painfully detailed picture at the forefront of her mind. Blood pulsated loudly through her veins, gathering speed and leaving her ears deafened to the sounds of the world around her. She could feel her heart beating rapidly, desperate to escape from beneath her skin before she was undoubtedly smote by God's hand.
She ignored Santana's curious gaze and sprinted towards the closest bathroom, pushing past loitering students and faltering every few yards when her legs threatened to give out beneath her. It wasn't unusual - considering the amount time that they spent in each other's company - for the cheerleaders' menstrual cycles to sync. With Santana's offhanded admission minutes before, Quinn had realized that she couldn't remember the last time she had had a period. It might've been a farfetched conclusion to reach, but after barely having time to lock the stall door before emptying the contents of her stomach, she knew that it wasn't.
In one solitary moment the staples securing everything that defined her unhinged and ruptured, eradicating all traces of the façade she been tolerantly erecting since the day Grace had left for college.
It was as if she had shed her skin, left exposed and vulnerable under the disapproving scrutiny of the glaring bathroom lights. With only the off white walls and an obscenely inappropriate depiction of Rachel Berry that she had drawn a few days prior bearing witness to her transfiguration.
Her chest heaved, a futile attempt at clearing the dizziness in her head. Her stomach muscles tightened, forcing the bile and remnants of Quinn Fabray - the socialite, out of her body. She had collapsed tiredly to the tiled floor, not even caring that she was probably exposing herself to at least a dozen different genetic strands of fungal bacteria.
For the first time since she had started high school, her eyes filled with tears and she was powerless to stop them from falling. She tried to convince herself that regardless of the rationality behind her deductions, that she was wrong. That there was no semblance of a possibility that she could be…
But it was ineffectual, because as she had sat there in the now too claustrophobic stall, tiny fragmented moments from the weeks that had passed highlighted themselves in acidic mockery. The fatigue, the nausea, the tenderness in her breasts that she felt throughout the days when she had awoken from sleeping on her stomach. They were all symptoms of the same ailment.
The lunch bell rang, disrupting the stifling silence of the restroom and the aroused snarls of the hellhounds that she could practically hear salivating at the sight of her defiled skin, eager for the cue that would allow them to tear into her flesh and usher her blasphemous soul through the gates of Hell.
When Quinn heard the door swing open and the bathroom fill with the unwelcome sounds of girlish laughter, she had struggled to upright herself and leave the stall as composed as she could muster in that moment. The other occupants of the room were freshman Cheerios and Quinn didn't know if they had noticed her flushed and disheveled disposition, or if they were just too afraid to comment but they silenced themselves immediately.
She had felt as though she was in purgatory as she moved though the mass of students on their way along the halls to the cafeteria, nothing but a husk consisting of meat and organs that were no longer connected to nerve endings. She was unaware of the movement of her limbs, of the erratic rise and fall of her chest as it desperately attempted to devour enough oxygen to keep her away from the brink of the afterlife.
It was only when the automatic glass doors of the local pharmacy parted before her and her nasal senses were overloaded with the scent of disinfectant that Quinn seemed to return to her body. She had moved quickly along the aisles, bypassing the shelves stocked full of antiseptic creams and toiletries and ignoring the stares from the other customers, who were watching curiously as the young blonde girl in a cheerleading uniform marched through the store with purpose during school hours.
When she had found what she had been searching for, her eyes traced over the lettering on all of the various packages. There were so many different brands, and Quinn had no prior knowledge to which was the leading in the market or the most reliable. With trembling hands she tested the weight of a slim white box advertising a digital stick, and after turning it over to read the instructions she scowled in disgust and replaced it on the shelf. There were also tests that revealed colored lines depicting the outcome, depending on the hCG levels found in the urine. Quinn was overwhelmed, having no idea which kit she should purchase. In the end she had taken a shallow breath and picked out a random five, each from a different brand.
She had glared at the male clerk serving her, he seemed only a few years older than her and wasn't fighting to control the smirk playing on his lips at the sight of the boxes she had haphazardly dropped on the counter surface. When he asked how she was doing in a condescendingly smug tone, she had wordlessly balled her fist around a couple of packs of chewing gum and thrown them down along with the credit card her dad had given her for emergencies. He chuckled and she had threateningly narrowed her eyes, sighing when he just began laughing louder. Her reign of power was over, she could feel it.
Quinn demanded that the clerk double bag the kits she had bought and had proceeded to lift them to eye level, making absolutely sure that the contents were disguised by plastic before she even entertained the thought of leaving the sanctuary of the pharmacy.
Once she had arrived back at the school, there were only approximately five minutes remaining until classes resumed. She hurriedly threw the bag she had been clutching protectively to her chest into her locker, checking to make sure that the small steel door was locked securely multiple times and safe away from the prying eyes of those around her.
Brittany had suddenly materialized by her side, and they linked arms habitually and headed to English whilst the taller blonde announced that the carwash had been a jubilant success, the drama of Mercedes throwing a large rock through Kurt's car window aside.
Quinn was unaware of the evolution of time throughout the afternoon. The hands on her watch appeared to be moving painstakingly slow one minute, and then passing at warp speed the next as she struggled to distract her mind away from the little white boxes awaiting her in her locker. She moved between classes in a daze, not noticing any of the surrounding students who still cowered in fear as she passed even though she was obviously lacking her usual bite.
The last bell rang out, signaling to the lowly adolescents that they were finally free to flee from their daily torture and head home, whilst their tormenters remained behind for football, hockey and cheerleading practices. Quinn entered the choir room and was surprised to find she was the last to arrive; all of the other members of New Directions were stood in a military line formation looking apprehensive as Dakota Stanley stalked from left to right and back again, his gaze surly with disapproval.
She had pushed back her shoulders and attempted to regain a fraction of the air of confidence that before today had always surrounded her and taken long strides across the room, standing in her rightful place between Brittany and Santana. Dakota immediately passed out laminated booklets outlining the team's new dietary plans and schedules, overlooking the cheerleaders completely. Quinn had half-heartedly resented the short man for ignoring her, feeling as though her weight was increasing exponentially as the seconds passed by.
She began feeling nervous as the choreographer started from the end of the queue with Artie, dragging his eyes slowly over the boy's frame as he sat up in his chair nervously. He announced offhandedly that Artie was to be cut from the team immediately, using his disability as an excuse to discredit his worth. When Mercedes had protested on behalf of her friend, Dakota turned his attention to her without hesitation and snapped a witty comment which seemed too racially ambiguous to not be intended as hurtful.
She thought that she would have enjoyed listening to Dakota rip into the gleeks one by one, leaving a festering cesspit of insecurity in his wake. But more than anything she felt the beginning of terror pulsing in her abdomen as she waited with baited breath, a wishful mantra repeating in her head that he would not somehow be able to see the state in which her body was currently in.
Instead - just as he had done with the booklets - he moved past them with only the utterance that they did not need to change anything about themselves for they were perfect enough already. Quinn felt her muscles slacken at his words, relief flooding her body and manifesting itself as the tiniest of smiles on her lips. It felt like an eon ago that she had last heard an appreciative compliment from an elder, she knew that she was a valuable asset to Coach Sylvester, but the woman had never made her feel any better about herself than a common work mule with alopecia. Dakota had soothed her, and she finally felt stable enough to appreciate the pleasure of hearing his obvious disdain when he regarded Rachel's nose.
She had even needed to bite down on her tongue against a low chuckle that threatened to rise from her throat when Dakota honed in on Finn. The choreographer was attacking with words that Quinn herself had often wanted to scream out loud, unapologetically accentuating her boyfriend's sluggish smile and graceless limbs as a translation for stupidity.
Though as quickly as it had ignited, her self-assurance dampened and faded away to reveal the twisting knot of guilt in her stomach. She watched as each member of the glee club averted their eyes to the ground, attempting to mask the hurt etched plainly on their faces. It was the first time that Quinn had been present to witness the damage that a cruel, premeditated insult could do. In the halls she would brush past someone, knocking her shoulder into theirs and turning her face at the last moment to snap something unpleasant directly into their ear, making sure it was heard and processed clearly. Then she would casually walk away, not sparing a glance backwards to see if her prey was angry, crying or even dropping to their knees and commencing a mass suicide with everyone else she had bullied.
But it was different in the choir room; she had been forced to stand in the same vicinity of those she had actively sought to antagonize and watch the repercussions of what such cruelty could achieve. She had let her own chin fall forward, eyeing the linoleum and momentarily enabling the sorrowful tension in the air to permeate her senses. She let Dakota's harsh insight wash over her, imagining herself in the place of any one of the teenagers standing close by. She could feel their vulnerability; smell the self-loathing that seeped from the open wounds that she had never allowed to heal. She had said far worse things to each of them, and she couldn't begin to imagine how it must have made them feel because hearing a complete stranger spitefully telling them they were all meaningless felt terrible even though it wasn't directed at iher/i.
Dakota had given them an ultimatum disguised as a question; they could either conform to his way of operating - sacrificing their dignity in the process - or he would leave and take any chance they might have had at placing at Sectionals with him. Her face turned to the left in unexpected surprise when Finn stated that he was quitting the club. Her ears barely registered the sound of Tina, Mercedes and Artie doing the same. She could see the side of Santana's face; her friend not attempting to hide a satisfied smirk of victory. The Cheerios' scheme was playing out beautifully, each domino having been previously put in place and now falling messily but in perfect synchronization, chaos in its wake.
The remorse of every hurtful comment she had ever made twisted inside of her, threading and tangling together until her heart was painfully constricted in their grip. She had wanted to stop her teammates from leaving the room. She had wanted to tell them that they weren't insignificant at all, that each and every one of them was talented and special and deserved to be seen and appreciated for being exactly who they were.
But she couldn't. Instead she silently willed Dakota to suddenly develop some humanity, and ignored the unbridled pleasure emanating from the two girls standing either side of her. Her brain was overloaded with the internal struggle between Quinn Fabray and Quinn, the vulnerable little girl that was well on her way to becoming absolutely sure that she had ruined her life. She had crossed her wrists over her stomach subconsciously, failing to ignore the inner monologue of an eight year old Quinn tearfully asking her babysitter over and over why her mother had drank the poison that made her go to sleep on the coach and not wake up when she shook her.
It was Rachel's voice that had broken through her reverie; Quinn ran the pad of her thumb over her abdomen a few times as the memory of her childhood with an alcoholic mother slipped away. She listened intently as Rachel delivered the speech that she couldn't, watching Dakota's face for every miniscule reaction to the inspiring words falling from the brunette's lips.
Quinn had been understandably bitter that it was Rachel Berry who could so effortlessly boost the morale of the defeated group of teens. After all, the brunette had seemed to make it her mission in life to take from Quinn every one of the little things she actually cared for. Leadership included.
Rachel made a show of firing Dakota, and Quinn noted the unadulterated respect in Finn's eyes as he appraised the shorter girl. He looked at Rachel in a way that he had never looked at her and suddenly the desire to destroy every fiber of Rachel Berry was back with a vengeance. She found little comfort in Dakota hurriedly picking up his duffel bag and scurrying out of the room with Finn at his heals, arms held out in front of his body, knees locked and eyes unseeing as he moaned cannibalistically.
Her patience finally shattered when Rachel - after giggling at her boyfriends antics - stretched up to throw her arms around his neck in a loose hug, ignoring the hand Finn had held out for a high five. Quinn wrapped her hand around Santana's bicep, not caring that she could feel the skin beneath her fingertips concaving around the pressure of her nails. She pulled the girl out of the choir room, barking over her shoulder for Brittany to follow. She had not relinquished her grip until they reached the door to Coach Sylvester's office.
Santana had been hesitant to approach Sue so soon after their carefully laid plans had backfired, but Quinn needed to be confronted by the wrath of the cheerleading coach immediately. She needed Sue's biting cruelty to quash the lingering remnants of empathy coursing through her veins. She wanted to be reminded of what was important to her, to revert back to the head cheerleader who felt nothing when ruling the school with an iron fist.
Coach Sylvester had said everything that Quinn had expected her to, that they were failures and a disappointment to both the team and to themselves. But Quinn found that her words lacked their usual power. Instead of feeling sufficiently chastised, the blonde felt the regret of what she had willingly allowed herself to become over the past year and some double in size.
Santana had fled the room in tears after having their tanning privileges revoked for the remainder of the semester - a punishment that didn't really affect Quinn because she cared too much about her skin to subject it to the harmful UV rays of the sun beds in Lima's rundown iU Can Tan/i salon.
She had hesitated in the doorway, knowing that she would be seriously reprimanded for the words spilling past her lips. She thanked Coach Sylvester, though her ears were still ringing with the proclamation Rachel had made minutes before. She thanked the older blonde for helping her understand that there was no reason to punish others for your own shortcomings if you were able to deal with them and allow your full potential to be noticed.
She knew that it was too little too late and that nobody was even around to witness her moment of redemption, but she had felt the need to say it even so. She just wanted to remember that the kind hearted little girl who believed anything to be possible in the world was still somewhere inside of her. She hadn't waited to gauge Sue's reaction; she just nodded once and left the room completely. Though it was Friday and therefore a game night, Quinn was thankful that McKinley had an away game that week so the Cheerios' attendance was not a requirement.