Author's Note: A drabble to build a bridge between canon and fanon. A 'missing scene' from the flashbacks in Diamonds Along the Way.

With Every Broken Bone

I saw so many places, the things that I did.
With every broken bone, I swear I lived.
~I Lived, One Republic

Everything is red and white and reverberating with music. Her mind tries to piece together the where and the why—she's in the high school auditorium, but she doesn't remember how she got there or when. She's certain that she remembers graduating from McKinley a long time ago and yet it feels like she's never left—like nothing else exists in her life outside of this place. It's almost like she's been stuck in some weird timewarp that makes it impossible for her to place her disjointed memories of the last seven years onto a timeline with any real accuracy. The faces around her are achingly familiar—people she knows deep in her bones that she hasn't seen or spoken with in years. Is that Matt Rutherford? And when did Sue Sylvester become the vice president of the United States? She's pretty damned certain that she should remember voting against her. And hadn't Rachel been pregnant, like, five minutes ago? Where's the baby? Was it a boy or a girl? Why doesn't she know that? And why can't she remember Rachel's wedding to Jesse St. James?

Wait.

Rachel was supposed to marry Finn Hudson, wasn't she? Quinn had been on her way…

Quinn reaches for answers that are quickly slipping away as the faces around her blur and her vision narrows on a memorial plaque. For Finn.

Because Finn is dead—but she can't remember how he died. Was there an accident?

Quinn remembers the screech of brakes and the crunch of metal—then nothing.

No. No, that's wrong. She can't be remembering Finn's accident. She's remembering hers.

Moments in her life that had felt undeniably solid only seconds ago—graduation, a strange visit to Rachel's loft in New York, half a night of drunken sex with Santana, inexplicably dating that guy from Gossip Girl before an attempt at settling with Puck—suddenly shift and crumble into nonsense. She feels an all too familiar twist of terror coil deep in her belly as she struggles to pull together the pieces of a life that has gone shockingly, frighteningly blank beyond the sound of shattering glass and the pain of shattering bones.

A surge of adrenaline rushes through her body, causing her heart to pound in her ears as she pries her heavy, sticky eyes open. There's a bright light casting an ethereal glow around a large, blurred form, and Quinn blinks once, twice, three times before the haze clears enough for her to recognize the person hovering over her.

"Finn?" she rasps, squinting her eyes in an attempt to make his face a little clearer, and the corner of his mouth quirks up into a sad, lopsided grin.

"Hey."

"Am I dead?" she asks uncertainly.

Finn's face crumples into an expression of relief, and he shakes his head. "You scared everyone pretty good though," he admits lifting a nervous hand to rub along the back of his neck. "The doctors say you're gonna be okay. It's been a couple of days since," he swallows, dropping his hand into his lap and looking away, "everything happened. They're still keeping you pretty drugged up." He offers her another shaky smile. "Must be strong, too. I guess you've been saying some weird stuff every time you wake up."

Quinn frowns as little bits of fractured memories—real ones—begin to slip into the spaces left by the morphine-induced hallucinations that have muddled her brain. "Like what?" she asks cautiously, feeling a trickle of apprehension at what might have slipped out of her mouth without her knowledge.

Finn chuckles, shrugging. "Brittany said you asked her how she liked MIT, and then you congratulated her and Santana on their marriage." His smile dims then, and he shrugs again. "You told Puck he looked good in uniform, and you offered to give Kurt an egg…whatever that means."

"I don't remember any of that," Quinn mutters—the frayed images from her dream are already falling away from her, lost to the waking world the way individual drops of rain are lost to the rivers and lakes and oceans.

"Um, Rachel's just down in the cafeteria getting some coffee. Do you think you're gonna stay awake for a while?" Finn asks hopefully. "She's been by to visit a few times, but you were always pretty out of it. If you pass out again after I got to talk to you, I'm never gonna hear the end of it."

Quinn isn't sure what to answer. Her mind feels thick and fuzzy, like it's filled with cotton (and frankly, so does her mouth), and her body feels like it's weighed down into the mattress. And a steady, throbbing ache is already beginning to chase away the morphine. She honestly can't say if she's completely awake or not. She barely remembers any of her visitors, though she knows now that she'd woken up to find her mother at her bedside several times, and the stuffed mouse on her table was a gift from Brittany, and, "You and Rachel aren't married," she remembers, feeling that same relief all over again that she'd experienced when Rachel had first told her. She'd been sitting right there—right where Finn is sitting now—holding Quinn's hand and blaming herself for Quinn's accident.

Finn frowns, sagging lower in his seat. "No. It…we were waiting for you," he tells her with a catch in his voice. "And now, Rachel…she thinks we should wait until we're out of school," he grumbles before he shakes his head again. "But, I mean, I guess we've got time, right?"

Quinn nods her head slowly. "Yeah. Yeah, we've got time," she agrees, feeling an odd sense of relief in that simple truth. She lets go of the lingering threads of her dream and smiles. "I think I'd like to see Rachel now," she tells him, silently vowing not to waste the time she's been given.