Work Text:
The housing market in New York City is a nightmare.
This is something Rachel knows, has known – she’s well aware that her Bushwick place was a one-in-a-million find, that by all means two college freshmen with an unpaid Vogue internship, a great deal of singing talent, and very little else between them should never have been able to afford it, that even with Santana’s late-stage addition rent was tight and the place could have likely fit five more subletters.
Unfortunately none of that practical knowledge means much of anything in the face of her current predicament: Fanny Brice split between herself and Santana, the apartment she’d started to call home rank with negativity, and her oldest friend turned against her (and it probably says something that she’s only known her oldest friend for four years) and so she does the only reasonable thing and she moves back into the NYADA dorms.
They’re ugly, and cramped, and she doesn’t like most of the girls on her hall but they are open and that is what matters, so she says to herself, over and over again, like a mantra, as her roommate blasts (of all things!) the Cats soundtrack.
She can’t even sing - not that this really counts for anything when your accompaniment is the Cats soundtrack - and yet Rachel needs to deal with her, every single day, and she’s impressed by the fact that Rachel is the lead in a Broadway musical (who wouldn’t be!) but she is not, apparently, impressed enough to stop playing the Cats soundtrack on loop.
***
Quinn is entering the home stretch of her freshman year - a quarter of college, under her belt - and she’s exhausted and the circles under her eyes would likely give Judy a heart attack.
She’s also maybe happier than she’s ever been.
***
“Find a new place yet?”
“Like you care.” Up the ladder, up the ladder, world so far, arm outstretched, give a pause, I’m the greatest star. Rachel’s started to do the steps in her sleep. Santana marks them down. Infuriatingly - because Rachel wishes that she’d just be bad at it, wishes she could give a single excuse she might take to the bank and have her thrown out - Santana is a diligent understudy, shadowing her, memorizing her lines.
“I do, actually. If you get snatched off the train because you’re homeless and you end up on Dateline that’ll overshadow both of us.”
“Right, well, you don’t need to worry about it.” Rachel feigns great interest in Eddie’s dialogue (which she suspects will be cut from the cast recording) and in truth keeps her attention trained on Santana. “I moved back into the NYADA dorms and they were all delighted to have me, and I still qualify for the meal plan, so I don’t even miss our half-cooked disgusting meals that we ate around the table together.”
“We actually get to eat meat now, so.”
“I never stopped you from eating meat.” Next verse - this is just a blocking rehearsal so Rachel doesn’t need to stop the conversation, which she appreciates, and besides she could do “I’m the Greatest Star” in her sleep.
“You guilted us out of it.”
“If you’re looking for ways to villainize me, there are much easier avenues to go about than that.” Back down the ladder, sit down, think hard on it. Big motions, big gestures - that’s how theater is. It’s how Rachel is, too, which is why she loves it.
“How about this: you’re a narcissistic bitch who can’t accept that a good thing happened to someone other than her, and for all your ‘everybody can achieve their dreams if they just work hard enough’ bullshit, you thought I’d be waiting tables forever and you wanted me to.”
“If that’s what you think of me, why are you still trying to have a conversation?”
Santana goes quiet. The ladder teeters, ever so slightly. Rachel feels like she’s won, maybe.
***
Yale is gorgeous in the spring. Allergy-filled, too, but gorgeous.
***
The sun’s gone down by the time rehearsals end and Rachel has all her things secure in her bag, slung over her shoulder, and she heads out dreading the train ride back to NYADA.
“You know, this would be easier if we actually ran lines together.”
Rachel turns, very slowly, and once she’s spun around entirely she sees Santana leaning on the exposed brick of the wall, one boot propped against it, stupidly perfectly elegant even in her workout clothes, even with her shirt hanging off her shoulder and exposing her bra strap, maybe even because of that in a way that Rachel knows, if their positions were reversed, would simply look sloppy on her.
That’s the part of it that really gets under her skin. Nobody will believe “If a Girl Isn’t Pretty” about Santana for a moment whereas - despite the shifting conversations that have occurred since 1964, acceptance semi-broadened - Rachel is not…Rachel could be…
She almost had a nose job at sixteen and she thinks that that speaks for itself.
“Well,” Rachel forces out, seething, layering her voice with every scrap of resentment she can muster, “unfortunately, I’m not in the business of dining with the competition.”
“I mean, suit yourself.” Hands up, eyes rolled, such a Santana move.
“You got the apartment and you’ve made my dream role a nightmare, isn’t that enough?”
“I’m trying to build bridges here, Berry.” Santana steps closer and Rachel’s heart, her damnable heart that she has never needed to guard the way she knows Quinn did, well, it beats and it beats and it wants to run to Santana and forgive her and not waste a single second because Rachel has felt, for the past several months, that she is wasting time.
(Every minute she didn’t spend with Finn weighs heavy on her and the grief hits her in waves and she has never done anything other than push through it; she doesn’t know how to do anything else)
She’s still Rachel, though, and she is stubborn in this as she is in so many things, which is why she doesn’t move, just gives Santana her worst stare, the coldest one, the one that implies this girl isn’t even worth her time.
“Don’t bother,” she says, and walks past her, knocks her bony shoulder, does not even stop or look back, and she would be such an excellent Orpheus, Rachel thinks, she is so good at knowing exactly where she’s headed.
***
Quinn learns about the fact that her two best friends are in a Broadway show together not from the friends themselves but from a clipping in the Lifestyle section of the McKinley alumni e-blasts she’s never known how to block.
There’s a photo of Santana and Rachel, arms around each other, with a little blurb describing how they’re both playing Fanny Brice in the Funny Girl revival, how they’re “causing quite a stir.” Quinn tries not to care.
She manages for about an hour before she phones Santana.
“Were you going to tell me you were in Rachel’s show?”
“The fact that you called it ‘Rachel’s show’ should tell you I wasn’t.” There’s the sound of cars roaring past, louder than usual.
“Are you outside?”
“Yes.”
“Is Rachel there?”
“No. She moved out.” Another car - this one honking louder than Santana’s voice. She’s saving it, probably, for the show.
Sometimes it feels like everyone’s stayed in music but her. Quinn barely sings at all anymore. She wouldn’t be able to tell you a single vocal exercise.
“Oh.”
“Surprised she hasn’t given you her version of the story, complete with the Big Bad Lopez tearing apart her precious theater-kid dreams by daring to be better.”
“We haven’t talked since the funeral.”
The invocation falls like a stone and Quinn regrets it the second she says it. Finn’s one of those things nobody knows how to talk about.
“The funeral you didn’t go to.”
“I’m not talking about this.”
“You brought it up.”
“I haven’t talked to Rachel. That’s it.” Quinn holds her pencil tight enough for it to leave grooves on her finger, flat ridges, red. “Still, it’s great that you’re the understudy. Really.”
“And I got Kurt in the divorce, so that’s…something.”
“Right.” Quinn’s highlighting sentences, figuring she’ll come back to them later, knowing rationally she won’t. Still, she’s a good enough student. Pressed for time, sure. Stressed out of her mind most days, too, but she’s happy.
Happier than these two seem, at least. She doesn’t know how to feel about that.
“Listen. You know what it was like for me. Yes, I was hot and popular and beloved by the majority of the student body for being hot and popular, but I also got outed and couldn’t even kiss my girlfriend for years. So.”
“Your point?”
“I didn’t peak in high school. Everyone thinks I did. I thought I did, for a while, but now I’m Fanny Brice on every night the hobbit gets a cold and I fucking deserve this.” The other side of the line goes quiet and Quinn thinks for a second that Santana’s hung up, or the line’s dead. “I deserve this.”
“Of course you do.”
It’s dark outside - it’s springtime, it’s late, but the night still comes. Quinn should be studying for finals. She should be out with her friends. She shouldn’t be here - shouldn’t still care - but she is, she does.
“I deserve this,” Santana repeats, slower this time, shakier. Quinn holds the phone closer.
“Do you want to come up to New Haven for the weekend? Most of my finals are just essays so I’m actually not that busy.” A lie. Quinn’s still so good at those.
“No. Then she wins and I can’t let her do that, also I’m busy with being a Broadway understudy.”
“That’s fine.” The guilt snakes in her gut: she doesn’t actually want Santana here, and what kind of friend does that make her?
“I hope you’ll see the show, though. Finally use that train pass for something.”
Quinn feels like someone’s weighed her down with bricks. She feels like whatever piper she owes for this college life has come to collect his dues: here is adulthood, here is the death of youth. Here are your two best friends and they are miserable.
Here you are, better than the people you wanted to be. It’s enough to crack her heart in half.
“It’s late. I need to finish this essay - I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“Still the queen of bullshit, huh? I know you don’t want to keep talking. Fine by me.” Some rustling. She must still be out on the balcony. “I’ll let you know how rehearsals are. You tell me about finals, okay?”
“I will.” She will. She’s a liar, she’s been a liar most of her life, she knows this is true anyway.
“Bye.”
Then Santana hangs up. She’s never minced words (the opposite of Rachel, who minces words like she needs to live off them) and Quinn doesn’t know why she’s still startled by the abrupt end to the call.
She lies down and feels a little hollowed out.
***
“Just a little closer. Yeah. Yeah, that’s it, there we go!”
This photographer, Rachel privately thinks, might be the most unpleasant person she has ever interacted with, and given the fact that she currently has her arm looped around Santana’s shoulders, that is saying something.
“Stop digging into my boob,” Santana hisses, impressively managing to smile and actually not move a single one of her cheekbones as she says it. Rachel grimaces and presses her elbow deeper into her boob, as retaliation.
She’d like it if this could go better - more like the way she envisioned it as a kid, where everybody loved her in an uncomplicated way and she was the center of it all - but that isn’t what’s happening.
“Hey, can we get one of the makeup artists over here?” the photographer asks, and Santana furrows her brow.
“What’s wrong with her?”
The photographer addresses his answer to Rachel. “Just that tattoo of yours. It’s easier to cover it up now than airbrush it later, but-”
“Hey.” Santana steps forward - Rachel doesn’t believe it, almost, her heart's already busy seizing up and hurting - and gets right in his face. “You’re not airbrushing that tattoo out of anything. Okay?”
“Okay,” the photographer says, a little scared, and Rachel is still much too prideful to say anything but she stops digging her elbow into Santana’s boob which she considers a concession in its own right.
***
Quinn barely kept anyone’s numbers. She’s of two minds about this. On one hand: fresh start, moving forwards. That’s healthy. On the other: she misses these people.
She shouldn’t, but she does.
Finals loom but her finger hovers over the Call button, over the photo of Rachel that she took herself, junior-year bangs and turtleneck filling the circle, frozen, beaming.
***
Rachel packs enough clothes for a night trip and she boards a train and she sits on the train and she gets off the train and she hails a taxi and it is nighttime by the time she arrives on Yale’s campus and it is even later when she finds Quinn’s dorm and calls her and asks her, in the smallest voice she has ever used, if she could come to the front door.
She does. It’s the first floor of the building so she arrives relatively fast and she’s in a big shirt (her version of pajamas now, Rachel knows) and her glasses are perched on her head and she stares.
“I didn’t know where else to go,” Rachel hiccups, and her right arm hurts from dragging the suitcase all the way, and her left hand hurts from clutching her phone so tight, and all of her is tired in different ways and she is offering her patchwork heart up to Quinn and she is so afraid she won’t take it.
The door is open, and Quinn steps outside and lets it close, and neither of them make any motion to step inside. Rachel can see the yellow light of a common room behind her.
“I’m sure that Santana has given you her version of the story by now-”
“You haven’t talked to me in months.”
“I assumed that you didn’t want to talk to me.” Rachel waits for the reassurance, waits for Quinn to correct her, but she just puts her face in her free hand, exhales long and slow and weary.
“You can’t do this to me. You can’t make me choose between you two.”
“I’m not asking you to choose anything.” It should be snowing. It should be windy. There should be something happening here - it shouldn’t all be so still, it’s been so still for so long.
Rachel wants to cry again and she doesn’t want Quinn to see her cry but some awful part of her actually does because then Quinn would hold her and she remembers from their brief hugs how good she always felt; she’s not a good hugger but she is softer than she looks and she always locked her chin over Rachel’s shoulder, close, a puzzle piece.
“I’m done with this- drama, Rachel.” Quinn leans a little heavier on her cane and Rachel’s heart gives out again. “Now you’re on my doorstep and it’s - what is it? Two in the morning?”
“Eleven P.M.”
***
Quinn’s gone soft.
She wants to bring Rachel inside, talk with her until the morning. She wants so many things but she’s never been any good at wanting.
***
“You did exactly what you set out to do,” Quinn says. “Does it matter if Santana did the same thing?”
“Yes. Yes, it matters, Quinn, because she implied that everything I did was because of her - she implied that it was spite that brought me here and not talent and ambition and drive. I spend my entire life struggling towards something and she expects to just take it? No. No. I can’t accept that. I can’t accept her trying to tear down my entire worldview because for once she was jealous.”
The thing that breaks her is that Quinn is still absolutely, devastatingly, heartbreakingly beautiful, and Rachel wants to kiss her, and Rachel wants to sink into her and stay there, and she feels like she might never get over the chasm it takes to reach her.
“Let’s go inside.”
***
It’s not the first time Rachel’s been in her room, but it still feels weird. Rachel drops her suitcase the moment she’s inside, flexes her fingers, breathes heavy. Quinn wonders if she’s skipping rehearsal for this.
Her roommate’s asleep, thankfully. She’s been asleep for a while and she’s a heavy sleeper - unlike Quinn herself, she’s been told. Apparently she sometimes wakes up drenched in sweat, blocking her head from glass shards that aren’t there.
She doesn’t tell Rachel this.
“I’ll sleep on the floor,” Rachel says automatically.
“No you won’t. There’s room in my bed.”
“I’ve lived in a college dorm for the past three weeks and I know that there’s barely room for one person in a twin, let alone two.” Rachel sort of closes herself behind Quinn’s closet door, starts to tear through her suitcase for pajamas, active and buzzing even when she’s (Quinn hazards to guess) miserable.
“Rachel. It’s fine.”
“No, it’s not, and I think we both know that.” She steps back out - she’s in a show with costume changes, it shouldn’t be weird that she’s an expert in them - in her nightgown, and at least that is the same. “But I’m exhausted and sleeping on the floor is bad for your back, so. If you insist.”
Quinn gets in, moves to the wall. Rachel’s perceptive and she probably knows how loud her heart’s beating, how hot her whole body is running - but at least she can blame that second thing on the lack of AC. It’s May. It makes sense for it to be hot.
So she says, to herself, over and over again until it becomes a mantra and then becomes a slurry of syllables, meaningless noises, marks on a page.
“I’ll be quiet.” Rachel turns over and Quinn can feel her back pressed against her own. She’s so warm. She doesn’t know how a person can be so warm without burning up, without burning out.
“Thank you,” Quinn manages, even if what she really wants to say is don’t be, even if she’s missed Rachel more than she rationally should and she’s desperate to hold this moment in her hands in case it’s the last one.
***
Rachel wakes up the next morning in Quinn’s bed.
She recognizes this before she recognizes anything else about the situation, because she wakes up with her face pressed against Quinn’s neck, at a very weird angle, hay-blonde hair tangled in her mouth.
Rachel moves back, comes slowly to her senses, recalls everything about the previous night and then about all the nights preceding it, remembers Santana, and she wants to go back to sleep.
Unfortunately she can’t do that - she’s awake now, there’s no going back, there’s never any going back - so she settles for going very very still. Closing her eyes, worming away from Quinn, ensuring that they’re not touching any longer. That is a courtesy she can give to her friend, if nothing else.
Breathing. Breathing. She has such good breath control and until very recently she had such good life control and now she only has one of those things.
***
They eat in the tea pantry. It might be the first time anyone’s actually had tea in the tea pantry, but it’s calming enough. Quinn’s made a habit of it. She doesn’t know what Rachel’s made a habit of.
It’s still early morning; nobody’s out yet. Quinn wonders if she and Rachel are the only people awake.
“I needed to get out,” Rachel admits. She looks more tired than Quinn’s ever seen her. She takes a sip of the tea and waves her hand over her tongue. “I needed to - not be around everything, but I know I’ll need to go back anyway.”
Quinn knows better than to ask for anything else. She can’t make Rachel stay with her. She can’t make Rachel do anything - that’s never how they’ve worked.
“So you came here.”
“Cheaper than a plane ticket.”
“So it is.” Quinn loves her. She doesn’t know what to do with it.
“I’ll be out of your hair tomorrow - they don’t hold rehearsals on the weekends, some sort of union thing, so I should be fine. This should all be fine.”
“You don’t sound fine.”
“I’m managing myself perfectly well, Quinn. And I’m in therapy, and I’m working through the pain, and everything is happening as it should, or it was, until Santana undermined everything I’ve worked for over the course of my entire life.”
She’s holding the cup tight enough to burn her hand. Quinn doesn’t pry it away.
“This isn’t something I can help with,” she says, slowly, “is it?”
“No.” Rachel stares at her own reflection in the teacup. “No, it isn’t.”
“Okay.”
***
“The tabloids,” Santana announces, gravely, upon Rachel’s entrance to the theater on Monday, “think we’re dating.”
“That isn’t my problem.” Rachel sets her things down, thinks about Quinn, thinks about Quinn, wants things to feel simple and fears very much that they will never feel simple again.
“You don’t want to put the kibosh on it?”
“Look at you, learning.” Rachel laces it with venom – it’s not a legitimate compliment, it can’t be, but she is so tired of fighting.
“Personally I’m a fan of the general public not thinking we’re secretly lady-lovin' it up between songs, but whatever floats your tiny little boat, I guess.”
“I’ll ask them to print a retraction, not that they will.” Rachel sits down on the couch, flips through her script more as a perfunctory action than anything. They’re both meant to be off-book soon. “That’s one thing you don’t know, Santana: if you don’t have any control over how the population sees you, you’re stuck like that.”
“Right, because it’s not like I was outed and called a dyke for months or anything.”
“You know what I mean.”
“You know what, actually, I really don’t. For once I’m trying to be the bigger person and you hate me for it. Why does it matter? Why should I care if we both had a shit time in high school for different reasons? We’re not in high school now, are we? You don’t see the lunch lady slinging her radioactive meat or the Glee Club trying to paper over life’s problems with a Journey song. We’re on fucking Broadway and I don’t care if I’m ruining it for you. I deserve this. You do, too, but don’t try and take it away from me like you took half the solos-”
“A-ha. So this is still about high school.”
“Of course it is.” Santana highlights something in her script - a single line, sharp, and Rachel wonders what it is. “Doesn’t mean it should be.”
The tech crew streams in, quiet and careful as they always are. Rachel bites her lip.
“Did you ever think about it?”
“What, sleeping with you? God, no.” Santana doesn’t look at her when she says it, though. That’s all the proof that Rachel needs. “Did you?”
“Sometimes. On occasion. But I chalked it up - as I do now - to the fact that you and Brittany were the only, erm, sapphic girls at our school.”
Santana chokes out a laugh at that and Rachel - ever respectful - does not ask her to clarify.
“Well. It’s definitely not happening now.” Santana folds her arms. Drums her fingers across her own biceps, once. “I broke things off with Dani, but.”
“But you’re completely fine, I’m sure.”
“I am. Being a Broadway understudy will do that.” Then Santana grins with all her teeth and Rachel can’t stand her and she loves her and she can’t balance any of it out.
“I’ll help you with the blocking,” Rachel finds herself saying, evenly, impressively so, “if only so you don’t impede rehearsal for the rest of us.”
Santana looks at her, probably scrutinizing the sentence for truth the way Rachel always does, has always done, has never stopped doing.
“Alright,” she manages, holding out her script. “Would it be too much to roll off the couch on this line?”
“Absolutely.”
“Then I’m doing it.”
“Hey!”
“It’s a way to set me apart.”
“You’re insufferable.”
Santana shrugs, winks, does not deny it. Rachel demonstrates her own plan for the scene, as it’s been tried out before, and Santana comments on it and she comments on Santana’s comments and she feels the tiniest bit lighter.