Well I am glad that a lot of you guys seem to think that I have executed this idea well. I was worried people would see it as just another high school faberry fic and roll their eyes. Thanks to those of you who followed your curiosity and read the first chapter, and an ever bigger thanks to those who took time out of their day to review. Massive compliment. ;)
Quinn parked up outside of the Berry household, and drummed her fingers against the steering wheel. The last time that she'd seen this house, it had looked like a fraying mummy. The entire thing had been Azimo's idea; Rachel had apparently shot down his romantic advances. So naturally his next course of action had been to buy fifty-eight rolls of novelty bacon-scented toilet roll.
Quinn had been there right along with the rest of them that night, cracking eggs against the auburn bricks that made up the dead unlit house. Dressed from head to toe in black, she'd moved with the shadows, whilst the likes of Azimo, Karofsky, Santana, Finn, and Brittany had papier mâchéd the large front window.
The Lima Police Department were still looking for the culprits.
Quinn had a feeling that Rachel knew the truth though.
As she dragged her gaze over the house, she noticed a small surveillance camera twigging sophisticatedly out of the brickwork. That was new. It was slick too; barely noticeable but for a squint.
She looked at her watch and a growl bounced quietly around her throat. Surely Rachel had seen her parked outside by now...
Her well-manicured fingers continued to drum away. Fuck if she was knocking the front door. Rachel's fathers most likely despised her, and there just wasn't time for a grilling from them, when she had to talk their daughter through the day's plan.
The quirky red front door gently clunked open soon after, the noise nudging Quinn's eyes in the house's direction once more, where they zeroed in on Rachel, who was dressed even more obnoxiously, today, than she normally was.
Quinn's fist clenched and trembled in her lap. She was certain that Rachel's over-the-top ensemble was no mere coincidence. No, she saw the garish hand band bow and those navy blue Penny Loafers for what they were; Rachel was planning to make her work incredibly hard to get McKinley High to buy that she was dating her.
"You wanted this, Quinn," she sternly reminded herself. "Suck it up, and do what needs to be done!"
Right then and there, as she thought about holding Berry's hand, and gazing into her eyes lovingly, it struck her that this was not going to be the last time that she heard that pep talk from her own lips.
She pulled the lock in her door up, listening to them all unlatch as RuPaul skipped down the steps that led to her house.
A small tremble worked through the vehicle when Rachel opened the passenger door, and settled into the seat. Smiling, she passed her palms over her skirt to protect her modesty. She was quite eager. There was a part to be played.
The smell of peaches suddenly swirled around the confined space.
Quinn grumpily wrinkled her nose, because for as cheap as it smelled, she liked it.
"Good morning Quinn. Thank you for arriving early. I feared that you wouldn't."
"Now you want to be all nice and polite, after you flipped me off yesterday? You know, I'm not gonna forget that," Quinn bitterly reminded her, as she lowered her one hand down to the key that dangled from the ignition.
Rachel swiftly reached for said hand, halting it - against its owner's wishes - from undergoing any further movement. "Before we go..." She paused, pulling a neat sheet of paper out of her bag's smaller compartment, along with her cell phone.
Quinn had always been intellectually sharp. She had caught onto what was happening before she could even think to frown.
"You're so annoying! We're not doing that now, Man Hands! We have to talk about how we're going to play things today!"
"No," Rachel drawled patiently, as if she were addressing a child. "We are, in fact, going to do this now Quinn Fabray. Or I'm afraid there's going to be nothing to play out. The insurance comes first. You have given me no reason to believe that this isn't just another vicious prank of yours." Her eyes blinked with an unyielding but owlish twinkle.
After a few tense seconds Quinn growled, snatching the sheet of paper from the brunette. She quickly ran her eyes over what was written on it. But her gaze hastened to return and linger on the clear red lettering once what was written had actually sunk in. One of her perfectly threaded eyebrows slowly hinged up. She spun the sheet of paper around so that Rachel would look at it. "Really?" she asked, monotone.
"What?" Rachel frowned, sub-consciously lifting her chin as she felt the power leaving out through her chest to pour into Quinn's. She'd been enjoying the rush of power over McKinley's Head Cheerleader perhaps a little too much. And now... "What's wrong with what I've written?"
Quinn's pink and glossy lips cracked into half a grin as she turned the paper back around and read, "I was the one who stole those cell phones from the girl's locker room, suckas?" She eyed Rachel almost obsessively, attempting to get the urban slang to sit with those knee-high Argyle socks, and that monstrosity of a head band.
Yep. Failure was how that inevitably ended. "Suckas? Really?"
Rachel held her phone up to the blonde who was essentially making fun of her, and huffily clicked the button on the side of the device.
The flash momentarily washed the space between them with light.
As Quinn aggressively clawed the air for Rachel, she squeezed her eyes shut, blinded by the almost psychedelic white spots that littered the space behind her eyelids. "Take that God damn flash off, idiot!" she yelled, furious.
"My thumb slipped." Rachel casually waved it off, before venturing into her cell phone's settings and disabling the flash mechanism. "But that will hopefully teach you not to mock your girlfriend in the future. I will have you whipped and trained within a week."
Quinn could hear the annoying smirk that danced all over Treasure Trail's lips. It clearly hadn't been an accident.
Her sight cleared eventually and she used it wisely, sending a skin-curdling glare Rachel's way. "I'm not playing games with you, dwarf! I can make this entire experience as dark, for you, as you're so clearly trying to make it for me."
The brunette shrugged as though she was oblivious. "I apologize for temporarily blinding you, Quinn. Now, if -"
"Did you turn the flash off?" Quinn barked over her.
"Yes."
"Then let's take this freaking picture already!" The Head Cheerleader proceeded to angle her body, and press her back to her door as tightly as it would fit. She held the stupid piece of paper at chest level, almost like a mug-shot. It might as well have been, being that it implied what it implied. "Take the shot!"
Rachel carefully drew her phone back, and then took it forward again, experimenting with the depth and angle of the shot. "Smile, like you're smug about the fact that you stole those phones," she instructed in a low focused murmur.
Whilst gritting her teeth the entire time, Quinn forced out a smirk.
"That's... great. But if you could just make it a little less painful? More smug."
"Take the shot now, before it gets a whole lot more painful for you!"
Without warning the car lit up with another flash, although it was a lot less intense than the last one.
"Are you fucking serious?"
Rachel's eyes took to scrutinizing the image that her phone had captured. "Oh," she finally replied, albeit absently. "That was the secondary flash. I failed to disable that one. Most of the time I forget that it's even there."
"God!" Quinn grimaced, knowing that she was going to be spending a lot more time with this... this intentionally difficult pest. "I cannot believe that you're this irksome! No way are you this aggravating!"
It suddenly dawned on her that there was a good chance that she was going to get to know the real Rachel Berry, and not just the dwarfy, big-nosed, pathetically unfashionable, ruthlessly ambitious caricature that everybody had turned her into in their minds.
What if the real Rachel Berry was even more unbearable than her caricature?
Quinn blanched, gripping the steering wheel tightly as if to comfort her mind.
Rachel put her phone away. "Yes," she nodded, unapologetically, "I am this irksome. What were you expecting, Quinn? You're going to see everything that I do through the fact that you dislike me anyway, whether I am that way or not. I might as well play along, and irritate that superiority complex out of you." She sat back, her back hitting the seat with a petulant thud as she tugged her seat-belt on, and then folded her arms.
She was right, Quinn concluded after a few seconds of pensively watching the other girl. If they'd been two friends, most of what had just transpired would have come under the funny mishaps category.
But there would be more time to ponder that some other time, like when she was crawling the walls with boredom, or something.
There couldn't have been more than fifteen minutes left until that jarring first school bell.
Quinn blindly tossed the incriminating sheet of paper into the back seat, and pounced. "We need to talk about the plan for today, and by we I mean that I'm going to tell you, and you're going to follow every last direction down to the letter. Understood?"
"You forget, Quinn," Rachel spat whilst making a point not to look at her long-time bully, "that I now have pictorial leverage over you. Not only that, but you need me. Yes, I would really like the merciless bullying to cease. But I'll live if it doesn't." It was at that point that she turned her head, fingered some hair out of her face, and regarded the scowling blonde nonchalantly.
"What are you getting at?" Quinn ground out through her teeth. Her eyes narrowed with nothing but bad intentions, boring into the impossible midget.
Rachel shrugged a shoulder, and was blunt when she said, "I want to have some creative control over how we go about this dating sham."
Now that that was out there, she went back to quietly peering out of her window; it was seriously lovely weather out.
Quinn's knuckles inevitably grew white around the steering wheel. Angry red sores were going to blemish her soft delicate palms soon, but in that moment she felt not a morsel of pain. She felt nothing but ire and frustration. "Creative control?" she yelled. A band of her soft blonde hair popped loose from her previously perfect ponytail. "This isn't one of your awful stage productions! This is my life! We do this my way, Rachel!"
"Well what do you know; you do know my name," Rachel retorted chirpily. Her sudden grin was infuriating. But as quickly as it was there, it was gone. "Nevertheless I've changed my mind. Now I want full creative control over how we navigate this dating sham!"
For a moment, Quinn seriously considered tying Rachel up, dumping her somewhere rural, and finding another loser to help her carry out her plan. The outcome wouldn't be as effective if it wasn't Rachel - Quinn might even have to rearrange a few of her meticulously thought-out steps - but it would still work...
"Do you hear that, Quinn?" Rachel suddenly asked. Her tone was different now; firm with the purpose of driving home its point, but softer somehow. "Do you hear your frustration in the silence - that hopelessness? Do you feel it? The unspeakable anger and frustration that you can't direct anywhere else but inwards, because the person that you're interacting with is being completely and utterly unreasonable?"
The hellish mist before Quinn's eyes gradually cleared, the world around her slowly phasing back into her awareness. She'd heard every one of Rachel's questions though. The only difference was that now she could see the agony that was etched into Rachel's face, to go along with those questions.
The answers were simple.
Yes, she felt it.
Yes, she heard it.
But she commanded her lips to remain as they were. Sealed.
So Rachel continued. "That is how you and your goons make me feel on a daily basis. Feel it, Quinn! I may never get a chance to inflict it upon you again. When you and your goons aspire to silence me, and strip me of all color, I feel that and more! I just want you to remember that when you look at me from now on, Quinn. See that I still manage to laugh, smile, dance, sing, and enjoy my life!"
"Alright!" Quinn shouted, if not for anything else but to silence the brunette's rant. She'd heard enough, and they didn't have time for this! "Ok! I get it. I'm a bad person! But you won't have to go through that once I'm back with Finn," she played along, in the hopes that telling Rachel what she most likely wanted to hear would end this chapter, so that they could move onto more pressing matters.
But Rachel merely rolled her eyes at the blonde's paper thin performance.
Her efforts to make Quinn understand the damage that she'd done, over the years, had failed, and right along with them: any hopes that the blonde would genuinely feel bad and apologize, so that they could get through this situation without her holding so much resentment towards the pretty cheerleader.
But Quinn didn't care. She'd proven herself to be completely unapologetic.
Without a second thought, Rachel made her choice. She would continue to make this difficult. Quinn didn't deserve her utmost cooperation or her expertise in improvisation. "It would be smart to get going. We can discuss today's itinerary in the car before the bell."
Whilst eyeing the stony brunette through a suspicious squint, Quinn decided that she didn't like the feel of this sudden shift at all. It was an unnecessary complication in an otherwise simple six-step plan.
She growled low in the back of her throat and cranked the key in the ignition.
Yesterday, as she'd watched Rachel pull out of McKinley High's parking lot, she had wondered what she had gotten herself into.
Today, as she pulled off, she had received her answer...
Parked, soon after, in the more or less empty McKinley High parking lot, she quieted the engine, silencing the only source of sound that had perpetuated throughout the otherwise silent car ride.
Man Hands was giving her the silent treatment. She was sure of it.
It irked her beyond belief. To the point that the tips of her alabaster ears tinged a sore pink. It wasn't winter. She wasn't cold.
She was irritated.
Her peers didn't ignore her... except for the fact that some were starting to now that Finn had broken up with her.
The reminder of her diminishing social standing lit a new fire under her ass where the other one had dwindled.
"This is how today's gonna go down," she began, her eyes focused, "we're going to hold hands as soon as we exit the car. When we make it to the hallway, we'll go to your locker. I'll discreetly hand you the rose that I have in my bag, whilst concealing the exchange by stroking the small of your back. That will divert everybody's eyes. You'll then pretend to pull the rose out of your locker. I'll smile adoringly at you as you smell it, and then you'll throw your arms around me. After that I'll kiss you on your forehead. At lunch, meet me in the toilets that are out of bounds, and I'll fill you in on the outline for the rest of the day, as well as snap some cute photos to create fake history for our relationship. Any classes we share are to be spent shooting one another steamy glances. I want pet names and longing gazes. Are you clear on all of that?"
"Quite."
Quinn glared at the monosyllabic diva. "If you fuck this up, it's going to cost you your precious voice. I'm persistent and driven. So I'll figure something out to make that happen, believe me!"
"How pleasant," Rachel quipped sarcastically. "It won't, however, be necessary. I plan on using this as a serious acting exercise and challenge, Quinn," was the sum total of what she had to say in response, dig intended.
Though beneath her casual exterior she was stirring a figurative cauldron, and smirking as the delicious aroma of pre-satisfaction wafted up her nostrils.
She wasn't planning on fucking anything up. Just the opposite actually...
"Not that much of a challenge! Let's not act like you wouldn't be falling all over yourself if this was real," Quinn just had to counter.
Rachel let her have it. After all, she was going to laugh last...
For as dead as McKinley High's school grounds had been five minutes ago, they now crawled with life; rife with teen spirit and anxious social hierarchy.
Far from it were any of Quinn and Rachel's peers expecting the bombshell that was about to hit them. They weaved in and out of one another like the sun rose every morning, none of them batting an eyelid.
Just another day at McKinley High.
Except that it wasn't.
"Are you ready?" Quinn asked, poising her hand on her door's lever.
"I offered to hold your hand minutes ago in the spirit of practice. You declined. I would say that it is you who isn't ready."
"Shut up and get out of my car," the blonde hissed.
Rachel chuckled merrily, and vacated the vehicle. She skip-walked around to the driver's side, opening the door eagerly.
When Quinn stepped out, and hiked her bag up on her shoulder you wouldn't have known that just seconds before she'd been scowling. Her cheeks rode up, full and rosy, with the pseudo grin that she shone down at Rachel. "Thanks for getting my door, baby," she said, stiltedly leaning down towards the brunette. It was now or never. Fighting a grimace, she just did it - leaned down and brushed her lips against the brunette's temple. She hoped that it had looked more graceful than it had felt.
Rachel only grinned up at her in response
Quinn just couldn't help but feel like the syrupy-ness of it was a threat of things to come...
Still, she smiled back, hip-checked her door closed, and allowed Rachel to slip her hand into her own.