This was inspired by a nightmare I just woke up from. It is 3.57 in the morning and I have had little over two hours sleep, so I apologise for any suckage. Next time I want to drink, I will remind myself this is what happens and hopefully opt for lemonade instead. Like pretty much every chapter, this one comes with a trigger warning.
Laughter. Cold, cruel and manic, it rang bodiless through the walls of her bedroom. It was not a voice she recognised, but strange and unknown and that just made it all the more terrifying. She could not seek comfort in the thought of familiarity. It did not speak, but the laughter grew louder and higher, becoming almost childlike in pitch. It sounded closer. It had not even been in the room to begin with, but now she heard it right outside her bedroom door. The sound closed in on her, louder and more haunting by the second.
Terrified, Rachel lunged for the duvet to whisk it over her head. She was mature enough to know such childish night time habits would be little protection, but she was too afraid to care. But as much as she tried to make her arms move, they would not obey the commands of her brain. They remained firmly by her sides and the duvet somewhere around her waist. With a gasp of panic, Rachel tried frantically to move her legs, her feet, her hands, any part of her body. She could not so much as close her eyes to shut out the darkness around her that had become so suddenly threatening and haunted.
The laughter came closer, right inside her room. Without the aid of light, Rachel knew there was no body to the voice. It was just the laugh; crazy, childish laughter that should have been innocent, but was twisted with the cruel taints of evil. There was something in that laugh that she did not want to meet, without having to know a single other thing about it rather than the way it sounded to her ears, the way it chilled her every bone, Rachel knew she didn't want it to find her. She had to move, get as far away from the soulless sound as she ever could.
But the more she tried to move, the more she was frozen, lying on her back in her own bed, the place she once felt so safe was now her own death trap, the last place she would be as the creature with the laugh took her. The comfort of the bed was deceptive, it lured her into a false sense of security, the large warm duvet acting as a protector, but not it was betraying her and something once so comforting turning in such a way scared Rachel almost as much as the laughter.
Without any knowledge of what was causing the sound, Rachel knew without a doubt it was going to kill her. And it was there. The sound was right beside her ear, so close it tickled the inside. She tried to scream, but just like the rest of her body, her voice was frozen. No one would hear her anyway. She was alone, alone in the terrifying darkness with the presence of evil and she was going to die just like that. Alone and petrified.
…
The tears were already on her face when her eyes snapped open, and she felt the urge like an itch before she was even properly awake. She needed it, she needed to feel the pain, she needed to push the dream, that sound, out of her head because otherwise she was going to lie awake, and when she was awake her mind wondered.
It wondered to all the things she didn't want to think about, everything she did her best to push out of her mind. When she was awake she heard all the taunts, she saw the comments left on her my-space page flashing through her mind, she heard her mother's voice, all the rejections over and over, and in those hours in the dark, Rachel felt as if she were literally breaking, like a sharp blade was tearing all the way through her insides. Putting the blade to her outside would blunt the one on the inside.
Puck would kill her if he found out, but if she didn't do it, she would lie awake and hear those things, until eventually, she might be able to cry herself to sleep. Her blades would chase that hurt away, silence those voices and give Rachel peace in her mind. Peace enough to sleep, to focus her mind on what she wanted it to be on, her Broadway dreams, hopes of a better life and the vision of one day giving her acceptance speech for a Tony award and telling the story of her struggles in High School, maybe even of this night. If she could imagine that, she would sleep.
Not for the first time, Rachel was grateful her dads were away. If they were asleep in the next room and she had to be as silent as possible, that would make all of this a lot harder. With them gone, she could make all the noise she wanted. She started in her room, searching through her draws, under her bed, even in her en-suite bathroom, but it seemed Noah really had thought of everything. She could not even find a sharpened piece of plastic, or something to snap. Even her straightening irons were gone.
Briefly, Rachel considered burning herself under the tap, or even with the kettle, but it was not the pain she needed. It was the pressure of something pressing into her skin, the feeling of it gliding across, she needed the opening for all the bad feeling, all the voices to escape through and let the calm in. She needed to see it, right there on her skin, obvious that she had done it to herself because then she would have something to hide, and it was that which gave her the power. A secret kept to herself over everyone who tormented her, they pushed her down, both literally and with their words and her own private way of hurting herself, of keeping the secret and hiding it every day was the only form of power she had over them.
It was not until she reached her dads' room that Rachel found what she was looking for. When she was younger, and their jobs had been less demanding, or at least less demanding than having a young daughter, Rachel had spent every evening and weekend with at least one of them, doing various activities for her entertainment. When they weren't taking her to clubs and classes, there was a phase of craft, and for that, her dads had brought a full craft set, complete with knives. Of course Rachel hadn't been allowed to use them, but the box was still in their everything draw, buried under mounds of other things and it was the one place Puck hadn't thought to check.
As soon as her hand closed around the handle, Rachel felt the calm begin to set in. She was safe again, she had something to chase away the restless pain. With a much less frantic pace than before, Rachel headed towards the bathroom and closed the door behind her, she knew no one else was in the house, but somehow it felt more private with the door closed, more like hers. She even closed her eyes as she dragged the knife across her skin, falling into her own private world of darkness.
Twenty seven minutes later, and her arm had not stopped bleeding. She had never done it there before. It was new, a clean, fresh canvas for her to paint whatever she liked on. Only the bright, clean patch had been all too appealing, and she had cut deeper than she was meant to. The blood had begun as a steady flow, but it wasn't letting up. All Rachel could do was press an already blood soaked towel to the wound and pray that it would soon stop.
…
A heavy banging woke her up. It forced her eyes open, even as she tried to ignore it. She blinked, momentarily confused at waking up on the bathroom floor before she remembered the previous night. She had fallen asleep shortly after wrapping a towel around her arm, exhausted. Light shone through the bathroom window, soaking the room in a grey glow. From her place on the floor, Rachel could the late signs of morning glimmering outside. It should be dark. It usually was when she got herself out of bed for her morning exercise ritual, that had been happening less and less in the past months.
Weakly, Rachel hooked one hand over the sink to pull herself up, her legs shaking slightly as she did so. She felt drained, as if someone had taken her all her energy and replaced it with an emptiness. Her arm was stinging painfully, and hesitantly, Rachel gazed down at it. The towel she had wrapped in the very early hours of the morning was soaked in blood, the once blue material had been stained a strange purple brown colour. In many places, the blood remained wet.
There was a gentle knock at the bathroom door, startling Rachel out of her exhaustion. She whirled around on the spot and stared at the still closed door, just in time to see it open at the same time as a familiar voice called her name. Kurt stopped dead in his tracks at the sight of her, his mouth falling open slightly in surprise. Rachel wanted to say something in explanation, but there was none. None that weren't the truth anyway, and that was even less of an option, but Kurt was still staring at her as if she had grown a third arm.
"Rachel, what are you doing? Why are you not dressed? And even though it does not match the scheme of the rest of the bathroom, please tell me that towel is supposed to be that colour."
There had to be some reason she could give, an explanation to cover her tracks. She was an actress for goodness sake, why did her impromptu performing skills fail her at the worst possible moment? Her concentrating wasn't helped by the throbbing pain in her arm and the exhaustion that clouded her brain. She could not even think of anything to say as Kurt hurried into the bathroom and took her hand in his, stretched her arm out and pulled away the towel.
She heard his breath catch when he saw the cuts, two of them, both clearly very deep and still oozing small beads of blood. His hand tightened around hers, and Rachel waited for him to say something, to call her out on her secret. She bit down on her lip and wished she could be anywhere but there, even being in school and tormented by Karofsky would be better than being here, with Kurt with his eyes locked on the damage she had done to herself.
"What happened?" Kurt's voice was not accusing, or horrified, as Rachel had been expecting. It was concerned, questioning. Perhaps she could still save herself.
"I caught it in the light fan," she said, without hesitation. The lie fell from her lips with ease, as if she had planned from the start what to say if anyone were to confront her about the wounds. "There was a fly on my ceiling and as I went to swat it, my dad called me and distracted me, I accidentally swung my arm into the fan." Finally, her acting skills were back. She sounded slightly concerned, not overly casual, but not in too much of a panic either.
"Why didn't you tell your dads?" Kurt said as he inspected her arm more closely. Rachel wished he wouldn't. The longer he stared, the more likely he was to see past her lies. "They should have taken you to the hospital."
"They'd gone out." The lies were becoming all too easy. "That's what they called up to me about, they went to meet up with some old friend who were in town, they warned me they might stay over the night."
Kurt said nothing for a several minutes, as if considering whether to believe her or not. He was no longer looking at her arm, but at her face. Rachel stared back at him, her expression innocent, and slightly apologetic, as if she were acknowledging she knew she had handled the situation wrongly. Finally, he let go of her arm and turned to the towel rack behind him, plucking off a fresh one to wrap around her arm. For a second, Rachel thought of snatching her arm away as the part of her that didn't want to ruin another towel kicked in, but before she could, Kurt had wrapped it firmly around her and taken her hand again.
"C'mon Princess, I'm taking you to a Doctor before school. That is if we ever get to school, you know how long these places can have you waiting."
"But we can't miss school!" Rachel argued, before she could stop herself. "I have a perfect attendance record and I don't want to throw that out for something that can easily be held off until the hours after my eduction had commenced for the day. And I'm not even dressed, I know you think I dress like an overgrown toddler at the best of times, but my fashion choices far outshine my nightwear."
"Rachel, please be quiet and get your coat. If you change now, you'll just get your clothes speckled with blood, and as much as I think it would be a gift to the fashion planet, we're far more likely to get seen quicker if you walk in looking like death with patches of blood on your pyjamas. Now come on, before we have to miss a whole day of school."
Kurt smiled at her, and Rachel found herself returning it without having to force it. He slipped an arm around her waist, helping to steady her as she shakily began to walk.
"Oh how I've missed your ramblings," said Kurt, squeezing her waist gently, and for the first time in weeks, Rachel felt as if someone just might like the person she used to be, and somewhere inside her stirred a faint flicker of hope that there was a small piece of her that just might have something better to offer.
Just to clear something up, Finn ignored Rachel in the last chapter because he knew he couldn't go to her as he normally would. He started to, and then remembered they had broken up. Probably should have made that more clear, but never mind.
If you review, you get my love, and since I'm awesome (and have an ego to match Rachel's), there is no better gift ;)